insignificant ramblings of a 50-something woman
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The Yorkshire Dales from the Settle-Carlisle Railway
Yesterday we finally made the trip to Carlisle through the Yorkshire Dales on the Settle-Carlisle railway. I have been wanting to take this train journey ever since we arrived and I have Bill Bryson largely to blame. Here’s what he said about it in his book, Notes from a Small Island: The Settle-to-Carlisle line is…
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On blog moderation and dealing with smarm
If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s when people say one thing and mean another. Everyone does it but some more so than others. I am sometimes guilty of this myself but mostly I prefer to say exactly what I think. When we don’t speak the truth we are being fake and I hate…
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Earth to warm 4C by 2100 under business as usual
A new paper by Steven Sherwood et al. published in Nature this week is predicting a higher climate sensitivity of 3°C or more per doubling of CO2. The paper is called Spread in model climate sensitivity traced to atmospheric convective mixing. Current projections of climate sensitivity fall in the range of 1.5-4.5°C. Part of the…
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Scarborough New Year’s Day Dip
What kind of crazy person goes swimming in the North Sea in winter? My sister-in-law, that’s who. Yesterday, we went to Scarborough on the North Yorkshire coast, to join the New Year’s Day Lions Club fundraising dip. Ben’s sister swims every weekend in Lake Geneva so she is well-trained in icy dips. I thought about…
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A new year: 2014
Elizabeth had a great birthday party yesterday. It was fun for the adults too and not without a few mishaps. At one point, Daniel vomited on the coat of one of our guests. I think he ate too much. Then a four-year-old in attendance was very taken with Ben’s costume and began requesting bits of…
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Happy birthday, Elizabeth
On this day, four years ago, Elizabeth was born. In hindsight, it wasn’t very well planned but she was due on the 17th of December and kept us waiting. After two weeks, the hospital staff refused to let me wait any longer and so on New Year’s Eve 2009, I was induced and Elizabeth was…
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A day out in Nottingham
We had a superb day yesterday. Our hosts took us to see some of the sights in Nottingham the first of which was Wollaton Hall – an Elizabethan mansion completed in 1588 and since 1926, home to the city’s natural history museum. Natural history museums are always interesting places to visit, especially for children, but…
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Geocaching in Nottinghamshire
We are visiting friends in the countryside of Nottinghamshire and it’s lovely. I’m never quite sure whether I’m a town mouse or a country mouse. I love the city with all its lively energy but then I come to the countryside and I love the peace and the beauty. I think I will be forever…
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Viking poo
The photo below is an exact replica of a 1000-year-old Viking poo found beneath the city of York, or Jorvik as the Vikings called it. This poo and real ones (not replicas) can be sampled (held rather than eaten) at the Archaeological Museum in York, called Dig. We took the children there today and it’s an…
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Denial Tango 2014
This is a great song written by the Aussie group Men With Day Jobs. Thanks to Hot Topic for bringing it to my attention.
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My war wound
I have an impressive bruise on my knee from falling over while skating last weekend. It started as a swollen lump. Now it’s an ugly purple mess but it’s healing nicely.
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Taking life
A little while ago I promised to write about taking life as a follow on from my post about eating plants. It’s Christmas Day today, the kids are playing happily with gifts, and so now is a good time to tackle it. When is it wrong to take the life of a living being? In…
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Recipe for Lebkuchen
This is a reblog of an old post of mine. It’s a recipe for lebkuchen which is a very delicious German treat eaten over the Christmas season. I usually make it every year but this year I’ve adopted the British tradition of baking mince pies instead. But this is recipe that must be shared. So…
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Yorkshire’s Winter Wonderland
I stacked it (stack it = Aussie phrase for fell over) big time at the outdoor skating rink today which is at Yorkshire’s winter wonderland. It’s a superb rink by the way and much fun was had by all. But I got a little bit overly confident in my abilities and tried one of those…
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Friday funnies
Someone sent me this yesterday. It’s quite old but I’ve only just seen it and want to share. I can certainly relate to the challenge of getting small children ready and out the door each morning.
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Does climate change need a new agenda?
I was speaking to some friends of mine recently about climate change (I know what you’re thinking, those poor souls). They understand and accept the science of climate change but were not particularly interested in the topic or its solutions. One thought wind farms were ugly and the other felt the answer lay with reducing…
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Do climate change policies hurt the world’s poor?
There’s something about what Bjorn Lomborg writes that makes me cross. He’s got an article on Project Syndicate in which he argues that environmental policy is hurting the world’s poor. He’s specifically referring to climate change policy and he thinks that what the developing world really needs is access to cheap fossil fuels. The article…
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An atomic bomb analogy
I want to ask my lovely readers what they think of an analogy which uses atomic bombs to help describe an amount of energy. The graphic below uses Hiroshima atomic bombs to convey the rate at which the Earth is currently accumulating energy, which is a lot. It was created by Skeptical Science – a…
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Dangerous climate change
It must be about time I wrote something about global warming again. I want to write about a new paper by James Hansen – the world’s best known climate scientist and former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It’s called Assessing “Dangerous climate change”: required reductions of carbon emissions to protect young people,…
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