A superb collection of wild-life camouflage images at the Daily Mail.
A wonderful collection of pictures by photographer Art Wolfe. “He has spent over 35 years roaming the deserts of Africa, the rainforests of South America, the mountains of the United States and snow plains of Canada to capture wildlife at its most invisible”.
Here’s one example:
SPOT THE LEOPARD
Spot the Leopard
1. In the Year Twenty Thirteen,
Twice shall the world be shaken,
At Richter 8 or more,
And once shall a volcano
Violently erupt.
But the invincible, soothing Sun
Shall calm the roiling seas,
And the climate of the world,
Shall continue to cool.
2. The New World in the West
Shall regain its composure,
While the weary Old World
Struggles in its disparate cackle,
Where Old Reprobates refuse to die
But their poison shall be contained.
Doomsayers shall be shriller,
More fanatic and more extreme.
But there will come an end
To their profligacy and waste.
3. The boils in the Middle of the East
Shall still swell and suddenly burst
And new carbuncles formed
Will need very prompt incision.
Blood-letting shall there be
And the recovery shall be slow,
The rashes will continue
And the itches will need scratching.
4. Corruption in the Body Orient
Shall fester and turn gangrenous,
But surgery of the infected parts
Will give some hope of renewal.
The Dragon shall breathe fire,
And the Tiger shall begin to roar,
And together, in new harness,
Will draw the chariot of the world.
5. Men shall marry men,
And women dally with women,
While children lose their innocence
Well before their time.
But of 7 billion people,
Six will be fed and clothed,
And will cherish a measure of hope
For the life that waits for them.
6. Reading the Human Alphabet
Will ease and grow in fluency,
And even little babies shall know
What diseases they must endure.
The Healers and the Drugmakers
Shall sell wonderful new cures,
For imaginary ailments
Of no great significance.
But they shall also find new Drugs
Against many human woes,
Precisely to be directed,
And immediately effective.
7. Twenty Thirteen
Will be just another Year.
A natural state of turmoil
In a world that shall not end.
There will, again as always,
Be much sound and bluster,
Of very little value
And signifying nothing.
8. We will be one year older
And that much more mature,
But one year in 200,000
Is not so very much.
But every little gain
Is not to be lightly given up.
9. And so in Twenty Thirteen,
I am glad to be alive,
Not for any raptures, but
For there was no better time to live!
The Indian Tectonic Plate split from Godwana some 140 million years ago and started colliding into the Eurasian Plate some 40 – 50 million years ago. The Indian Plate is being subducted under the Eurasian Plate. The collision is still going on with the Indian Plate moving North East at about 6 -7 cm per year while the Eurasian Plate is moving Northwards at about 2 cm per year. The region is geologically active and earthquakes are not uncommon as the Himalayas continue to grow. It was thought that Himalayan earthquakes rarely, if ever, broke the surface and were “blind quakes”. But a new paper describes field work with novel imaging and dating techniques which show that at least the earthquakes of 1255 and 1934 have left discernible ruptures.
S. N. Sapkota, L. Bollinger, Y. Klinger, P. Tapponnier, Y. Gaudemer, D. Tiwari. Primary surface ruptures of the great Himalayan earthquakes in 1934 and 1255. Nature Geoscience, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1669
Wikipedia: The Indo-Australian plate is still moving at 67 mm per year, and over the next 10 million years it will travel about 1,500 km into Asia. About 20 mm per year of the India-Asia convergence is absorbed by thrusting along the Himalaya southern front. This leads to the Himalayas rising by about 5 mm per year, making them geologically active. The movement of the Indian plate into the Asian plate also makes this region seismically active, leading to earthquakes from time to time.
Even blind quakes can be devastating as with the Kashmir quake of 2005:
It is inevitable that investment and jobs – and especially in energy intensive industries – will migrate to regions of low energy costs. Over the next few years the lead that the US has developed over the rest of the world in the exploitation of shale gas will cause European companies to shun the high energy costs at home and shift to the US.
Reuters: Austria’s group Voestalpine is considering a plan to build a $1 billion plant in the United States that would convert iron ore into concentrate used in steelmaking, Trend magazine reported. ………. Trend said the plant was envisioned for a coastal city in the southern United States, given cheap and reliable supplies of natural gas, political stability and efficient port infrastructure.
And the problem has been the unnecessary and misguided European obsession with chasing a mirage. A meaningless and unjustified pursuit of “low carbon” energy; profligate subsidies for ineffective renewable energy; wasteful – and eventually corrupt – attempts to bias the market with carbon credits and the shutting down of perfectly viable coal and nuclear power plants has given the highest energy costs in the world. Gas prices in Europe are 4 or 5 times as high as in the US. Europe has plenty of shale gas potential but development is lagging far behind the US largely because of the political opposition from the “Green” lobbies. As the New York Times reports:
High Energy Costs Plaguing Europe
.. Asked whether he had considered building the plant in Europe, Voestalpine’s chief executive, Wolfgang Eder, said that that “calculation does not make sense from the very beginning.” Gas in Europe is much more expensive, he said.
High energy costs are emerging as an issue in Europe that is prompting debate, including questioning of the Continent’s clean energy initiatives. Over the past few years, Europe has spent tens of billions of euros in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The bulk of the spending has gone into low-carbon energy sources like wind and solar power that have needed special tariffs or other subsidies to be commercially viable.
“We embarked on a big transition to a low-carbon economy without taking into account the cost and without factoring in the competitive impact,” says Fabien Roques, head of European power and carbon at the energy consulting firm IHS CERA in Paris. “I think there will be a critical review of some of these policies in the next few years.”
Both consumers and the industry are upset about high energy costs. Energy-intensive industries like chemicals and steel are, if not closing European plants outright, looking toward places like the United States that have lower energy costs as they pursue new investments.
BASF, the German chemical giant, has been outspoken about the consequences of energy costs for competitiveness and is building a new plant in Louisiana.
“We Europeans are currently paying up to four or five times more for natural gas than the Americans,” Harald Schwager, a member of the executive board at BASF, said last month. “Energy efficiency alone will not allow us to compensate for this. Of course, that means increased competition for all the European manufacturing sites.”
And it beomes increasingly clear that the chase for politically correct “brownie points” by European governments as they have demonised carbon dioxide quite needlessly while spending massively on renewable subsidies is not sustainable. Just as Japan must now waste political energy in “reviewing” their hasty decisions about the use of nuclear energy after Fukushima , Europe will have to spend the next decade in “reviewing and reversing” the spate of bad decisions made based on climate alarmism.
The expansion in renewables will probably ensure that Europe will meet its target of reducing greenhouse gases 20 percent from their 1990 levels by 2020. But it has been a disappointment on other levels. For one thing, emissions continue to rise globally. In a sense, Europe is likely to have exported its emissions to places like China, where polluting economic activity continues to increase while the European economy stagnates.
A striking indicator that the European effort has not achieved all that it intended to is the continued rise in the burning of coal, by far the biggest polluter among fossil fuels.
The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based group formed by consumer nations, recently said that coal was likely to catch up with oil as the world’s largest source of energy in a decade.
Much of the increase in coal use can be blamed on China and India, but not all of it. Europe has increased its coal use this year, and that has led to an increase of about 7 percent in carbon dioxide emissions from power generation, according to IHS. Coal use is increasing in all regions except the United States, the I.E.A. said.
In spite of the seriousness of the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, it was never sufficient to justify the hysteria which ensued and the knee-jerk anti-nuclear decisions taken not only in Japan but also in Germany and other countries. The alarmist, anti-nuclear hysteria often seems to forget that it was the great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami which killed around 18,000 people (15,878 dead with 2,713 missing). The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant incident killed no-one directly. There may well be some indirect deaths which can and will eventually be attributed to the nuclear plant accident but there were no deaths caused directly.
Nevertheless Japan and Germany announced hasty, panic-ridden plans to abandon nuclear power. Greens began to rejoice and then started to realise that there is no practical alternative to nuclear power other than large-scale hydro-power and fossil fuels. The pipe-dream of thinking that base-load nuclear power could ever be replaced by unreliable and intermittent wind or solar power began to be seen for the mirage it was. The high electricity price which has resulted has also seriously disdvantaged industry and hit households hard. Reality has begun to sink in.
Now Japan has a new government and a new Prime Minister. The task of reversing the fear-driven decisions (invariably bad decisions) of the past has begun. A “review” has been ordered and the results are inevitable …..
BBC: The new government in Japan has announced it will review the planned nuclear power phase-out proposed by the previous administration.
Trade and Industry Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said that reactors would be restarted if considered safe by the nuclear authority. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has promised bold measures to revive the economy. The stoppage of nuclear power use by 2040 was ordered following last year’s Fukushima disaster.
….. Veteran trade minister Toshimitsu Motegi, who is also in charge of energy policy, made it clear that the government would not allow its plans to be hampered by higher energy costs.
“We need to reconsider the previous administration’s policy that aimed to make zero nuclear power operation possible during the 2030s,” he told a news conference. …..
…… “A strong economy is the source of energy for Japan. Without regaining a strong economy, there is no future for Japan,” Mr Abe said after taking office.
The prime minister had also said that he would allow nuclear energy a bigger role, despite last year’s disaster. Japan, which relied on nuclear power for almost one-third of its energy supplies before the incident, shut all its 50 nuclear reactors after the leaks, but recently restarted two of them. The move has resulted in higher energy costs, and many big businesses want Japan to return to using nuclear power.
The journalist Henrik Lennart has a new book out in Swedish – “Åldrandets gåta” (The Mystery of Aging), where he interviews the worlds leading researchers and demographers about aging. Our descendants will have to learn to have many careers within their lifetimes.
Science has long envisaged a limit to how long a person can live – around 120 years. But now research is catching up with our fantasies. Henrik Lennart interviews the world’s leading researchers specializing in aging. They all come to the same conclusion: We, and especially our children, will live far longer than is common today.
Why? Improved standards of living come into play but also our lifestyles. Advice from the experts can differ: eat fewer calories, stand up when you are working, fast or cut down on meat and sugar. These choices certainly affect the aging of cells, and when researchers finally find the genes that control lifespan and have learned how to control them, the question will become:
How old would we like to be?
Aftonbladet reports:
Some researchers believe that the first human who will live to be 200 years old is already living.
“According to our calculation, half of the children born in Sweden in 2012 will live to be 104 years old”, says demographer James Vaupel. Life expectancy has increased steadily over the past hundred years. ….. Today, the average life expectancy in Sweden is 83 years for women and 79 for men.
In a new book “The Mystery of Aging” journalist Henrik Lennart has interviewed demographers and scientists who believe that statisticians world-wide have systematically underestimated the rate of increase of life expectancy and that this has been going on for a very long time.
Statisticians have not fully considered the influence of welfare reforms, better living conditions and more efficient healthcare. To get a more accurate picture one of the world’s best-known demographers James Vaupel, along with a group of prestigious scientists have made new calculations where they have added a factor to reflect the impact of as yet unknown developments – not dramatic but which can be expected in the future.
Their calculations show that half of all the children born in Sweden this year will live to be 104 years old. “In the future, we could live to be ten times older. Why not? It will take time to get there but it is certainly not impossible. In my opinion it is quite likely that there is a rather small child already born somewhere who will live to be more than 200 years old”, says James Vaupel who is interviewed in “The Mystery of Aging.”
Svenska Dagbladet adds:
James Vaupel and Cambridge researcher Jim Oeppen have previously shown that the curve of women’s life expectancy in the Western world has increased at an even and steady pace of three months per year for 160 years. Swedish statistics extend further back than in most other countries, and this increase has been by an average of 2.5 months per year since 1751.
Previously, scientists believed that there was a ceiling for the average life expectancy of a little over 80 years. Today this ceiling has shifted up at least a decade, and continues to rise.
“We no longer know if there is any ceiling and where it lies if it does exist”, says James Vaupel.
At this rate everybody will be living to around 200 years by 2500.
No doubt I have a simplistic view but the best thing in the long-term for the world economy would be for the US to start reducing its budget deficit and its burgeoning public debt. Public debt has to be set to whatever level is sustainable. An economy in transition from one level to another can permit a changing level of public debt, but the current level of deficits (7 -9% of GDP) and ever-increasing debt is not sustainable. The problem is that even if the US did not avoid the fiscal cliff the US public debt would continue to grow – if a little more slowly than as at present. The cliff may in reality be more like a hill but it is still along the way to the wrong place.
US Public Debt
Budget discipline and a stable level of public debt must – I think – come first. It is public profligacy – whether in Greece or Spain or the US – which is unsustainable and rampant profligacy will not end without some short-term pain. It is probably time for the US to bite the bullet.
I see that the US press is now beginning to expect that some kind of fall – whether over a cliff or a hill – is inevitable but that perhaps the fall can be cushioned by attaching a bungee rope or by aiming for a ledge part-way down!
NY Times: Until late last week, most observers had expected the president and Congressional Republicans to come up with at least a short-term compromise before the year-end deadline. But thefailure of Speaker John A. Boehner to win support for tax increases on the wealthiest Americans from fellow House Republicans has forced many economic observers to reconsider what might happen if political leaders remain deadlocked into 2013.
MSNBC: On the Sunday news shows, no one signaled a change of position that could form the basis for a short-term fix, despite a suggestion from Obama on Friday that he would favor one. The focus was shifting instead to the days following January 1 when the lowered tax rates dating back to the George W. Bush administration will have expired, presenting Congress with a redefined and more welcome task that involves only cutting taxes, not raising them.
“I believe we are,” going over the cliff, said Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. “I think the president is eager to go over the cliff for political purposes. I think he sees a political victory at the bottom of the cliff,” Barrasso said on Fox News Sunday.
Some Republicans have said Obama would welcome the fiscal cliff’s tax increases and defense cuts, as well as the chance to blame Republicans for rejecting deal. Obama has rejected that assertion.
WSJ: Lawmakers returning to town this week will see whether they can agree on a plan to avoid the full brunt of the fiscal cliff, the combined $500 billion in tax increases and spending cuts set to begin next week. Little if any progress was made in the talks before Congress and President Barack Obama left town last Friday for Christmas. The president plans to leave his vacation in Hawaii late Wednesday night, returning to Washington on Thursday, the White House said.
CNBC: Despite the $600 billion of tax hikes and spending cuts due to come into force at the end of this month unless U.S. lawmakers reach a deal, the S&P 500 index is not displaying signs of stress, says independent chartist Daryl Guppy.
The stock index is in fact trading upwards as investors increasingly take in the possibility that the U.S. economy might fall over the “fiscal cliff,” he told CNBC Asia’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “The fiscal cliff is a bungee jump. It used to be exciting. Now it’s just a tourist attraction. The market is absorbing that,” he said.
While the S&P 500 index has dipped back towards the 1,380 to 1,400 range seen in August and mostly recently in November, stocks appear to be on their way up again, he added. The index closed at about 1,419 on Wednesday.
Narendra Modi – Wikipedia
If the Gujarat riots of 2002 had not happened, Narendra Modi would have an easy- and almost pre-ordained path – to becoming the nominated Prime Minister of the Bharatiya Janata Party. With his record in Gujarat he ought to be the “natural” choice of his party. As the only other political party having a national presence, the BJP has a very good chance of replacing the Indian Congress Party as the largest party and the party of government at the next general elections in 2014. But the BJP lacks leaders of any stature – apart from Modi. The party President is himself badly tainted by corruption charges. The leaders of the past are approaching senility. Their Young Turks of 10 years ago come across as a whiny bunch who oppose for the sake of opposing and have no convictions of their own. Without a credible PM candidate having some national appeal the BJP may – at best – only just get to be the largest party but would have the most horrendous task of creating a majority in Parliament. But there are still strong factions within the party who do not much like him. Not because of the “anti-Muslim” taint which hangs over Modi as the legacy of the Gujarat riots; but because he is just a little bit too efficient, too decisive and most of all, too “incorruptible”.
The BJP have few other leaders who have Modi’s undoubted competence and his ability to assemble competence. They have no other leaders with his charisma. He has been one of the very few regional leaders who has had the nerve to be a leader – with some kind of vision of where he wants to go – rather than a populist follower (like Mamata Banerjee). In India, populist politicians – no matter how criminal or venal or incompetent – have usually been able to ride the wave of their vote-banks into power. But that is changing as the Indian electorate becomes more discerning and more sophisticated though still dominated by caste. So it seems likely that the BJP establishment will reluctantly – and with some fears for their own futures – unite behind Modi. They have little choice with his unprecedented success in Gujarat:
Narendra Modi will take oath a fourth time as Gujarat Chief Minister at 11 am today. …. Mr Modi began his morning by tweeting a Vivekananda quote, as he is wont to do. “To make a great future India, the whole secret lies in organization…co-ordination of wills,” he said on Twitter.
It has been conventional wisdom that Modi has been fatally tainted by the Gujarat riots. But this is the conventional wisdom of the urban, semi-liberal middle-class. But I see this view changing mainly because even the urban middle-class see – especially in comparisons with China – that a chaotic democracy holds back economic development. Political decisiveness a la Modi is seen as something which could unlock the Indian potential which is being held stagnant by corruption and the constant interplay of opposing factional interests. There is a mood abroad in the urban, middle-classes that “a Modi” is needed to bring an end to the institutionalised corruption in the country. There is a groundswell of support for the movement started by Anna Hazare but neither he nor Kejriwal are seen as being capable of implementing the ideals of the anti-corruption movement. These two forces – unlocking economic development and the fight against corruption – will convince the liberal-left middle-class to rationalise their views of Modi. He will not be completely forgiven for his role in the Gujarat riots but the taint will fade. Just as the Congress leaders implicated in the anti-Sikh riots following the assassination of Indira Gandhi reinstated themselves with the help of supportive Sikhs, Modi is rebranding himself with the help of supportive Muslims. His former opponents are applying selective memory. Already other non-Congress regional leaders are positioning themselves to be able to support Modi when – no longer “if” – he becomes the PM candidate for the BJP.
Internationally, Modi was condemned in many quarters. But international politics is ultimately about pragmatic self-interest. If he becomes Prime Minister, it will not take long for countries – especially in Europe to come around. After all, to be seen to be anti-Muslim is quite acceptable in Europe even if Modi would like to tone down that perception. He already has the sympathy of China and Russia who struggle with containing their own Muslim minorities. His visa to the US was revoked in 2005 and the UK avoided him like a pariah for 10 years before reinstating contact in October this year.
But it his acceptance across India which counts. If he can succeed in getting some support from the Muslims across India – and this is not implausible – and if he can gain the support of the urban middle-class – which is already happening – the regional party leaders will also back him and the rest of their sheep will fall in line. For the elections in 2014, to be seen as being incorruptible, a “fighter against corruption” and to be seen as being an efficient CEO could trump all other perceived sins.
And that could make Narendra Modi the first Prime Minister after Rajiv Gandhi having a national stature, an administrative competence and a vision of his own that could be fun to watch.
Grasshopper, SpaceX’s vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (VTVL), rose 131 feet (40 meters), hovered and landed safely on the pad using closed loop thrust vector and throttle control. The total test duration was 29 seconds.
The 12-story flight marks a significant increase over the height and length of hover of Grasshopper’s previous test flights, which took place earlier this fall. In September, Grasshopper flew to 1.8 meters (6 feet), and in November, it flew to 5.4 meters (17.7 feet/2 stories) including a brief hover.
Testing of Grasshopper will continue with successively more sophisticated flights expected over the next several months.
Notre Dame de Paris prepares to celebrate 850 years since its first foundation stone was laid in 1163.
Dozens of Jews who claim to be the descendants of a lost biblical Jewish tribe emigrated to Israel on Monday from their village in northeastern India. … The Bnei Menashe say they are descended from Jews banished from ancient Israel to India in the eighth century BC. An Israeli chief rabbi recognized them as a lost tribe in 2005, and about 1,700 moved to Israel over the next two years before the government stopped giving them visas. Israel recently reversed that policy, agreeing to let the remaining 7,200 Bnei Menashe immigrate.
Rape protests in India claim their own victim. A 47-year-old Delhi Police Constable, who suffered serious injuries during violent protests at India Gate on Sunday, died on Tuesday after battling for life in a city hospital.
Piers Morgan – he of telephone hacking fame – is for once on the right side of the argument but has angered the NRA and other gun-lovers.
While more than 600 people have died in the European freeze, the Bayern region is basking in warm weather and the city of Munich enjoyed over 20°C on Christmas Eve.
Since language is merely a tool for communication and develops and evolves entirely in response to the need to communicate, most attempts to invent new languages for human use fail because they cannot accurately predict or define the required needs. This is in contrast to the invention of machine languages where the needs can be much better defined. But this fascinating story of Ithkuil – an invented language – shows what a dedicated individual acan achieve even without formal academic credentials. And this piece about New York as the graveyard of languages which misses the point that languages die simply when they no longer fulfill the need for communication or are superceded by another which does.
“How is it that elves can see further than humans? Are hobbits evolutionarily related to humans? And so on. My mind raced ahead of the inquiries, so that I found myself asking (and answering) such questions as – how could dragons breathe fire? What would life be like for a walking tree? How do all those elves live beautiful, healthy lives without any obvious means of support?” On the science of Middle Earth.
Mobile phones on aircraft have no impact on aircraft operation. “The truth is that the FCC never was concerned about the possibility of electronic interference when, in 1991, it banned the use of mobile phones on board aircraft. All it was really worried about was their impact on cellular networks on the ground”.
Svante Paabo’s work on the Neanderthal genome is to be covered in a documentary.
British People Problems and 10 Reasons British Comedy Is Better Than American Comedy
The k2p blog 