Teena McQueen, new vice president of the Liberal Party, has no time for the Liberal Left women complaining of bullying and demanding quotas: “Women always want the spoils of victory, without the fight.”Can't we have an election now, instead of watching this
The series of deadly explosions and fires that tore through suburban Boston on Thursday has thrown a spotlight on proposed upgrades to safety standards for natural-gas pipelines, something that has languished amid opposition from utilities.The enormous scale of the Boston incident outright killed only one person. I didn't even remember this deadly gas pipeline problem from 2010:
“We have been pushing for more regulations for years and there has been some huge regulations in the works but for some reason they have been stalled,” Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust in Bellingham, Washington, said in a telephone interview. “The industry does a whole lot to slow these things down.”
At least one person died and dozens were injured Thursday after a series of explosions and fires along NiSource Inc.’s natural gas network in Massachusetts. Investigators say it’s too soon to say what the cause is, but past incidents have led safety advocates to issue proposals for tighter rules or closer oversight that have gone unheeded.
Federal filings show NiSource, which owns seven local gas distribution companies from Ohio to Virginia, has joined the broader pipeline industry in opposing rules on when certain pipelines need to be inspected, frequency of corrosion monitoring, and reporting leaks.
U.S. oil and gas pipeline-related deaths jumped to the highest level in seven years in 2017. The 20 fatalities were the most since 2010, when a natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California, leveled a neighborhood and killed eight people.Another article ends by saying that "serious consequences" from natural gas distribution aren't all that common, but then gives some figures that make that sound a dubious proposition:
Even though natural-gas leaks are fairly common, serious consequences aren’t. From 1998 to 2017, 15 people a year, on average, died in incidents related to gas distribution in the U.S. “Significant incidents”—those that do things such as cause an injury or death, result in at least $50,000 of damage, or lead to a fire or explosion—happen about 286 times a year.
That might sound like a lot. But then again, the streets of Boston carry an average of four gas leaks a mile.
Isabel Briggs Myers (1897–1980) was an autodidact who eschewed formal psychological methods of test development and validation. She became interested in personology, as she called it, largely as a result of an obsession her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs (1875–1968), had with the ideas of psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Emre charts the women’s competitive relationship and expanding ambitions with sensitivity and skill.The Guardian has an interview with the author, and is also well worth reading. I thought that this was a particularly interesting observation:
Initially Cook Briggs wanted to make a landmark contribution to the practice of child-rearing. In popular-magazine articles, she presented Isabel as a triumph of an “obedience-creativity” regime. In this model, kindness, warmth and play were won only after authoritarian orders to study and work had been complied with. Before reading Briggs Myers bedtime stories, Cook Briggs required her to complete a demanding programme of study. By her early 30s, Briggs Myers was an accomplished polymath and award-winning writer of formulaic but engaging detective fiction.
These ventures paved the way for both women’s fervent interest in personality. Cook Briggs hoped to make Jung’s obscure writings accessible to the world by cataloguing the character of everyone she met on index cards. Briggs Myers formalized her mother’s project into the MBTI, after losing the proceeds of her novels in the 1930s economic crash.
Attitudes towards the Myers-Briggs indicator have varied over the years. In its early incarnation, especially the 1950s and 1960s, it was deemed more desirable to be an introvert. “There was something very suspicious about the extrovert,” Emre notes. “The extrovert is the people-pleaser, the social man, the superficial one. And the introvert is the serious, creative intellectual who commands respect because he or she will not change herself to meet the demands of others.”Then, to my surprise, I see that David Roberts had a tweet thread in which he explains that he thinks the critics of it go a bit overboard. You can read his take on it here.
This flipped in the 1970s, Emre thinks, and since then we’ve lived in “the age of the extroverts”. She says: “Despite the fact that introverts are being summoned by someone like Susan Cain [in her book Quiet], there still is a really strong bias towards extroversion. Towards a person who is incredibly flexible with their personality and who can change themselves to meet the demands of any given situation. In some ways it is because that’s what is utterly necessary to succeed in today’s economy, right? You have to be a kind of constantly flexible labourer.”
There are clearly problems, though, with reading too much into a Myers-Briggs score. Peer-reviewed scientific papers on the effectiveness of the indicator are hard to find. It is criticised for giving binary outcomes – you’re either extrovert or introvert – and human personality is often more slippery and changeable. Moreover, one of the central tenets of the instrument is that you can’t change your type: it is innate, fixed from birth. Yet the company that now publishes the MBTI concedes that half of subjects change at least one of their four types when they answer the questions a second time.
A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports suggests beer brewing practices existed in the Eastern Mediterranean over five millennia before the earliest known evidence, discovered in northern China. In an archaeological collaboration project between Stanford University in the United States, and University of Haifa, Israel, archeologists analyzed three stone mortars from a 13,000-year old Natufian burial cave site in Israel. Their analysis confirmed that these mortars were used for brewing of wheat/barley, as well as for food storage.
Sardines have had a surprising and important revival in the Pacific. For decades in the 20th century their abundance gave birth to an industry that fed millions of soldiers fighting both world wars and sustained thousands of Sicilians, Asians, and other foreign-born workers—the fishermen and packers of Cannery Row, in Monterey, California—during the worst years of the Depression. Visitors to the Monterey Bay Aquarium can see photographs and machines from the cannery that originally occupied the building, and promotional films from the 1930s and ’40s showing the factory life that was the backdrop of John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row. (You can also watch the films at www.mbayaq.org.) The California sardine fishery was the largest in the Western hemisphere, and in its peak season, 1936–37, fishermen took 726,000 tons of sardines.
But even as Steinbeck wrote the novel, which was published in 1945, the sardine population was mysteriously declining, and by the early ’50s the industry had collapsed. By the middle of the decade, Cannery Row was practically deserted. The easy explanation was overfishing: In the ’30s, “reduction” operations were grinding sardines into meal for animal feed and oil for paint, glue, and industrial purposes. But decades of close study of sardines after the collapse revealed that Cannery Row might have turned into Skid Row even without the voracious reduction plants. For 2,000 years the Pacific coastline had seen roughly 60-year cycles of sardines and anchovies (their cousins), following temperature cycles: Sardines prefer warmer water, anchovies prefer cooler, and their populations fluctuate in similar cycles around the world. After severe restrictions and moratoriums on sardine fishing that lasted from 1967 to 1986, the fish began coming back in numbers that made commercial fishing thinkable again.
But the canneries were gone for good. Pacific sardines caught today are frozen and sent to tuna-fattening farms in the waters off, for example, Australia
The question is what to do about the left-wing tech monopolies of Silicon Valley. Start conservative companies and platforms to compete with them? Break them up under the Sherman Act? Turn them into regulated public utilities, with public employee-level salaries and no stock options? Those are all possibilities. After watching the video, you no doubt will be ready to take action.
So what can we expect the next volcanic eruption to be like? It depends where it happens.I see that in 2011 I had a post on the same topic, with a Professor suggesting it might be a good idea for local governments to think about what to do if a volcano suddenly emerges.
If the next eruption occurs in the northern areas of the Newer Volcanics Provinces (around Bendigo, Ballarat or Hamilton), we can expect lots of lava flows and fire fountains.
But if it occurs in the southern part (Colac, Camperdown, Warrnambool or Mt Gambier), the presence of groundwater could make it much more explosive.
We could be up for an eruption just like the 2010 Iceland eruption where a big plume of ash was sent high in the atmosphere. In this case disruption will occur in Eastern Australia and New Zealand.
Will it happen any time soon? Well, the Newer Volcanics Province has been active for more than 4.5 million years, with eruptions occurring at least once every 10,000 years.
It could happen in our lifetime, but more likely it will happen after that.
Oh, another outcome of the research was that the first warning signs with Mt Gambier would have been noticed only by the most sensitive equipment up to two days in advance.
Such equipment is not present in the area at the moment.
The rest of the column explaining how, against the evidence of my eyes and ears, it has "gone splat" is behind a paywall. But this just appears to be a case of the current Right wing quasi post-modernistic "I interpret evidence in the manner that best creates my own chosen reality".For three weeks the ABC obsessively pushed fake news: claims that the federal Liberals had a culture of bullying, particularly of female MPs.So how about an apology, now that this fake news has gone splat?
