If you have 9 minutes to spare – and let’s be honest, who doesn’t? – then take a quick look at this video
Potentially (?!?) a little less glamourous than the above alternative, but actually quite relaxing and thought-provoking, as various migratory birds take a breather on merchant ships literally hundreds of miles offshore.
Are the ships heading the right way? If so, the birds will cheat a bit. If not, they’ll catch up once they get going again. But it actually doesn’t matter, because these birds are completely knackered and just need a bit of a break from their constant flying.
How many can you identify?
* I spent four hours of searching for an appropriate image for this bit of the post. That’s dedication for you.
Probably not the debate that you thought the title might suggest. I think I did that back in 2009 in the subtly entitled post ‘Why Does Our Society Hate Children?‘.
No, this has nothing to do with whether kids should be allowed to aurally terrorise innocent passengers travel on flights, but rather keeping them safe while they are up there.
There’s an interesting article here from the Washington Post about how best to keep babies safe on flights. The basic problem is that in episodes of turbulence or in the event of a crash, parents’ loving arms simply aren’t strong enough to hold onto their child:
Your arms aren’t capable of holding your in-lap child securely, especially during unexpected turbulence, which is the number one cause of pediatric injuries on an airplane.
See?
And in the event of a crash, the supplementary belt seems to be there more for show than for actual function:
During dynamic testing, the forward flailing of the adult and the child resulted in severe body impacts against the forward seat.
Beautifully put. The use of the word “flailing” is particularly descriptive. Given the proximity of the forward seat in most economy flights, I’d guess that the flailing in question would be pretty brief.
So if we’re going to keep babies safe on planes, we need to find another way. And that other way is: by making them having their own seat. Yep. The safest place for a small child is in its own seat. So problem solved, right? No, not at all. In fact, additional problem created.
Because having to pay for an extra seat will persuade/force some families to choose a different mode of transport. Probably not for long haul stuff, but certainly for shorter journeys. And that alternative is often car, and car is much more dangerous than plane.
In fact, a 2003 study showed that “if as few as 5 to 10 percent of travelers hit the road instead of flying, the number of infant deaths caused by car accidents would probably exceed the number of fatalities averted by requiring child restraints on planes”.
At the end of the day, there doesn’t seem to be consensus about any foolproof way forward. Although there does seem to be some sort of unwritten agreement about using strikingly descriptive language when referring to potentially unfortunate scenarios for small children while they are on board a plane. Like when putting your baby in a harness/carrier against your chest:
Hoffman warns that the carrier is not foolproof, especially during severe turbulence. “The child can slip out of it because of all of that force. A plane that falls 4,000 feet in seconds — that’s like being shot out of a cannon.”
It’s been a while since i did one of these and my Pocket is filling up again. So…
It’s Springtime! (in the UK) and time to switch to BST. But this isn’t the correct way to put your clocks forward:
And this might work, but is also very confusing:
Pro-tip: Use a whiteboard marker and you can simply use a damp cloth to change the clocks back again in October.
Good news for me on this change is that evening football matches now kick off at a more reasonable time and so I can watch them and still get enough sleep (see below).
However, that good news is tempered somewhat by the fact that their Spring means our Autumn. And the weather has been doing its bit to remind us of the changing seasons. We’re losing 2 minutes of daylight a day in Cape Town each day at the moment, and we crossed the 12 hours daylight/12 hours nighttime line yesterday.
I was reminded of this Soy, Ginger and Chili salmon recipe today. I must cook it again. Today is all about the big boneless gammon joint on the hob, though. The whole house smell of cloves and all-spice (coincidentally also the name of the giant robot formed when all the Spice Girls zigazig-arred together like the Power Rangers). Delicious.
The future is bright: Sheffield United win the Professional Development League (North) for the third season running.
A fact made even better when you look at the whole league table:
tl;dect (didn’t even click through) – risk of developing LC drops after a secondary infection (UK 4.0% to 2.4%), but that’s still not zero!
and just for reference, 2.4% of the UK population is one and a half million people. That’s a lot of potential cases, and a huge burden on individuals, families and the health service.
Covid really is just like the common cold.
I was out on a run earlier this week and was thinking about how I couldn’t even manage a staircase in the aftermath of my acute Covid experience. Things are clearly much, much better now, although it took over a year to get back to normality. That said: three things I have noticed post-Covid: I need more sleep, my lung capacity still isn’t what it was before, and my memory (which use to be very good) really isn’t as good any more. Especially on people’s names. Other random nonsense (phone codes, capital cities, song titles/bands) – generally fine. Names (famous ones or personal acquaintances) – nope.
…The problem is that people are increasingly building rock cairns to leave their mark or symbol of their presence in a natural setting or for posting on social media. Therefore, when engaging in this activity, it is important to be mindful of the potential negative impacts on the environment, wildlife and other people’s experiences.
Moving rocks and stacking them can disturb the natural habitat of tiny creatures. On the rocky shore, these organisms, such as crabs, molluscs, and algae, depend on their environment’s rocks and other structures for shelter and protection. By moving or stacking rocks, we may inadvertently destroy or disrupt their homes, harming their populations. Similarly, rock stacking can also have adverse terrestrial impacts on insects and moss in wilderness areas.
The article has a (terrible) picture of Agulhas National Park in it. So this is a local thing, close to my heart. And when the kids were younger, we did used to do this from time to time, albeit that our towers were built near the low tide mark, ready to be knocked down as the waves came in, and never for social media purposes.
Anyway. No more. Stoppit.
Lastly for today: a new way to filter flights on flightradar24. This is the update that everyone as crying out for. And it works. From being a very cool tool, its now also massively powerful. You can now get it to do whatever you want (and even more if you pay for a subscription). A lot of the features are in the free Beta version at the moment, but it seems to be stable and full rollout isn’t likely to be far away.
I mean, it’s 1. We all know that. Hit a cat with your car and it’s game over. No second (or third, fourth, fifth etc etc) chances. That’s it: kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.
But there’s the old saying that “cats have nine lives” because they like to live dangerously and take risks and not all of those risks involve intercepting a 2 ton motor vehicle.
Except, in some places, cats only have seven lives:
Interestingly, the myth that cats have multiple lives exists around the world. However, it’s not always nine lives – the number varies from culture to culture. In certain regions of Spain it is believed that cats have seven lives, for example. Meanwhile, some Turkish and Arabic legends say cats have six lives.
Although Turkey is very clearly in the 9 camp above.
I’m not sure if these differences are down to the countries in question actually being more dangerous for a cat to live, because who is keeping count anyway? And why would some of Switzerland be more risky for felines than, the rest of it? Avalanches? How is Corsica 28.6% safer than Sardinia? And what about trans-border cats? Do they average out at 8?
Nope, wherever you are in Europe – in the world, in fact – stick a cat in front of an SUV and you’ll note that the average number of lives it has is one.
Well, it’s phosphorus. So well done if you had that on your bingo card this morning.
Too much phosphorus is going to kill us, and too little phosphorus… er… that’s also going to kill us. It does seem like phosphorus is one of those things that you have to get just right. And also that we’re doing really badly at that.
Too much phosphorus is being used in fertilisers, which are then running off into waterways and creating massive blooms of algae. When that algae dies off, it releases a lot of methane, which is a major contributor to climate change. And brilliantly, because of that climate change, more algal blooms will form in the future, which will result in more methane being release.
It’s a good example of a viscous circle (because the algae makes the water a bit thicker).
And because we’re using too much phosphorus in fertilisers, it’s likely that in a few years time, there won’t be enough phosphorus to go around, so we won’t be able to make fertilisers, and so we won’t be able to grow crops as efficiently, meaning food shortages and famine for millions – if not billions – around the world.
Happy days.
Aside from the direct issues caused by too much or too little phosphorus, there are spin-off problems as well. Like the researchers into those phosphorus problems coming up with this sort of thing:
“We have reached a critical turning point,” said Prof Phil Haygarth of Lancaster University. “We might be able to turn back but we have really got to pull ourselves together and be an awful lot smarter in the way we use phosphorus. If we don’t, we face a calamity that we have termed ‘phosphogeddon’.”
No, Phil. No. I value your work, and I am genuinely concerned about the warnings you are giving us. It’s clearly important that mankind changes the way that we are using phosphorus. But what’s also clear is that you should stick to the science, and let the English language experts come up with any new terminology to describe your results. Because ‘phosphogeddon’ is an absolute car crash of a word, and detracts from your important research.
Adding a scary suffix to just any word might be linguistically correct, but it doesn’t necessarily make for catchy terminology that’s going to be memorable and therefore influence public behaviour. And I feel that I need to take a stand on this, because otherwise, we’re surely headed for a portmanteaupocalypse.
That would mean fewer deaths because of erratic weather and worsening food security, but many, many more facepalms at terrible attempts to make words to describe concerning over- and underuse of chemical elements and the like.
We can still change this now and make a difference.
