Categories
Eco-philo-pol

Gold, Silver, Bronze, Carbon

Georgia, it seems, may finally have reason to celebrate after what’s been a tough few weeks for the former Soviet nation. A revised tally of the 2008 Olympic gold medal count, which adjusts the tally according to carbon emissions, puts Georgia at the top of the rankings, well ahead of its nemesis, Russia. Jamaica, Ethiopia, Kenya and Cameroon round out the top 5 in the revised tally.

Gold medals per kilotonne of carbon emissions - top 5 countries

Australia, Russia, China and the USA are left trailing by some margin, as shown in the figure below.

Gold medals per kilotonne of carbon emissions - selected countries

Armenia tops out the revised ranking when all medals are taken into account.

All medals per kilotonne of carbon emissions - top 5

It gets even worse for the traditional powerhouses of Olympic sport.

All medals per kilotonne of carbon emissions - selected countries

Notes:

  1. The medal tally is from the official overall medal standings for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
  2. Emissions data is from CDIAC – A Compendium of Data on Global Change. This means the emissions data is from 2004 (i.e., it is a little out of date). Anyone know of a complete set of more up to date data?
  3. This article is, of course, for your amusement only; this analysis is completely meaningless, and should not be cited as evidence in any argument (in pubs, courtrooms, scientific conferences or elsewhere).
Categories
Innovation

It’s happening: Macs gaining market share

Macs are increasing their share of the personal computing market, and Aussies are leading the charge: in the last quarter, Mac sales grew at a whopping 52% in Australia. Overall, Macs are still way behind, at about 3.5% of the global market. But apparently that’s double what it was five years ago.

Categories
My family and me

A year of parenthood

Xander's Birthday

It’s been just over a year since Xander was born, and I can quite honestly say it’s been the most fulfilling year of my life so far. Parenthood is everything they say it is: tiring, rewarding, sometimes difficult, but ultimately truly wonderful. To me the year seems to have passed fairly quickly, although it’s been jam packed with stuff.

Xander had a fantastic 1st birthday party, meticulously organised by his mummy. He’s just started walking, and he has a penchant for climbing stuff. He likes to try to climb the dresser by sort of doing chin ups and then getting traction with his feet against the cupboard. His favourite word is “bird”, though lately he’s really into “balloons” (because we’ve still got bunches of them hanging around our house from his birthday). He’s a happy and frightfully energetic little soul.

We’re still dealing with his allergy problem, but we’ve got an appointment with one of the two paediatric allergists in the state in October (somehow we managed to jump the 13 month waiting list, which we’re kind of relieved about, because his allergy isn’t limited to cow’s milk protein, unfortunately). One gets the feeling that allergies are still not well understood by medical researchers. Nobody seems to agree about how they come about or what the best course of action is.

The second year of his life is going to be an eventful one for our family, with a few things on the agenda before next July. Here’s hoping it all goes smoothly!

Categories
Random observations

TransLink go card: I’m ahead

The TransLink go card system is broken, but not for the reasons Ben points out, or at least not mainly for that reason. It’s broken because the machines are too often not working (on the buses, anyway). That means that I, and thousands of other passengers each day, score free trips. Already this week, I’ve had three or four free trips because the machine was not functional, and the bus drivers simply waved me onto the bus. While I’ve been pinged a couple of times for forgetting to swipe off, or because the machine has stopped working sometime during a trip, I calculate that I’m well ahead, probably by around $30 since the inception of the go card system.

The system is also pretty easy to game if you’re travelling on the bus: touch on at the front door like a good little passenger, then touch off at the rear door as you walk down the aisle. That will charge you a one zone fare (I think) instead of the two, three, four, whatever zone fare you would have to pay if you did the right thing and touched off when you hop off the bus. Of course, I don’t do this and I don’t condone it.

All this raises a very interesting question, though. When does the city’s/state’s investment in the go card system, and the ticketing system as a whole, start to pay off? Apparently the go card system alone costed around US$95 million. My question is whether it wouldn’t be better to just remove all ticketing infrastructure and make public transport free. At least until Brisbane’s population is big enough to support a world-class public transport system. Let’s do a really naive analysis. Assume that the US and Australian currencies have reached parity. At an average of $3 a journey (adult 4 zones fare), it would need around 30,700,000 journeys to break even. With 70,000 go cards in circulation, that’s probably around a year’s worth of go card journeys. That mightn’t seem like much, but the maintenance costs will be ongoing, and, as pointed out above, a significant proportion of journeys are unpaid for. Furthermore, the US$95 million does not include the overheads for all the other kinds of ticketing, like paper tickets. Factor in the costs of employees to dole out tickets at train stations, process go card complaints, and so on, and you could be looking at tens of millions per year (at a guess).

Readers would know that my bleeding heart leftist tendencies have long been replaced by a leaning towards free market capitalism. So it may seem strange that I’m advocating free public transport. But the fact of the matter is that our public transport system is already subsidised, and it will probably stay that way for quite some time. So why add another layer of costs to a system that has to be subsidised anyway? It doesn’t seem to make business sense. Of course, I’m on the outside looking in. I have no idea of true costs, or the expected population growth of Brisbane City. But I reckon it would be a good way to get people using public transport. The only problem is, these ticketing systems are already in place; we’ve paid the upfront costs already, so I guess the government has to try to recoup these costs, and it won’t do that by making public transport free. D’oh!

Categories
Random observations

Blogging with TextMate: image uploads supported

Xander's 1st birthday cake
Drag an image to the blog entry you’re composing in TextMate, and it uploads the image to your weblog and inserts the resulting URL into your blog post. Like this. Cool.

Categories
Random observations

TextMate

TextMate seems to be recommended by just about every Mac-oriented programming site out there. So I bought it a few weeks ago. For 33.15 EUR. It rocks. Oh, and this post was made from within TextMate.