There’s a story on the BBC News site today covering a series of rallies against climate change in Australia. The caption on the accompanying photo caught my eye:

“Australians are the biggest polluters in the world”

The story itself doesn’t seem to completely agree with that fact, saying only that Australia “is one of the worst polluters in the world, on a per capita basis”.

I can’t find anything online to suggest that the USA isn’t the biggest polluter (in terms of carbon emissions), both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis. Here’s one example. So I reckon the caption on the picture is just plain wrong.

It’s hardly the end of the world, but a little misleading all the same. I’ve emailed to let them know. Be interesting to see whether they change it.

I’ve been even quieter than usual lately because I’ve been on holiday. Just got back the other day – San Francisco is lovely at this time of the year, although I am still feeling the jet lag a bit.

Anyway, I’ll get to the point. I just stumbled upon a new way of booking train tickets in the UK, and if you ask me it’s the best out there. By a mile.

Admittedly, that’s not saying an awful lot. The current train ticketing websites are pretty much universally awful. For the full story, check out my previous post on the subject.

Virgin’s site was the best of a bad bunch, but now GNER’s new ‘mixing desk’ actually delivers a reasonably pleasant experience. It looks to be in some sort of testing phase, but you can use it to book tickets – I just picked up a return to Edinburgh as part of their handy five quid promotion.

Ok, I’d be lying if I said I’d given the site a thorough test, and they still have some design issues to sort out (it doesn’t render properly in Firefox, though my non-standard font size may have something to do with that). But give it a go – it makes it finding the cheapest fares much easier.

A definite step forward, and one that might force the other vendors to up their efforts in a similar fashion. From what I’ve seen so far: good work.

… writing a post about inappropriate advertising on Facebook. But then WordPress destroyed all my hard work.

That means you’ll just have to make do with a screenshot of the advert that prompted the rant. I think it speaks for itself. It could’ve come straight from a piece of junk email. Honestly – don’t they have an advertising policy?