


[Yes, I have realised, I still don't know how to spell "Barack" correctly. So sue me. Anyway, what's wrong with being "Bruce" or "Barry" instead?]
How many Palestinian Anne Franks did the Israelis murder, maim or turn mad? Unless the Israeli state can see that equivalence there is no future for Palestine...Let's remind ourselves from Wikipedia:
After the war, it was estimated that of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands between 1942 and 1944, only 5,000 survived.The comparison with Gaza (for the current conflict) is about 1,300,000 with 1,298,700 survivors. Yes, I can see the similarity.
Sleep has an interesting relationship to mental illness. While sleeplessness and disturbed circadian rhythms have been linked to mood disorders for many years, sleep deprivation is known to have an antidepressant effect and is sometimes used to treat the most severe cases of depression.Sleep deprivation in short bursts only, I assume they mean.
Venezuela's Foreign Ministry said Caracas also plans to denounce Israel's military actions at the International Criminal Court and the South American nation "will not rest until it sees them punished."Expect lack of rest, then.
In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding - and, not incidentally, explaining humans' peculiar erotic fascination with breasts - Young predicts that it won't be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink.The report speculates that an "anti-love" potion could then follow.
Professor John Taylor of Stanford University devised the so-called Taylor Rule used by central banks to set interest rates. He told the American Economic Association's annual meeting in San Francisco this month that neither of the Bush government's two emergency tax rebates in 2002 and 2008 had made any difference to consumer spending. The problem was that they were temporary. We adjust our spending based on what we think we are going to be earning, not on the dollars that happen to fall into our pocket on any given week.Given that the first of these failed rebates was in 2002, weren't Peter and other economics commentators aware that they did not make significant change to consumer spending? (I didn't know either, but economics is not something I profess to know much about.)
I am still waiting to see more criticism of the short fuse of this spending too.It seems economics commentary is a game anyone can play at these days.
China has a $2 trillion foreign currency reserve but it also suffers from a huge disparity between the rich and poor: while 0.4 per cent of the people hold 70 per cent of the wealth of the country, a fifth of the population - more than 300 million Chinese - have daily incomes of less than one dollar.Now that's wealth disparity.
...at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth, and the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth.So, does this mean that wealth concentration is roughly 20 times worse in China than the US? Gosh. Good thing they are communist, or who know hows bad it could have been!
The Australian Conservation Foundation's consumption atlas shows people living in high-density areas have greater greenhouse gas emissions than those living in low-density areas. A study by EnergyAustralia and the NSW Department of Planning shows the energy used by a resident in high-rise is nearly twice that for a resident in a detached house. Think of all the lifts, clothes dryers, air-conditioners and lights in garages and foyers. ...I am a little suspicious of the slant being put on some figures here. In the second paragraph, for example, he talks of little change in "percentage" of car use, but is that taking into account the much shorter distances that may be being driven when you live close to the city, even if you still use your car to get to work?
Research in Melbourne shows people squeezed into newly converted dense areas did not use public transport to any greater extent and there was little or no change in their percentage of car use.There is not enough difference in the emissions of public versus private transport to counter the increased emissions of high-density living. For each kilometre CityRail carries a passenger, it emits 105 grams of greenhouse gases, while the average car emits 155, and modern fuel-efficient cars such as the Toyota Prius emit just 70.
Home wind turbines are generating a fraction of the energy promised by manufacturers, and in some cases use more electricity than they make, a report warns today. The results of what is thought to be the most comprehensive study undertaken of the industry show the worst performers provided just 41 watt-hours a day - less than the energy needed for a conventional lightbulb for an hour, or even to power the turbine's own electronics.
On average the turbines surveyed provided enough electricity to light an energy-efficient house, but this still only represented 5%-10% of the manufacturers' claims, said consultants Encraft. ...
It found the best performing turbines would generate "clean" electricity equivalent to that needed to manufacture them in less than two years, while the worst performing ones would take 40 years.
Toyota says the new car, revealed Monday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, will achieve an estimated 3.7L/100km in the city and 4.0L/100km highway, for a combined rating of 3.8L/100km. The first-generation Prius was rated 4.6 L/100km combined fuel consumption, the second generation was 4.1....According to the Courier Mail, it will cost $40,000 here.
Toyota says the 2010 model, which goes on sale this spring, has the lowest drag coefficient of any mass production car - 0.25. A normal sports car often has a drag of 0.32 or higher.
I'm with the rationalists. And yet this division—which seems so plain and irreconcilable to me—keeps being muddied by the contributors to this collection. Wes Jackson offers the most romantic fantasy of the book—but he is a distinguished scientist. Al Gore offers the most lucid popular summary of hard climate science we have—and then attributes the disaster, in an unexplained leap of logic, to a "spiritual crisis." Almost all the rational accounts here let romantic tropes seep into their writing as rousing quasi-religious end lines. Why? It feels as though the rationalists don't have enough confidence in their own intellectual tradition to inspire and rouse people. It's an old Enlightenment fear: Are we too irrational and poorly evolved a species to respond to neat reason?I would say that opposition to nuclear being a substantial part of the response to greenhouse gases is largely based on the romantic view, yet typically it will be dressed up by Greens with facts and figures (talking about the long half life of isotopes, for example) to give it a more rationalist sheen.