TED Global

Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from the TED Global conference on Technology, Enetertainment, and Design as they apply to Africa. He's live-blogging the talks by people ranging from Ethiopian paleontologist Zeray Alemseged to some mononymic Irish singer.

This is one of those things where reading Ethan's blog makes me feel like a schmuck. I mean, he's using his blog to spread the word about ways to use technology to improve the lives of millions of the world's poorest people, and I'm posting links to doggerel poetry about cats...

I'll be doing some conference blogging of my own later this week, but alas, I can more or less guarantee that Bono will not be appearing.

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The world's poorest people should die of their own palsied hands, soonest. 6.5 billion Homo sapiens infest this planet, 4 billion of them being trash meat. What is to be gained by making that 8 billion and 6 billion respectively?

Four billion Third Worlders doing heavy labor (no Wal-Marts) metabolize 3500 Calories/body-day. A metabolic Calorie is 1000 gram-calories. Summed heat issuing from their flesh is

(4x10^9 bodies)(3500 Cal/body-day)(1000 cal/Cal)(365.242 days/year) = 5.11x10^18 calories/year

Add daily cooking fires, slash and burn agriculture, and stock animal metabolisms to obtain a larger, truer number. Ice at 0°C masses 0.917 g/cm^3. 80 cal/gm melts it into 0°C water. Third World body heat annually melts

(5.11x10^18 cal)/[(80 cal/g)(0.917 g/cm^3)(10^15 cm^3/km^3)] = 70 km^3 of ice

Greenland's ice cap between 1993-1994 and 1998-1999 lost at least 51 km^3/year of ice on the average, Science 289(5478) 428 (2000). Whose fault was that - with another 20 km^3 loss/year in excess to thin Arctic ice?
depp=true

Neither metabolism nor arithmetic has political agenda. Four billion Third World bodies emit 5.11x10^18 calories/year - sufficient to melt 70 km^3 of ice/year. That is Global Warming. What solution do you suggest?

Chad, whatever else you've done today, you've given me the idea of creating a LOLBono. The world may never be the same.