Rickard Andersson

In an old post titled Sweden: pros and cons, I listed some pros and cons for Sweden. On May 1st, my wife and I are expecting our first child and while preparing for this, I’ve encountered something that has to go on the pro list. When a Swedish couple have a baby, they each get 240 days (!) paid parental leave to be with the baby. It’s only 80% of your salary, but in many cases, your employer will pad that number (in my case to 90%). You can distribute the days however you want between the parents, but each parent has to take at least 60 days off.

It’s at times like this I’m happy to pay taxes.

I read a rather interesting article today called Top 10 green living myths. One of the “myths” the article discussed was the fact that people these days tend to buy new fuel-efficient cars like they’re iPods. This, of course, is a bad idea since actually producing the vehicle is a very CO2 heavy activity. I don’t want to digress too much, but a different article points out that as much as 30% of the total CO2 emissions of a Toyota Prius, based on a 150,000 km long life, are produced during manufacturing and distribution of the vehicle. In other words, unless you drive an awful lot and your current car is a real gas guzzler, chances are switching to a new fuel-efficient car would actually be more harmful in terms of CO2 emissions than staying with your current car.

Now, to get back to the subject at hand, in the same article, the author touched on the CO2 emissions of air travel. I couldn’t quite believe what I read so I researched it some more. The CO2 emissions of one passenger on a passenger jet is roughly equivalent to the emissions should the passenger instead travel by car (roughly). However, due to the effect known as “radiative forcing”, the actual impact of emissions from a plane is higher due to the altitude at which it flies. I won’t go into detail about this because frankly, I don’t understand it. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who recently was awarded the Nobel Prize, uses a multiplier of 2.7. In other words, if traveling by plane gives you a gas mileage of 20 MPG, the effective MPG is 2.7 times less than that.

Calculating the CO2 emissions of air travel is a pain, but thankfully, there’s an online calculator at Atmosfair.de.

A common tourist destination for Swedes is Phuket in Thailand (for some odd reason). It’s roughly 9000 kilometers away if traveling from the south of Sweden. I fed in the departure and arrival airports (Copenhagen-Bangkok-Phuket) and here’s the result.

6.7 tonnes of CO2! As the graph illustrates, one return-flight to Thailand for a Swede is the equivalent of driving your average car 12,000 km per year for 3 years. This completely blew me away. Instead of placing too much weight on the CO2 emissions on your next car, maybe you should consider vacationing a little closer to home next time.

A fair amount of scepticism is a good thing. I applaud that people are sceptical about what they see on TV, read in books, magazines and on the Internet. Come to think of it, a lot of people could use some scepticism when it comes to religious literature, but, I digress. We know that the information we are fed is not always complete or unbiased. But there is such a thing as one-way scepticism and it’s a recipe for disaster. The 9/11 conspiracy theorists are a perfect example of this.

Followers of this cult are extremely sceptical about any information that originates from the US government, the mass media or the corporate world. However, they have no problem whatsoever believing everything that comes out of the mouth of people like Alex Jones, David Ray Griffin and Dylan Avery. A little neutrality please.

As usual when it comes to conspiracy theories, my question is this. What is the likelihood that every single person involved in such a massive operation would keep their mouth shut about it for all these years? In a National Geographic documentary on the subject (I believe it was called Science and Conspiracy), they did a non-scientific but still illustrative count of the number of people that would need to be involved in the supposed 9/11 conspiracy. I believed they stopped counting at around 5000 people. I’m sure the actual number would have to be a lot larger though. This is just not the way conspiracies work. Conspiracies are conducted by a few people behind closed doors under secrecy, not involving thousands and maybe tens of thousands of people. If you open your mind and think about this for a few minutes, you quickly realize that it’s just not possible.

I end this short blurb with a quote from Benjamin Franklin:

- Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

Without a doubt, the most common user issue we have on campus is students that do the following:

1. Click a link to a Word document in their Gmail (or somewhere else on the web).
2. When asked if they want to open of save the document, they select open.
3. They work on the document for a couple of hours and then hit save.
4. They log out.

The issue with this is that when you pick the open option in the open/save dialogue, the document gets downloaded into your “Temporary Internet Files” and then opened from there. It works, but Temporary Internet Files is a highly volatile place to store documents, in particular when Internet Explorer is set up to clear the folder when you log out (to keep roaming profile size to a minimum). In other words, the changes the student worked on are gone.

I don’t know how to solve this. I’m looking for a solution that does either of the following:

1. Defaults to save and disables the open option for particular file types in Internet Explorer.
2. Forces users to “save as” when the document has been “opened” through a browser.

Anyone?