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Recent Commentsby Gus Leonisky on Mon, 2013-05-06 13:32
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, weren’t in Babylon at all – but were instead located 300 miles to the north in Babylon’s greatest rival Nineveh, according to a leading Oxford-based historian. After more than 20 years of research, Dr. Stephanie Dalley, of Oxford University’s Oriental Institute, has finally pieced together enough evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the famed gardens were built in Nineveh by the great Assyrian ruler Sennacherib - and not, as historians have always thought, by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Dr. Dalley first publicly proposed her idea that Nineveh, not Babylon, was the site of the gardens back in 1992, when her claim was reported in The Independent – but it’s taken a further two decades to find enough evidence to prove it. Detective work by Dr. Dalley – due to be published as a book by Oxford University Press later this month – has yielded four key pieces of evidence. First, after studying later historical descriptions of the Hanging Gardens, she realized that a bas-relief from Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh actually portrayed trees growing on a roofed colonnade exactly as described in classical accounts of the gardens.
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by Gus Leonisky on Mon, 2013-05-06 13:28
In 2010, David Letterman asked Hollywood actress Salma Hayek if she routinely eats bugs. "Look," she responded. "I'm salivating! They're delicious!" Insect eating, officially called entomophagy, is an age-old custom found throughout the world and often considered standard dietary practice. Nearly 2,000 species of insects are eaten by approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide. We come from a long line of bug eaters. Our earliest primate ancestors were insectivores and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, make rudimentary tools to fish termites out of narrow tunnels in their mounds. Among the laws of Leviticus codified by the Israelites millennia ago is permission to eat "the locust after its kind, and the bald locust after its kind, and the cricket after its kind, and the grasshopper after its kind". Roman naturalist Pliny wrote that beetle grubs were so prized that they were fattened on meal to enhance their flavour. And the German explorer Heinrich Barth wrote in his 1857 Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa that people who ate locusts could "enjoy not only the agreeable flavour of the dish, but also take a pleasant revenge on the ravagers of their fields". Some of the most interesting bits on entomophagy are found in Vincent M Holt's 1885 booklet Why Not Eat Insects? Holt recognised that it would be difficult for many people to overcome squeamishness, but he also felt that with a "fair hearing", an "impartial consideration of arguments" and an "unbiased judgment", they would be persuaded to rid themselves of their "stupid prejudices" and use insects as food. To this end, he drew up menus of curried cockchafers, moths on toast, devilled chafer grubs and slug soup. Quite simply, over centuries and across the globe, eating insects has been the norm. In contemporary Western Europe and North America, entomophagy occupies only a tiny (but growing) culinary niche - at this point, perhaps, more curiosity than anything else. In London, the high-end department store Selfridges now sells toffee-flavoured candies and vodka-flavoured lollipops containing scorpions, worm-salt infused with chilli and agave, and oven-baked worm crisps. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/201343073411650485.html
Forget the slugs, they will kill you... They are full of toxins... But snails are nice and nutricious... And stop the insecticide industry...
by Gus Leonisky on Mon, 2013-05-06 13:16
Clashes between security forces and demonstrators have raged in the centre of Dhaka, where at least three people have been killed since protests began on Sunday. More than 10,000 forcers drawn from police, the elite Rapid Action Battlion and paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh jointly launched a drive late on Sunday to clear demonstrators from a major thoroughfare in Dhaka. But while the main street was largely cleared, protestors scattered into side streets and continued to battle police, officials said early on Monday. The security forces fired numerous rubber bullets and teargas when they launched the eviction drive. The turmoil comes as the government struggles to deal with outrage over the collapse of a factory building north-west of Dhaka, where the death toll has risen to 610 since the late April accident. Rescue workers were still searching through the rubble. The protesters, who are demanding an anti-blasphemy law with provision for the death penalty, had announced their determination to shut down Bangladesh's main business hub Motijheel until the government accepts their demands. In the hours after security forces started evicting the activists and supporters of Hefazat-e-Islami, at least 50 people, including policemen were also injured, a police officer who took part in the operation said. Police also arrested a number of protestors. Security forces got involved after what began as a scheduled demonstration exceeded its time limit and turned violent. Demonstrators attacked the headquarters of the ruling Awami League party, set fire to more than 100 shops and at least 50 parked cars, and vandalised many other buildings. Supporters of Hifazat-e-Islam group carried sticks and had blocked major entry points to the city, sealing off the capital. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2013/05/20135510413485449.html blasphemy is a right to be had... Freedom for atheists and free thinkers... by Gus Leonisky on Mon, 2013-05-06 08:59
Hmm. Between World War II and 1980, every US president left the debt ratio lower when he left office than when he entered. Reagan/Bush I broke that pattern; Clinton brought it back; then came Bush II. And yes, debt is up under Obama, but a depressed economy in a liquidity trap is precisely when you’re supposed to do that. So the story isn’t “irresponsible politicians will always squander the good years”; it is “conservative Republican politicians run up debt even in good years, because they want to force cuts in social programs.” Kind of a different story, isn’t it? The point, then, is that the seemingly worldly-wide cynicism that seems to be the last defense against the economically obvious is in fact based on an imaginary history that looks nothing like what actually happened.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/naive-fiscal-cynicism/
Of course when reading "Republicans" in this article, substitute "conservatives" (Australian Liberals)... In a way, I would say that "our" (Australian) conservatives are less cynical but far more moronic and hypocritical about the price of fish... Hum... if we multiply moronic and hypocritical the result is clueless cynicism... For example, Joe Hockey's answers on "Bolt" were typical figments of clueless cynicism... while Andrew Bolt king-hit him with a kiss on the cheek... by Gus Leonisky on Mon, 2013-05-06 07:52
Australian scientists have found a way of hugely increasing the efficiency of solar panels while substantially reducing their cost. The University of NSW researchers have come up with improvements in photovoltaic panel design that had not been expected for another decade. The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in silicon cells used in solar panels. As a consequence, poor quality silicon can be made to perform like high quality wafers. The process makes cheap silicon "actually better than the best-quality material people are using at the moment", the head of the university's photovoltaics centre of excellence, Professor Stuart Wenham, said. Silicon wafers account for more than half the cost of making a solar cell. "By using lower-quality silicon, you can drastically reduce that cost," he said. "We've been able to figure out what the secret is that enables hydrogen to sometimes work the way people want it to, and sometimes doesn't." At present, the best commercial solar cells convert between 17 per cent and 19 per cent of the sun's energy into electricity. UNSW's technique, patented this year, should produce efficiencies of between 21 per cent and 23 per cent. by Gus Leonisky on Sun, 2013-05-05 21:18
BOB DIAMOND, the former Barclays boss once described as the "unacceptable face of banking" by Peter Mandelson, has claimed he is not motivated by money and doesn't even own a boat. In a lengthy interview with The New York Times, his first since being ousted from Barclays in the wake of the Libor rate-rigging scandal ten months ago, the American-born banker explains that while it might sound as "arrogant as hell", he "never set money as a goal. It was a result."
And I believe in fairies... by Gus Leonisky on Sun, 2013-05-05 21:07
Republican voters are told over and over by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and GOP leaders in Congress that climate change is a sham, a scare campaign orchestrated by scientists with liberal agendas. Ergo, Republicans are less likely than others to believe that fossil-fuel burning is changing the climate. It stands to reason, therefore, that they are less likely to support efforts to tackle the problem. But once Republicans come to understand that the world is indeed imperiled by global warming, they begin to support government actions to try to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the journal Climatic Change. Researchers analyzed the results of a 2012 Gallup poll that asked around 1,000 Americans about their climate change views. From a Michigan State University press release: U.S. residents who believe in the scientific consensus on global warming are more likely to support government action to curb emissions, regardless of whether they are Republican or Democrat, according to a study led by a Michigan State University sociologist. http://grist.org/news/study-when-republicans-believe-scientists-they-support-climate-action/ by Gus Leonisky on Sun, 2013-05-05 20:56
Britain was offering to sell arms to the Argentinian dictatorship just three days before the invasion of the Falkland Islands, newly released documents in the National Archive show. The British ambassador in Buenos Aires sent a telegram to the Ministry of Defence in London on 29 March 1982 saying that the Argentine air force had an "interest in acquiring extra squadron bombers". Ambassador Anthony Williams planned to meet the head of the Argentine air force the "next week" to discuss the sale. The subject of that meeting – obviously cancelled when Argentina invaded the islands on 2 April – was the sale of Canberra jet bombers and the refurbishment of other bombers that Britain had previously sold to the regime. "BAe [British Aerospace] is committed to making a proposal [to refurbish the planes] … if all goes well here BAe could move further up the class in time," Ambassador Williams wrote. The documents show that British arms sales to Argentina's junta, notorious for its abuses of human rights, jumped after Margaret Thatcher came to power. Arms sales rose from £4.9m in 1978 to £66.6m in 1979; £62.6m in 1980 and £12.5m in 1981. Margaret Thatcher's government oversaw the delivery of two Lynx helicopters in 1979 and a Type-42 destroyer in 1980, contracts that had been agreed by the previous Labour government. Both the helicopters and the destroyer were used in the invasion of the Falklands by Gus Leonisky on Sun, 2013-05-05 20:29
Scientists have developed the first global model that analyses the routes taken by marine invasive species. The researchers examined the movements of cargo ships around the world to identify the hot spots where these aquatic aliens might thrive. Marine species are taken in with ballast water on freighters and wreak havoc in new locations, driving natives to extinction. The research is published in the Journal Ecology Letters. There has been a well-documented boom in global shipping over the past 20 years and this has led to growing numbers of species moving via ballast tanks, or by clinging to hulls. Some ports such as San Francisco and Chesapeake Bay have reportedseveral exotic new species arriving every year. Economic estimates indicate that marine invaders can have huge impacts that last for decades. Now, scientists from the UK and Germany have developed a model that might help curb these unwanted visitors. They obtained detailed logs from nearly three million voyages that took place in 2007 and 2008. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22397076 Read article at top, seriously... by Gus Leonisky on Sun, 2013-05-05 14:20
A quarter of British adults now walk for less than nine minutes a day – including time spent getting to the car, work and the shops. The figures, from a YouGov poll for the Ramblers, published exclusively in The Independent on Sunday, reveal that a quarter of Britons walk on average for less than an hour every week. The survey of more than 2,000 over-18s shows that while nine out of 10 Britons agree that walking is a good form of exercise which can keep you healthy, most are not doing so nearly enough. Almost half of people surveyed walk for two hours or less a week – meaning they are not doing enough walking to stay healthy. Chief medical officers recommend that adults do 150 minutes of moderate physical activity, like walking, per week, but 43 per cent of people surveyed walk for 120 minutes or less. William Bird, a GP who specialises in the benefits of exercise, said: "We're going to find this generation will die earlier than their parents if they don't start doing basic movement. We all age quicker when we're not moving and the consequences of that are age-related diseases, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer."
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