HAPPY EASTER

So I cut my usual cup of bkfst cereal to 1/2 cup from 1 cup and added

40% of a 260 calorie chocolate bar to the bowl. Tasted alright.

Slept all afternoon.

Fine Easter.

Waiting for bicycle season. This week?!

Daft Punked

Differences

source: Agence France-Presse, Washington

February 25, 2013

translation doxa-louise

DISTURBANCES IN ATMOSPHERIC COURANTS THE LIKELY CULPRITS FOR CRAZY WEATHER

Climate researchers have identified the mechanism behind extreme weather events such as droughts, heat or cold spells, which come from disturbances in atmospheric circulation provoqued by global warming.

The United States went through an extreme heat spell in 2011, on the heels of Russia in 2010 while Pakistan experienced, that same year, unheard of levels of flooding.

According to the works of climate reserchers published Monday, these devastating phenomena can all be attribured to the same disturbance of atmospheric currents around the globe in the Northern hemisphere, which are affected by heating resulting from the release of  greenhouse gases due to human activity.

‘An important part of air circulation in the mid latitudes of earth normally takes the shape of waves circling the globe, oscillating between tropical and artic regions’ explains Vladimir Petoukhov, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, principal author of this study.

‘When these waves oscillate upward they pull up hot air from the tropics toward Europe and Russia or the United States, and when they oscillate downward they produce the same phenomenon, but with cold air masses from the Artic’, continues the scientist, whose study is being published in the Annals of the American Academy of Science (PNAS).

‘We have discovered that, in the cousre of these recent extreme weather events, those waves were stalled in their mouvement for many weeks’, he adds.

Global warming is not uniform on the planet. In the Antartic the rise in temperatures is more amplified by the melting of ice and snow, the climatologist makes more precise.

This reduces differences in temperature between the Artic region et say Europe, which affects the circulation of air around the globe whose principal motor is differences in temperature, he explains.

Further continents heat up and cool down more quickly than oceans, contributing as well to stagnation of air mases.

‘These two factors are crucial to the mechanism which we have detected, which provoques long periods of hot or cold’, adds Vladimir Petoukhov.

Two or three days with a temperature of 30 degrees Celsius is not a problem, but twenty days or more create an important level of stress for many ecosystems and urban areas not adapted to this kind of prolonged heat wave, he opines, citing greater mortality, forest fires and loss of crops.

Melancholy_Berlin

source: Videotron, Burlesque #2.

Love_it, Buy_it

Array Version

The full app runs on the Small Basic Microsoft site, with a mundane Ingredients list .


http://smallbasic.com/program/?ZFS556

Meal-time

Consider yourselves lucky that I remembered: there is an explanation

to the obesity tsunami curently hitting North America. I am old enough to have

memories of what things were like before television, and they were

very, very different. Or rather television made things very, very different

from what they had been before.

Because, with television, it became nightime in the morning. And dessert time at 4

in the afternoon. And time for cereal all morning long. And everybody smoked: everybody 

who was anybody, except for maybe he catholic clergy. And it was okay to become blond. 

And laugh at your wife. And ride spaceships.

Before that time, one really accepted hunger as part of life. Indeed, thinking about food 

at non-meal times was pointless, and possibly sinful. That’s just the way things were.

Until advertisement came along. And cake mixes.

The child that I was remembers all that, or rather her ways of seeing things comes back to 

me in strange little moments. But it was all very long ago, before school even, for some of it. 

And as I learned to decipher those strange sounds of the English language.

Coming to you from New York. And those other places.

So I am really drawing on my pre-critical self - but oddly, on a much saner self - than

today’s loony intello.

Food only happens at meal times. Take it from me.

Tomorrow

Working Model

This is a first pass at programming WSalad. Regretably, Small Basic forces us to be linear
about things. If we don't like current totals, we can just start all over again.

More fun, and to the point in designing such an app, would be  model where the user could
test the results of various choices and change his/her mind...

The D-word!

India

Like many women, I am horrified to read about  gang

rape behaviour in  India. It is one of those countries experiencing

rapid population growth (x3 since 1951) thanks to the incursion

of western medecine. It is also experiencing a grave demographic

imbalance as men are preferred to women offspring: currently 908

females to 1 000 males (for the most populous province). How is
the culture adapting. Hard to tell from such a distance. But very troubling.

Uttar Pradesh has a humid temperate climate and experiences four seasons. The winter in January and February is followed by summer between March and May and the monsoon season between June and September.^[

source: Wikipedia, Uttar Pradesh.

Canada/Mongolia

Brain

Brain connectivity is currently an active area of research in Europe, thanks to new imagery
possibilities. Above, the white matter (neurological) of the brain, seen from the front.

source:http://sante.lefigaro.fr/actualite/2013/03/13/20050-cerveau-est-lobjet-dune-course-connaissance

Horses

from: Jean-Paul Roux, Hisroire des Turcs, Deux mille ans du Pacifique à la Méditerranée, Fayard 2000,Paris.

translation: doxa-louise

Horses

Herding is the principal occupation of the steppe-inhabitant Turks. Their homeland, Mongolia, is the example country in this regard, which explains why empires establish their headquarters there. It is the key to their history which is, in fine, a story of horses.That only makes sense of the destiny of Turks and Mongols in the world, explains many essential traits which, otherwise, irrespective of valid arguments, remain shrouded in mist, like a photo taken with a badly set objective. For all of the qualities which give nomads their superiority to express themselves, they need the essential support of the cavalry.

The intensive breeding of horses will find its optimum in Mongolia and will be extensive in pretty much all of the countries of the steppe. But it remains impossible in deserts,in forest or agricultural regions, in Siberia certainly, but also in China, in Europe and even more so in the valleys surrounding great rivers, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile. Turkish muslim power in the Balkans, the Near-East, in India, will rest on other basis. For no sedentary country possesses the necessary grasslands to nourish great herds. Which is why so often, men will prefer to raid them rather than to establish themselves, knowing that, sooner or later, they would be assimilated or expulsed, less by the softening effect of civilization than by the ruin of what had made conquest possible: the cavalry.

We know that the independant Republic of Mongolia (excluding inner or Chinese Mongolia) could nourish in 1918, before the introduction of a modern economy, 1,5 million horses, plus 1 million bovines, 225,000 camels and more than 7 million sheep, thus in total  3 895 000 animal units, a unit being comprised of one horse, one sheep, one bovid or five sheep. It must have been thus earlier, when wars, epizootics, grasshoper invasions (46 AD), droughts did not bring about catastrophic, but passing diminutions in the livestock or when happy circumstances did not make for unreasonable growth. But in 1918, Mongolia no longer had warlike or conquering goals; pastoralism was more important than horseback riding. It had been different when war was the basis for all activity; then horses were more precious than other animals. The herd of the Xiongnu, normally, varied between 15 and 25 heads of cattle per person; it went down to less than 2 in the poorer tribes, during difficult years, went up to  almost 300 in the richer tribes during prosperous times (evaluation for 127 BC). As we estimate the population of the Xiongnu at 1,5 million, their herds must comprise a minimum of 2 million animals, in general 20 to 30 million, thus two or three times  the 1918 numbers, a time of decadence, and it is true, a much greater territory. We know that the percentage of horses held between 12 and 15 %, which translates to some 3 million heads, but could grow to 40 %, a stunning total of 12 million horses (evaluation for 46 BC). For comparison purposes, there were 12 million in the soviet Union in 1955, 8 million in 1965.

These numbers, carefully arrived at, answer to other information to the effect that  the nomads each brought with them a minimum of two or three horses per person, which assured them of always having a fresh mount. Upwards of 1 million horses was thus more than sufficient for an army of 300 000 men, a colossal army for the times, no doubt without precedent, but which sources often mention, not without inviting doubts on the part of many historians, to my mind unjustified. One didn’t need so much to reign supreme on all the infantries on the planet, on the medieval knights of the Orient or the Occident. Neither China, India nor Europe could feed so many animals. The high plains of Iran, and to some extent Turkey could in a lesser fashion. The hungarian plain, the richest region in the west for grazing land, can feed at the most 323 000 animal units, a mere 1\12 of Mongolia’s capacity and forests were earlier more important than they are today. Reducing beyond probable the number of ovines and bovines necessary for human consumption, it could entertain 50 000 to 70 000 cavalry: this was suffecient for launching expeditions to Gaul and Italy, certainly with the help of allies, but not sufficient to occupy these countries, especially so since horses could not have been fed. Thus Attila did not intend to conquer Europe.

Similarly, the Seljuqs, also faithful to the cavalry, will find themselves obliged to inflict a profound setback to agriculture in Iran and Anatolia. The Mongols or Turks will not obtain sustainable success in Syria or Irak nor use these countries as bases for incursions in the Nile valley and will remain exposed to the attacks of the Mamluks (but could a large cavalry have crossed the Sinaï desert?). And Genghis Khan, with a lively intelligence, having perfectly understood the givens of the problem, but not wanting to give up on world leadership, will consider turning into grazing land all the agricultural land of China. When one was not waging war, one thus had to export horses. China, to maintain peace with the Uyghurs, might thus be forced to make massive purchases, at insane prices, and then letting them starve as quickly as possible. This explains why the expeditions were often brief; they took no longer than the time for the expiry of the feed and the weakening of the beasts, and would be done anew from year to year.

To inhabit the lands of civilization without transforming them into steppes, will be needed a slow adjustment of a century or two to new conditions. This will be the result of becoming sedentary which, while allowing for a strong equestrian force, will no longer give to cavalry an essential role, as will be the case for the Ottomans. For his part, Attila, arbitrer of the Roman Empire, will never leave the plains of Hungary.

As with the wolf that is often his emblem, his paragon, the true nomad must live on the borders of civilization to feed himself at its expense, but not penetrate it. What could be the purpose of arms, mounts, clothing adapted to life on a horse that the Turks had known to develop and would adopt the civilized if horses came to no longer be in sufficient numbers? They could only be thus on the steppe. One remains mystified that so many great conquerors resigned themselves to remaining in sedentary lands. One understands the desolate character of so many lands of modern Asia which were earlier cultivated lands when one knows that nomads have sojourned there.

Mine

http://www.latimes.com/features/food/dailydish/la-dd-mark-menjivar-photos-strangers-refrigerators-20130301,0,1900895.story

The rules to this aesthetic exercise are strict. One photographs the insides
to one's fridge as it is, no clean-up or re-arrangement. And one annotates and
publishes. Here's the fridge at doxa-home:

Woman, 63;  with college-age daughter away at school.

Let's not forget the secondary mini-fridge:

Make_My_Day!