Warning: becoming Shrek won’t help global warming.

Columbia Housing has just announced the winner of their residential Energy Challenge, in which the residence hall that saved the most energy over the course of 26 days.

The winner was Hartley: they reduced their energy consumption by 10.3%. Hartley residents will get a celebration catered by Dining Services, date and location TBA.

River came in second with a 7.2% reduction, followed by Broadway with 6.1%. Overall the campus saved 4,352 kWh of energy, equivalent to 3,946 pounds of carbon dioxide pollution. This is about the amount absorbed by a 40-acre oak forest in 1/10 of a year, or produced by a car after 200 gallons of gas.

Congratulations to Hartley for the win and to our campus for being green!

Typical Hartley resident via Shutterstock

The top costumes of the night

Bwog’s SGA correspondent Renée Kraiem brings you the latest on costume contests, bureaucratic shakeups, and campus events, not-quite-live from the Diana.

• At last night’s meeting, the Colombian dancers emerged victorious from the Rep Council’s Inaugural Costume Contest. Madeline, Nicky Minaj and Gilly from Saturday Night Live also made surprise appearances.
• The SGA is getting a new VP of Finance—Naomi Cooper (BC 12), who will be transitioning over in the coming two weeks.
• If you have upcoming events or open meetings, SGA wants you to send them to barnardcampuscalendar@gmail.com. Please include the event’s name, date, time, and one sentence blurb in your email.
• One event that’s on the calendar is tomorrow’s (Thursday, November 3rd) Basketball Mania. Dan from CU Athletics stopped by to talk about fostering a strong relationship between Barnard and CU Athletics, and the Rep Council looks forward to working with them all year. Show up to Levien at 9:30 pm, get a free T-shirt (among other giveaways)!
• Another highlight on the calendar is Barnard’s Sustainable Iniative Consulting Board (SICB)’s round-table tonight (Wednesday, November 2nd), from 7 to 9 pm in the Altschul Atrium (the Hive). If you have any particular green initiatives that you’d like to see tackled this year, or are concerned about energy consumption, waste reduction, or water conservation at Barnard, head to the Hive. To celebrate the arrival of autumn and mourn the disappearance of green around us, a fall-themed diner will be provided.

Drugs went into the making of this image.

A little bit of sour news, Columbia. Threatening precipitation has forced the good people at Bacchanal to move their Dark Side of the Oz screening indoors.

Instead of once on the Low Steps, the movie will be screened twice, at 8 pm and 9 pm in the Lerner Cinema. Run time is about 45 minutes. According to a message from the Bacchanal people themselves, you can expect ridiculous amounts of fooood:

There will be munchies available outside of the cinema provided by FeelGood, NOM^3, 4local, CoreFoods, Green Umbrella, and more.

Come by early and enjoy gratuitous consumption before the film.

For the most up-to-date updates, check out the Facebook event.

Thanks and stay green,

Bacchanal

Stoolie from Wikimedia Commons

Look long enough: the red seems to recede

Look out for Watson, IBM’s new supercomputer/trivia whiz, who will continue to compete on Jeopardy this week against two of the shows more prolific champions. Watson does trivia without the internet, and can answer complex questions.  The future is now. (NYT/Washington Post)

There’s always a bigger fish: Borders declared bankruptcy! It plans to shut 30% of stores and borrow money because Amazon and Wal-Mart are better. (Bloomberg)

Columbia and NYC beat Obama to the punch—before he announced his Better Buildings Campaign, the pair had already launched the Urban Technology Innovation Center. We predict SEAS will engineer some über-cool managerial name tags for themselves. SEAS… they get jobs! (Clean Technica)

We’re apparently overdue for a major earthquake.  John Armbruster, a seismologist, says, “we’d see billions in damage.  People would probably be killed.” (Metro NY)

Image via Wikimedia

The final challenge of the EcoReps’ “Do It In the Dark” initiative begins today. To become the “biggest loser”, you and yourself/your roommate/your suitemates must have the room with the most reduced electricity consumption for the week (ending May 3) compared with its consumption at the beginning of the challenge. 

The electricty meters will come in next week and the winning dorm will be announced then. Take radical measures like turning off your lights, putting your computer to sleep, and unplugging your fridge to achieve victory.

As if John Jay’s courageous tray-elimination weren’t enough! Dining goes the extra mile today with “Green Dinners” for Earth Day in John Jay and Hewitt.

You should probably proceed with the usual caution, avoiding all meats and carbohydrates that appear green, but on your way out you might stop by a few of the student environmental groups that’ll be tabling at the events. And, in all fairness, the “locally grown food” might be pretty good.

If green food and the EcoReps’ guilt-inducing waste buckets don’t fulfill your earth friendly quota for the day, you could turn off some lights or something. Plus, Greenspiration, a series of events sponsored by various campus groups, will be running earth-related activities from now until Sunday. There are also Earth Fairs going on throughout the city this weekend – Friday and Saturday at Grand Central and Sunday in Central Park. There will be musical performances, tons of info on how to do good by Mother Earth, and probably some free stuff.

Of course, if you want to feel like you’ve really done something really important, you should head to Times Square today to see New York City’s best effort to diminish it’s carbon footprint – The Green Ball Drop. Yes, we’re talking about a big ball of green lights, all bright and shining, dropping at 12 noon to celebrate Earth Day.  They’re energy saving lightbulbs, but still. 

Bwog recently received in its inbox a glimmering copy of “Sustainable Columbia E-News,” apparently a seasonal update for community members of the university’s most recent steps towards increased environmental stewardship. 

With information about everything from Columbia’s greenhouse gas inventory to a listing of Columbia’s most recent sustainability score, “Sustainable Columbia E-news” details a wide range of intitiatives to reduce Columbia’s carbon foortprint and improve its long-term commitment to the environment

A formal launch email from Senior Executive Vice President, Robert Kasdin, officially announced the emergence of the new e-newsletter as an update on the “broad participation by students, faculty, and staff…in the shared goal of becoming even more sustainable and energy efficient in our operations and daily lives” and perhaps adds one more of many bureacratic messages to your already flooded email inbox.  But, its for a good cause, so you might as well read it.

Bwog hopes you have a chance to give it a gander soon.

In which Bwog newcomer Anish Bramhandkar keeps you up to date on the latest news in the strange and quirky happenings of the lives of Columbia’s finest.  Beware, in some cases connections to our fair alma mater may be otherwise dubious or somewhat circumspect.

UPDATE: Columbia Economics professors hijack today’s New York Times Op-Ed page to wax about the bailout and their expectations for tonight’s Presidential debate.

CU Researcher Quantifies SEAS Sex Appeal

That Peter Bretter even dated Sarah Marshall to begin with is a mystery CU Business School assistant professor (and MIT graduate) Leonard Lee has solved, according to the Calgary Herald.

According to Professor Lee’s research, men are just as “superficial” as women, but women let their perception of their own appearance limit their dating pool.  Men, on the other hand, will date just about anyone.  The figure of men being 2.5 times more likely to accept date requests just about summarizes the situation in the Carleton Lounge, Bwog figures. (more…)