News

Green sleeves

To environmentally conscious consumers, the pre-purchase itinerary of clothes has become as important a consideration as the organic nature of the materials used to make them, Eric Wilson writes in The New York Times. Every well travelled suit leaves a carbon footprint, he adds, and some clothing companies are beginning to provide information about it. "Patagonia, for example, offers such details for five of its designs on its website. It traces the path of a $190 [U.S.] rain jacket from its design in Ventura, Calif., to the fabric production in Matsuyama, Japan, to the sewing in Hanoi, Vietnam, to a distribution facility in Reno, Nev. - a total of 14,125 miles [22,730 kilometres]. Patagonia estimates the total carbon dioxide emissions generated along that route to be 15 pounds [6.8 kilograms], about 10 times the weight of the jacket itself."

Word watch

Captcha: A website test to check that a user is human (not spam). This is usually done by displaying an image of obscured text and asking the user to type the characters.

Exabyte: 1.074 billion gigabytes, the Internet Innovation Alliance says. Two exabytes equal the total volume of information generated in 1999. The Internet now handles one exabyte of data every hour.

Gold-farming: Repeatedly collecting valuable items in online role-playing games, often to sell them for real-world money. People sometimes gold-farm as a job.

Thrashing: What happens when a computer is asked to do so many background tasks at once that its hard drive is overworked. Thrashing can paralyze the system's ability to do the important tasks a user requires, Gloria Goodale writes in The Christian Science Monitor. Humans who are continuously communicating or reeling in images and data can dramatically slow their processing abilities as well, human behaviour experts say. "I see the American worker becoming less and less productive," says David Wertheimer, executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California. "As workplaces get flooded with digital demands, such as constant e-mails and non-stop information, we are in danger of becoming a Third World-style economy, where much movement takes place but little actual effective work is being done."

Other sources: news services

Gym cleanliness

"The gym is an unusually effective place to transmit germs," Oxygen magazine says. Among the magazine's recommendations:

Wipe down equipment before and after each use.

Always place a towel between yourself and the equipment.

Don't touch your eyes, nose or mouth while in the gym. Wash your hands with soap and warm water afterward.

Don't dry sensitive body parts with a towel you used in the gym.

Juggling balls

Only a handful of people have ever managed to juggle 11 or 12 balls and no one has done 13, Britain's Focus magazine reports. "The problem is that the more balls are in the air at once, the faster your hands need to move to keep them from falling. A 1997 study using accelerometers attached to the hands of the world's best jugglers showed that, with perfect technique, it might be possible to juggle 16 balls at once. But for this to happen, every ball would have to be thrown to exactly the same height and land in exactly the same location. There is no margin of error to reach even a few centimetres for a misplaced ball, because the forces required would exceed human limits."

An easier trick

In "the cork stand" trick, the challenge is to drop a wine cork so it lands upright, Wired magazine says. "The barfly's secret: Hold the cork horizontally and drop it from a height 1.5 times its length. Almost every time (don't bet the house on this) one end of the cork will strike the table first. Its rotational momentum will be just great enough to make it pivot 90 degrees on the hop and stick the landing like an Olympic gymnast."

Civilization spreads

New York has launched a high-school cricket league, Associated Press reports. It is believed to be the first school system in the United States to offer the sport. The league has been extremely popular, a reflection of the growing number of immigrants in the city from the Caribbean and South Asia, where the sport is the most popular. The 14 teams in the league are playing a "limited over" form of cricket that should have games lasting no more than two or three hours, a Department of Education official said.

Thought du jour

"Efficiency is concerned with

doing things right. Effectiveness

is doing the right things."

- Peter Drucker