Archive for June, 2012
June 29, 2012
Sami flag
Just back from our “Midsommar” tour of Northern Sweden. A fascinating 3,500km trip and I learned a little more about the Sami peoples and their history. I had not known how coercive and oppressive it had once been in Sweden when the Sami religion and language(s) were banned. There are some 80,000 Samis today ranging across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
Wikipedia
….. In 1913-1920, the Swedish race-segregation politic created a race biological institute that collected research material from living people, graves, and sterilized Sami women. ……
The strongest pressure took place from around 1900 to 1940, when Norway invested considerable money and effort to wipe out Sami culture. Notably, anyone who wanted to buy or lease state lands for agriculture in Finnmark had to prove knowledge of the Norwegian language and had to register with a Norwegian name. This and similar actions in Scandinavian countries, e.g., the sterilization of Sami women by Swedish authorities, are debated to be an act of ethnic cleansing, and perhaps a genocide.
We did not have too much rain but it was never very warm. Reindeer had calved (a little late this year) and the Sami were busy marking the new calves. While we saw many reindeer we only saw one moose (a large male) munching by the roadside but we were travelling too fast to get any good pictures. Midsommar itself was a very traditional Swedish experience in Sundborn.
Raising the Midsommar pole in Sundborn June 2012
June has been a cool month throughout Sweden (the coldest June in 92 years):
Temperatures have remained below average for the month, at just 13.3 degrees Celsius, compared with the usual 15.2 degrees, SMHI said.
For the month of June, Stockholm usually has an average of 5.3 days with temperatures above 25 degrees, but this year the high for the month was just 21.6 degrees.
That is only the second time since 1920 that the temperature has failed to hit 25 degrees in June in Sweden.
Tags:Sami, Sami peoples, Sundborn, Sweden
Posted in Sweden, Trivia | Comments Off on On tour during coldest June in Sweden in 92 years
June 21, 2012
A week away from blogging as we travel north through the hinterland and into the Arctic Circle for a Swedish Midsommar! With the midnight sun and consequent shortage of sleep I suspect I shall not be blogging much.
Tags:Arctic Circle, Midsummer, Sweden
Posted in Sweden, Trivia | Comments Off on Midsommar
June 21, 2012
I have a theory that political correctness is transient and driven by electoral advantage. But common sense – over time – provides the restoring force.
The move away from wind power euphoria is becoming all more evident in the UK. It is a shift that is inevitable since – eventually – common sense does prevail. And as with all such shifts of political correctness it is accompanied (or is it caused) by a change which appears to provide some electoral advantage for somebody. Causes which once provided electoral advantage to the Greens across Europe – because they were seen (partly) as being the “minority” view being suppressed by the establishment – are now themselves part of the establishment view across most parties. But these views are now perceived as being suppressive and coercive and the backlash is beginning to move us back towards common sense.
No doubt the coming Age of Gas will be supported by all the political parties as reduced energy costs provide electoral advantage. And being cynical, it will also – just like wind power – be exploited to excess, to the point where it becomes coercive and suppressive of other alternatives and then political correctness will shift again.
Benedict Brogan writes in The Telegraph:
A government re-think on costly green energy resources is a winning statement of intent. ..
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Tags:Age of Gas, political correctness, Renewable energy, Renewable Obligation, Shale gas in the United States, wind power
Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Energy, Politics, Renewable Energy | Comments Off on Political correctness shifts away from wind in the UK
June 20, 2012
Two decades of waste in the name of alarmist “environmentalism” are coming to an end.
The BBC’s Richard Black reports that a text has been agreed at the jamboree in Rio to be “approved” by country leaders later this week. The text appears to be watered down and to be largely meaningless in terms of binding commitments by any country for moving towards the politically correct view of “a more sustainable future”.
But actually the lack of commitments is itself of great significance. History will show that the Rio meeting of 2012 was the symbolic end of the era of profligate “eco-fascism”.
BBC:
Negotiators have agreed a text to be approved by world leaders meeting this week in Rio in a summit intended to put society on a more sustainable path.
Environment groups and charities working on poverty issues believe the agreement is far too weak.
The Rio+20 gathering comes 20 years after the Earth Summit, also held in the Brazilian city.
The text has yet to be signed off by heads of government and ministers, but it seems that no changes will be made.
“We have reached the best possible equilibrium at this point; I think we have a very good outcome,” said Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota.
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Tags:Earth Summit, Rio, Rio+20, UN CoSummit on sustainable development
Posted in Alarmism, Environment, Politics | 1 Comment »
June 19, 2012
The Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview has talked to Sebastian Thrun:
One of these ideas was for a self-driving car, not through a desert, but on the streets of San Francisco and beyond. Crazy. But Mr. Thrun and 12 engineers created a car that could drive itself down twisty Lombard Street without a human driver. How did they do that? “We should question all the rules—we should break the rules,” he says. “I like to put myself in the most uncomfortable position. There’s so much baggage we take on. Why is that so? We should have the courage to put everything overboard.” ……
At Google X, Mr. Thrun brought in University of Washington Prof. Babak Parviz to create a set of eyeglasses that are capable of displaying Web and Google search results. Not easy—yet another cross-discipline challenge to make the device ultra lightweight and natural to use. It was announced recently as Google Glass. It works like bifocals in that you look up to see the display so your normal vision below is never blocked. “We discovered this is not some crazy moon shot, this is real. It turned out we were closer to something interesting than all of us thought.” Every geek is itching for a pair.
To be able to state that “something” cannot be done we must first be able to articulate that “something”. And to articulate it we must be able to imagine it. And when we find “it cannot be done” we can qualify it to be “it cannot be done now” — and the process of innovation starts.
I suppose I am an optimist. I am sure that tomorrow will be filled with things “we cannot do now”. In less than 10 generations from now the current fears of global warming and the mass extinction of species and of unsustainable populations and of resource exhaustion will be seen on a par with primitive peoples fearing that the moon was being swallowed up during an eclipse. And 10 generation from now they will have found new things to fear and new things that cannot be done.
There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
Donald Rumsfeld
Tags:Google X, Innovation, Sebastian Thrun
Posted in Behaviour, Innovation | Comments Off on Innovation – To do what cannot be done
June 18, 2012
Football as the indicator for politics??
Greece and the Czechs stay in but Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Poland, the Netherlands and Russia are already out. Germany stay in comfortably while Portugal scrape through.
Today’s matches will probably see Spain staying in and Italy may edge out Croatia while Ireland are already out.
And tomorrow France and England will probably confirm that they stay in and the second host nation Ukraine will also probably crash out.
A football match is a great leveller.
And so is the European Union – but unfortunately it levels down to the Lowest Participating Economy (LPE). How the profligacies of the tiny economy that is Greece can shake the mighty European Union is still a mystery. But the Greek voters seem to have realised that remaining subsidised by the Eurozone is probably their best option. In the long run however it is probably best for the Euro that the Eurozone shrink and for any monetary union to wait for a true fiscal and political union – which is at least some 200 years away.
Cristiano Ronaldo
The useless trappings of the bureaucracy in Brussels and the pig-trough that is the European Parliament need to be dismantled. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain need to to leave the EMU. Sweden and Denmark and Finland need to get out from under the weight of oppression of Brussels. Poland and the Czech republic would grow faster without the shackles of the EU. There is no flair or brilliance on display in European politics which is suffocating, smothered by “consensus” and political correctness. Individualism and excellence have become “undemocratic”. Unlike politics, football still allows for excellence and flair and individual brilliance — a la Cristiano Ronaldo and Mario Gomez.
Tags:Cristiano Ronaldo, Euro 2012, European Union, football, Lowest Participating Economy - LPE, Mario Gomez
Posted in Football, Politics | Comments Off on Greece stays in the Euro! Football or is it the state of the European Union?
June 15, 2012
Three Chinese astronauts, Liu Yang, Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang will launch at 1237 GMT on Saturday in a Shenzhou 9 spacecraft to dock with the orbiting Tiangong 1 space “station” (module) now orbiting 322 kilometers above the Earth.
(Updated with new image below).
Liu Yang, China’s first female astronaut, at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in Gansu province on Friday. Photo AP
China Daily: The impending launch of the manned Shenzhou IX spacecraft will be the first time that China’s astronauts will stay in space for more than 10 days, said Cui Jijun, chief commander of the country’s first space docking mission’s launch site system, on Wednesday. The previous record is five days, set by the Shenzhou VI spacecraft in 2005.
The mission will also complete the country’s first manned space docking to master thenecessary technology for assembling a space station, see China’s first female astronaut in space and have astronauts entering a space lab module for the first time, he added.
It is also the first time for the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, located in a desert, to conduct a mission in the summer. The past nine launches of China’s manned space program were held in the spring, autumn and winter, but not summer. The three manned spacecraft all blasted off in autumn.
Xinhua: China succeeded in the automatic docking between Shenzhou-8 spacecraft and Tiangong-1 lab module last year. A manual docking between Shenzhou-9 and Tiangong-1 will be attempted this time. ……. a female astronaut will be included in a space mission for the first time in China’s space program, the selection, training, medical monitoring and security, and flight crew equipment for female astronauts will also be tested.
Tiangong-1 Heavenly-Palace Chinese-space-station
Tags:China, Jing Haipeng, Liu Wang, Liu Yang, Shenzhou program, Space rendezvous, Tiangong-1
Posted in China, Science, Space | 3 Comments »
June 14, 2012
A new paper in Nature suggests that before we were apes we were fish and not just any old fish. The primitive fish which predates the split between sharks and bony fish, Acanthodes bronni was the common ancestor of all jawed vertebrates on Earth – including mankind, according to the paper. The split with bony fish occurred some 420 million years ago and Acanthodes bronni disappeared some 250 million years ago.
The researchers re-examined fossils of Acanthodes bronni, the best-preserved acanthodian species. They created highly detailed latex moulds of specimens revealing the inside and outside of the skull, generating a new data set for assessing cranial and jaw anatomy as well as the organizations of sensory, circulatory and respiratory systems in the species. The analysis of the sample combined with recent CT scans of skulls from early sharks and bony fishes led to the reassessment of what Acanthodes bronni tells us about the history of jawed vertebrates.
Acanthodes bronni : Wikipedia
Tags:Acanthodes, Acanthodes bronni, Common descent, Evolution, spiny sharks
Posted in Evolution, Science | Comments Off on Before we were apes we were sharks
June 13, 2012
Open access is still evolving and the bottom-line is finding the revenue model that works. But open access is inevitable and the glory days of the high impact factor, pay-walled journals is coming to an end. They will not disappear any time soon but history will show that their era was the 20th century and that their decline was the natural consequence of the world-wide-web.
PeerJ provides academics with two Open Access publication venues: PeerJ (a peer-reviewed academic journal) and PeerJ PrePrints (a ‘pre-print server’). Both are focused on the Biological and Medical Sciences, and together they provide an integrated solution for your publishing needs. Submissions open late Summer.
Reuters reports:
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Tags:Academic publishing, open access, pay-walled journals, PeerJ, PeerJ Preprints
Posted in Education, Media, Science | Comments Off on PeerJ – Open access Journal gets started
June 12, 2012
NASA has updated its forecast for Solar Cycle 24.
Maximum is expected to be reached in Spring 2013 with a sunspot number of 60 and this prediction is for the lowest sunspot number in 100 years. This only confirms that we are currently in a solar minimum – the Landscheidt Minimum – though it remains to be seen whether this will be a Grand Minimum in the style of the Maunder Minimum or the Dalton Minimum. In any event a period of several decades of global cooling is to be expected and is already probably upon us (starting some 10 years ago).
(more…)
Tags:global cooling, Landscheidt Minimum, NASA, solar cycle, Solar Cycle 24, Sun
Posted in Solar science | Comments Off on Solar Cycle 24 prediction: On track to be smallest in 100 years
The k2p blog 