Lazy day, walk around town.

From the book Euclids elements, circa 300 BC, arguably the most important textbook ever written.

1. Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another.
2. If equals be added to equals, the wholes are equal.
3. If equals be subtracted from equals, the remainders are equal.
4. Things which coincide with one another are equal to one another.
5. The whole is greater than the part.

Talk about invasion of privacy! These pictures are even a little blurry, some others I have seen are literally like photos of you naked. Now to be used on all flights from Amsterdam to America. There is apparently only a low radiation risk and you are UNLIKELY (!!!) to get cancer. So I guess that’s ok then.

Er, wait, no it’s bloody not! Parallels with much of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four come to mind.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (also 1984), by George Orwell, published in 1949, is a dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of the Party, an oligarchical collectivist society where life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control, and the voiding of citizens’ rights.

From the same novel, this also sounds familiar:

In the telescreens, figures for all types of production are grossly exaggerated (or simply invented) to indicate an ever-growing economy where there is actually loss.

I guess this was around 1985, with my brother and sister. My first pair of Nike.

Had my mum and Aunt here for a few days and the weather closed in pretty hard, so we took it easy. I took a few fairly shite photos.
December 2009: Second Snowiest on Record in the Northern Hemisphere

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My Aunt out in California always does brilliant Christmas cakes, and even though I didn’t make it over this year, my bro and sister went to stay with my mum who lives there and got a photo of this years.

The little Obama even spoke and said part of his inauguration speech when you clicked on his front.

When Obama got elected everyone was so happy and kept saying why don’t you post something about how great it is, I just always said wait and see, I was skeptical that anything would change for the better for the majority of people.

Anyway, Happy Christmas!

New years eve, eve.

In all, the print news media have warned of four separate climate changes in slightly more than 100 years – global cooling, warming, cooling again, and, perhaps not so finally, warming.

The cooling world in newsweek 1975.
In days past Time Magazine was predicting catastrophic global cooling too.
One more:

The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.
- NYTimes, February 24, 1895, Wednesday

As a point of note, even though the graph on the right looks fairly dramatic, the actual temperature change over the 90 years fluctuates by less than 0.9 degrees. During the accelerated industrialization period of 1940-1970, when carbon emissions reached a crescendo, the temperature actually dropped.

When i first saw this, I thought it was fake, but a spiral with a greenish blue light was witnessed and recorded this morning by thousands of people throughout northern Norway and the Trondelag.

Video and more photos here: http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/nordland/1.6902336

Info via spaceweather.com.

Knut Jorgen Roed Odegaard, Norway’s most celebrated astronomer, said:
“This was seen over an exceptionally large area of the country – in all of north Norway and the Trondelag. My first thought was that it was a fireball meteor – but it lasted far too long. It may have been a missile from Russia – but I can’t guarantee that is the answer. I rang the Air Traffic Control tower in Tromse. They said it was over in two minutes. To me, that is far too long for this to be an astronomical phenomenon. This spiral shape is unique. It is definitely not a variation of the aurora borealis – northern lights.”

Another video of it here. And more info here. The most likely explanation so far seems to be that it was an out of control Russian rocket, but that expanding black disk is still a bit puzzling.

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This book is really superb. Taleb uses the Black Swan idea to explain the existence and occurrence of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations.  He writes about the impact of the highly improbable, which have a much greater impact on things than the probable (and usually misunderstood) and our tendency to simplify and therefore not see the whole picture.

Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as “black swans”—undirected and unpredicted,  although AFTER the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it had been expected.

Some nights it is so brilliant, I find myself reluctantly putting the book down as my eyelids droop and then not being able to sleep because it sets me off thinking for hours. Occasionally on other nights it gets a little boring and sends me to sleep pretty quickly which is not a bad thing either! Anyway, here are some of the standout sections so far. I really cant recommend it highly enough:

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Really everyone should watch this. He is incredibly well spoken, knowledgeable and insightful. Much respect to Immortal Technique.

Part 2 here..

The end of the world is near—December 21, 2012, to be exact—according to theories based on a purported ancient Maya prediction and fanned by the marketing machine behind the soon-to-be-released 2012 movie.

But could humankind really meet its end in 2012—drowned in apocalyptic floods, walloped by a secret planet, seared by an angry sun, or thrown overboard by speeding continents?

Continued here…

The image below is recorded from NASA’s Swift satellite of the brightest flare ever seen from a normal star other than our Sun, on EV Lacertae. High res image here..

Saturday we went snowboarding which was good but its too hot right now so everyone was crammed on the glacier. The snow line is pretty high up at the moment. As my bro Luke was explaining to me it’s an El Niño Year. Means warmer weather and higher levels of precipitation so you will have to go high up for good snow (but there should be lots of it). From wikipedia:

There is some evidence that an El Niño may cause a wetter, cloudier winter in Northern Europe and a milder, drier winter in the Mediterranean Sea region. The El Niño winter of 2006/2007 was unusually mild in the UK and Western Europe, and the Alps recorded very little snow coverage that season.^[28]

After 2 years in Salzburg we finally made it up to the castle. I found some funky pinhole mode on my camera and took some fairly boring photos (apart from the chastity belt perhaps).

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