Things to be done, and fun using Pixlr (for on line image editting, and then Superlame to add voice ballons, as well as Irfanview to do a resize for my blog width) is too distracting.
Back in a few days, I think....
Monday, July 15, 2013
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Quite a gap
BBC News - Class divide in boys' reading skills seen in Pisa scores
The brightest boys from poor homes in England and Scotland are at least two-and-a-half years behind in reading compared with those from the richest homes, a study suggests.Research for the Sutton Trust educational charity says Scotland's gap is the highest in the developed world, while England's is the second highest.
In Finland, Denmark, Germany and Canada, the gap is equal to 15 months.
The government in England says its reforms will improve reading standards.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Clever Brian
I'm not the biggest fan of physicist Brian Cox as a media personality - he looks just a little too happy all the time. But last night, the first time I saw an episode of his Wonders of Life series (which is sort of a David Attenborough meets physics show), I was quite impressed by this sequence:
Not exactly looking like something da Vinci had in mind
Canadian Team Claims $250,000 Prize for Human-Powered Helicopter | Autopia | Wired.com
At the link, there's a video of a human powered "helicopter", of odd design. It sort of looks fake at first, but it isn't. Still, they won a prize, so congratulations are due.
At the link, there's a video of a human powered "helicopter", of odd design. It sort of looks fake at first, but it isn't. Still, they won a prize, so congratulations are due.
Tony takes up the fight
I had an earlier version up for a while, but have made some further changes. I trust that my Friend from Perth reports to a certain blog that I finally found a way to post an image of a nude Abbott.
Pleasing movie news
James Bond: Sam Mendes directs Skyfall follow up
I wonder if they will allow James to be a little bit happier this time around.
I wonder if they will allow James to be a little bit happier this time around.
Bad news Friday, Part 2
Energy production causes big US earthquakes : Nature News
Natural-gas extraction, geothermal-energy production and other activities that inject fluid underground have caused numerous earthquakes in the United States, scientists report today in a trio of papers in Science1–3.
Most of these quakes have been small, but some have exceeded magnitude 5.0. They include a magnitude-5.6 event that hit Oklahoma on 6 November 2011, damaging 14 homes and injuring two people, says William Ellsworth, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and the author of one of the papers1.
He says that the annual number of earthquakes record at magnitude 3.0 or higher in the central and eastern United States has increased almost tenfold in the past decade — from an average of 21 per year between 1967 and 2000 to a maximum of 188 in 2011. A second study2, led by Nicholas van der Elst, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, finds that at least half of the magnitude-4.5 or larger earthquakes that have struck the interior United States in the past decade have occurred near injection-well sites.
Bad news Friday
A blog at the Guardian notes that there is a new James Hansen led paper out soon that argues that burning all our fossil fuels could effectively ruin the planet for humans (too hot to grow food grains, for example). The concern is about poorly understood feedbacks that may lead to a mini runaway increase in temperatures.
That's a worry, of course, but I was more interested to read a summary of other recent papers arguing that there are grounds to question whether a 2 degree increase in global temperatures is really a "safe" level. I've always thought that there was probably a lot of guesswork in that nominal figure, and it is important if it is too "conservative", especially as there has been much publicity lately that the sensitivity to doubling CO2 is closer to 2 degrees than to 3 or 4. If the sense of complacency that some are encouraging as a result of that is ill founded, we should know.
Anyway, here's the summary:
That's a worry, of course, but I was more interested to read a summary of other recent papers arguing that there are grounds to question whether a 2 degree increase in global temperatures is really a "safe" level. I've always thought that there was probably a lot of guesswork in that nominal figure, and it is important if it is too "conservative", especially as there has been much publicity lately that the sensitivity to doubling CO2 is closer to 2 degrees than to 3 or 4. If the sense of complacency that some are encouraging as a result of that is ill founded, we should know.
Anyway, here's the summary:
The new paper by James Hansen is just the latest confirming that we are on the verge of crossing a tipping point into catastrophic climate change. Other recent scientific studies show that the current global emissions trajectory could within three years guarantee a 2C rise in global temperatures, in turn triggering irreversible and dangerous amplifying feedbacks.
According to a scientific paper given at the Geological Society of London last month, climate records from Siberian caves show that temperatures of just 1.5C generate "a tipping point for continuous permafrost to start thawing", according to lead author Prof Anton Vaks from Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences. Conventional climate models suggest that 1.5C is just 10-30 years away.
Permafrost thawing releases sub-ice undersea methane into the atmosphere - a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent that carbon dioxide. In June, NASA's new five-year programme to study the Arctic carbon cycle, Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), declared:
"If just one percent of the permafrost carbon released over a short time period is methane, it will have the same greenhouse impact as the 99 percent that is released as carbon dioxide."Another paper suggests that conventional climate modelling is too conservative due to not accounting for complex risks and feedbacks within and between ecosystems. The paper published in Nature last Wednesday finds that models used to justify the 2C target as a 'safe' limit focus only on temperature rise and fail to account for impacts on the wider climate system such as sea level rise, ocean acidification, and loss of carbon from soils. It concludes that the 2C target is insufficient to avoid dangerous climate change.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Abbott's anxiety rise continues...
I've just been watching Kevin Rudd's Press Club address on the economy.
He sounds confident, across a lot of details, consultative and smart. Less "Ruddisms" in expression too.
There is no doubt he has been improved greatly by being dumped.
He makes, more than ever, Tony Abbott sound like a mere shallow sloganeer.
(And I'll make another call out across the interwebs: cry Catallaxians, cry...)
He sounds confident, across a lot of details, consultative and smart. Less "Ruddisms" in expression too.
There is no doubt he has been improved greatly by being dumped.
He makes, more than ever, Tony Abbott sound like a mere shallow sloganeer.
(And I'll make another call out across the interwebs: cry Catallaxians, cry...)
More "you don't say...."
Combination of smoking and heavy drinking 'speeds up cognitive decline'
Mind you, seems to me the effect is not exactly all that pronounced:
Mind you, seems to me the effect is not exactly all that pronounced:
The research team found that in current smokers who were also heavy drinkers, cognitive decline was 36% faster than in non-smoking moderate drinkers. This was equivalent to an age effect of 12 years – an additional two years over the 10-year follow up period.Is it that easy to tell the difference between, say, a 67 year old brain and a 65 year old one?
You don't say....
Men and Women Often Expect Different Things When They Move In Together - W. Bradford Wilcox - The Atlantic
A study confirms what common sense and observation should have already made clear:
A study confirms what common sense and observation should have already made clear:
According to a new paper from RAND by sociologists Michael Pollard and Kathleen Mullan Harris, cohabiting young adults have significantly lower levels of commitment than their married peers. This aversion to commitment is particularly prevalent among young men who live with their partners.I wonder how many fathers point this out to their daughters? I mean, they understand the likely psychology of men better than the mother.
Brisbane colonial history noted
I was in the State Library bookshop last Sunday, killing a bit of time before heading off to see War Horse, and briefly noted a book (a novel, I think) which revolved around the Brisbane Bread Riot of 1866.
That's an event I didn't recall having heard about before, so I Googled it up.
I can't seem to link to it directly, but the first on the list should be the link to a good article by Paul Wilson explaining what it was about (basically, not enough work or food for immigrants arriving on boats expecting same, and the government being blamed for poor organisation.)
It has a couple of good, old photos of Brisbane in the period too.
Cities sure changed a lot in the century ranging from 1866 to 1966, didn't they?
That's an event I didn't recall having heard about before, so I Googled it up.
I can't seem to link to it directly, but the first on the list should be the link to a good article by Paul Wilson explaining what it was about (basically, not enough work or food for immigrants arriving on boats expecting same, and the government being blamed for poor organisation.)
It has a couple of good, old photos of Brisbane in the period too.
Cities sure changed a lot in the century ranging from 1866 to 1966, didn't they?
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