I should be redundant

There are some children who would have special needs even if they had two loving parents at home; but they're in a minority.

We once had a boy whose behaviour was really - well, the mealy-mouthed modern term is "challenging". He was taken from home and put in foster care. He was also put in with a much younger group of children at the educational centre, so he could take on the responsibility of being a good role model. The transformation was dramatic.

As a Looked After Child, his case was reviewed every few months. Part of the process is to get the views of the child, so I asked his teacher to help. We passed her an A4 sheet with the outline of a head on it; the boy had to sketch his face and write a few things about himself around the drawing.

In the top corner he wrote, "I am loved."


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What the Rhine maidens really wanted

(From the Bayerische Staatsoper's 2012 production of "Götterdämmerung")

Synopsis:

Having lost their gold to the Federal Reserve, who in turn foolishly leased it to Alberic (the gnome of Zurich), the Rhine maidens cling to the false gold of the Euro for comfort, though it will ultimately lead to the destruction of the Gods and all Southern Europe.

Prizing wealth and power above love, they have poisoned the wellspring of natural affection and driven away their lovers so, doomed ever to remain maidens, they are left lamenting, "Viagra, Viagra" (at 4:00 below).




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Gasless

83% of UK homes are heated by gas and much of our domestic electricity is supplied by gas-powered generating stations. Some estimate future supply at 40 - 50 years, so if you have children of school age they will live to see the end of gas in the home.

What's the plan?

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Professional trouser hunters

From dailymail.co.uk

From nknews.org

An acquaintance of mine, a North Korean refugee currently living in South Korea, told me how, in the early 2000s, she broke a bone. The incident happened one afternoon when she was on the way home. A few streets away from her house she encountered a patrol of regular police and militia, and she instantly knew she was in trouble because she had done something seriously improper. She had no choice but to run, and while trying to get away from her pursuers she broke a bone in her feet. But she still escaped the hand of law.

What was the crime she had committed? She was wearing trousers while walking the streets of a major North Korean city.

This story might seem strange. As every visitor to North Korea can testify, there are a great number of women clad in trousers on the streets of major North Korean cities. Nonetheless, a theoretical ban on women wearing trousers has existed since the late 1970s. Its enforcement has, however, been rather patchy at best.

My acquaintance did not blame her pursuers for the above-mentioned incident, instead she blamed herself. She knew that patrols of professional trouser hunters could be encountered only in certain parts of the city and only at certain times of the day, and she believes she was foolhardy to venture into such a high-risk area dressed in such an “indecent” way. 


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Oceans protecting us from global warming? For how long?

Are the scientists researching climate change allowing sufficiently for the moderating role of water?

Water has a high specific heat capacity. The same energy that raises the temperature of water by 1°C, will make copper hotter by more than 10°C.

This Time article (November 2013) reports "the vast oceans carry 93% of the stored energy from climate change, compared to just 1% for the atmosphere, with melting ice and landmasses making up the rest." Some of that energy goes to raising the temperature at certain depths.

But water has other ways of processing heat. It can expand, so that could be one of the reasons sea levels are rising.

There is also water's tendency to form chains of molecules - or even rings - and presumably heat energy will be used in the breaking of these structures, and there's a lot of them in the Earth's 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of ocean.

Another energy-employing phase change is evaporation. “The atmosphere’s water vapor content has increased by about 0.41 kilograms per square meter (kg/m²) per decade since 1988, and natural variability in climate just can’t explain this moisture change," says this article.

And then there's claims and counterclaims about melting ice. The argument is plagued by complexity because of the warming, cooling, evaporating and precipitating effects of wind currents and the difficulty of measuring ice thickness as well as extent.

The thermal absorption properties of water may have bought us more time, but they don't let us completely off the hook. Just as we are learning to discount climate change alarmists, we should look more skeptically at the sanguinists. There's a huge difference between "small chance" and "no chance", as we have found in financial matters; also, between "a long time ahead" and "never".

And then there's the at present theoretical concern about all that methane currently trapped in the oceans - by the water structures known as "clathrates", structures that heat energy can break.

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Blown away by harpsichord

I've got the CD, and play it loud on the motorway. The combination of Frisch's powerful and authoritative playing, the pindrop recording and the tremendous sonorousness of the period (1751) instrument make other harpsichord recordings I've heard seem dull greyscale by comparison. This is not a geek thing - you will be hypnotised, moved, exalted. And when you've heard it, I hope you'll be fair to the artist and buy it.



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Extraordinary guitar opening

I have to share this with you, perhaps it will move you as it does me. The first minute or so of Almir Sater's "Flor do Amor":



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