I moved over to Dreamwidth entirely almost 4 years ago. You can find me here if this is the thing that finally pushes you to migrate. Not that there's many of you left on Livejournal.
This got some reactions, as it should, but of course, it also aroused (as ever, ill-informed) scepticism. It seems inevitable. So I tried to answer some queries.
> Their maths isn't very good. First they say it's the size of England, then they say it's 50 miles wide.
If that narrow bottleneck goes, then the rest slides into the sea rapidly. It doesn't need to melt, any more than ice cubes dropped into a glass need to melt to make the glass overflow. It doesn't matter if they take decades to melt; the sea-level rise due to displacement will take only about 12 days to spread out and equalise worldwide.
The key point here is that the fairly narrow point where the glacier flows into the sea is a bottleneck, and once the bung is removed, the flow speeds up.
Another said:
> TIL that the estimated time it could take for the doomsday glacier to melt has reduced from 40 > years to just five years in the space of seven months.
It doesn't need to melt. It doesn't really matter when it melts.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is sitting on rock that is below sea level. Ice is very slightly less dense than water. That means it floats. If water gets underneath the ice, it slides into the sea and floats off. It displaces vast amounts of water and the sea-levels rise. It is not about melting. Melting could take decades to centuries but it's irrelevant. It's when it floats away that is important.
And the Thwaites glacier is one of the 2 main points that the WAIS pours out into the sea.
> The article refers throughout to Antarctic ice "thinning and melting"
I specifically already addressed this.
If you are lying in a bath tub & the water is within millimetres of the rim, which will cause it to overflow quicker?
[a] Turning on the taps and adding 10 litres of water. That takes 1 minute using typical bath taps.
[b] Dropping 10kg of ice cubes into the water, in one motion. 1kg of ice is 1 litre, in case you don't know your SI units. I'm a sprightly 54 but I don't speak fluid ounces and all that stuff I'm afraid. It doesn't matter in this context.
If I tip a 10kg bag of ice cubes into a full bath, it will overflow immediately. If I pour water in at 10l/min it will take tens of seconds.
No, it is not about melting. It is about adding ice to the oceans, which adds mass. Archimedes' principle etc. Crystalline solids are a state of matter, a phase. It is irrelevant what phase the water is in; it's how much you add.
> Since 1950, the waters south of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current have warmed at a rate of only 0.02º/decade.
The poster didn't say degrees F or C.
But I submit that the numbers are irrelevant. The poles are warming much faster than the rest of the globe, but because most of Antarctica is a big raised continent with the icecap on top, it's much less in there. *Except* the Antartic peninsular – the long spur that points towards South America – which is the fastest-warming land on the planet:
The numbers may look small but the changes are vast. As a comparison, the Gulf Stream transports about 0.8 of a petaWatt of energy from the equator to the north pole. A fraction of a unit doesn't sound impressive. But the total energy output of humanity is about 23 teraWatts (2018 figures, latest I can find.)
1 PW = 1000 TW.
So humanity produces 0.023 PW. The very slightly warmer water flowing up the east coast of North America transports about 35 times the total energy output of humanity.
I have seen other estimates it's more like 60 times.
Which means that any human attempt to change the Gulf Stream is pretty futile. A mosquito pushing on the prow of a supertanker.
But the increase in CO₂ levels humanity has accomplished, from 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to 410 now, is more than enough to trap enough heat to melt Greenland faster than it's collecting snow in winter, dumping over 500 thousand million tonnes of freshwater into the Arctic ocean and slowing the Gulf Stream, which is powered by warm, saltier water cooling and sinking to the bottom in the Arctic ocean.
The numbers look small but the real effects are vast and impossible to imagine on human scales. 0.2ºF (my guess as to what they meant) sounds like nothing, it seems trivial, but it's huge.
Current Location: Kobylisy Current Mood:angry Current Music: Guy Garvey's Finest Hour on 6music Tags:climate, thwaites
После успешного запуска в космос Многофункциональный лабораторный модуль «Наука» столкнулся с рядом проблем на пути к Международной космической станции. Сейчас он в автономном режиме успешно приближается к МКС, но его операторам удаленно пришлось решить ряд проблем. Попробуем сделать полный обзор непростого путешествия двадцатитонной «Науки» на низкой околоземной орбите. ( Читать дальше и узнать больше...Collapse )
Unchecked capitalism is rapidly destroying the climate and most of the life on the planet. The Earth will be fine -- it's survived at least half a dozen mass extinctions before. But we might not.
We face a choice of 2 options:
• End capitalism, free markets, consumerism, globalism, and democracy. Move into a period of degrowth, massive population shrinkage, switch to green technologies, a low-power way of life for the remaining population: no international travel, no flying, no cars, etc.
This is probably the best way but it's extremely hard, nobody really knows how to do it, and there are a vast number of extremely powerful entrenched entities implacable opposed to it.
• Or, embrace growth and expansion, in which case there is only one place to go: move industry and power generation off the Earth and into space. Meantime, switch to greener tech here, such as mass solar power generation, electric cars, telecommuting, etc.
To do option 2, we need cheap, accessible space transport. Governments only did it in the 1960s to show off, and once the race was won, they stopped trying. They did it with extremely expensive, disposable vehicles, and as soon as their flags were planted, they stopped doing the hard stuff.
Some will now exclaim "but the ISS!" The ISS is about 220 miles, 350km, above us. You could bicycle that in a couple of days and drive it in an afternoon. No human has been further from the earth than that in about half a century, and there is no prospect of any government doing that very soon. Only Russia and China can currently do it; the American government gave up on it with the end of the Space Shuttle programme.
But SpaceX has done it repeatedly in the last year.
Yes, billionaires are going to space (or at least out of the atmosphere). Because only the biggest wealthiest companies can afford to do it. Because it costs billions, so only billionaires can afford it.
Yes, arguably, we shouldn't have private citizens who can afford their own space programmes. Our governments ought to be doing it, and they ought to be taxing those people to pay for it as well as for free healthcare and education and much more.
But they aren't.
So be glad that somebody is.
It doesn't matter why. What matters is that if the economy continues to grow on Earth and only on Earth it will kill all of us. There is only one place else it can grow, and that is space, where there is no air or water to pollute, no life to exterminate.
We need to embrace and support SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. They are, for venal reasons, the trailbreakers of literally and precisely the only place we have to go.
The human race needs cheap spaceflight. We need solar power satellites. We need cheap lunar helium for fusion reactors.
It is by far the easiest path out of the mess we're in.
Yes, these early efforts are a bit poor. They are short hops, barely out of the atmosphere, not really into space at all and only just out of the atmosphere. They fall straight back.
But look at the context here. SpaceX nearly screwed the pooch. Falcon-1 launches #1, #2 & #3 all went wrong and were aborted, destroying their science payloads. Only the 4th worked – and delivered a bunch of scrap iron to LEO.
So many companies/efforts have tried and failed: Xcor, Armadillo Aerospace, HOTOL, Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries...
This stuff is hard. Spaceplanes are hard. Launching from a plane is hard. Landing rockets is hard: no superpower ever managed it, because governments aren't much worried about cost.
No, Virgin "Galactic" aren't going into orbit with their current tech. Blue Origin are planning to, although they can't yet. But they got humans out of the atmosphere and back safely and that's a big deal. Only a handful of major nations ever did that before, and just 3 private companies have ever managed in history.
But the Wright Brothers only flew less than the wingspan of a 747 first time. They only managed 26 seconds and 846 feet. Not so impressive. But look what it eventually led to.
I used to live within walking distance of arguably the first public railway in the world. It was horse-drawn, and it was replaced by a canal -- arguably a step backwards.
But still, it was an important forerunner, and today a tramline I used to use a lot runs on that track. It wasn't a big deal in itself but my points are that what it led to was hugely important, and it's still around in some form.
Yes, the first efforts at anything are a usually rubbish compared to what comes later. But SpaceX set a benchmark and now others are striving towards that, and that IMHO is wonderful stuff.
Locative, lokál, the declension for the state of being in a location. Used only after v (in), na (on or to), po (past, after, on, to, for, by – yes, all of them), při (by, nearby, with) & o (about, with). Although s is normally "with". Except if the word starts with a vowel, then it's se, although that normally marks a reflexive verb. Lots of verbs are reflexive.
The locative is, naturally, different for all four genders, and in the plural, and there are different endings depending on the final letter, or possible the penultimate letter, or possibly both, or you might drop the penultimate vowel, and then you might change the last letter.
*Brief pause for broken weeping*
One of the problems with learning Czech is that Czech people only do very basic grammar at school, so unless they have special training, they don't know how it works -- they just do these many incredibly complex convolutions, like declensions on multiple different plurals of irregular nouns in a hierarchical gender system, without thinking.
Which means that, because they don't know they are doing it, they can't not do it in order to, say, make life easier for a beginner. They can't stop doing something they're not aware of doing, nor can they explain it.
Many years ago my then-lodger Ulrike asked me what the difference between "who" and "whom" was, & I had to think hard to answer.
But I could, and it maps easily onto one structure of her native German, so from then on she used them perfectly – better than a native. We English-speakers only have he/him, she/her etc. and it only applies to pronouns, not to normal nouns or to possessives.
Czech has cases for:
the thing doing the verb
the thing being owned (also, all plurals >=5)
the thing being given something
the thing the verb is being done to
the thing being summoned or identified
the place the thing is in, or on, near, past, close to, with or about
the thing being used for something or with something else
Yes, they must be in that order. People don't know the names, only the number. I use the mnemonic "No Good Driver Arrives Very Late & Intoxicated" to remember the names (in English/Latin).
Czechs use a system of little questions to work out which they're using:
pád (Nominative) - Kdo? Co? [Who? What?]
pád (Genitive) - Bez koho? Bez čeho? [Without whom? Without what?]
pád (Dative) - Ke komu? K čemu? [To whom? To what?]
pád (Accusative) - Vidím koho? Vidím co? [I see whom? I see what?]
pád (Locative) - O kom? O čem? [About whom? About what?]
pád (Instrumental) - S kým? S čím? [With whom? With what?]
These help me not one whit. Not even slightly. None of them "sound right" to me.
The saintly Jana has memorized all the names for the cases so she can tell me which word is in which case when I ask. I can hear her quickly asking herself "kdo? bez koho? ke komu? vidím koho?" Then she goes "it's in accusative."
All these use-cases overlap. They apply to all nouns, to names, to posessives and to pronouns, are different for number (of which there are four: ordinary singular, plural singular, two to four, and five and higher), and are different for all four genders (and of course there are at least two to four patterns per gender plus exceptions).
Some nouns, for instance, have the feminine ending but are masculine, which means in some declensions they take the feminine forms, but not always. I think. For these nouns there's a special extra feminine ending bolted on (-kyne) to tell you that that form is really feminine.
The declensions for case #4, the most common – no, of course they're not in frequency order, that would be way too easy – make many masculine nouns (e.g. names) in the accusative take the same ending as feminine nouns in nominative. The endings for case #6 sometimes are pronounced the same as the different endings for case #2. The endings for nouns in case #5 closely resemble the endings for adjectives in case #4. And so on.
Vowels are closely rationed in Czech, you see. There's a national shortage. There's no easy way to distinguish "bull" from "bool", or "hut" from "hoot", or "bat" from "bart". So endings get endlessly recycled because there just aren't enough vowel sounds to give every case in every gender a unique ending.
I am slowly compiling tables of declensions and endings in a series of spreadsheets. If I can find a way to export these to LJ simple HTML, I'll post them on this blog.
I had two favourite Asian-foods shops in Brno. I looked up a few here, and in three-and-a-bit years in Prague, I never visited either.
Well, I've finally got around to it.
A couple of weeks ago, I found Orient Food in Holešovice. I spent about £60 in one go and staggered out with all I could carry. It's a good thing I didn't make it there with Ada a month ago, on my previous attempt to visit the place. She was on foot, which means progress was slow and inefficient at best. (Although she did great and was a little star – we went all the way into the city centre, to I P Pavlova (named after the great Dr Pavlov, who I am sure would be delighted at how a billion humans now jump and reach for their pockets at a mere hint of vibration). Foreigners affectionately call the station "I P Freely". That time, we went to the Candy Store where I stocked up on Marmite, crisps, biscuits and beer. Especially custard creams, which Ada picked for me and put in the basket. She gamely tried to carry it, but it was rather big for her.
(She put quite a lot of things in the basket, in fact – she very much enjoys putting things in other things. Today, while we were Skyping with her grandma, she raided the kitchen vegetable drawer, found a bag of onions, and after playing with them in the kitchen, she brought the bag into the living room, and unpacked the onions onto the sofa. And then back into the bag. And then out onto the sofa again. Then back into the bag. Then she gave her mum an onion. Her mummy told her to give daddy an onion too... so she took mummy's onion back and handed it to me.
I spent some time sweeping up onion skin this evening.)
Anyway. Back to the Oriental Potraviny. This time, it was more like a spicy orgy to make a Fremen sietch proud. Biriani paste and mix, plantain chips, frozen parathas, Bombay mix, some Tetley masala chai tea-bags, and more. I have been sadly missing a lot of my favourite spicy foodstuffs. ednun and I made quite a few shopping trips for such things in the Before Time.
I never knew Tetley's made masala teabags! The box proudly proclaims that Tetley's is now a Tata company. Tata, if you don't know the name, is a Mumbai zaibatsu who make everything from coffee to cars. I only knew the tea from my beloved and much-missed Sri Lankan restaurants of Colliers Wood. For tea, I especially recommend the Apollo Banana Leaf. (Prague's only Sri Lankan has closed down, and I am dismayed.)
Turns out, it's great. Being the real Indian deal and not some watered-down British version for feeble white people, it has a strong punch of both spice and tea. Wonderful morning pick-me-up.
Well, today, I visited the second such grocery store on my list – and discovered it was within walking distance of my old flat on Charles Square. How did I not know that? Swagat do both retail and wholesale, so although smaller, there's a quite different selection, including multiple blends of masala tea at 25% discount. I was recommended Wagh Bakri and I bought a tub of leaf tea.
And lo, I now know the recipe for masala tea! Well, the ingredients, anyway. I don't recommend making your own; I have no idea about the quantities.
Tea (Camillia sinensis) flavoured with:
Cardamom (Elletaria cardamomum Maton)
Clove (Syzygium aromaticum)
Black pepper (Piper nigrum L.)
Cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum)
Ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe)
Nutmeg (Myristica fragrans)
Long Pepper (Piper longicum)
Yes, they helpfully included all the Latin names. I have, however, fixed the spelling of a couple.
I will report back once I have tried it, but if you can, seek it out. If you've had coffee-shop chai, this will be a revelation. The real deal is a far cry from the weak Western version. It mirrors an experience I had in Tooting some years back. I visited a newly-opened Indian vegetarian restaurant, Saravana Bhavan, with Ednun, freshly back from a work trip to Gurgaom. When I led him in, he clutched my guiding elbow excitedly and told me that if the smells and the sounds were anything to go by, this was the real thing and the food would be amazing. Well, it was good, but not amazing.
I recounted this tale over a vindaloo to the late and very much missed nesacat, who told me that what I had to do was to go back there, ask for the manager, and tell him that I didn't want the food for British customers, I wanted the proper stuff that they'd serve to Indian customers.
Well, I went again, with Eddie again, and feorag, charlies_diary and pndc if I remember correctly, and although embarrassed, I did as Nesa had told me. The manager was quite indignant at the suggestion, and informed me that all customers got the same food prepared the same way...
... But this time, the food was excellent.
By a happy coincidence, just by the hotel that my employers put us in when we're in Brussels for the FOSDEM conference is the Belgian branch of Saravanaa Bhavan. It usually closes just about the time I arrive (after the cheap evening Ryanair flight from Prague), but last year, I hot-footed it straight from the airport to the restaurant and just got in in time to be served... and went again on my way to the airport on the way home, too.
As a wise man once wrote:
In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is the spice Melange. The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness.
"Melange" is of course the French for a mixture. In other words, variety is the spice of life...
Current Location: v Praze Current Mood: mildly peckish Current Music: Bowie, "Moonage Daydream" Tags:indian food, masala chai, prague, spice
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Stuff is going to get weirder and less predictable from now on. Unseasonal heat and freezes. Hurricanes, monsoons, droughts, dust-storms, etc., where they don't normally happen, or disproportionately many of unusual force.
Massively hot summers in regions where the crops can't take it, but we won't be able to grow crops that can take it, because they'll be coupled with massively cold winters like we've not seen for centuries. Forested regions burning, even in relatively moist areas. Where I am, with woodland about 50 metres away, the intensely-managed forests are full of dead trees, killed by bark-boring beetles or the fungi they carry -- but that's probably because the trees were weakened by unusual weather. Some trees are standing, marked in fluorescent paint, but there are big heaps of logs everywhere too. The woods look superficially healthy, but they're not.
Everyone noticed that you don't get so many insects splattering on your visor any more, even in high summer? That's because about 85% of the world's insects have died since the start of the 20th century.
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angry
exhausted