A few of you noticed that I disappeared from Facebook, and asked me if everything is fine with me. Let me start by reassuring that everything is fine with my loved ones and me, both in Norway and Italy. That said, the reason why I deleted my Facebook account is that I cannot stand the disinformation and divisiveness on my feed anymore.
Category: Politics
Double standards in Norwegian environmental culture?
“Norway: Environmental hero or hypocrite?” was the question the Financial Times asked a year ago. As a resident in Norway for the last decade and with a background of research and innovation, I have long been concerned with the same question.
Norway has implemented a number of measures for a green shift. For example, power generation is mainly based on renewable sources, and the number of electric cars per capita is the largest in the world. Nevertheless, the waste volume in Norway increased by 7% while recycling decreased 1% from 2013 to 2014.
We can put an end to imperial units
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie1 of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” Wild Thing by Josh Bazell.
I have not read Wild Thing, and I do not have any idea about who Josh Bazell is, but I love this quote. It brilliantly summarises how superior the International System of Units (i.e., the modern form of the metric system) is to the system of imperial units, as shown in the following illustration:
Yet, nowadays…
Footnotes
- One may argue that calorie is not a unit of the metric system. In the International System of Units, which is an evolution of the metre-kilogram-second (MKS) system of units, which in turn is a variant of the metric system, both mechanical and thermal energies are measured in Joule. However, in the centimetre-gram-second (CGS) system of units, which is another variant of the metric system, the thermal energy is measured in Calories. Therefore, I would still consider Calorie as one of the units of the metric system, although not of the International System of Units. Besides, I do not think Josh Bazell aimed at being scientifically rigorous, so I would excuse him for not clarifying which variant of the metric system he refers to. ↩
We can put an end to month-day-year dates
What is today’s date? If you answered this question with June 8, 2023 (read June the eighth, two thousand and twenty-three), you should go on reading.
The day-month-year date format (e.g., 8 June 2023) is officially adopted by the vast majority of the world’s countries.
The year-month-day date format (e.g., 2023-06-08) is officially adopted by China, Japan, Korea, and Iran, and is also the date format of the ISO 8601 standard.
The month-day-year date format (e.g., June 8, 2023) is officially adopted by the USA only (although contamination of this format can be found in a few other countries). Like most standards adopted in the USA, the month-day-year date format is bizarre at best, as shown in the following illustration:
Yet, nowadays…
La gente fa schifo. Vaffanculo alla speranza.
Il risultato a dir poco tragicomico delle ultime elezioni mi ha riportato alla mente uno dei migliori pezzi di George Carlin. Mi permetto di tradurlo in italiano sostituendo l’aggettivo «americano» con «italiano»:
Tutti si lamentano dei politici. Tutti dicono che fanno schifo. Be’, ma da dove pensano che vengano questi politici? Non cadono dal cielo. Non arrivano attraverso una membrana da un’altra dimensione. Vengono da genitori italiani, da famiglie italiane, da case italiane, da scuole italiane, da chiese italiane, da imprese italiane e da università italiane… E sono eletti da cittadini italiani. Questo è il meglio che possiamo fare gente. Questo è quello che abbiamo da offrire. È ciò che produce il nostro sistema: immondizia in entrata, immondizia in uscita. Se hai cittadini egoisti ed ignoranti, avrai dirigenti egoisti ed ignoranti. E i limiti dei mandati non aiuteranno di certo: finirai semplicemente con una nuova cerchia di italiani egoisti ed ignoranti. Quindi, magari, non sono i politici che fanno schifo. Magari è qualcos’altro che fa schifo qui… Come, la gente. Sí, la gente fa schifo. Per qualcuno sarebbe un buon motto per una campagna: «La gente fa schifo. Vaffanculo alla speranza.»