Author: Adam Clare

Be Lazy When Waiting for the Bus

Waiting for a bus that never seems to come can be one of life’s more aggravating moments. No need to sit around getting all frustrated with underfunded services though. Thanks to the power of mathematics we now know that you should justbe lazy and sit and wait for the bus.

Scott Kominers, a mathematician at Harvard University, and his colleagues derived a formula for the optimal time that you should wait for a tardy bus at each stop en route before giving up and walking on. “Many mathematicians probably ponder this on their way to work, but never get round to working it out,” he says.

The team found that the solution was surprisingly simple. When both options seem reasonably attractive, the formula advises you to choose the “lazy” option: wait at the first stop, no matter how frustrating (www.arxiv.org/abs/0801.0297).

Dreaming in Green

The Guardan has a well written article that looks at the emergence of academic green thinking in the UK. The article looks at the advancements being made, but does so in a way that ensures we keep our feet on the ground.

Fortunately, he points out, students are starting to take action for themselves, with campaigns including student organisation People and Planet’s Green League Table last summer, which gave universities degrees according to their environmental awareness. The results were surprising. Oxford and LSE both got 2.1s, while York and Glasgow scraped 2.2s: the top three were Leeds Metropolitan, Plymouth and Hertfordshire. “That really shook a few vice-chancellors,” says Patton, smiling. “I imagine that resolutions were made not to come that far down again.”

But the biggest problem is that, in the end, this is not just an issue for universities. This is going to be a problem for all of us. Paul Allen, development director at the Centre for Alternative Technology, is very anxious about the blindness of the academics. “Do they realise that we need to have a huge reskilling for Britain, that in the years ahead we are going to have to learn how to do things very differently? Are they planning courses that are going to re-educate our young people? No. They’re teaching young people in buildings where the lights are on all the time, in buildings where the energy is badly managed, where no one has even thought about approaching green electricity providers.”

5 “Unusual” Reasons to be Vegetarian

A blogger has outlined the top reasons that he’s vegetarian. Like me, he loved to BBQ when he ate meat, but now the thought isn’t so appetizing. His reasons for being vegetarian are nearly identical to mine, so hopefully he can convince you to at the very least eat less meat.

Here’s a sample from his list:

I am boycotting the least efficient food product to create. Pound per usable pound, meat costs us 30 to 100 times more water than it’s nutritional equivalent in plant foods, not to mention the plants that are also fed to the animals (food consumption of animals is a heated topic because some farmers use recycled waste material with their feed to reduce their figures, so I’m not even going to try to add some figures here). Why isn’t meat more expensive if it costs so much to make? Read on to find out.

The Rich Stop Sending Money Down the Line

Rich snobs like Paris Hilton make other rich people bothered, and most likely entire societies bothered. Well, hopefully a trend of people who worked hard to earn their fortune not passing their wealth to their children will continue.

Being born into wealth helps people advance in life, and for people who have indeed worked for their fortune, as opposed to be being born into it, realize that knowing other rich people helps just as much as being rich. This is why people like the Late Body Shop founder leave relatively very little material to their children.

Many of these rich do not come from riches. They are self-made, and generally the self-made have a different attitude to money – or specifically, the acquisition of money – compared with those who have always had it. They generally do not, for example, have the “legacy assets” of the old rich – the 4,000-acre pile in Scotland that has been in the family for generations and must be passed on in good nick; or the idea of noblesse oblige that used to go with such assets: the responsibility to the tenants of the land, to the local community. “With inherited wealth, the current generation may simply consider themselves custodians for the time being of the family wealth and will follow the path laid down over many generations,” says Stuart Chappell, director of Barclays Wealth. “With self-generated wealth, it is the responsibility of those who made the wealth to decide what is to happen after they are gone. It is more likely that the creators of new money will feel that those who follow them should not be ‘feather-bedded’.”

Office Building Warmed by Commuters

In Sweden a new office complex will be heated through the power of body heat. The offices will be attached, or really close, to a major train station that is already heated by the people who use it.

“We had a look at it and thought ‘We might actually be able to use this’,” said Karl Sundholm, project leader at Jernhusen, which also owns the station. “This feels good. Instead of just airing the leftover heat out we try to make use of it.”

Jernhusen markets the building as “environment smart” and aims for its energy consumption to be half of what a corresponding building usually is.

The bodily warmth from the central station will be redirected to heat up water. The investment will be around 200 000 Swedish crowns, Sundholm said.