10 tips for Earth Day 2008

Article Link: 10 easy ways to improve the Earth’s health
Source: LiveScience.com, courtesy of Yahoo!

Living green can get confusing. With all the buzz and hype, what can we (as ordinary citizens) do to help save Mother Earth? Here are 10 practical things you can do today:

1. Make the move to florescent light bulbs. If every household in the USA did this, we would save 13 billion pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere every year. That’s equivalent to 1 million fewer cars on the road.
2. Drive less and smarter. Getting a fuel efficient car is best. If you can’t do that, slow down on the roads; this saves gas, which ultimately affects fuel consumption at large.
3. Control your temperature. Tune up your heating/cooling systems, clean your vents, and buy a programmable thermostat that lets you cut the temperature when you’re not home.
4. Tame your beast of a refrigerator. Responsible for 15% of the energy use in your home, clean old coils and replace units with new ones. If you have a second refrigerator, get rid of it! Eating less will never harm you.
5. Turn some knobs on your water heater. Turn it down by a few degrees and install a timer to turn off the heater at night and restart it before you wake up in the morning.
6. Plant smartly. Just as trees soak up CO2, they also emit it when they die. There are smarter ways of planting for the long run. I’m no expert at this, so here’s a beginners guide for this.
7. Invest in green energy. Most electricity companies have an option to pay a few cents more every month to change your energy source to green. Or, they have a Carbon-Offset voluntary fee that ensures your energy use is offset by an equivalent amount. Call your energy company and look into this.
8. Go organic and local. By eating locally grown food, we’re setting a trend of not having to buy things that have traveled far distances (and thus used resources like fuel for trucks, energy to keep things refrigerated or frozen, etc.).
9. Buy recycled. It takes less energy to manufacture a recycled item than it does to manufacture a new one.
10. Live a minimalist lifestyle. This is more about a frame of mind.  Buy less of what you want and more of what you need.  Life is surprisingly simple.

If you’re not up to any of these, the least you can do is donate to a cause whose goal is to save Mother Earth.

The benefits of Sanskrit, as told by a London school

Download Article: Sanskrit required in London school
Source: Aditya Ghosh and Sumana Ramanan, Hindustan Times

A Christian school in London has adopted Sanskrit into its curriculum. Why? After 12 years of monitoring the results of this move, they say that learning Sanskrit helps develop overall cognitive skills and the ability to better learn other topics like math and science.

“This is the most perfect and logical language in the world, the only one that is not named after the people who speak it,” says Warwick Jessup, Head of Sanskrit Dept., St. James Independent School.