“Global warming is a crime for which we are all guilty, from our cars, our homes and our workplaces.”
Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Jack Bauer in the Fox TV show 24, on how next season’s finale will be carbon neutral (The Independent, London, 6 August)
“It is a visual reminder of how our private spaces are really shrinking. Computers have very long memories.”
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Pam Dixon, of the World Privacy Forum, on how Google Maps is expanding its Street View photos to southern California, including images of people clear enough to identify them (Los Angeles Times, 7 August)
“The keyboard is as familiar to you as your mother’s voice. It’s as if your mother turned around to you and spoke with a man’s voice.”
Robert Schneider, mathematics enthusiast and frontman of indie band The Apples in Stereo, on the unearthly sound produced by his new musical scale, based on natural logarithms (San Jose Mercury News, 6 August)
“It was presented to her like this is going to make her knee better. It was supposed to be just a simple thing.”
Robb Mohr on the experimental gene-therapy treatment for arthritis made by Targeted Genetics Corporation of Seattle, Washington. After his wife, Jolee Mohr, was injected with the drug she fell ill and died days later of massive bleeding and organ failure (The Washington Post, 6 August)
“A mother told me that a flock of vultures settled next to her by the village fountain when she was with her children.”
Didier Hervé, director of the Upper Béarn Heritage Institute, France, on how panic is spreading about flocks of hungry griffon vultures in the Pyrenees. Ornithologists are calling it “collective hysteria” (The Times, London, 6 August)
