Thursday, 12 August 2010
♪♫ Dan Bull - Dear Mandy [an open letter to Lord Mandelson]
the lyrics
Samples used:
Lily Allen - Never Gonna Happen
Lily Allen - Who'd Have Known
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Historic Russian Seed Bank Faces Destruction
Priceless Plant Collection in Peril
Ninety percent of the more than 5,000 varieties of berries and fruit seed at the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry seed bank in Leningrad, Russia are found in no other seed bank or plant research center in the world. During WWII, with Leningrad under siege, twelve scientists protecting the seed bank's valuable specimens starved to death, unwilling to eat the rare seeds.
What makes a few hundred thousand plant seeds worth dying for? The carefully tended seed collection at VRI -- one of the oldest seed banks in the world -- preserves rare genetic traits that could one day help farmers save entire nations from famine.
Yet today, part of Vavilov's priceless repository is in danger of being lost forever. The seed bank's research station at Pavlovsk, home to thousands of rare plant varieties, is facing destruction by one of the most banal evils imaginable: a housing development. A group of Russian real estate developers plans to bulldoze the historic agricultural research center -- and its fields of rare berry bushes and fruit trees -- to build the Russian equivalent of a subdivision of McMansions.
TAKE ACTION: SAVE THE SEED BANK FROM DESTRUCTION!
The Crop Diversity Crisis
Modern industrialized agriculture has encouraged the standardization of crop seeds. Most of the world now depends on fewer than 150 species of plants for food, and 90% of the crop varieties grown just 100 years ago are no longer commercially produced, leaving most of humanity dependent on just a few varieties of vital food crops like corn, wheat or apples.
This lack of crop diversity makes the food plants most people depend on for survival highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, disease and insect pests. With an artificially limited gene pool, most conventional food crops cannot evolve new defenses quickly from one generation to the next to deal with a changing environment. And planting the same variety of a plant from one field to the next makes it easy for plant diseases to spread. A new virus or fungus might wipe out not just one farmer's field, but an entire state's crop.
But older, heirloom varieties of food plants often carry genes that can help plants withstand drought, flooding and pestilence. And that is why seed banks like the one at Pavlovsk are so vitally important -- by preserving a wide variety of plants and seeds, seed banks preserve genetic traits that one day might save entire plant species from extinction.
Save the Seed Bank
If the Russian real estate developers have their way, the Pavlovsk agricultural research station might be destroyed in just a few months. The Global Crop Diversity Trust and botanists around the world are petitioning the Russian government to save Pavlovsk's seeds.
The director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, Dr. Cary Fowler, is encouraging anyone who would like the Russian government to stop the destruction of this historic seed bank to join a Twitter campaign to convince Russia's President, Dmitry Medvedev, (@kremlinrussia_e)to intervene.
TAKE ACTION:
Costs of Major U.S. Wars Compared
More than a trillion dollars has been appropriated since September 11, 2001 for U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. This makes the “war on terrorism” the most costly of any military engagement in U.S. history in absolute terms or, if correcting for inflation, the second most expensive U.S. military action after World War II.
A newly updated report from the Congressional Research Service estimated the financial costs of major U.S. wars from the American Revolution ($2.4 billion in FY 2011 dollars) to World War I ($334 billion) to World War II ($4.1 trillion) to the second Iraq war ($784 billion) and the war in Afghanistan ($321 billion). CRS provided its estimates in current year dollars (i.e. the year they were spent) and in constant year dollars (adjusted for inflation), and as a percentage of gross domestic product. Many caveats apply to these figures, which are spelled out in the CRS report.
In constant dollars, World War II is still the most expensive of all U.S. wars, having consumed a massive 35.8% of GDP at its height and having cost $4.1 trillion in FY2011 dollars. See “Costs of Major U.S. Wars,” June 29, 2010.
Travelling Solo
It's really simple: the great thing about travelling alone is that there is no one else with you. No one whose wishes and needs you have to consider when you want to spend the day at your hotel in bed reading excursion brochures or gloomy Thomas Bernhard. You want to stay in bed? You stay in bed. You want to lie at the edge of an ocean and let the surf play with your feet? You do that. You want to see the sights? Really? Do you really? Well, if you must, you can.
You travel alone, you do exactly as you want. This surely needs no further explanation. But, of course, I'm from what Margaret Thatcher (that well-known communitarian) called the Me generation. Being with other people on holiday makes me anxious. Are they comfortable, happy, restless, resentful, bored? On the whole, togetherness requires compromise and why would you want to compromise (more than already required by the location and budget) while travelling, as well as in your real, everyday life?
Nevertheless, I know that there are those who find the word "alone" distressing. That scene in Les Enfants du Paradis where the insufferable toddler enters the theatre box, in which the gloriously tragic Arletty watches her secret love on stage, and pipes: "Vous êtes toute seule, madame?" makes being toute seule a lifelong terrifying prospect. Well then, try "solo".
The difference between travelling solo and travelling alone is a state of mind. I've been travelling alone for decades, long before I could call myself a "travel writer" – not that I do call myself a travel writer. But the word could is essential here. It's true that, for different reasons in different places, people can be curious, suspicious even, of a woman (young, middle-aged or old) travelling alone. Yet tell them you're a writer and not only is everything explicable but people will stay and talk to you, telling you sometimes wonderful stories about their lives. Use the writer excuse with a different look on your face, and people will understandingly leave you alone.
In those circumstances where you might feel awkward – eating alone in a restaurant full of holiday couples and families, lizarding on a beach hoping for perfect peace, ordering a drink at a bar in a small town – only think of yourself as a writer on an assignment and the unease falls away. You are, after all, doing what a writer does: looking, thinking, playing with characters or ideas, and idling. Once you've explained yourself to yourself it does wonders for not worrying about what other people think. It makes all social unwillingness acceptable. You can talk, not talk; join, not join; everything's covered for other people and for you. You're travelling solo, not alone.
I've chilled out in the Caribbean, encircled America by train, cargo-shipped across the Atlantic and explored the Antarctic peninsula, all solo and at ease, using my laptop as a flag of peace and quiet. Even before I really did write travel stuff, I went to Greek islands in that blissful condition of being alone but free to talk to people if I wanted, by using the journalism excuse.
There are other ways to travel solo without raising eyebrows, as I did when I went with my three-year-old to Lake Como and was stared at with deep suspicion and disapproval by the other, mostly elderly, Italian guests in the hotel. Eventually, I made it a point to "find" myself sitting in the foyer next to the crossest-looking elderly lady and explained how sad and yet comforting it was to return here where my late husband and I had enjoyed such happy holidays. She broke into a relieved smile to discover I was a virtuous widow and not a disreputable single mother, as I was, and passed the news around, so that the rest of the vacation allowed me to "mourn" while basking in benevolent glances.
As a young woman in Greece, I found a polite but very firm "no, thank you" was sufficient to send young Greek men, who were both practical and fatalistic, off to try their luck elsewhere.
There are limits to easing your way alone in the world. None of these strategies would have worked in the train I took in my late teens from Rome to Assisi. It was full and I had no seat booked, so I spent the journey standing in the corridor in a tube-like crush with what seemed like an entire brigade of the Italian army. This was awkward and uncomfortable.
For several hours the young men, every one of them, stared unblinking at me with that deadly gaze poised between loathing and lust, until the train reached Assisi, where I fought my way through hands, mouths and groins to the exit. I hadn't thought of the journalism justification at that stage, but it really wouldn't have helped.
Jenny Diski @'The Guardian'
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
Ancient language mystery deepens
A linguistic mystery has arisen surrounding symbol-inscribed stones in Scotland that predate the formation of the country itself.
The stones are believed to have been carved by members of an ancient people known as the Picts, who thrived in what is now Scotland from the 4th to the 9th Centuries.
These symbols, researchers say, are probably "words" rather than images.
But their conclusions have raised criticism from some linguists.
The research team, led by Professor Rob Lee from Exeter University in the UK, examined symbols on more than 200 carved stones.
They used a mathematical method to quantify patterns contained within the symbols, in an effort to find out if they conveyed meaning.
Professor Lee described the basis of this method.
"It I told you the first letter of a word in English was 'Q' and asked you to predict the next letter, you would probably say 'U' and you would probably be right," he explained.
"But if I told you the first letter was 'T' you would probably take many more guesses to get it right - that's a measure of uncertainty."
Using the symbols, or characters, from the stones, Professor Lee and his colleagues measured this feature of so-called "character to character uncertainty".
They concluded that the Pictish carvings were "symbolic markings that communicated information" - that these were words rather than pictures.
Professor Lee first published these conclusions in April of this year. But a recent article by French linguist Arnaud Fournet opened up the mystery once again.
Mr Fournet said that, by examining Pictish carvings as if they were "linear symbols", and by applying the rules of written language to them, the scientists could have produced biased results.
He commented to BBC News: "It looks like their method is transforming two-dimensional glyphs into a one-dimensional string of symbols.
"The carvings must have some kind of purpose- some kind of meanings, but... it's very difficult to determine if their conclusion is contained in the raw data or if it's an artefact of their method."
Mr Fournet also suggested that the researchers' methods should be tested and verified for other ancient symbols.
"The line between writing and drawing is not as clear-cut as categorised in the paper," Mr Fournet wrote in his article. "On the whole the conclusion remains pending."
But Professor Lee says that his most recent analysis of the symbols, which has yet to be published, has reinforced his original conclusions.
He also stressed he did not claim that the carvings were a full and detailed record of the Pictish language.
"The symbols themselves are a very constrained vocabulary," he said. "But that doesn't mean that Pictish had such a constrained vocabulary."
He said the carvings might convey the same sort of meaning as a list, perhaps of significant names, which would explain the limited number of words used.
"It's like finding a menu for a restaurant [written in English], and that being your sole repository of the English language.
Victoria Gill @'BBC'
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