Christmas trees replanted

Beginning of January the streets are full of the sad sight of discarded Christmas trees, which took a couple of years to grow, only to end up decorating a house  for two weeks, and then to be thrown out. 

As an oprimistic contrast, I just found out that it is possible for those who HAVE to have a tree, that they can rent a tree and have it re-planted:

http://www.recyclenow.com/news/couple_launch.html

 

Grateful to the firefighters

This summer, again, there were many fires in Greece.

But the firefighters (both Greek and from other countries) extinguished most of them early enough for the damage not to become a catastrophe. Eternally grateful for their hard and dangerous work.

Greek forest fires in 2007

In 2007, about 10% of the Greek Woods were burnt, and 87 people died. The three beautiful woods around Athens were destroyed. Even though arson and negligence were involved, the role of environmental factors is undisputed. 

The satelite images say it all.

Efficient characters

I am comparing the two books on the right: the red Penguin book was printed in 1946 in the US, while the white Hutchinson book was printed in 2006 in the UK. What interests me is not their contents, but their relative efficiency. 

The former looks so much smaller than the latter: fewer resources required to produce it, to transport it, to store it. Is that so?

I estimated that the former contains around 361760 characters, while the latter contains around 661850 characters. The former weighs 100 gr., while the latter weighs 548 gr. Therefore, the red book is three times more character efficient in terms of weight.

The red book's  dimensions are 11 cm x 18 cm x 0,8 cm, while the white book's are 15 cm x 25 cm x 3 cm. Therefore, the red book is 4 times more character efficient in terms of volume.

I think it is time publishers started producing again  books like the red one.