Earth Hour and the End of the World

Earth Hour has come and gone, and it was a success... sort of. Here at the Pond, we enjoyed an hour of darkness sans TV and computers. (quanta cheated and surfed the Internet for a little while on his Blackberry. Really, a man can only be away from technology and information for so long.) Baby C enjoyed his first candlelight meal, and got his diaper changed in the dark twice. Fun for all involved.

Around Ontario, power usage fell by more than 5% (which is what was expected). In Toronto, power usage dropped by 8.7%. Sure, it is all hype. An hour of reduced power usage isn't going to change the world, but at least it (hopefully) got people thinking about just how much power they do use.

Blog TO review's Toronto's participation in Earth Hour: Earth Hour Toronto 2008: Pass or Fail. The videos on this page are worth watching just to see the huge (and ugly) sign at the corner of Younge and Dundas go out.

The Torontist (a great blog about TO), has a photo gallery of Toronto during Earth Hour here. Stunning!

In other news, the world may end this summer so there is no reason to conserve energy or worry about the environment. Yay! According to two men in Hawaii, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sanchon, when the CERN Large Hadron Collider is powered up, it will create a black hole what will devour the Earth... or it may create stangelets that will lead to a change reaction changing all matter into stangelets... or it may create particles with only one magnetic pole, leading to a reaction where atoms are converted into other forms of matter. (Am I the only one imaging my desk turning into pudding?) I'm glad they've got their story straight.

You can read more about this here: CERN Experiment May Violate NEPA, Destroy Universe