In a letter addressed to all 27 European Union nations, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said Europe was doing all it could.
"Europe has stepped up and assumed its special responsibility for securing the financial stability of the euro area and we will continue to do so," said the letter in the run up to the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico.
"It is now up to all G20 members to enhance their efforts and deepen our cooperation in order to ensure a sustained global economic recovery."
In particular, it looked to the United States to avoid falling off a "fiscal cliff" - avoiding the problems that could result from tax rises and spending cuts meant to take effect at the end of the year. It also called on China to deliver reforms.
After all, somebody needs to pull them back up the cliff after they finish their swan dive.
Now, of course, it's true that the US needs to get it's fiscal house in order. But to be told that by the EU?
Well look who grew up while we weren't paying attention (at least I wasn't). Another British actress, but born in Paris in 1990 to two lawyers. At least that didn't breed true.
She was first cast for Hermione Granger for the Harry Potter series in 1999, making her more or less 9 years old at the time her die was cast.
With the series now over, she can get on with her life. She has already starred in two non-Potter films ("My Week With Marylin" 2011, and "The Perks of Being a Wallfower" 2012), and has another, "The Bling Ring" in the works.
She has begun some modelling work for Burberry, Lancome, and People Tree.
She is at Brown University in Rhode Island, and expects to graduate this year. She hasn't had much time (nor apparently the inclination) to engage in the hijinks that get so many child stars into trouble.
Maryland State Police say the bodies of a father and his two teenage sons have been recovered from a large manure pit on the upper Eastern Shore.
Police said Thursday it is not clear how the three victims became submerged in the manure pit at a large dairy farm where they worked on the 12000 block of Vansant Corner Road in Kennedyville. They were tentatively identified as 48-year-old Glen W. Nolt, of Peach Bottom, Pa., and his sons, 18-year-old Kelvin R. Nolt and 14-year-old Cleason S. Nolt. Their bodies will be transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore for autopsies to determine the cause of their deaths.
Police say when the three did not come home to milk their dairy cows Wednesday evening, family members became concerned and drove to the farm.
And, of course, special thanks to Wombat-Socho for including this in his weekly Rule 5 roundup, "Rule 5 Monday: Memorial Day". Also thanks to the Classical Liberal who linked this in "She's Got the Jack."
Skye is pretty good about not taking food off counters. Which is good because back in the old days she was fully capable of dismantling the kitchen to get to the food.
Parts of Washington, D.C. are served by a combined system carrying both storm water and sewage. Some of the pipes in this system date back to the Civil War. A large rainstorm can overwhelm the system, allowing sewage to flow into area waterways leading into the Chesapeake Bay.
To correct this situation, D.C. Water has embarked on the Clean Rivers Project, a federally-mandated $2.6 billion, 20-year project to build huge underground tunnels to store overflow storm water and sewage during rainstorms until it can be treated. A new Brookings paper examines the project and concludes that despite D.C. Water’s smart management, we need a better financing system to ensure its success and spread the cost fairly and efficiently among all the beneficiaries.
All the beneficiaries? Hmm, I sense some
... Some would say, this is the District's problem; let them pay to solve it. That approach ignores the fact that water doesn’t recognize political boundaries. Cleaner water flowing from the District means downstream jurisdictions have fewer pollution problems, and it helps improve the health of the Chesapeake Bay, a national priority. The District is home to about 11 percent of the region's population, but the benefits of cleaner water for drinking and recreation from here all the way to the Bay are enjoyed by millions.
But these other downstream areas have their own pollution problems to address; we've already seen how the counties surrounding and downstream of Washington D.C. are facing their own huge bills for the Bay clean up. Why should the districts costs be ameliorated by cost sharing?
The new device is a cross between today’s transistors and the vacuum tubes of yesteryear. It’s small and easily manufactured, but also fast and radiation-proof. Meyyappan, who co-developed the “nano vacuum tube,” says it is created by etching a tiny cavity in phosphorous-doped silicon. The cavity is bordered by three electrodes: a source, a gate, and a drain. The source and drain are separated by just 150 nanometers, while the gate sits on top. Electrons are emitted from the source thanks to a voltage applied across it and the drain, while the gate controls the electron flow across the cavity. In their paper published online today in Applied Physics Letters,
Vacuum tubes suffered a slow death during the 1950s and ’60s thanks to the invention of the transistor—specifically, the ability to mass-produce transistors by chemically engraving, or etching, pieces of silicon. Transistors were smaller, cheaper, and longer lasting. They could also be packed into microchips to switch on and off according to different, complex inputs, paving the way for smaller, more powerful computers.
But transistors weren’t better in all respects. Electrons move more slowly in a solid than in a vacuum, which means transistors are generally slower than vacuum tubes; as a result, computing isn’t as quick as it could be. What’s more, semiconductors are susceptible to strong radiation, which can disrupt the atomic structure of the silicon such that the charges no longer move properly. That’s a big problem for the military and NASA, which need their technology to work in radiation-harsh environments such as outer space.
I remember the transistor revolution (a little dimly, it's been a while). Old TVs and radios had vacuum tubes, they died frequently, and you had to pull them out and find which one was bad and replace it; today you just throw away the TV and buy a new one. A hand held radio was a virtual miracle.
High end guitar amps are still mostly powered by vacuum tubes, and most of those tubes are now available from Russian sources. The Russians continued to use them for many things, including jet aircraft long after we abandoned them for virtually everything else.
It's too early to say if this could be the beginning of a new era in electronics, but it would be cool if it was. Someday soon, we'll run out of atoms for Moore's Law to continue, so maybe this will stave off end of the continued improvements in electronics a few more years.
Sorry about missing last Friday's Monkey Dacker post, but I was otherwise engaged in Alaska. This week's Monkey Dacker is the zookeeper who licked the monkey butt to save the monkey.
Wuhan Zoo Monkey caretaker Zhang Bangsheng unbelievably used his tongue to lick a small monkey’s butt!
50-year-old Zhang Bangsheng used warm water to clean a small Francois’ Leaf Monkey’s buttocks, then began using his mouth to lick it, not stopping for over an hour, until the little monkey defecated a single peanut. Only after the peanut was defecated did Zhang Bangsheng laugh with satisfaction.
As it is understood, this small Francois’ langur is only 3 months old, and is the first Francois’ Leaf Monkey to be born in nearly 10 years at this animal park. The Francois’ langur is a rare primate from Guangxi and Guizhou and is amongst the nation’s most protected animals. Because it is so precious, the zoo gave it to model worker and high-level expert Zhang Bangsheng to care for and raise.
On the first day of the “May 1st” short holiday, Zhang Bangsheng let the small Francois langur enter the monkey exhibit for the first time to meet visitors so it can see more of the world. The next day, Old Zhang discovered that the little monkey had indigestion and difficulty defecating, and immediately became worried. Seeing peanut shells on the ground, Old Zhang immediately understood that visitors had definitely tossed peanuts to the small monkey, and the toothless monkey swallowed the peanut whole. If it does not quickly defecate it, it would endanger the little monkey’s life.
Because the monkey is too small, it wasn’t suitable to use medicine to let it defecate. The only way was to lick its butt, to prompt it to defecate the peanut, and so the scene at the start of this article occurred.
But... if you sought career advancement by making a claim that was not factually grounded, then it is relevant as you seek political office. It goes to your character, your honesty, your fairness. Now, it might nevertheless be something of an answer to the question to say: You know, I now realize that I didn't have an absolutely sound basis to believe what I believed, but I did genuinely believe it. And I know that I did expose this belief in a way that could have attracted benefits, and I did come to regret it. I've forgiven myself, and I ask you to forgive me, because my mistake was a daughter's belief in what her mother told her was true, a granddaughter's belief in her grandmother's knowledge and honor.
If she came that far, and Scott Brown were to respond: Your mother and your grandmother were either liars or fools — that would be an attack on her family.
That hasn't happened, and who can imagine it would? Thus, the inappropriate attack here is on Scott Brown, because he has not attacked her family.
And from Alhouse's comments:
Scott Brown's obvious reply:
"If my mother told me that my great-grandmother's grandmother was black I would believe her. I would be proud of my ancestors for being open-minded enough to enter into an interracial marriage at a time when interracial couples were widely persecuted.
But I certainly wouldn't claim that made ME an African-American -- and I damned well wouldn't accept special benefits for it, like Ms. Warren did. To do so is an insult to the people for whom those benefits were intended."
How absurd? Warren says that for almost a decade she listed herself in the AALS directory as a Native American because she hoped to "meet others like me." This well-educated, highly paid, much-honored (she was a consumer protection adviser to President Obama) member of America's upper 1 percent went looking for people "who are like I am" among Native Americans?
This makes perfect sense to a liberal subscriber to the central superstition of the diversity industry, which is the premise of identity politics: Personhood is distilled not to the content of character but only to race, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference.
Nothing really new here, but he says it so nicely in his inimitable voice...
4. "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity."
5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage."
I think I just lost my appetite. And that takes a lot.
Mao Sugiyama, a self-described "asexual" from Tokyo, cooked up, seasoned and served his own genitalia to five diners at a swanky banquet in Japan last month, Calorie Lab reported.
In most cases, "asexual" is a word used to describe a person who is non-sexual. Sugiyama, however, embraces it as a way to show that he does not affiliate with either gender.
I would add that heshe it has just strikingly limited hisher it's options as to which gender to affiliate with.
My own taste in Japanese weirdness runs more towards...
Speaking of Japanese weirdness, I recently downloaded "Black Wind" by Paul F. Wilson onto my Kindle, and read it on my recent cross country adventure. A good deal at $2.99
And, of course, special thanks to Wombat-Socho for including this in his weekly Rule 5 roundup, "Rule 5 Monday: Memorial Day". Also thanks to the Classical Liberal who linked this in "She's Got the Jack."
Waterways like Marley Creek on Maryland’s Western Shore have been hit by algae blooms called mahogany tides, and it’s been killing thousands of fish. They’re dying from a lack of oxygen.
“Typically, it’s at the end of creeks where you get this algae blooming, and it depletes the oxygen from the water,” Pierre Henaart, a scientist with the Severn Riverkeeper Program, said.
We had a huge dinoflagellate bloom in the area where I work, which colored the water reddish brown for weeks, consuming CO2 and producing high levels of oxygen. In the past two weeks however, the blooms crashed (the dinoflagellates died and rotted), and oxygen levels have declined sharply and dissolved CO2 increased sharply. You can see some of the date here. I suggest looking at the past 3 months of data; look at chlorophyll (a measure of algae density), DO% (dissolved oxygen as percent of atmospheric) and pH (a measure of acidity, mostly CO2), and set the graph type to "stacked".
I have not seen any fish kills here, and the oxygen graph above does not show dangerously low levels.
These fish kills are not quite the same as the ones we often see on my stretch of beach caused by the upwelling of low oxygen waters, which occur under some specific wind conditions in summer. The algae that fuel them are much the same, but the physics of the situations that cause them are different.
The 32-year-old model was recently approached by a French businessman who wanted her to re-enact a moment from hit film Indecent Proposal where Demi Moore spends the night with a stranger in return for $1million.
But then, I don't think it would be an approved budget item at our household. BTW, does he actually specify what he would like to get done during this night?
Following the bizarre request, Brook put the incident behind her and wowed onlookers at the annual event wearing a stunning silver dress. According to The Mirror, the businessman who is known only as Frederic, interrupted a photocall session which Brook was attending at the Majestic Barriere hotel and offered her a cheque for €1million in return for 'one night' with her.
So, here the Daily Mail is showing poor proof reading. In the first paragraph the price is a million DOLLARS, but in the second, a million POUNDS. Given the current exchange rate, one millions pounds would be worth 1.57 millions bucks. Now, that's not insignificant for a night's hard labor. Shocking what gets by in newspapers these days...
Brook was a bit confused at first and thought it was nothing more than a prank set up by Lemon - whose film she was promoting at the 65th Cannes Film Festival.
But Frederic, who is said to be in his thirties, wouldn't give up and allegedly tried to grab the brunette.
Now, that's just uncool. Don't grab the girl! Up the bid! If you have a million to waste on a nights pleasure, certainly you have two million. It's just money after all, and you can't take it with you.
'Just one night! Please, one night! I have money!' he shouted as Brook suddenly realised there was a problem.
A bodyguard came to the rescue and escorted the man away and was ejected from the French hotel.
And despite perhaps being a bit shaken up, Brook continued her photo shoot and showed no signs being freaked out as she graced the red carpet today.
And, of course, special thanks to Wombat-Socho for including this in his weekly Rule 5 roundup, "Rule 5 Monday: Memorial Day". Also thanks to the Classical Liberal who linked this in "She's Got the Jack."
An interesting study which suggests that occasional bouts of infectious diseases that cause fevers leads to a reduction in cancer:
Information on potential breast cancer risk factors, history of fever during the last 10 years, and blood specimens were collected from 839 incident breast cancer cases and 863 age-matched controls between October 2008 and June 2010 in Guangzhou, China...
The effect of the fever appears to be dependent on which genetic variant of interferon gamma the women carried. Interferons play roles in immune regulation. So this comparison of interferon gamma variants was not randomly chosen.
This association only occurred in women with CT/TT genotypes [0.54 (0.37–0.77)] but not in those with the CC genotype [1.09 (0.77–1.55)].
So there appears to be a genetic connection as well; if you have the right genes, fever can help keep you cancer free,
The idea that lower infectious disease incidence is associated with higher rates of cancer is not new.
Since the 19th century, it has been repeatedly observed that spontaneous cancer regressions were coincided with acute infections and the cancer patients had a remarkable disease-free history before the onset of cancer. In the 20th century, an inverse association between infectious diseases, particularly febrile ones, and cancer risk has also been consistently found for malignant melanoma and glioma using modern epidemiological methods.
With the widespread introduction of antibiotics and antipyretics since the beginning of the last century, however, the critical role played by fever has often been overlooked, resulting in considerable changes to the clinical course and magnitude of the immune response that develops following acute infections. These changes may be part of the reasons for the substantial increase in the age-adjusted incidences or mortalities of malignant diseases during the early part of the last century in western countries and in the late of the last century in China. It has been observed that every 2% reduction in infectious disease mortality was followed by a 2% increase in cancer mortality over a 10-year interval from 1895 to 1963 in Italy.
An important question is whether the drop in deaths due to the treatment of infectious diseases is greater than the increase in deaths due to higher cancer rates in treated populations? I would think that it would. Fever producing diseases are mankind's ancient enemies, and the ability to treat fevers is one of the great advances in medicine. I'm not giving up my Aspirin or Tylenol when I'm burning up from some random virus to prevent some hypothetical cancer years later, and I would be even less likely to not take an antibiotic that could halt a potentially fatal bacterial infection.
I can't do this one justice by cutting excerpts. Read the whole thing, and remember that this applies to more than just cancer statistics, it applies to a wide array of science, particularly the way science is portrayed in the media.
Last week the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a shocking drop in power sector coal consumption in the first quarter of 2012. Coal-fired power plants are now generating just 36 percent of U.S. electricity, versus 44.6 percent just one year ago.
It’s the result of an unprecedented regulatory assault on coal that will leave us all much poorer.
Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction. These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”
The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.
Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious: “Capacity prices were higher than last year's because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.” Northern Ohio is suffering from more forced coal-plant retirements than the rest of the region, hence the even higher price.
These are not computer models or projections or estimates. These are the actual prices that electric distributors have agreed to pay for new capacity. The costs will be passed on to consumers at the retail level.
Street lighting is transforming communities of insects and other invertebrates, according to research by the University of Exeter.
Published in the journal Biology Letters, the study shows for the first time that the balance of different species living together is being radically altered as a result of light pollution in our towns and cities.
Believed to be increasing by six per cent a year globally, artificial lighting is already known to affect individual organisms, but this is the first time that its impact on whole communities has been investigated.
This study shows that groups of invertebrates living near to artificial lights include more predators and scavengers. This could be impacting on the survival rates of different species, having a knock-on effect on birds and mammals that rely on these species for food. The effects could be affecting entire ecosystems and even humans.
...They collected 1,194 individuals covering 60 species. They discovered that total numbers were more abundant under street lights, where they also found more predatory and scavenging species, such as ground beetles and harvestmen. This was the case during the day, as well as at night, suggesting that the effect on communities is ongoing.
Well, yes, everything affects something. Humans have been lighting the night since we learned how to keep that lightning strike fire alive hundreds of thousands of years ago. Are we supposed to quit because that's helping a few insect predators catch more food? A bug's gotta eat, after all.
Lead author Dr Tom Davies of the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus said: “Our study shows that light pollution could be having a dramatic effect on wildlife in our towns and cities. We need to be aware of how the increase in artificial lighting is impacting on the delicate ecosystems on which we all rely. Our research shows, for the first time, the changes that light pollution is making to entire communities of invertebrates. We now need to examine what impact this is having on other communities and how this may be affecting important ecosystem services and whether we should change the way we light urban spaces.”
That will be another ₤500,000 please. It's not like the wildlife is anywhere near pristine in cities and towns anyway. At least it's only British money, but I'm pretty sure somebody from the States will jump on the bandwagon as soon as they see it's easy research to do (we don't call them "bug shufflers" for nothing).
I was looking for a song with lyrics "Like Moths to a Flame" that I dimly remembered, and I ran across this; it's only had 2700 hits since 2007, so it hasn't gotten a lot of play. A little (no, a lot) sappy, but a nice guitar solo. What the heck, hit it and give them a thrill. It even satisfies my cutie quota, sorta. And, hey, they're at least 31/32s more Indian Native American than Elizabeth Warren.
I reported on the results for the Chesapeake Bay proper in late March, which showed that seagrasses (or more properly, submerged aquatic vegetation, as few of them are actually grasses) dropped sharply from 2010.
Today's report from Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the Maryland Coastal Bays
program, the Virginia Institute of Marine Scientists and the National
Park Service shows that seagrasses in the Maryland and Virginia Coastal Bays (the small and medium sized inlets that front on the Atlantic Ocean and not the Chesapeake) also suffered substantial declines in 2011:
Seagrass acreage dropped 35 percent between July 2010 and May 2011, including nearly all of the grass beds in the Assawoman Bay and the Isle Wight Bay, according to figures by several groups.
The drop in seagrasses, which provide food and shelter for crabs, fish, birds and other species, coincided with large decreases in grasses in the lower Chesapeake Bay. Researchers said the grasses are now at levels not seen since the early 1990s, exceeding declines caused by the hot summer of 2005.
"The heat alone doesn't kill them unless combined with the already stressful conditions the plants are living in," said Thomas Parham, DNR Director of Tidewater Ecosystem Assessment Service.
The Chincoteague Bay lost the most — a decrease of more than 2,700 acres or about 27 percent of grasses, split nearly equally between Maryland and Virginia. Assawoman Bay lost about 900 acres, the Isle of Wight Bay, nearly 500, and the St. Martin River lost its last 1.6 acres.
One of the few areas of good news was the continued expansion of eelgrass in Virginia's coastal bays.
Clearer water of the Virginia coastal bays and the proximity of the eelgrass meadows to cooler ocean waters made the summer heat more bearable, said Bob Orth, who oversees the annual aerial survey.
Officials blamed hot summer temperatures, and nutrient pollution for the losses, without actually pointing to any data to support that. It's pretty clear that the huge rain and turbidity events in the Bay resulting from Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee had a lot to do with the sea grass losses in the Bay, but I note that those events are not mentioned in this article. Does this mean these events had less impact in the coastal bays? Or is it simply easier to blame pollution and global warming (by implication)?
