Climate Change Denying

The deposits of fossil fuels that we have been cheerfully consuming over the last 100 years or so, and at an ever-increasing rate,  were gradually laid down over many hundreds of thousands of years. Although aspects of  the present theories and predictions of climate change may still be open to be dispute or questioning, what climate change deniers, like Simon Heffer of the Telegraph, first need to tell us is; why should releasing this carbon in such a small fraction of the time in which it was laid down not produce some observable effects on the climate? If they can't, the sensible thing for the time being is to assume the worst and do what we can to get off this carbon jaunt.

Zippers

The modern zipper has been around since 1914 and its adoption really took off after WW2. It has been through numerous manifestations. Anyway, nearly 100 years is a good long time. Could some mechanical designer now invent a version, or expert tailor a seaming technique, in which the slider does NOT get caught and jammed in the edge of the garment material.

PLEASE!

Monkeys using tools

"Life", narrated by David Attenborough, makes one

wonder not only at the amazing scenes of the

natural world recorded, but also at the extraordinary

skills shown by the cameramen.

I found this particular extract particularly moving.

Science is Real

Last Lines 3

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

From "The Dead" in James Joyce's "Dubliners"

"Cardboard Self" by James Lake

An entrant in the "Outside In" competition and currently on display at the Pallant Gallery, Chichester. It is a powerful, highly detailed sculpture made of pieces of corrugated cardboard built up on an armature of carboard tubes of the kind we discard from rolls of wrapping paper.

It was not one of the 6 winners.

Last Lines 2

"We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a lot more than lucky breaks"

from "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson