Monthly Archives: June 2006

Closer than you think

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Remember this post, about Sweden’s new year’s resolution to give up oil by 2020?

According to Jeremy Faludi at Worldchanging.com, it might not be as difficult as you think.

For example, currently, 6% of Europe’s electricity generation is from renewable sources. If they wanted it to be 100% by 2025, they should expand renewable energy generation by about 15% per year, every year, compared to other power sources. (This does not mean 6% now, 21% next year, 36% the year after, etc. It only means 6% now, 6.9% next year, 8% the year after, etc.) This sounds small, and in fact is less ambitious than their current plan to grow renewables from 6% to 12% by 2010. That would require increasing renewables’ share by 17% per year. But if Europe kept growing its percentage of renewables by 15% per year until 2025, they would be at 100% green power. Perhaps such a policy would be both more ambitious and easier to achieve.

Who’s in?

Ursprache is German. And so is Weltschmerz.

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Well, gentle readers, here’s your occasional light Saturday post about transatlantic relations.

Should you or your children ever be interested in winning spelling bees, which, according to the Times Online, have enjoyed a recent explosion of popularity in the United States, choose words from obscure European languages, which, for some reason apparently made it into Webster’s dictionary. German, in particular, seems to be a safe bet –

“[Katharine Close, a] 13-year-old girl won America’s 79th national spelling competition last night, trotting out the letters of “ursprache”- a technical term for language [note by the afoe author – it actually means ‘the original language’ or ‘a very old language’] – in front of millions of viewers on primetime television.
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The decisive moment … came when [Finola Mei Hwa ] Hackett stumbled over “weltschmerz” (world weariness), erroneously starting with a “v”. “

“Weltschmerz”, of course, is a tough one, certainly for a non-German. Not just as it may well still express the most German of all sentiments, but also because I have a feeling the American pronounciation thereof would have made me wonder about the “vw-question” as well…

Killer Workout

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Do gyms breed terrorists?

The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though—their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires? Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims’ relationships with others—whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves.