all things apocalyptic

I'm shocked that George Monbiot has another book out -- and I haven't even managed to catch up with the last three. I do read his weekly column though, and I usually agree with everything he says, so I feel I don't have to read the books. Although they are important, of course.

Well, anyhow, the new one is called:

Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice

and available via amazon or Guardian books.

20 min sport

I have decided that if I have to follow some kind of sport, watching the Oxford v Cambridge boat race is the most efficient way of doing it, as it takes only 20 minutes -- per year! So I watched it today (only the second time) and we (oxford) won. (Oxford also won the first time I watched, which i think was two years ago.) So that's an undeserved success for the day, and enough sport for a year ...

discovering ecuador

Could you name a writer from Ecuador? Well, until a few weeks ago, I couldn't, even though I have shelves full of Latin American literature. But now, thanks to a few recommendations from Adri, an Ecuadorian friend, I am discovering a whole new country. Currently reading El Cristo Feo, by Alicia Yanez Cossio and loving it. More raving surely to follow in due course.

dolphins in the Mediterranean

There's an Earthwatch lecture on at The Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London, tonight at 7 pm, on two dolphin projects.

Ricardo Sagarminaga van Buitan is going to talk about the dolphins in the Alboran Sea (off the Spanish coast). Ric will also mention his sea turtles project which is featured at the site www.loveearth.com

Joan Gonzalvo Villegas will talk about dolphin research and conservation in Greece, and his outreach work with the local communities and schools.

I've seen the rehearsals, so I can promise you that the talks will be very interesting ...

antarctic art

Artist Chris Drury has spent some time in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey. An exhibition of his antarctic art will go on show at the Beaux Art, London, in April.

rob the poor to fuel the rich

biofuels have fallen from grace with alarming speed. What looked like the future of transport a year ago is now seen as a threat to food provision and the environment alike. Today's issue of Current Biology contains a few news features on these problems, and I've written the one on the impact of biofuels on African countries. Apologies for the title which I didn't choose or approve.

HD189733b

... no, that's not my social security number, it's a jupiter-sized planet which does us the favour of circling its sun in a plane that also includes us, i.e. it passes in front of its star once in every complete orbit. Therefore, scientists can use spectroscopic methods to find out which parts of the star's spectrum the planet atmosphere swallows up more effectively than others, and from this conclude what kinds of molecules form the atmosphere.

With this kind of measurements, performed with the Hubble space telescope, Mark Swain et al. have now for the first time presented evidence for carbon molecules in the atmosphere of any extrasolar planet (Nature 2008, 452, 329). Their spectroscopic results reveal methane as a component of HD189733b's atmosphere, and confirm the presence of water vapour. Indirect evidence suggests there might be carbon monoxide as well.

While HD189733b itself is not a very promising candidate for extraterrestrial life (way too hot), it is really exciting that detailed analysis of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets is now possible. In theory, the same kind of technology could be used to detect signs of disequilibrium, i.e. life, on more suitable planets.

measuring the world

Finally, I got round to reading "Die Vermessung der Welt" (Measuring the World), by Daniel Kehlmann. This is a somewhat fictionalised double biography of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt. In their parallel lives, both did indeed measure parts of the world, one as a mathematician and surveyor on home ground, the other as an explorer and naturalist.

The book is very readable and follows in the tradition of books like "longitude" -- this "mid-brow" terrain is still relatively new to German literature; until recently there was a wide canyon separating the U and the E literature, i.e. the popular and the literary fiction. Novels bridging this gap, possibly starting with Patrick Suesskind's "Perfume" have been rewarded with successful translation deals, and Kehlmann's book is now available in English too.

While it was very entertaining to read, and useful in terms of organising a number of household names of the 19th century into a network of who knew whom (they didn't have facebook back then!), I felt slightly unsure about the fine line between biography and fiction, I mean did Gauss really make that promise to learn Russian as a favour to a Russian prostitute? I'll need to read a proper biography at some point.

the last cubist

I really enjoyed watching Sidney Pollack's documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry earlier this week. Beforehand, I only knew two things about Gehry, namely that he built the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, and that he's featured in a Simpsons episode (the Springfielders send him a letter asking him to build an opera house for them, he scrunches the sheet together to throw it away, then looks at the paper ball, has an inspiration, and builds the opera house in the image of the crumpled paper).

I've always been a sucker for anything that appears to give some kind of insight into the nature of creativity, and there is no bigger challenge to the creative mind than to shape spaces the size of theatres and sports venues, so this was bound to appeal. In addition, I also enjoyed it because Gehry's work is so close to modern sculpture and cubist painters. I think somebody in the docu calls him the last cubist or something similar.

And of course, as always, the Simpsons episode managed to capture the spirit of Gehry's creativity in a few minutes just as well as the documentary in 83 minutes.

five years on

Five years of war and mayhem in Iraq, what a depressing anniversary. Around this time in 2003, I ran a preliminary kind of blog (without the proper tools) called "Cassandra's Diary" raging against all this, just as a way of stopping myself from pulling my hair out.

Oh well. let's look at the bright side -- if this invasion had worked, they would have invaded two or three other countries by now. Iraq is bearing the cross to save the world from the neocons, if I am allowed a seasonal metaphor ...


PS in those days, 2001 through to 2003, Seumas Milne was the editor of the comments pages in the Guardian, which more than once were the last island of sanity in a mad world. He's no longer in charge, but he's written a commentary on the anniversary.

a special duchess

Generally I don't believe that there is anything special about the people who call themselves aristocrats, but I might make an exception for this Spanish duchess, known as La Duquesa Roja. At least her obituary sounds very interesting, and there was an additional appreciation in the paper a few days later. plus, of course a Wikipedia entry.

Oh, and she's written novels as well. I should check those out.

Mor Karbasi

Back in January, I was raving about Yasmin Levy and her Ladino / Flamenco music. Thanks to this and the magic of MySpace I found a "friend request" this morning from Mor Karbasi, a London-based singer who does very similar things, and I like the four songs on her MySpace profile a lot.