The first figures have come out of searches on Google Books, and they make for curious reading. No 1 on this particular “best-seller” list is Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers, Peter K. Endress.
I can only conclude that the sex organs of plants have proved, if accidentally, to hold considerable fascination.
As for Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot, Brad Graham,Kathy McGowan, perhaps there are lots of would-be Mars explorers out there?
Twenty years ago now, when I was studying agriculture at university, there was just dawning an awareness that much of the arable farming in Australia, and particularly the irrigation farming, was unsustainable. Ancient soils were having unprecedented quantities of water poured on them, and the rising water table was bringing millennia of salt to the surface; trees were still being felled, destroying the land’s capacity to retain moisture (and soil) in Queensland, at the start of the great Murray-Darling system that is Australia’s only great river and on which the entire city of Adelaide depends for water. (And there were even government subsidies for felling these trees, at least until a few years ago – any Australian readers know if there still are?)
Yet still the fantasy continues. A story in tomorrow’s SMH (time difference) starts by excitedly saying record prices are being offered for Australian rice. Then, and only then, does it say that many farmer’s water allocation has been cut to zero due to the acute shortage, so very few of them will be getting these “record” prices.
On September 19, the federal commodities forecaster, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics, slashed its rice crop forecast to less than 40 per cent of last year’s 1.05 million tonnes.
The next day, the NSW Department of Primary Industries went further, estimating the area of rice-growing land would be 20 to 30 per cent of last year’s.
“This is an incredible climatic event, the worst drought in recorded history, and we’ve got the joy of living through it,” said the president of the Ricegrowers Association of Australia, Laurie Arthur. “There’s not going to be more than a quarter of last year’s production.”
Even if you ignore the strong possibility that the greenhouse effect is starting to have transformative effects on climate (a largish “if”), Australia still, astonishingly doesn’t get the fact that “drought” (by definition supposedly an extraordinary event) is a normal part of the Australian climate.
I’m reminded of an expert I interviewed many years ago who said the only sustainable “farming” in Australia would be to turn nearly all of it over to the kangaroos and harvest the meat from them. Except that won’t go a long way towards feeding 20 million people.
Particularly interesting In Our Time this morning on the 12th-century Islamic philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who lived in a time of an interllectual flowering of Western Islam (he was born in Cordoba) and was important in the transmission of Aristotle to the Latin-speaking world.
Definitely worth a listen – available in podcast or for listening on your computer.
You wouldn’t want to take Davd Cameron’s soft, cuddly Tory party at face value – I know some of the people behind him, who are definitely neither soft nor cuddly, and definitely very pro-American – but he certain has convinced some members of the own party and some of its natural supporters.
Anatole Kaletsky is horrified by his apparent tax-and-tax approach (the cynic in me thinks that Cameron’s spin docs will be very, very happy about this piece, in their desperate struggle for the “middle ground”) and you can see the Telegraph visibly gulping as it writes the headline Cameron kills Tory taboos on gays and single parents.
Interesting times in politics, when the Tories are definitely positioning themselves to the left of Labour on many issues. Then again that’s the only bit of the middle ground left, so far to the right is Tony Blair.
Another interesting example of science “proving” the truth of “old wives’ tales” – a nice cup of tea does help to deal with stress. (In a genuine double-blind trial tested against a tea-like placebo.)
“Tea is chemically very complex, with many different ingredients such as catechins, polyphenols, flavonoids and amino acids. All have been found to have effects on neurotransmitters in the brain, but we cannot tell from this research which ones produced the differences.”
He added: “Although it does not appear to reduce the actual levels of stress we experience, tea does seem to have a greater effect in bringing stress hormone levels back to normal.
“This has important health implications, because slow recovery following acute stress has been associated with a greater risk of chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease.”
The 8th Carnival Against Sexual Violence is on Abyss2hope: A rape survivor’s zigzag journey into the open.
And the First Carnival of African Women is on African Women’s Blog.
And don’t forget the Carnival of Feminists is coming up fast on F-words. Deadline for nominations is Friday.
That’s also the deadline for the first Carnival of Disability Blogs, set up by Penny, who often contributes suggestions for my Friday Femmes Fatales.
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