Archive for the ‘SciTech’ Category
The Danes are a brilliant people…ahem. They have now invented a technology that could prove to be very effective at taking the risk and size out of storing hydrogen for use in vehicles and other applications. Pehaps we could trade them for that island they want…
Katrina is a terrible, terrible disaster. Global Warming is real, and it is demonstrably linked to human activity.
But to suggest Katrina is linked to global warming is to overplay the hand. There is no pattern to support the assertion that hurricane activity is up in intensity over time. We are in a period of higher tropical storm production, but this is more the result of el nino and el nina activity.
In fact, more realistic global warming scenarios show the temperature in the Atlantic may drop significantly, thus suppressing hurricane formation.
Making hasty claims provides ammunition to the detractors of climate change science that supports the case for emmissions regulations. It does so by giving these opponents something to point to when they say humanity’s role in global warming is exaggerated.
Reported in The Independent but unavailable to non-suscribers. Allow me to do you the service or reproducing it all here.
Found: Europe’s oldest civilisation
By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent
11 June 2005
Archaeologists have discovered Europe’s oldest civilisation, a network of
dozens of temples, 2,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.
More than 150 gigantic monuments have been located beneath the fields and
cities of modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia. They were built 7,000
years ago, between 4800BC and 4600BC. Their discovery, revealed today by The
Independent, will revolutionise the study of prehistoric Europe, where an
appetite for monumental architecture was thought to have developed later
than in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
In all, more than 150 temples have been identified. Constructed of earth and
wood, they had ramparts and palisades that stretched for up to half a mile.
They were built by a religious people who lived in communal longhouses up to
50 metres long, grouped around substantial villages. Evidence suggests their
economy was based on cattle, sheep, goat and pig farming. Read more
As much as I enjoy Apple technologies, I can’t help but laugh at their current home page advert. “Subscribe to thousands of podcasts…” Who could possibly subscribe to thousands of anything? OK, I’m being a bit willful in my (mis)reading of their copy, but one of these days somebody is going to figure out that information is not knowledge.
I am now coming to the realization that, without some form of structure, the Information Age is nothing but a metaphor for shattered consciousness. Some days I sit at my machine and wander aimlessly through the infoscape. One link leads to another, and my clickpath resembles that of a slowly freezing and delerious victim of a ditched car in a blizzard. You wind up going in circles and little stays with you.
The Knowledge Age will be the realisation of the promise of the Information Age. Leaving aside the obvious compaint that the Golden Age is always just over the horizon, what does the Knowledge Age look like? UNESCO has an idea.
Count on those who are going to be financially hurt by climate change to give us the straight scoop. Here’s a good example. The world’s second largest insurer is predicting major losses as a result of climate-related damages.
