I enjoyed being at my sister’s on Christmas Day. Didn’t thinkI would, would rather not been there at at one point. But anyway I went and it was good. Therr with mum, my sister and her kids. See-ing her happy was all the world to me.
Month: December 2014
Glasgow’s accident .
Yesterday a local authority refuse truck went out of control. It careered along the pavement and embedded itself in at hotel some three hundred or so metres away. Six people were killed and seven people seriously injured. As it was Christmas the streets were crowded.
Sorry people’s loss. The shock of something remains with you. You always remember how well thing were before the incident.
Stones that made food
Many locations, in fact most regions had their milestone quarry. How is really simply brilliant. The use of sticks and water, hammers and chisels; and physical effort. Seemed to be joint task locally.
For centuries there was production of millstones in these mountains, now a national park. The production in Kvernfjellet (The millstone mountains) started sometime during the 1500s, and lasted until 1914. There have been many sites for millstone productions in Norway during history, but this was the biggest with more than 1000 quarries. For some centuries this area supplied more or less all the country with these stones. In the 1800smostof the bread eatenin Noway was bakedfrom flourmade withthes stones, that is mica-schist scattered with 2-5mm large crystals of hard minerals. In the picture above is a broken millstone left in the mountains.
Millstones were needed to grind grain, our most important food source, in Norway as in so many countries. There have been a lot of scientific work on these sites lately. A multidisiplinary research project involving geologists, archaelogists, historians, botanists, geographers and…
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inequality in the skies
Like yourself flying has been a big part of my life.
I noticed this too on a recent flight to New York from London. Airlines treat ordinary passengers like cattle. I wasn’t always the case.
I’m on a plane right now, flying from Sacramento back to Albany. And sitting here I’m reminded of how air travel itself reflects the growing inequality of society in a trivial, but suggestive, way.
Planes have always had first-class and passenger cabins, at least as far as I know. If the Titanic had this distinction, I’m guessing it was in place from the beginning of commercial aviation.
But for most of my adult life, planes—at least the ones I usually fly on, from one U.S. city to another—looked something like this:
Just roughing it out here, this means that 7% of the passengers used about 15% of the room, with the other 93% using 85% of the cabin space. Such a plane would have a Gini index of about 8. (For reference, the U.S. Gini is about 48, and the global one is around 65.)
Domestic airlines have pretty much…
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Dailyfromlargs 