This Saturday, apart from being my birthday, is also an international day of action on climate change. There will be, amongst many other things, a demo in central London, which quite a few of my friends from a variety of different backgrounds are going to. There's more info on the demo and the campaign against climate change more generally on the website of the Campaign Against Climate Change.

The government here in the UK is now committed to some sort of climate change bill this parliament, thanks in no small part to the dedication of groups like Friends of the Earth, though as described, amongst other places, in George Monbiot's book Heat, most scientists appear to agree that far far more than what is currently on the table will be required in order to avoid starvation, suffering and migration on a scale never before seen in human history.

The government is also unfortunately, in my view, engaged in the diversionary tactic of passing the responsibility of action required back onto us. Of course it is vital that we all begin to understand our role in building a different kind of society, with an economy which is not reliant on high levels of carbon emission, and the government has an important role to play in this. However, though I hope to be proved wrong, it seems that initiatives like their television advertisements and "carbon footprint calculator" are droplets of change when compared with the carbon legacy ocean created by airport expansions, road building and support for expansions in fossil fuel extraction and new coal-powered electricity generation.

Incidentally, I just calculated my carbon footprint (to whatever accuracy can be determined in five minutes by a small flash animation with rather limited questions and answers). Apparently 9.84 tonnes of carbon are emitted each year in my name. Anyone know what 9.84 tonnes of carbon looks like? Sure sounds like a lot of pencils... Calculate yours here.

Blackle. It's Google, only black.

The designers claim that having computer screens displaying lots of black rather than lots of white leads to lower energy consumption, and therefore created this black version of Google. Apparently, tests have shown that this may be true on CRT monitors, but not on LCDs, which now dominate across the world.

Well, regardless of all this, it's actually nice to have websites with dark backgrounds in my opinion. For the last year or so, I've been using a dark theme (white or off-white text on black or dark grey backgrounds) on my computer and it is much easier on my eyes. I suppose I should probably update this website along the same lines, actually.

I have to say though, that it is annoying how many applications and websites don't account for people who might have this kind of colour scheme set up on the OS or browser, and are built with fairly lazy style sheets. For example, on parts of Flickr, the CSS specifies dark grey text, but fails to specify a light background for the same areas. This means that it becomes unreadable. So, any web designer people reading this, please do bear in mind that people might be viewing your pages on systems with other colour schemes than the "high usability" ones defaulted to by most interface designers these days.

I have always wondered though, why, when on text consoles, we spent decades using white-on-black, when we're in a GUI, we default to black-on-white... Answers on a postcard!

Today, 21st September, is International Park(ing) Day. I just came across this, thanks to TreeHugger's post. The motivation behind the day, which originated two years ago in San Fransisco, California, is that so much of our cities' space is given over to vehicles, so why not, for a day, reclaim a bit as a public park. The idea is therefore pretty simple: find a parking spot, and turn it into a park for a day.

I didn't search for long, but the only example of the day being observed here in the UK was in Manchester last year. It'll be good to see if this grows this year. One in Birmingham would be great, and if I'd have found out about this earlier, I might have been quite up for helping to organise it.

This reminds me of a Reclaim the Streets style party which we held in Leicester a few years back, occupying part of Evington Road and moving in with barbeques and music. That day was a huge success; over a hundred people surprised themselves by joining in, bringing food, music and sofas out onto the street. It was actually kind of weird to see everyday people just stopping and chatting, having a free bite to eat, meeting new people and going away saying what a good idea it was. One local shoe shop owner even spontaneously suggested that we hooked up a sound system to his electricity supply to keep the thing going rather than use a generator.

Anyway, I'm all for the kind of thing that keeps public spaces for people. So, if anyone knows of a local effort or feels like doing this next year, let me know!

(Photo copyright Scott Beale / Laughing Squid. Thanks Scott!)