Actually, that doesn’t quite do justice to what has been going on in a series of incidents over the last little while.
Gabrielle Jackson did a piece for The Guardian Enough platitudes and excuses: here is the truth about this week of sexism. Amazingly, on the weekend before she wrote the article she herself was groped by a complete stranger sitting at the next table in a Sydney restaurant. Continue reading Men behaving badly
About 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of anyone outside Africa is Neanderthal in origin. But the DNA is not evenly spread. Your Neanderthal DNA may be different from mine. Scientists have found at least 20% of the Neanderthal DNA in humans. That’s what they’ve found, the toatal may be twice as much. Continue reading Saturday salon 9/1
At this time of the year we invariably wish for people to be happy.
I recently came upon an article where Tiffany Watt Smith was interviewed about how language affects emotion. It seems that the assumption that happiness could be within our reach is a relatively new phenomenon. Not so long ago we aspired to be sad: Continue reading Happiness is…
Wall Street Journal has the story, or you could try The Guardian, or The Independent.
The ruling conservative Popular Party was reduced to 28.7% of the vote, followed by the main socialist party PSOE with 22%. These two parties normally win 70-80% of the vote, now reduced to around 50%. Third was Podemos, a far-left anti-austerity party less than two years old. Next was Ciudadanos, a centre-right party, with 13.9%. Continue reading Saturday salon 26/12
Climate Plus wishes you a pleasant Christmas/New Year and health and happiness for 2016.
It’s quiet this year, but I intend to keep blogging as time permits. Continue reading Seasons greetings
It is said that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but in fact it seems both are very much from Earth. New research finds that while there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain or female brain. Continue reading There’s no such thing as a ‘male’ or ‘female’ brain
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a commander of Ottoman forces at the Dardenelles during the first world war and later the founder of modern Turkey, has been quoted far and wide as saying in 1934:
There are no contemporary references to the speech. Continue reading Saturday salon 12/12
About 20 million children are born each year in China, and all but a quarter are bottle fed. Several brands of formula in Australia and New Zealand are disappearing from the shelves and being shipped to China, where they are selling for up to $100 per tin, five times the price in Australia. Continue reading The strange case of baby formula and the Chinese
No place is safe. You can be hit anywhere where people gather. This seemed to be the message of the six co-ordinated attacks in Paris on a sports stadium, a concert hall, three restaurants and a shopping centre. As the Paris metro ground to a stop, as air and sea ports were closed, as the streets emptied, as France closed its borders, and as the army fanned out onto the streets of Paris the terrorists’ strikes seemed to be successful. Continue reading Paris attacks
The WHO pronouncement on the linkage between processed meats and cancer generated a lot of misleading stories, like this one from The Guardian:
The ‘sharing economy‘ has crept up on policy makers. Perhaps best known are Uber and Airbnb.
Uber, which competes with the taxi business, has chalked up 2.5 million rides in Brisbane in just 18 months. Andrew Leigh told the ABC that one in 200 homes in Australia are listed on Airbnb to be available for accommodation. Continue reading Saturday salon 24/10
Away for 35 days, it was really five holidays in a row – Berlin, Erlangen, Prague, Poland and the boat trip from Passau to Budapest. The overall impression is of 500 million people on the move. A surprising number of people we met had connections with Australia, but if we dropped off the map, I think the world would just blink and carry on.
One way of judging Europe is by their cars. They drive better cars than we do, and that includes Poland and the central European countries. No bombs or rust buckets on the road. Did you know that Slovakia with a population of 5.4 million makes over a million cars per annum? Continue reading Back in Oz
