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Lessons the United States can learn from the drought in Australia

The brutal drought has ended over large parts of Australia -- and consumers are obsessively reducing their demand for water -- and yet water "prices are set to double in the next five to 10 years," Water Services Association Australia executive officer Ross Young told a drought briefing in Canberra.

The focus on water conservation has never been higher:

Water is a dinner table topic. People are quite passionate about water and they are quite concerned about water in the context of climate change.

And the results are impressive:

Ralph Nader picks running mate, ‘doomsday’ seed vault opens in Arctic, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Mate? … Check An Eye for a Buckeye The Damages Done How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the […]

Encyclopedia of Life up, but empty

A tip from Canis sent me to the Encyclopedia of Life, which came online last week. I posted on this project about nine months ago. I was skeptical that it would amount to much back then, so I was curious to see if I had missed the mark (as usual). I typed in a bunch of species and found nothing but placeholders for them. The site is still an empty shell, about 99.999 percent short of its goal. They have the categories in place, ready for armies of professional, hand-selected curators with nothing better to do than volunteer their free time to fill in the information.

Yes, I'm still skeptical. The whole idea behind Wikipedia is bottom-up data acquisition. In a sense, it is analogous to a free market: iterative and imperfect, but productive and useful. If every article in Wikipedia had to pass muster from an appointed expert on each subject, there would be no Wikipedia. The EOL will never see the success of Wikipedia with its present top-down, command-and-control structure.

U.N. says: Don’t iron your jeans

Um, wow. So this is what the United Nations Environment Programme is up to these days:

Gore at TED

Bruno Giussani supplies a detailed rundown of Al Gore’s talk at this year’s TED conference. See also Kim Zetter in Wired.

Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA, on Stephen Colbert

I don’t think she says 10 words through this whole thing:

Appeals court rules against Navy in sonar case

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld many restrictions on the Navy’s use of mid-frequency sonar off the coast of Southern California, reinforcing a lower court ruling from last month. […]

Propaganda soft-pedals sonar impacts on marine mammals

The following is a guest post from a friend of mine, Michael Stocker, director of Ocean Conservation Research. —– When it comes to national security interests, I can accept a […]

Tracking whaling ships and whale sharks

Anti-whaling activists planted tracking devices on Japanese whaling ships as part of a campaign to disrupt the annual hunt, and the Australian customs ship that had been monitoring the hunt returned to port with photographs and video to use for future legal action ...

... a study showed that commercial fishing forced fish to evolve into meeker, less active creatures that carry fewer eggs. Bolder and more adventuresome fish were more likely to be caught by gillnets ...

... the butterflyfish, a common resident of coral reefs, was in danger of extinction because it could only eat one species of coral, Acropora hyacinthus, which is highly vulnerable ...

Friday music blogging: Medeski Martin & Wood

There are few bands with which I have a longer ongoing relationship than jazz-funk-improv trio Medeski Martin & Wood. I think I’m one of the few people that started listening […]