So I got inspired by Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn's defiant, proud even, support for the royal favourite that is homeopathy. And also by the idea that water 'retains a memory' - stop laughing at the back or I'll get out the ruler again - and I dredged the memory (geddit?) banks of the Parliament website ..
Golly.
This is the list of Labour MPs who have at one time or another backed a homeopathy Early Day Motion (EDM). There are plenty of others, of course, LibDems and Tories and ... Ian Paisley, and ... Alex Salmond. But for the purposes of purely laughing at comrades (as well as for this poor comrade channeling Princes Leia), let's stick to Labour.
Abbott, Diane
Anderson, Janet
Bailey, Adrian
Banks, Tony
Barlow, Celia
Barnes, Harry
Battle, John
Bayley, Hugh
Benton, Joe
Berger, Luciana
Best, Harold
Bradley, Keith
Brennan, Kevin
Buck, Karen
Burgon, Colin
Campbell, Ronnie
Clapham, Michael
Clarke, Tony
Cohen, Harry
Coleman, Iain
Cook, Frank
Corston, Jean
Corbyn, Jeremy
Cryer, Ann
Cummings, John
Cunliffe, Lawrence
Cunningham, Jim
Dalyell, Tam
Davis, Terry
Dean, Janet
Dismore, Andrew
Dobbin, Jim
Docherty, Thomas
Dowd, Jim
Drew, David
Eagle, Angela
Edwards, Huw
Elliott, Julie
Etherington, Bill
Field, Frank
Flynn, Paul
Follett, Barbara
Gapes, Mike
Griffiths, Win
Hall, Mike
Hall, Patrick
Hamilton, David
Hamilton, Fabian
Hepburn, Stephen
Hodge, Margaret
Hopkins, Kelvin
Howarth, George
Jackson, Glenda
Jones, Barry
Jones, Lynne
Kennedy, Jane
Kilfoyle, Peter
Kumar, Ashok
Lazarowicz, Mark
Lewis, Terry
Linton, Martin
Livingstone, Ken
Mahon, Alice
Marsden, Gordon
Marshall-Andrews, Robert
McAllion, John
McCafferty, Chris
McDonnell, John
McGuire, Anne
Meale, Alan
Michie, Bill
Naysmith, Doug
O'Hara, Edward
Pickthall, Colin
Pike, Peter L
Plaskitt, James
Pope, Greg
Pound, Stephen
Prentice, Bridget
Primarolo, Dawn
Quin, Joyce
Robertson, John
Ross, Ernie
Roy, Lindsay
Russell, Christine
Sarwar, Mohammad
Sawford, Phil
Sharma, Virendra
Sheridan, Jim
Simpson, Alan
Skinner, Dennis
Smith, Geraldine
Stringer, Graham
Taylor, Dari
Taylor, David
Wareing, Robert N
Vaz, Keith
Vis, Rudi
Walley, Joan
White, Brian
Wyatt, Derek
[NB: You can unsign EDMs.]
For more detailed info, and about other parties MPs, see Skeptical Voter
A science broadcasting legend predicts the future, after getting it mostly right 40 years ago, and has some choice words on the NSA 'scandal'.
James Burke is a British broadcasting legend, one who any Brit over 45 years old would recognise as the face of technological progress.
Most familiar as the chief presenter of the long-running BBC science series 'Tomorrow's World', he also anchored the Moon landing coverage and has written many influential books. The Washington Post has called him "one of the most intriguing minds in the Western world."
He may be familiar to Americans for his hit PBS series charting how technological progress happens, 'Connections', and his writing for Scientific American and Time.
Writing in 1973 for BBC magazine Radio Times he predicted life today and marking that 40th anniversary the BBC has looked back to see how his predictions stack up: they mostly do. He predicted the mass take-up of computers, in-vitro fertilisation and cheap air travel.He got right that the British people would resist identity cards. He got wrong that there would be 300,000 computer terminals by 2000 - there were 134 million.
Burke also predicted "metadata banks" of personal information - Facebook, Google - and that "young people" would be completely relaxed about releasing their personal information.
Speaking to the BBC's Eddie Mair (audio after the jump), Burke was asked about this attitude to privacy in the light of the current panic about government and privacy.
Burke says that issues like transparency and accountability are new, they have come forward because of the Internet, the 'information age'. That the general public now has access to more information, and is demanding it - this is "healthy". But matters of privacy are contextual:
When street numbers came out in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 1820s there were riots, because nobody wanted others to know what your street number was. Times change. When you tick a box when you buy something online that allows them to put you in their big data pile and find out what you'd really like next time.
Walmart does 300 million transactions an hour and they use that information, for example, when there is a big hurricane predicted they'll put torches on the shelves exactly where you want to buy them. And pop-tarts because, believe it or not, that's what people buy when there's going to be a hurricane.
So it's a quid pro quo.
Asked if he's content with this situation (which he had predicted) Burke reflects that when he visited the Soviet Union he was told to be careful of what he said, 'because everyone is listening'. Says Burke:
Of course they're not listening. If they had to listen to everything we said in hotel rooms in the USSR in those days they'd be up all day and night.
So called snooping is them looking for metadata, not what you say. Not what you said to Charlie but the fact you talked to Charlie. If Charlie's unimportant and you're unimportant the thing they're happiest to do is dump it because the pile is unmanageably big now.
So called Big Data, the electronic exhaust we leave behind, is unbelievably large and growing at extrapolated rates. Nobody is going to ask me what I said to somebody on the phone yesterday afternoon, they're not interested. The algorithm will say 'I see he's talking to so-and-so and it's not relevant to us', and that's as far as it will go. There's no other way you can run the system anywhere.
So you're unperturbed by the NSA and the Edward Snowden revelations and all that?
We've been doing that since we left the caves. Anybody who thinks that governments have not been taking what they can about public behaviour, they haven't understood the political process.
Of course everyone does it, of course they've always done it. Seems to me the press has jumped on the idea that people are snooping without recognising that the amounts of data are so gigantically enormous that there is no way that the NSA cares a rat's ass about me or you.
We're in a transition period. I don't think it'll be that long before we'll be able to throw out our own search algorithms to, say, find out if anybody is looking at me!
There's always a quid-pro-quo with technology. There's always two sides to every knife.
Speaking about the future, Burke cites one development which will fundamentally change the world: nano-factories. (Video about this after the jump.)
Let’s say that 2040 sees the start of worldwide wi-fi distribution of software kits to make a nano-fabricator. Sits in the back garden, spare room, somewhere. Uses dirt, air and water and a bit of cheap, carbon-rich acetylene gas. Manipulates atoms and molecules to produce anything you want, virtually free. Each fabber can make copies of itself, so: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 etc: one each for nine billion of us, say, by 2042.
Sixty years later, we’ll have adapted to the new abundance and are living in small, no-pollution, autonomous communities, anywhere. Energy from spray-on photovoltaics makes any object (like a house) its own power source. So, here you are in your fabber-fabricated dwelling, filled with Mona Lisas if that’s your wish, with holographic reality transforming any room into anywhere (like: beach, sun, wind ruffling hair). So nobody travels any more. Want to see a pal, have dinner with your mother, join a discussion group? No problem: they’ll be there with you as 3D holograms, and you won’t know Stork from butter, unless you try to make physical contact (I’m avoiding sex and reproduction because that might have to be wild speculation).
The entire global environment will also be covered with quintillions of dust-sized nano-computers called motes. So your life will be constantly curated by an intelligent network of ubiquitous cyber-servants. The “motes” will know you need more food, or that it’s a bit chilly today, or that you’re supposed to call Charlie. And they’ll take the relevant action. Your shirt (motes in the fabric) will call Charlie. Either his avatar will appear, or you’ll hear his voice. Not sound waves, but brainwaves. Brain-to-brain communication (it happened for the first time in summer 2013).
No travel means no need for infrastructure, such as high-speed trains (unnecessary by mid-century, along with superhighways and airports). No need for anything that Government does, because, in our millennial culture of scarcity, Government was primarily there to tax, spend, and re-distribute the wealth. In 2103, with no scarcity, what need for Government? And with abundance, everybody has everything, so what need for criminals?
Listen to the interview with Burke and watch his predictions for the future after the jump:
After once more regretting going BTL (below the line) in a comments section of The Guardian I discover a fantastic demolition of Edward Said's 'Orientalism' on Jacobinism.
The lengthy, thorough post had lots which springs out. It quotes Ibn Warraq on practitioners "intellectual terrorism". It describes Said's hugely influential work as "an accusatory and deeply reactionary text" and describes the ill effects it has had, principally in the Arab world. Go read the whole thing.
But what most sprung out to me was this:
And while Said's work was a convenient cudgel with which to bash the West, it was often misleading and tendentious to the point of outright fraudulence. The Orientalists Said attacks in Orientalism were not the Imperialist stooges of his imagination. They were learned classicists and multi-lingual philologists motivated by a desire to know about and to understand cultures, traditions and peoples unlike their own. Their voluminous research and the translations of Arab texts they undertook have proven invaluable, not only to Western scholars but also - in spite of Said's claims to the contrary - to Middle Eastern scholars, who were grateful for the preservation of their own neglected pre-Islamic history.
I immediately thought of the scholars who documented Australian Aboriginal culture in C19th and early C20th. Who did this work at a time when the worst horrors were being inflicted on Aboriginal people.
Their records are now used by Aboriginal communities all over Australia to reconstruct or fill in the blanks about their ancient culture. They have been crucial to native title claims over land.
It also made me think of the four part series just finished on Australian TV, First Footprints, about how Aboriginal people transformed the environment. The series is a collaboration demonstrating this alive and wonderful connection between scientists and Aborigines.
The sight of Jawoyn elder, Margaret Katherine, learning factual details at an amazing rock art gallery near Kakadu from anthropologists and archeological experts is profoundly moving. You can feel her joy as she realises the stories she is custodian of not only have authenticity but are verified by tangible evidence thousands of years old. Her gratitude is as palpable as her dignity.
Indeed. Throughout the series we see a real exchange. In one highlight trackers from the central desert explain to scientists what is going on in ancient footprints found at Willandra Lakes. In another at the 'world's largest gallery' in the Kimberley, Western Australian, a scientist gives the date of rock art depicting a human face to an awestruck young Aboriginal local.
The whole of First Footprints is on YouTube, part one here. (Timelapse photography short after the jump.)
Another of the things I learned from the series was that there are probably more trees now in Australia than at first contact because Aboriginal people systematically burnt to create grassland and open woodland. This so impressed the first white settlers and it is now thought that the pictures painted of pastoral scenes once thought misleadingly reminiscent of Britain are accurate.
Human beings are not descended from apes. We are apes.
So says Christopher Ryan, co-author of the book 'Sex at Dawn', at this funtime TED talk.
Turns out our sexual antics are closely related to those of our closest relatives -- chimps and notorious lust monsters the bonobos (gorillas barely have sex at all). Why? We all have big hanging balls.
Stay with me.
Says Ryan, having testicles hanging out there means we are built for 'frequent and spontaneous ejaculation'. And we do this primarily for social reasons, not reproduction.
Ryan also argues that our human societies were once collectivist, back in the hunter-gatherer days, and this included sexual sharing. Once we settled down to farm and invented the idea of property, and exclusivity, we twisted that nature -- but it is still there.
I should say first that I admire Goldacre, author of Bad Science, for his work on nailing down tricksters who sell stuff which doesn't do anything and has no science to back it up. In particular his posts about the media-driven hysteria around MMR.
Back in the 90s I worked with a therapist friend on testing whether any alternative therapies would help relieve AIDS symptoms. I could see that some of them did help and this makes sense as much conventional medicine is derived from nature: this is why drug companies send people out to indigenous peoples to find new therapies from amongst their traditional medicines, a process known as bioprospecting.
My generation of gay men, until the first effective medicine started to appear in the mid 90s, faced multiple funerals and would look at anything which might help.
When the efficacious medicines started to appear I witnessed something close to the sort of desperation I could imagine occurring in an Ethiopian refuge camp as the emaciated fight for the last scraps of food and water.
Two things in particular stick in my memory and my throat.
I had friends who literally were making choices between medicine, rent and food - they were poor. They did not have boyfriends or family to support them, they were isolated. Some were literally growing their own food. The largely middle-class and highly educated people living with HIV/AIDS who ran the decision making bodies and sat on government advisory panels only cared about drug trials, they refused to see that before those breakthroughs they were waiting for others would die from such situations and the stress they engendered.
When the drug trials really took a turn towards what would eventually become the therapies which keep people alive today the drug companies decided who lived and who died. Amongst those who couldn't get on them were women, 'because they might become pregnant'. It didn't matter if they were lesbian, as a friend of mine was, to protect themselves and maybe for scientific reasons, women had to be turned down.
The biggest problem myself and my friend faced in trying to produce science on alternative therapy was the impossibility of getting funding or any support to test them.
The system for 'proving' the efficacy of a substance is radically bent against the ability of alternative therapies to do that as it is so expensive, even simple blood tests - we had to do this by cheating or with the help of a few sympathetic doctors.
Unfortunately the experiment came to an end with the premature death of my friend. But I know others around the world at this time who were trying similar experiments and - much as the use of marijuana has been shown to be effective against glaucoma - despite all the odds there is scientific proof that some alternative therapies do work to relieve AIDS symptoms.
So it is a plain fact that alternative therapies are not all placebos.
Charlie Booker was back on BBC4 with a new series, Newswipe, which did a copyright Booker-esque evisceration of 24 news.
Whilst it made me pine a bit for the ABC Australia primetime show 'Mediawatch', which used forensic journalism rather than Booker's albeit wit and piercing attack mode, he did hit one nail in a Jon Stewart video edit stylee.
Sensationalist and, particularly, highly descriptive media coverage of suicide and 'school shootings' creates even more suicide cases and 'school shootings' .
Ben Goldacre has more to say about mass media actually killing people in his Bad Science column.
The Berlin gay holocaust memorial is unveiled and among the participants was 95-year-old Rudolf Brazda, who survived incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1941 to 1945. "It was a terrible time," Brazda said. Asked how he felt now, he responded: "I must say that I feel as though I were in paradise in this democratic society."
What is happening in the Italian blogosphere? I check viral videos regularly and a lot are suddenly Italian. And this is in a list previously 100% dominated by America with occasional Sarkozy interruptions.
Viral, political video on the whole is becoming more international. I've seen (as well as French) some Malaysian and Canadian video pop up with serious numbers of blog postings.
The Chinese public sphere has become a more freewheeling, interesting and chaotic arena for expressions of opinion than it was. This isn't all due to the Internet (crusading print journalists and activists have also done their part), but bloggers calling attention to official corruption or mocking government policies have definitely helped alter the political landscape.
The politically significant things happening online involve forms of communication, such as efforts to call attention to corrupt acts by local officials, that dovetail with policies that are promoted or at least given lip service by the central authorities.
Really recommended science feature from the New Yorker:
The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.
...
Researchers at the University of Manchester, in England, have gone a step beyond mirrors and fashioned an immersive virtual-reality system for treating patients with phantom-limb pain. Detectors transpose movement of real limbs into a virtual world where patients feel they are actually moving, stretching, even playing a ballgame. So far, five patients have tried the system, and they have all experienced a reduction in pain. Whether those results will last has yet to be established. But the approach raises the possibility of designing similar systems to help patients with other sensor syndromes. How, one wonders, would someone with chronic back pain fare in a virtual world? The Manchester study suggests that there may be many ways to fight our phantoms.
Using blogs with names like Fix the Pumps and Squandered Heritage, citizens took up "beats," lending their professional expertise, ingenuity and gumshoe efforts to create a citizens' voice to counter city government rhetoric.
That’s not all, though - I have also been drafted in by Tracey Todhunter to help develop her ideas for a ‘communiversity’ for low carbon communities. She writes about it here. We’re going to start off in my session, so Tracey and her colleagues can develop a strategy using the game; and then take the results into her session to drum up support and refine things.
From next Monday foundation staff will lead discussions twice a week in Habbo.com's InfoBus, which is a virtual room designed to look like the inside of a high-end bus.
I oblige. I'm shocked, confused, scared and embarrassed all at the same time. Most of the bystanders have vacated the platform by now, by police order. And I'm not talking about normal police either. This is the Specialist Firearms Unit, about 8 of them, machine guns, bulletproof vests, police dogs and all. And they're here to arrest ME!
With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, however, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech. That, of course, could also invite meddling by the government, the way broadcasters now face indecency and other restrictions that are criticised as vague.
Others believe companies shouldn't police content at all, and if they do, they should at least make clearer the rules and the mechanisms for appeal.
Local government officials had mixed views about how they see Web 2.0 meshing with their needs, however. Mary Benner, CIO of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, called it "something that we need to pursue, but it is not an immediate priority".
While Web 2.0 can help residents communicate better with their governments, she says, offering those kinds of features is becoming a key way to lure younger IT workers to take jobs in government where they can build innovative Web 2.0 applications.
Dave Briggs' review ofCommunities in Control, the new white paper by the Department for Communities and Local Government. It's pretty radical but I commented that if you want to address the 'digital divide', which it references, you could start by ramping up funding for UK Online Centres whose CEO has been screaming about underfunding. Not sexy and seemingly not on anyone's agenda.
7) Because our senior executives haven't gotten the hang of email yet, and we know that our executives (who approve our ad design and spend) think and act exactly in the same way as our customers, even though they earn more, are degree-qualified, much older and live in Canberra.
Obviously, European Youtube users didn’t ask for their youtube usage to be handed over to Viacom Inc.. Who knows what Viacom will do with this highly private data (which contains highly detailed information about people’s interests such as the videos they watch, the various topics they are interested in, and so on)?
I only hope that enough Europeans will formally protest at their country’s privacy agencies and/or at the European institutions. Although, I fear it won’t matter anymore as privacy nowadays has become far less important than Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.
After being held in custody in appalling conditions for over 26 hours by the department of homeland security, Mengal was refused entry to the US and deported. No reasons given. No right of appeal. This is Bush-style democracy in action.
Before my retirement, I personally made an over estimation, and stacked the sum of Six Million Three Hundred Thousand Great Britain Pounds which I totally intend for the purpose of charity and none other which will be supervised Attorney as he will also be the one in charge of securing these funds into your custody.
'During my testimony in court I said I was only trying to criticise those in power or those that would speak for us. That right has been upheld by the judge's decision. If the judge had ruled against me, then every blogger would have been vulnerable to charges of intimidation because those at the end of their criticism could claim they were being picked upon. A very bad precedent would have been set,' he said.
Revealed: The ten members of Web’s ‘500 million club’ - Via NetImperative: Only 10 websites and applications - led by MSN Messenger, eBay and Facebook – have averaged at least 500 million UK minutes per month over the last year, according to new research. Facebook, YouTube and Second Life are the fastest growing sites in terms of total UK minutes.
Both media and online leaders are grappling with the Internet's increasing fragmentation. And they're all looking for more advertising revenue online, where media companies have recouped only a small fraction of what they lost in print and where Web companies want to maximize their investments.
EMI, Warner, V2, Sony BMG and the other four hundred or so members of the BPI want to cut people off from that network for copyright infringement.
Imagine if you had a child who was excluded from school for cheating in an exam, and you were told that they weren't allowed to watch TV, listen to music, read books, talk to their friends or go into any shop during the exclusion.
Oh, and you and your entire family were subject to the same restrictions.
The company has been churning out dozens of white papers on sustainability, publicly available on its website, addressing everything from how to change eating and exercise habits to green charities; holding state-of-the art conferences on greening the supply chain; building environmentally efficient stores with open sky lighting and motion sensors to reduce energy consumption; rolling out green products in almost every department; and basing its promotion structure of its own employees, including senior staff, on how successful they are in convincing vendors to adopt measurable environmental standards.
From PSF, this story made me think of numerous Fairy Tale analogies:, largely involving wolves
Ministers have declared another major sweeping 'new' pan-government efficiency drive aiming to cut down IT spending and slash back-office costs.
The 'Operational' Efficiency Programme kicked off last week with the launch of a series of 'cross-cutting' reviews headed up by a veritable host of business leaders. Each review will report back in March with news of where £££ billions of savings can be made across the public sector.
The first review, led by Martin Jay, chairman of technology and engineering group and former stock market darling Invensys.
Talk about desperation ... in Slate: the movie I'm rushing out to see, Wall-E, is allegedly fattist:
This stereotype of the "obese lifestyle" is simply false. How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA.
That’s because, Lord Saletan, we know full well who WILL be doing the controlling — Eros from Plan 9 ! Can’t you see him now explaining it all to us? Why is this happening, O Visitors From Another World? “Because of death. Because all you of Earth are idiots! You see! You see! Your stupid female brains! Stupid! Stupid!”
Fabulous
If ever anything summed up that British "stiff upper lip", this Keep Calm And Carry On poster is it. During the early spring of 1939 and the war with Germany almost inevitable the British Government commissioned this poster to be displayed throughout the country upon the out-break of war. The plan for the poster was to relay a message from the King to his people that all capable measures to defend the country were being taken. This original World War II poster lay undiscovered and forgotten until a copy turned up over 50 years later within a pile of dusty old books bought from an auction, it's soothing message is still relevant today - it understands that you are a little bit stressed but knows you'll be ok. You can purchase heaps of great products that feature the Keep Calm and Carry On logo from this fab site. www.keepcalmandcarryon.com.au
It's about privileged beliefs. I'm a vegetarian. If I worked at Tesco and said I'm not going to put meat through the checkout they'd be quite justified in saying 'you're not right for the job'.
Under the direction of the Helmholtz Zentrum München, a German research group studied in a longitudinal study, over six years, whether associations are identifiable between the onset of atopic diseases and exposure to air pollutants originating from traffic. The scientists based their analysis, on the one hand, on the corresponding distance of the parental home to streets busy with traffic, and on the other hand, modeled values, for the respective residencial addresses of the children, of air pollution with fine dust, diesel soot and nitrogen dioxide.
The research team led by Dr. Joachim Heinrich of the Institute of Epidemiology of the Helmholtz Zentrum München compared, with this, the data of 3,061 six-year old children from Munich and its surroundings. From birth, their development has been tracked within the scope of the so-called GINI and LISA studies. The studies are led by Prof. Dr. H.-Erich Wichmann of the Helmholtz Zentrum München, and, among other things, are aimed at the study of behavioral and environmental risk factors for allergic diseases. In the current analysis, the results of medical research and regular parental interviews were considered. Moreover, the appearance of the specific IgE antibodies against common allergens in blood serum was tested in children at the age of 6.
Joachim Heinrich and his colleagues consider the results of their research to be clear evidence of the disadvantageous effects of air pollution from traffic on the causes of allergies and atopic diseases. In the past, epidemiological studies on this subject failed to supply a clear picture, although the effects of laboratory experiments and inhalation studies are well-known.
Is this science? Yes. Is this also common sense? Yes. Is our continuing to pollute our children's air a classic example of collective displacement behavior? Yes.
CellBazaar: A SMS Marketplace in Bangladesh Imagine you're in Bangladesh and you want to buy a cow [I know, just so easy to imagine]. You pull your mobile phone out of your pocket and start sending text messages to 3838, the shortcode for CellBazaar, a mobile phone marketplace which some have called the "Craigslist of Bangladesh." You look through the relevant ads and look at the ages, locations, and number of teeth of the 187 cows that are currently for sale. After another SMS, you are connected with the phone number of the the seller, ready to make your new purchase.
The Best Copyright-Free and Government Video Libraries From the US, quality variable but some of very high production values. They seem to have some sort of corporate deal with RealPlayer though and nothing's embeddable (except Condi's greatest hits), or copied to YouTube ... they're behind Gordon Brown!
Murdoch The Google Monger? "There's a very interesting dynamic going on there in that world where Google is going forward, marching forward, with tremendous momentum," Murdoch said.
Answers to the judge’s questions James Ball re-asks a Judge's questions to journalists on how they understand the real nature of crime in the UK - it's usually widely wrong.
Bill Vs Barack Really bitchy yet oddly touching overview from the New Yorker on the spousest with the leastest who's 'out of time' in a 15' soundbite era.
Last week's JeremiahWrightinterview on BillMoyers (PBS) (part 1 of six, other parts) Gives a proper context and background. The more I see, the more I like. Wonderful line to Moyers about 'you go to Nigeria and they're wearing a tie in 140 degree Fahrenheit weather because they think that's what it means to be a Christian' - take that (Nigerian Anglican Bishop) Peter Akinola. He also says there have been death threats and bomb threats (which I haven't read).
Linden Labs is developing a hands free interface (inspired by the Segway. yes, I laughed) and Ren Reynolds sees sexual implications. The dirty bastard. HT. J. Gould.
1900, Ladies Home Journal: 'These prophesies may seem strange, almost impossible ... ' Telephones Around The World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn . By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a 'Hello Girl'. Strawberries As Large As Apples. Coal Will Not Ne Used For Heating Or Cooking. Man Will See Around The World. Store Purchases By Tube. The American Will Be Taller. Trains One Hundred And Fifty Miles An Hour.
The British government says a sizeable chunk of the poison satellite of death will hit the earth at 5.30pm GMT today (12.30 Eastern). They expect it to hit somewhere in the South Atlantic, but are a little bit concerned that it might end up crashing into the picturesque seaside village of Cromer in Norfolk - they’re worried enough to have informed the local emergency services…
This is Cromer described as a "lovely hobbiton" in my US source full of "quaint, thatched-roof cottages" and something to do with "wicket goblins" (a Potter reference I believe). Oh those charming Americans!
If only. It's actually a depressed seaside resort town with a drugs problem and seafront bed'n'breakfasts full of displaced asylum seekers. The pier area's been tarted up but the Victorian Gothic hotels behind desperately need a lick of paint.
The 'quaint' (rich) bit of North Norfolk starts further up the coast.
Just been reading about how the last Democrats debate was sponsored by coal interests and full of 'clean coal' promotional ads — and no questions about Climate Change.
The environment is nowhere as an issue in the election, rating around 1%, although 'energy policy' (a specifically American prism through which climate change is usually glimpsed) rates much higher. Here's a typical Hillary contexualisation:
When I speak, as I have now for the last eleven months, to tens of thousands of people and I say that we will do everything necessary to end our dependence on foreign oil, people!
Interestingly, Climate Change is, in this election, being loudly raised from the Right - some prominent evangelicals have made it a front-and-centre issue and this has caused schisms with those who prefer going after the gays. It was a big issue in the Republican primary.
McCain was the only Republican candidate signed up to the need for carbon reduction targets and joining carbon trading schemes (what Bush has consistently undermined alongside attacking the science).
Mitt Romney has really been going after Senator McCain on this. Of course, McCain was the first to propose a cap on carbon emissions, and Romney's really been on the attack, saying this means McCain's not a real conservative. He's putting the economy at risk through increasing energy prices. McCain shoots back that he will trust American entrepreneurs to rise to this challenge and create green energy jobs.
But the Democrat base hasn't prioritised it, as Al Gore has lamented (note the faint praise).
"Some of the candidates have made speeches which are quite good and proposals that are quite responsible, but overall the issue has not achieved the kind of priority that I think it should have."
"I don't blame the candidates for that, some of them have tried to push it higher on the agenda."
"That is just the very reason why I have put so much of my time into trying to change the way people think about this crisis in my country and around the world -- so that candidates will hear from citizens that they want this to be the top priority."
Indeed, if you look at Hillary and Obama's positions, they call for massive energy use reductions and massive carbon output reductions. All of their plans have enormous implications which - patently - the Democrat base don't get.
Barack Obama will invest $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial scale renewable energy, invest in low emissions coal plants, and begin transition to a new digital electricity grid. A principal focus of this fund will be devoted to ensuring that technologies that are developed in the U.S. are rapidly commercialized in the U.S. and deployed around the globe.
The policies are pretty xenophobic, messy and contradictory and way too inadequate ($150 billion isn't anywhere near enough) or just plain wrong. And in the November finale, expect the Right to use even these wishy-washy policies to go after so-called Reagan-Democrats. They'll capitalise on either Obama or Hillary's failure to explain/sugar coat reality for short-term political gain.
Just to take one example of not facing up to reality, think about 'Peak Oil'. This is the fact that oil reserves are spent, that demand will (some say it already has) exceeded supply and this means the entire world economy (based on oil) needs massive retooling if it isn't going to collapse in wars and famine. I couldn't find a single candidate quote about 'peak oil'.
I've been background reading on this and the permaculture movement seems to be the only way of looking realistically at this looming reality, rather than 'sustainability' which is kindof pretending that we can carry on as before whilst making a few mildly difficult changes. Permaculture says that we have to learn to live with less energy.
Here's a fascinating interview with David Holmgren, one of the founders of the permaculture movement. He details what he regards as the opportunity for humanity which Peak Oil represents.
He's Australian and it's interesting to note that Climate Change was a real big issue in that country's recent elections, primarily because Australia is very much on the edge ecologically.
For ordinary Australians the persistent drought has forced even big-c Conservative Australia to think radically on these issues. They've seen the future and they're very very worried. Americans evidentially haven't woken up and for the rest of the world that's pretty depressing.
A rip is a strong current of water running out to sea. Waves normally wash up onto the beach and ebb back into the sea. In some places the ebbing water forms a strong channel pulling out to sea. On many beaches the force of this escaping water can drag you far out to sea.
Like all the other Sydney Beaches it's public and used by lots of ordinary people, even though the surrounding suburb is millionaire's row.
I'd got burned, literally, at Bondi. Like most arriving Brits I'd venture. When we travelled around we went first to Palm Beach. Somewhere I'd recommend, though it's not on the tourist trail.
Palm Beach, showing the rip
Even I couldn't resist swimming and, bobbing around, I eventually noticed 'Oh, the shore seems a way off'. I had just floated out in the rip, from the middle of the beach, not realised and not fought - which is probably what saved me (alongside the bloke on a board who pulled me onto the board and back to the beach, with my trunks half off).
The advice is:
If caught in a rip, don't panic. Tread water or float. Once out past the breakers, swim parallel to shore and catch waves in. Or signal for help and wait for a lifesaver to rescue you. If you are a strong swimmer you can swim at 45 degrees across the rip into the wave area, then catch a wave back to shore.
I really didn't realise the seriousness of what happened at the time but when I did it gave me a big fear of deep water. Stories like this bring it all back.
So if you're heading off to a beach, be wary of rip currents :}
To avoid rips, look out for:
A darker colour because the water is deeper
A calm rippled surface, generally with smaller waves
Debris or foam floating on the surface out to sea
Here's the rip at Tamarama (aka Glamarama), next to Bondi.
Coastal (most) Aussie kids all know this, coming from a fairly beachy culture, but Brits like these parents, a similar age to me, aren't taught it.
Guardian reports today that the giant Greenland glaciers are, as feared, melting more quickly.
The predicted rise this century was 20-60cm (about 8-24ins) , but it would be at the upper end of this range at a minimum, and some believed it could be two metres. This would be catastrophic for European coastlines. Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat, Greenland yesterday:
"We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at 2 metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep."
"seen gigantic holes in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place. There are hundreds of them."
This melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier to float on land.
"These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."
The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event.
Religious leaders from all over the world met at the mouth of the Illulissat last week to say a silent prayer for the planet, appealing to mankind to address the impact that humanity is having on life on Earth.
Christian, Shia, Sunni, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist and Jewish religious leaders took a boat to the tongue of the glacier for a silent prayer for the planet. They were invited by Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of 250 million Orthodox Christians worldwide.
NASA: Fastest Glacier in Greenland Doubles Speed Greenland Ice Changes Since 1990's: This visualization of laser altimeter measurements from the mid 1990's shows overall thinning of Greenland's ice sheet, with thickening in a few locations including the Jakobshavn Glacier, where the ice stream slowed down in the mid 1990s. More recent data show that the Jakobshavn is now, in fact, retreating, and causing accelerated thinning of adjacent ice at higher elevations in a manner that is consistent with its acceleration. Cool colors represent areas of thinning ice while warm colors show thickening. Slight inland thickening is attributed to accumulation of atmospheric moisture from melting ice at the coasts, supporting observations of a greater net loss to the overall sum of Greenland's ice cap. (6.7 MB). Credit: NASA
NB: First try with new Blogger video upload. Quick and easy but there's no way to share video and it's not indexed by Google Video. Also not allowing resizing, unlike YouTube.
Another NASA Jakobshavn Glacier animation
EU Video 'Living with climate change' about glacier retreat in the Alps, sea level rise (good bye Netherlands) and changing tourism patterns (bye bye Med, hello Baltic)
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