Ippoippo

What the….

All explained here.
Most amusing spoof.

Gaggghhh, talk about over-sensationalisation!

Whilst it’s interesting to see some proper science stuff being reported in the mainstream media, the way it’s been done is just plain daft.

I mean all this talk of today being ‘Big Bang Day’. Then you have the reports about a the chances of the experiment going wrong and sucking up the earth in a black hole.
Well, that was never going to happen today anyway!! All they bloody did was turn the machine on, fire off some protons at (relatively) slow speed in one direction… then do it again in the other direction. There was never any intention of doing any proton beam collisions until October (if I recall correctly).

Of course, ‘LHC turned on’ isn’t exactly an attention grabbing headline is it

Mind you, this over reaction and fear-mongering has gone and had a rather negative effort with the report of a 16 year old in India committing suicide.

Meanwhile, the BBC ‘Have Your Say’ discussion has been invaded by the God Squad

The last couple of weeks have been quite busy in work… hence the lack of posting. This week is the last ‘big push’, so it will be nice to get that out of the way.

Meanwhile, Yuko and I have been reaping the rewards of our gardening, sampling some of the potatos, turnips, various herbs, various salads and onions that we’ve been growing.
We’ve haven’t eaten much of it yet, but our Kale plantation has grown really well, and the peas and beans are on the way now too. Some of the oriental greens have now been planted for later on in the year.
All good stuff anyway.

Next month, Yuko and I are also off on holiday to Italy (Florence and Bologna). Now, since jetting off there is somewhat ‘un-eco’ (going there is un-eco too I admit), we’ll be going by train instead. So, it’s off to London by train, then hope on the Eurostar to Paris. Then we’ll take the sleeper train from Paris to Florence. We’ll get to see a fair bit of the journey on the way down I guess, before so that will be quite nice I hope.
The plan is to spend a little time in Florence, with a little trip out to the wine making regions before heading up to Bologna. This will be Yuko’s first trip to Italy and the my second (my first being to Bologna as the base for daily trips down to Imola for the San Marino Grand Prix back in 2001).

We’ve decided to do this now because fuel costs (and thus travel) are heading up now so we should do this while we can. Also, this will be our first holiday together since we’ve got married (yeah, I know we’ve been to various places since then, but the trip to Australia was for my work and trip to Japan last December was more about family and friend commitments, and the trip to Paris was really only done as a favour for Yuko’s cousin when he visited the UK)… so at long last get to have a week off together. Hurrrahh!

Last week, there was a fair bit of reporting about Sharon Stone when she said…

I thought, is that karma – when you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?

… referencing the earthquake in China being about karma in retribution for Chinese actions in Tibet.
Whilst, to me anyway, being a bit of a “mehh, not really that interested”, I did catch some comments on the BBC’s Have Your Say comments on their News website.

I particulary liked this one on the matter…

People are always entitled to their opinion, but opinions, particularly religious ones that have no evidence to back them up, are often dangerous or offensive to people. It’s no more provable than if I claimed it rained yesterday because the Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster was angry with me because I didn’t finish all of my pasta-based dinner.
Ryan Hawthorne, Brighton

A response to Gordon’s views

This is what David Strahan (author of ‘The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man’) had to say about Gordon Browns announcements about the oil price.

Even by the low standards of his Government, Gordon Brown’s recent pronouncements on oil have been surprising. Writing in a national newspaper on Wednesday, he argued that the price of a barrel had soared to $135 because of barriers to production that are “technical, financial and political”.
There are problems here, sure enough, but the word he left out was “geological”, and the omission is crucial. It means he really doesn’t understand the profundity of the current crisis, and explains why panicky initiatives are bound to fail.

F@*%ing idiot economists

There were two stories reported here and here.

Something caught my attention in the second one…

Others assume the reverse: that the price is bound to keep rising indefinitely, since supplies of oil are running short. The majority of the world’s crude, according to believers in “peak oil”, has been discovered and is already being exploited. At any rate, the size of new fields is diminishing. So production will soon reach a pinnacle, if it has not done so already, and then quickly decline, no matter what governments do.

As different as these theories are, they share a conviction that something has gone badly wrong with the market for oil. High prices are seen as proof of some sort of breakdown. Yet the evidence suggests that, to the contrary, the rising price is beginning to curb demand and increase supply, just as the textbooks say it should.

Woooaaaa, what happened to basic common sense in a closed system and a finite resource.
How can decreased demand result in more of a finite source becoming magically available??