From EnergyStar.gov: Lifecycle impact is an invaluable tool in making fair comparisons.  It’s easy, for example, to get hung up on the small amount of mercury in a CFL bulb, a percentage of which can escape into the environment if the bulb is crushed in a landfill. But the biggest contributor to mercury pollution is coal-fired plants, which Continue reading

My new favorite term from epidemiology: J-Curve. There’s a lot of things that increase your mortality in a more-or-less linear way. The more you smoke, the greater your all-cause mortality risk, for example. This isn’t to say you increase your chance of death by 100% moving from one pack a day to two. But on Continue reading

The Silicon Valley conception of privacy isn’t working for anyone except Silicon Valley. We know that. Charlie Stross, who is one smart dude, points out that if you follow the corporate-driven push to overshare to its logical conclusion your phone becomes a handy-dandy genocide machine, or, in the near term, the perfect device for this year’s Rufie-carrying Continue reading