Best of 2011

While I'm off on vacation, I thought I'd bring back the posts that caused the most "excitement" in the last year.

And the top 5 posts are....

1. Urban Homesteaders - Cease and Desist: I can't believe it's been almost a year since the whole "urban homesteaders" trademark activity hit the fan when the Dervaes family started pursuing people and organizations who had the audacity to use their brilliant concoction of words never before used by man.

2. The Skinny vs. Curvy Ideal: This clearly must have been a result of people Googling the wrong thing, but nonetheless, it got over 2,000 pageviews.

3. Top 5 Easy Homemade Cheeses: What can I say? Everybody loves easy. And most people love cheese. A winning combo.

4. Urban Homesteaders Blog Like a Pirate Day: On the heels of the whole silliness involved with trademarking common terms, bloggers come out in force to thrown down against those arrogant enough to trademark them.

5. BPA-free Canned Tomatoes: Hitting the news this year was research after research showing the unsavory health consequences of consuming BPA through food, drink and touch. The popularity of this post shows that people are serious about finding alternatives to BPA laced cans. BPA, most recently, was shown to make healthy breast cells act like cancerous ones, render the chemo drug Tamoxifen useless and push women's hearts into deadly arrhythmias. Better living through chemistry? No thanks.

Pee powered battery available

Treehugger recently reported that there is a battery that runs on urine and has the ability to create enough of a charge to power a laptop for over four hours.

Designed by a South Korean company, the MetalCell, which also runs on salt water, uses magnesium plates which react with sodium to generate a small amount of electricity.

This portable device is designed primarily for military use or when electricity is in short supply. The standard MetalCell model costs about $200.

So, if solar or wind isn't a viable option and you need a portable battery, you might want to keep an eye out for this. I say using it power my laptop would help mitigate the global impact of all this blogging and Facebooking.

Would you be willing to use your pee to power your iPad, phone or laptop?

San Diego & Crunchy Chicken TV

We're having a great time down here in San Diego, although the kids are a little overwhelmed with all the travel and Christmas excitement. We had a marvelous day of meltdowns yesterday while going Christmas shopping for the kids, which always makes for a highly pleasant day. Especially when we locked ourselves out of my brother's house. But, otherwise it's been great.

Saturday we went to a local farmers market (see picture above) and did a little filming, interviewing some of the farmers and generally checking out what a winter farmers market looks like in Southern California. The filming of the farmers market is part of the first of the episodes I'm producing for "Crunchy Chicken TV", which I'll post later this week. I'll be filming two episodes while I'm down here and will have them up over the next two weeks. So, stay tuned for those.

Today, we are heading out to Borrego Springs for a few days to check out the Anza Borrego Desert since my kids have a huge fascination with deserts, particularly because we live in the land of rain and trees. It has been hot since we arrived, but the temperatures are cooling. Saturday it was 81 degrees and I can't say that I minded since I've been freezing my buns off over the last few weeks. The desert should still be fairly warm, with cold temperatures overnight. I'll try to post some pictures of what we find there later this week.

Hot men of climatology

There are plenty of lists floating around out there stating who is the hottest this or that. Who are the hottest green models and the hottest green actors and so forth. But, what about the people who really matter, the ones doing the climate research, not the celebrities?

Because of this, I wanted to write a post about the Hot Men of Climatology, but when I went a huntin' for hotties, pretty much what I found were older men sporting a lot of hair or none at all. And, the only hot thing going on was more related to warming temperatures than chiseled abs. But, I've found the up and coming (well, under 50ish) "hot" men of climatology for your review. Let me know if I missed any :)

First up is Michael Mann a, relatively speaking, sprightly 43-year-old climatologist. Michael is an author of more than 80 peer-reviewed journal publications and has attained public prominence as lead author of a number of articles on paleoclimate and as one of the originators of a graph of temperature trends dubbed the "hockey stick graph" (not to be confused with the "hockey mom graph").

The graph received both praise and criticism after its publication in an IPCC report. In 2005 he was appointed Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University, in the Department of Meteorology and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and Director of the university's interdepartmental Earth System Science Center. If you like your men with degrees in Applied Math, Geology and Geophysics, Michael fits the bill.

Next up is Caspar Ammann, a 40-year-old researcher from Switzerland. Caspar is a climate scientist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and is interested in the reconstruction of natural climate forcings, natural climate variability, coupled modeling of natural and anthropogenic climate change, and data/model intercomparison. In other words, he studies past and present climate changes.

He has a Ph.D. in Geosciences and his research centers around the climate of past centuries and millennia and how this information can help to understand what elements of future climate might be predictable as well as what potential environmental and ecological impacts are to be anticipated given various climate change scenarios.

Rasmus Benestad is a physicist by training and works as a senior scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Oslo Climate Group. He earned a Ph.D. in Physics from the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics department at Oxford University.

Rasmus' recent work has involved research on regional climate and seasonal predictability, but his past experience also includes ocean dynamics/air-sea processes and cloud micro-physics. In addition, he is the author of the book Solar Activity and Earth's Climate.

Rounding out the list is hottie, Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In 2004 he was named as one of Scientific American's "Top 50 Research Leaders" for the year. In addition to his scientific work he is a founding member and one of the contributors to the climatology blog, RealClimate.

Gavin is a computer climate modeler who works on developing large-scale models of the atmosphere-ocean climate system. He has worked on understanding climate variability both in past climates going back as far as 55 million years ago and forward to the possible future climates.

Whew! Now, even though it seems totally sacrilegious to do this, this post is just begging for a poll....

Who's the hottest climate change scientist?


Update: Ooh! I have a late entry. Unfortunately, I can't add him to the poll, but wanted to introduce you all to him.

Julian Sachs is a paleoclimatologist working right here at the University of Washington. He has a Ph.D. in Chemical Oceanography from MIT and his research interests include the evolution of the tropical Pacific climate and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation since the last glacial period.

He also works on the development and application of organic geochemical and stable isotopic techniques in paleoclimatology and oceanography. I'm pretty sure he can melt a few icebergs while he's at it too.

Make your own oil lamp

My olive oil lamp article is finally up on Mother Earth News if you want to check out how to make your own lamp using ordinary household materials and olive oil.

Let me know if you've made one before!

New blog - Green Goddess Dressing

Okay, so I've started a new blog. I figured I already had a separate food blog, so I might as well start one to compile all my green fashion and beauty posts as well as include additional product reviews and stuff that not everyone here would be interested in.

It's called Green Goddess Dressing and the first week will be re-posts of stuff you've already seen here, but I'll be branching out into more product reviews, beauty related book reviews and green fashion information. I don't have all the bells and whistles going on yet, but that will come soon enough.

I'd certainly appreciate if you mosey on over and check it out and sign up!