Aug
27th
Wed
27th
An eclectic collection of things I'm reading, looking at or thinking about.
A stream of consciousness companion to the Park Paradigm.
A stream of consciousness companion to the Park Paradigm.
Brazil, the world’s largest coffee and sugar producer, ranked top among the 68 economies assessed for weather-related risks while Pakistan’s economy ranks the least sensitive.
The study said Brazil was 30 times more vulnerable to weather risks than Pakistan, which “means that a dollar in Brazil will be thirty times more weather-sensitive than a dollar in Pakistan,” WeatherBill said.
Competing ethnic and linguistic groups, arbitrary borders—the legacy of colonial rule—and a lack of democratic tradition create an climate unsuited to electoral systems in which one group takes complete power at the expense of others. What is needed instead, suggestes Dowden, is a new, “African” democracy, perhaps one that approaches a form of proportional representation in which all groups are accorded a seat at the top table.
The use of smart meters is crucial to overcoming consumer ignorance of their power consumption. In February 2008 a trial by Scottish and Southern Energy involving 2,000 residents near Perth (and since repeated by a number of other energy suppliers across the country) illustrated the dramatic change in everyday habits when smart meters presented consumers with a visual display of power use, whether from putting on a kettle or switching off a computer monitor.
Great brands are ultimately created by when people are talking about you and not by you talking about yourself.
The videos are all available free at www.dimensions-math.org. The videos go on to show how we can visualize imaginary numbers geometrically, how fractal patterns emerge in the Mandelbrot set and Julia sets, and how beautiful and complex shapes can be built up from circles.
We are asked to believe that everything we already know to be true about the accelerating disintegration of hierarchies of all kinds—economic, academic, cultural—will somehow magically suspend itself for the political process. That, somehow, politics will be different.