AndyRob
Australia Garden at British Museum
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I posted to flickr.com
Australia Garden at British Museum
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/5713561808/
May 12 2011, 11:12am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Australia Garden at British Museum
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/5713560542/
AndyRob
Australia Garden at British Museum
May 12 2011, 11:11am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Australia Garden at British Museum
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/5713558038/
AndyRob
Australia Garden at British Museum
May 12 2011, 11:10am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2
Australians have been queueing up for the Apple iPad 2 for just as long as Britons – almost two days – and the numbers in the line built up to more than 300 in many locations
This article titled “While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2″ was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 25th March 2011 06.29 UTC While you were sleeping, the iPad 2 went on sale in Australia, and it seems to have drawn a lot of attention. This was the queue at 0704am this morning in Sydney…
Photo by BeauGiles on Flickr. Some rights reserved …and this was the queue by sale time at 5pm:
Photo by BeauGiles on Flickr. Some rights reserved (Thanks to Beau Giles in Sydney who took a whole set of pictures through the night. People had been queueing outside the Sydney Apple store for almost two days: some told World News Australia that it’s all about meeting people: Canadian backpacker Alex Lee arrived in Sydney on Wednesday to be first in line to buy Apple’s iPad 2 and has theorised on the phenomenon. “I call it the 90/10 rule for Apple – 90 per cent is about the people, the experience and just the whole feeling and 10 per cent is about the product itself,” the IT consultant said. CNet Australia says there were around 300 people queueing at the Brisbane story in Chermside and that they had started at around 5.30am that morning. Large queues were also seen in Hobart. And lest you think it’s only a game for the whippersnappers, the Australian newspapers found Sally Johnson, aged 73, who “may be hot and tired, but that hasn’t deterred her from queueing…” (It’s not the heat of summer in Sydney – it’s just turning to autumn. Which is still hot compared to the UK, of course.) Johnson has recently emigrated from Nottingham. She was roughly 250th in line. And why was she there? “Queuing for her son Mark, who was at work.”
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March 25 2011, 7:43am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Japan’s horror reveals how thin is the edge we live on
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/18/japans-horror-reveals-how-thin-is-the-edge-we-live-on
Climate change may not be responsible for the tsunami, but it is shrinking our margin of safety. It is time to shrink back ourselves
This article titled “Japan’s horror reveals how thin is the edge we live on” was written by Bill McKibben, for The Guardian on Friday 18th March 2011 21.00 UTC It’s scary to watch the video from Japan, and not just because of the frightening explosions at the Fukushima plant or the unstoppable surge of tsunami-wash through the streets. It’s almost as unnerving to see the aftermath – the square miles of rubble, with boats piled on cars; the completely bare supermarket shelves. Because the one thing we’ve never really imagined is going to the supermarket and finding it empty. What the events reveal is the thinness of the margin on which modernity lives. There’s not a country in the world more modern and civilised than Japan; its building codes and engineering prowess kept its great buildings from collapsing when the much milder quake in Haiti last year flattened everything. But clearly it’s not enough. That thin edge on which we live, and which at most moments we barely notice, provided nowhere near enough buffer against the power of the natural world. We’re steadily narrowing the margin. Global warming didn’t cause the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Miyagi coast, but global warming daily is shrinking the leeway on which civilisation everywhere depends. Consider: sea levels have begun to rise. We’re seeing record temperatures that depress harvests – the amount of grain per capita on the planet has been falling for years. Because warm air holds more water vapour than cold, the chance of severe flooding keeps going up and in the last year countries from Pakistan to Australia have recently ended up on the wrong side of those odds. Those changes steadily eat away at that safety margin. With less food stored in our warehouses, each harvest becomes critical. With each massive flood, we have to spend more money rebuilding what was there before: there are still as many as 4 million homeless from Pakistan’s floods, which means “development” has given way to “getting a tarp over your head”. Even rich countries face this trouble: Australia cut much of its budget for renewable energy to help pay the recovery bill for soggy Queensland. Warmer temperatures are helping dengue fever spread; treating one case can use up the annual health budget for a dozen people in some Asian nation, meaning that much less for immunisations or nutrition. Just the increasing cost of insurance can be a big drag on economies: a study by Harvard and Swiss Re found that even in rich nations such as the US, larger and more frequent storms could “overwhelm adaptive capacities”, rendering “large areas and sectors uninsurable”. The bottom line was that, “in effect, parts of developed countries would experience developing nation conditions for prolonged periods”. There have always been natural disasters, and there always will be. For 10,000 years the planet has been by and large benign; you could tell where the safe margin for civilisation was because that’s, by definition, where civilisation was built. But if the sea level rises a metre, that margin shrinks considerably: on a beach that slopes in at 1 degree, the sea is now nearly 90 metres nearer. And it’s not just a literal shrinkage – the insecurity that comes with smaller food stocks or more frequent floods also takes a psychological toll: the world seems more cramped because it is more cramped. We can try to deal with this in two ways. One is to attempt to widen it with more technology. If the Earth’s temperature is rising, maybe we could “geoengineer” the planet, tossing sulphur into the atmosphere in an effort to block incoming sunlight. It’s theoretically possible. But researchers warn it could do more harm than good, and maybe this isn’t the week to trust the grandest promises of engineers, not when they’ve all but lost control of the highest technology we’ve ever built, there on the bluff at Fukushima. The other possibility is to try to build down a little: to focus on resilience, on safety. And to do that – here’s the controversial part – instead of focusing on growth. We might decide that the human enterprise (at least in the west) has got big enough, that our appetites need not to grow, but to shrink a little, in order to provide us more margin. What would that mean? Buses and bikes and trains, not SUVs. Local food, with more people on the farm so that muscles replace some of the oil. Having learned that banks are “too big to fail”, we might guess that our food and energy systems fall into that same category. Imagine, for instance, a nation that got most of its power from rooftop solar panels knitted together in a vast distributed grid. It would take investment to get there – we’d have to divert money from other tasks, slowing some kinds of growth, because solar power is currently more expensive than coal power. We might not have constant access to unlimited power at every second of every day. In the end, though, you’d have not only less carbon in the atmosphere, but also a country far less failure-prone. The solar panels on my roof could break tonight – and I’d have a problem if they did – but it wouldn’t ramify into rolling blackouts across the continent (and no one would need to stand in my driveway with a Geiger counter). Such changes wouldn’t make the world safe: climatologists promise us we’ve already put enough carbon out there to raise our planet’s temperature two degrees in the decades to come, which will make for a miserably difficult century. But they also promise that if we don’t stop burning coal and oil, that number will double, and miserable will become impossible. With Japan’s horror still unfolding, there’s nothing to do for the moment except watch, pray, and try to find some small ways to help people caught up in forces beyond their control. But the lesson we should learn, perhaps, is that it’s time to back off a little. Suddenly squat and plain words – “durable”, “stable”, “robust” – sound sweeter to the ear.
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March 18 2011, 5:29pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
New Zealand earthquake strikes Christchurch, killing at least 65 people
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/22/new-zealand-earthquake-65-dead
This article titled “New Zealand earthquake strikes Christchurch, killing at least 65 people” was written by Ben Quinn and Mark Tran, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 22nd February 2011 13.18 UTC At least 65 people have died and more than 100 are missing after a powerful earthquake struck the southern New Zealand city of Christchurch, collapsing buildings, burying vehicles under debris and sending rescuers scrambling to help people trapped under rubble. The 6.3-magnitude quake struck the country’s second largest city on a busy weekday afternoon. The mayor of Christchurch, Bob Parker, has declared a state of emergency and ordered people to evacuate the city centre. “Make no mistake this is going to be a very black day for this shaken city,” he said. Power and water was cut and hundreds of dazed, screaming and crying residents wandered through the streets as sirens blared throughout Christchurch in the aftermath of the quake, which was centred three miles from the city. The US Geological Survey said the tremor occurred at a depth of 2.5 miles. After rushing to the city within hours of the quake, the prime minister of New Zealand, John Key, said the death toll was 65, and may rise. “It is just a scene of utter devastation. We may well be witnessing New Zealand’s darkest day.” The spire of the city’s well-known stone cathedral toppled into a central square, while buildings collapsed in on themselves and streets were strewn with bricks and shattered concrete. The multi-storey Pyne Gould Guinness Building, housing more than 200 workers, has collapsed with an unknown number of people trapped inside. Television pictures showed rescuers, many of them office workers, dragging severely injured people from the rubble. Elsewhere, police said debris rained down on two buses, crushing them, while emergency workers were moving to rescue survivors trapped in other partially collapsed buildings across the city. New Zealand’s TV3 said 24 people were trapped on the 17th floor of the 19-storey Forsyth Barr office building, near the cathedral. The building was intact but a stairwell had collapsed, it said. Christchurch hospital had to deal with many injured residents. “We’ve had a lot of people at the emergency department … a significant number, a lot of major injuries,” said David Meates, the chief executive of the Canterbury health board. “They are largely crushes and cuts types of injuries and chest pain as well,” he said, adding some of the more seriously injured could be evacuated to other cities, where hospitals have been put on alert and prepared to accept casualties. All army medical staff have been mobilised, while several hundred troops were helping with the rescue, officials said. A woman trapped in one of the buildings said she was terrified and waiting for rescuers to reach her six hours after the quake. “I thought the best place was under the desk but the ceiling collapsed on top. I can’t move and I’m just terrified,” office worker Anne Voss told TV3 news. Emergency shelters had been set up in schools and at a racecourse, as night approached. Helicopters dumped giant buckets of water to try to douse a fire in one tall office building. A crane helped rescue workers trapped in another office block. “I was in the square right outside the cathedral – the whole front has fallen down and there were people running from there. There were people inside as well,” said John Gurr, a camera technician who was in the city centre when the quake hit. The city’s historic cathedral was one of the buildings that took significant damage, while cars were buried under rubble and roads buckled as the tremor opened fissures in the ground. “It is huge. We just don’t know if there are people under this rubble,” a priest standing outside the rubble of the damaged cathedral told Television New Zealand. Search and rescue teams are working through the night to look for survivors, the civil defence director, John Hamilton, said. “We have to be prepared to accept that it is going to be a heavy toll,” he said, adding that it was unclear how many people were trapped in buildings. “There could well be people who are stuck in buildings overnight. I can’t confirm, but I would expect that’s in all probability the case.” All airports and airspace in the country were shut down and all flights into, out of and around the country were put on hold immediately after the earthquake. Airways NZ, New Zealand’s national air traffic control organisation, is based in Christchurch. Local TV showed bodies being pulled out of rubble strewn around the city centre, though it was unclear whether any of them were alive. It was the second time in five months that the city has been struck by a major earthquake. Last September’s 7.1-magnitude earthquake was 30 miles west of Christchurch. About 100 people were treated at hospital with earthquake-related injuries then. Christchurch has been hit by hundreds of aftershocks since that earthquake, causing extensive damage and a handful of injuries, but no deaths. New Zealand, which sits between the Pacific and Indo-Australian plates, records on average more than 14,000 earthquakes a year, of which about 20 would normally top magnitude 5.0. Christchurch is home to about 350,000 people and is a tourist centre and gateway to the South Island.
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February 22 2011, 7:53am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Weather Photography Competition
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/08/04/weather-photography-competition
I've just heard about the British weather photographer of the year competition and decided to enter myself. This provided me with a nice opportunity to look back through my photographs of the summer on Flickr to see if I could find something appropriate. I browsed through my pictures of rain and a few summer seaside scenes and then lost a bit of confidence. I have pictures of light, pictures of scenes affected by weather but nothing I could really call specifically "weather photography". My thoughts turned to extreme weather – tornadoes, floods, ice storms etc but I don't seem to have witnessed many of those recently, not with a handy camera ready anyway. Then it occurred to me I was being far too literal in my interpretation of the competition requirements:
…to find the best amateur photographer of the British elements. Judged by top professionals and experts in the field of photography and weather, 12 finalists will be chosen for the flair, technique and originality they use in capturing British weather.
I've got it down to two photographs that might fit the bill here, the first is a picture of sunlight shining through gaps in the clouds over the sea near the Worms Head, Gower, South Wales. If you click through and look at the large or original sized photo I think it looks quite stunning, and it was quite an unusual weather pattern to observe for me, even if it might happen in such places more regularly than I imagine.
The second picture I'm considering is one of the dried up lake bed during an extended period of drought.
The patterns made by the drying out process in the mud make interesting shapes, and this one looks a bit like a map of Australia, a country where drought is a more familiar problem than southern Britain.
Whichever I decide, (suggestions?) or maybe I can submit both, you can have a chance to vote for me if you feel like it there, but probably more likely and preferable anyway, would be to enter one of your own weather photographs in which case do please leave your link in the comments below.
Disclaimers:
British Weather Photographer of the Year competition is sponsored by Lloyds TSB
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Related posts:How to Photograph a Ghost
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August 4 2010, 6:17am | Comments »
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