How all life on Earth was almost wiped out – five times
March 24th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Thos weekend, I watched episode 2 of the fascinating new American television series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”.
This episode concentrated on evolution and referred to the five great extinctions when substantial proportions of life on the planet were made extinct.
The best known one – the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction – wiped out the dinosaurs, but the most severe – yhe Permian mass extinction (nicknamed The Great Dying) – eliminated around 96% of all life forms. We are descended from the 4% that survived.
You can learn more about these great extinctions here.
Posted in History, Science & technology | Comments (0)
The pain and sorrow of saying farewell to so many books
March 23rd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I love books. I love the look of them the feel of them, the smell of them. But we have too many – or at least my wife Vee says so.
It is true that we have thousands and that, for years now, I have been forced to adopt a policy of ‘one in, one out’. But Vee keeps pressing me to get rid of more. She says that we need the space.
This weekend, I was compelled to address the issue of our travel books – almost 100 of them. Vee was insistent that we didn’t need them – we’re not going back to those countries and, even if we did, we would want up-dated guides. In truth, I don’t even buy travel books now because they are so heavy and it is much easier to download them to my iPad.
But getting rid of books that accompanied me around the world over the past 30 years? Heartbreaking. But I had to do it. So, so sad.
Footnote (29/3/14): Now all the foreign language dictionaries and phrase books have had to go.
Posted in Cultural issues, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
It is World Water Day
March 22nd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
For the past two years, one of my important areas of work has been in the water sector. I am the independent Chair of the Customer Challenge Group at South East Water which supplies drinking water to 2.1 million customers in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire.
So my heightened consciousness of the vital importance of water makes me aware that today is in fact World Water Day and this year the focus is on the connection between water and energy.
Water and energy are closely interlinked and interdependent. Energy generation and transmission requires utilization of water resources, particularly for hydroelectric, nuclear, and thermal energy sources. Conversely, about 8% of the global energy generation is used for pumping, treating and transporting water to various consumers.
In 2014, the UN System – working closely with its Member States and other relevant stakeholders – is collectively bringing its attention to the water-energy nexus, particularly addressing inequities, especially for the ‘bottom billion’ who live in slums and impoverished rural areas and survive without access to safe drinking water, adequate sanitation, sufficient food and energy services.
It also aims to facilitate the development of policies and crosscutting frameworks that bridge ministries and sectors, leading the way to energy security and sustainable water use in a green economy.
You can find more information on World Water Day here.
Posted in Environment | Comments (0)
How to critique a political system
March 22nd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
On my web site, I have produced short guides to 11 political systems [click here]. Since there are 193 members of the United Nations, there are obviously many more political systems although, for the purposes of this posting, I am only interested in political systems that are at least partially democratic.
Comparing and contrasting political systems is a useful exercise that brings out strengths, weaknesses and nuances. On this web site, I have compared the political systems of two Anglo-Saxon nations with a special relationship: the United States and the United Kingdom [click here].
But, more generally, how should one critique a particular political system? And how does one assess how democratic a particular political system is? I have just added to my web site an essay on “How To Critique A Political System” [click here].
Fell free to critique my critique.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
Understanding our universe (1): a review of “Deep Time”
March 21st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I’ve always been fascinated by cosmology. How did the universe begin and develop? Where is it going? Where do we fit into the picture?
“Deep Time” is one of the shorter and most accessible books that I have read about these questions and you can check out my review here.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
Understanding our universe (2): detection of primordial gravitational waves
March 21st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I don’t fully understand it, but I’m excited by the news this week that scientists have for the first time found convincing evidence for the existence of primordial gravitational waves – described as the first tremors of the Big Bang that created our universe and ultimately us.
As one newspaper put it: “The minuscule ripples in space-time are the last prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity to be verified.” He would be thrilled, I’m sure. I know it’s taken a while but, after all, time is relative.
You can read more here.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
Was the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 caused by something as ‘simple’ as a fire?
March 19th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
On 8 March, a Boeing 777 airliner with 239 people on board simply disappeared and so far no evidence of a crash has been found and no explanation for the incident has been determined.
Chris Goodfellow has 20 years experience as a Canadian Class-1 instrumented-rated pilot for multi-engine planes.
Check out his reasoning here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the documentary film “The Unknown Known”
March 19th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
American politician Donald Rumsfeld – now in his 80s – had a remarkable political career, serving four presidents and twice holding the post of Secretary of State for Defense. He was a leading architect of the “war on terror” which led to the fiasco of the Iraq invasion. Does he have any regrets or reflections?
Erroll Morris interviewed him over 11 days for a fascinating documentary which I have reviewed here.
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (0)
Why the Great War of 1914-1918 really was a world war
March 18th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I recently attended an evening seminar at the London School of Economics addressed by three LSE academics in international history: Dr Anthony Best who spoke about East Asia, Dr Paul Mulvey who addressed the British Empire, and Professor David Stevenson who considered the rest of the world.
Stevenson referred to an opinion poll which made it clear that most British people think of the First World War in narrow terms as between few nations (Britain, France and Germany) and in few locations (primarily the trenches of France and Belgium). The international; poll showed that, in the UK, fewer than half of the 1,081 people questioned were aware that North America and the Middle East played a part in the First World War, while less than a quarter realised that Africa and Asia were involved.
At the time of the conflict, the British called it the Great War, but the Germans called in a world war from the beginning and after 1917 the Americans used the same terminology.
The number of belligerents was considerable. From the beginning, there was Germany. Austria, Russia, France, and Britain plus the colonies of these nations which, in the case of the British, included Canada, India, Australia & New Zealand. Later many other countries joined the fray: the Ottoman Empire, Japan, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece. In 1917, the USA, then China and finally Brazil entered the war.
So, geographically there was a series of parallel wars. Besides the Western Front that dominates British recollections, there was the bloody Eastern Front with Russia until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. There was a southern front between Italy and Austria. There was the allied fiasco in Gallipoli which resulted in as many casualties as the Battle of the Somme. There were engagements in Mesopotamia. The Middle East was a major area of conflict which included the Arab Revolt involving Lawrence of Arabua and the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians. There were lots of deaths in Africa especially of Africans. The Japanese made ’21 demands’ on China.
Just how many countries were involved in the First World War is well brought out by the map on this Wikipedia page.
It was not just a land war either. Both the British and the Germans used large fleets to attempt a sea blockade of the other. Meanwhile air warfare increasingly developed.
This understanding of the global nature of the First World War is not just a matter of history. As Stevenson pointed out, the Versailles Peace Conference after the war created a series of unexploded bombs around the world: the issues that encouraged the rise of Nazism in Germany, as well as Yugoslavia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Rwanda, Burundi …
Posted in History | Comments (0)
Who was Giordano Bruno and what did he believe?
March 17th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
This weekend, I watched the first episode in the new television series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”.
The programme mentioned an Italian called Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who believed that the sun was merely one of many stars. I confess that I had never heard of Bruno.
There has been some controversy over the selection and representation of Bruno which you can read here.
Posted in History, Science & technology | Comments (0)