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Posted: 24-03-2013 17:29 Post subject:

You're all missing the essential point. These various diseases are getting more dangerous by the year, simply because bugs reproduce so fast - and of course it's the drug resistant ones that reproduce. Scientific research takes years, but bugs reproduce every few hours or minutes, so we can never keep pace, let alone keep up.

It's a good thing that some experts are willing to discuss this - only international efforts at the highest levels stand a chance of discovering new approaches, because antibiotics have had their day. (In fact, it's the over-use, and mis-use, of antobiotics that have created the problem in the first place - in effect, for the last few human generations, we've been selectively breeding for bugs that are resistant!)

Since penicillin was discovered (1928) to now is but the blink of an eye in terms of life on earth, and yet in that short time we have changed the rules of life. Some people understand this, and that it's a mthematical certainty that one of these bugs will get most of us, sooner or later. Sadly, most people don't understand maths, which is why they stick their heads in the sand and try not to hear the warnings of those who do.

But I like to hear about problems, and what we might do to meet them. But take it from me, antibiotics are so last century! Wink

Posted: 24-03-2013 18:29 Post subject:

If Raquel Welch is still available, we could put her in a sub, shrink her down and get her to zap microscopic bugs that way.

Posted: 24-03-2013 22:26 Post subject:

Bacteriophage therapy might help
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage

but see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy#Safety

Posted: 04-04-2013 09:05 Post subject:

Another housing development for Falmouth:

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/10330554.Community_centre_and_homes_for_the_elderly_as_huge_Bosvale_plan_unveiled/?ref=mr

It all sounds fairly 'righteous':

Posted: 04-04-2013 09:30 Post subject:

These NIMBY Falmouth posts should really be in the Grand Duchy of Cornwall thread. Go and complain to your Duke. Wink

Posted: 04-04-2013 11:43 Post subject:

Posted: 18-04-2013 09:43 Post subject:

[Double post deleted]

Posted: 18-04-2013 09:46 Post subject:

Must Britain now Dig for Survival?
Warnings of world food shortages are gathering pace and the horsemeat scandal has highlighted the provenance of food
By Judith Woods
7:27PM BST 16 Apr 2013

.........

As a nation that imports 40 per cent of all the food we consume, Britain is in a precarious position if the supply chain breaks down due to poor harvests, rising international costs and competition from other countries clamouring to buy up dwindling stocks.

It was revealed earlier this month that our wet winter and freezing spring have led to the poorest potato yield (down 20 per cent on last year) since the drought of 1976. Jersey Royals will be at least a month late because of tardy planting due to adverse weather, and the price of a 2.5kg bag of white potatoes has risen by 43 per cent – up from £1.35 this time last year to £1.93. The carrot harvest has been hit by the waterlogged ground, peas and tomatoes have been affected by low levels of light, and Britain will also need to import more wheat than it exports for the first time in a decade.

It’s a bleak picture when the price of the weekly shop is already steadily rising. All the same, can it really be true, as agriculture minister David Heath claims, that unless householders start Digging for Victory (Survival, even), we will face empty shelves as supermarkets struggle to import enough food to feed us? Alarmingly, it would appear so.

“I am delighted that, at long last, a minister has been upfront about what is a very serious issue, because we urgently need to get our act together, but shame on the Government for dragging its feet,” is the vehement response from Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London.
“The last Labour government, of which I was no fan, belatedly realised the same thing in 2007-08, when food prices rocketed, and they ended up with a policy called Food 2030, published in 2010. But the Coalition came in and abolished it, so we’ve lost three years.”

According to Prof Lang, all assessments of the world’s food systems reach the same damning conclusion, namely that “a big crunch is coming”. Falling oil reserves – needed for fertilisers – climate change and a soaring global population are coming together in a perfect storm.

“The only arguments are over what to do about it,” he says. “Some say that new technology will address the problem, but I’m one of those who say it can’t, because we would need four planet Earths to eat like the Americans and two to three planet Earths for us all to eat like Northern Europeans. What we need to do is radically change our diets.”

At present, 50 per cent of all grain grown in the world is fed to livestock. A dramatic reduction in meat and dairy consumption would free scarce land and resources for plant cultivation.

Consumer concerns over buying genetically modified foods may be swept aside by the need for large-scale production, and indeed this Government plans to lobby other European Union countries to lift current restrictions on the use of GM technology.

But a key factor in securing our food supply lies, quite literally, in growing our own, and public figures are leading by example. When David Cameron was elected Prime Minister, he and his wife took on the vegetable garden planted in Downing Street by former residents Gordon and Sarah Brown. Their green-fingered foray was made with the encouragement of the American First Lady. When she arrived in Washington, one of Michelle Obama’s first projects was to dig a vegetable patch on the White House lawn, so that she could invite local children along to sow and harvest vegetables.

“We are all down in the dirt,” wrote the novice gardener in her book American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America. “There is no hierarchy, no boss and no winner. It is almost impossible to mess up and we make it clear that gardening isn’t about perfection. It is, however, about re-establishing a seasonality to our diets and would certainly put paid to the environmental scourge of air-freighted strawberries in December and Peruvian asparagus in March.”

It may come as a shock to learn that a National Farmers’ Union report shows tomatoes, cucumbers and spring onions are among several British fruit and vegetable crops that have been labelled “endangered” due to a significant fall in national self-sufficiency over the past 10 years. A further four crops – Brussels sprouts, lettuce, leeks and cauliflower – are “at risk” due to a steady shrinkage in production and consumption.

“This is not about growers versus retailers, but we have to bring an end to damaging activities or risk losing huge swathes of British horticultural production,” says NFU deputy president and potato grower Meurig Raymond. “Some retailers are making efforts to invest in the future of British farming, but our figures show that all too often this is being undone in pursuit of higher profits.

“Unless action is taken now, we could see less home-grown fruit and vegetables on supermarket shelves. This will mean more imported produce, less choice and ultimately higher food prices due to a lack of investment in farming.”

Elsewhere, the Royal Horticultural Society’s Britain in Bloom movement has just launched “Edible Britain”, which promotes the idea of growing herbs, salads and fruits in outdoor spaces: chives in window boxes, lettuce in tubs and strawberries and tomatoes in hanging baskets.

Throughout this month Britain in Bloom will be giving away 30,000 packets of seeds to create more than 1,000 public edible gardens nationwide. The scheme, which has been given the backing of Michelin-starred chef Raymond Blanc, is part of a drive to get people in general and children in particular to re-engage with fresh food. And according to research carried out by Homebase, 62 per cent of British children want to be taught more about gardening at school.

“It’s really important to get children involved in gardening and learn that fruit and vegetables don’t come wrapped in polythene,” says Andrea Van Sittart, head of regional development at the RHS. “And 17,000 schools signed up to our gardening in schools programme.”

............

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/howtogrow/9997719/Must-Britain-now-Dig-for-Survival.html

Posted: 24-04-2013 07:43 Post subject:

This article is less a counter-balance to most of the arguments on this thread, but rather it's an example of the dooms that await us if we don't get things right - dooms that even Malthus didn't envisage! Wink

How are humans going to become extinct?
By Sean Coughlan, BBC News education correspondent

What are the greatest global threats to humanity? Are we on the verge of our own unexpected extinction?
An international team of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute is investigating the biggest dangers.

And they argue in a research paper, Existential Risk as a Global Priority, that international policymakers must pay serious attention to the reality of species-obliterating risks.
Last year there were more academic papers published on snowboarding than human extinction. Rolling Eyes

The Swedish-born director of the institute, Nick Bostrom, says the stakes couldn't be higher. If we get it wrong, this could be humanity's final century.
So what are the greatest dangers?

First the good news. Pandemics and natural disasters might cause colossal and catastrophic loss of life, but Dr Bostrom believes humanity would be likely to survive.
This is because as a species we've already outlasted many thousands of years of disease, famine, flood, predators, persecution, earthquakes and environmental change. So the odds remain in our favour.

And in the time frame of a century, he says the risk of extinction from asteroid impacts and super-volcanic eruptions remains "extremely small".

Even the unprecedented self-inflicted losses in the 20th Century in two world wars, and the Spanish flu epidemic, failed to halt the upward rise in the global human population.
Nuclear war might cause appalling destruction, but enough individuals could survive to allow the species to continue.
If that's the feelgood reassurance out of the way, what should we really be worrying about?

Dr Bostrom believes we've entered a new kind of technological era with the capacity to threaten our future as never before. These are "threats we have no track record of surviving". Shocked

Likening it to a dangerous weapon in the hands of a child, he says the advance of technology has overtaken our capacity to control the possible consequences.
Experiments in areas such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and machine intelligence are hurtling forward into the territory of the unintended and unpredictable.

Synthetic biology, where biology meets engineering, promises great medical benefits. But Dr Bostrom is concerned about unforeseen consequences in manipulating the boundaries of human biology.

Nanotechnology, working at a molecular or atomic level, could also become highly destructive if used for warfare, he argues. He has written that future governments will have a major challenge to control and restrict misuses.

There are also fears about how artificial or machine intelligence interact with the external world.
Such computer-driven "intelligence" might be a powerful tool in industry, medicine, agriculture or managing the economy.
But it also can be completely indifferent to any incidental damage.

These are not abstract concepts.
Seán O'Heigeartaigh, a geneticist at the institute, draws an analogy with algorithms used in automated stock market trading.
These mathematical strings can have direct and destructive consequences for real economies and real people.
Such computer systems can "manipulate the real world", says Dr O'Heigeartaigh, who studied molecular evolution at Trinity College Dublin.

In terms of risks from biology, he worries about misguided good intentions, as experiments carry out genetic modifications, dismantling and rebuilding genetic structures.
"It's very unlikely they would want to make something harmful," he says.

But there is always the risk of an unintended sequence of events or something that becomes harmful when transferred into another environment.
"We are developing things that could go wrong in a profound way," he says.
"With any new powerful technology we should think very carefully about what we know - but it might be more important to know what we don't have certainty about."

And he says this isn't a career in scaremongering, he's motivated by the seriousness of his work. "This is one of the most important ways of making a positive difference," he says.

This eclectic group of researchers talk about computers able to create more and more powerful generations of computers.
It won't be that these machines suddenly develop a line in sarcasm and bad behaviour. But research fellow Daniel Dewey talks about an "intelligence explosion" where the accelerating power of computers becomes less predictable and controllable.

"Artificial intelligence is one of the technologies that puts more and more power into smaller and smaller packages," says Mr Dewey, a US expert in machine super-intelligence who previously worked at Google.
Along with biotechnology and nanotechnology, he says: "You can do things with these technologies, typically chain reaction-type effects, so that starting with very few resources you could undertake projects that could affect everyone in the world."

The Future of Humanity project at Oxford is part of a trend towards focusing research on such big questions. The institute was launched by the Oxford Martin School, which brings together academics from across different fields with the aim of tackling the most "pressing global challenges".

There are also ambitions at Cambridge University to investigate such threats to humanity.
Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society, is backing plans for a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
"This is the first century in the world's history when the biggest threat is from humanity," says Lord Rees.

He says that while we worry about more immediate individual risks, such as air travel or food safety, we seem to have much more difficulty recognising bigger dangers.

Lord Rees also highlights concerns about synthetic biology.
"With every new technology there are upsides, but there are also risks," he says.
The creation of new organisms for agriculture and medicine could have unforeseen ecological side-effects, he suggests.

Lord Rees raises concerns about the social fragility and lack of resilience in our technology-dependent society.
"It's a question of scale. We're in a more inter-connected world, more travel, news and rumours spread at the speed of light. Therefore the consequences of some error or terror are greater than in the past," he says.

Lord Rees, along with Cambridge philosopher Huw Price and economist Sir Partha Dasgupta and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, wants the proposed Centre for the Study of Existential Risk to evaluate such threats.

So should we be worried about an impending doomsday?
This isn't a dystopian fiction. It's not about a cat-stroking villain below a volcano. In fact, the institute in Oxford is in university offices above a gym, where self-preservation is about a treadmill and Lycra.

Dr Bostrom says there is a real gap between the speed of technological advance and our understanding of its implications.
"We're at the level of infants in moral responsibility, but with the technological capability of adults," he says.
As such, the significance of existential risk is "not on people's radars".

But he argues that change is coming whether or not we're ready for it.
"There is a bottleneck in human history. The human condition is going to change. It could be that we end in a catastrophe or that we are transformed by taking much greater control over our biology.
"It's not science fiction, religious doctrine or a late-night conversation in the pub.

"There is no plausible moral case not to take it seriously."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22002530

Posted: 24-04-2013 08:19 Post subject:

Oh yes, and he forgot humans evolving into something that will out-cool them.

<puts on mirror shades>

Posted: 24-04-2013 08:23 Post subject:

From general academic speculations to the nitty-gritty of new housing: this is from my local paper, but no doubt similar debates are taking place across the country:

'Local plan' would see 4,000 homes built around Falmouth and Penryn
6:30am Wednesday 24th April 2013 in Falmouth/Penryn .

The housing need predicted in the Cornwall Local Plan would see a 40 per cent increase in the area of Falmouth concreted over in the next 20 years, it was claimed last week.

Under the plan, which is currently being consulted upon, Falmouth and Penryn will be allocated a further 3,200 homes with another 800 earmarked for the rest of the local community network area, which takes in outlying villages.

Falmouth Town Council’s strategic planning committee has questioned the validity of predictions made in the plan with regards to future job numbers and the demand for new homes.
“These jobs that are going to be created are based on guess work at best,” said committee chairman, David Sterratt, “considering we are in the middle of a recession and we don’t know how long it’s going to last.
“Nobody in their right mind would project over 20 years the number of jobs that will be created – you may as well be doing the lottery if you can guess that well. You cannot rely on it.”

With regard to the housing numbers, he added: “What people have to realise is, if you go out to Goldenbank, we are going to have one of them a year for the next 20 years. That’s what it works out as. We are looking at a 40 per cent increase in Falmouth being concreted over.”

Councillor Marie Ryan added: “We are tying ourselves up for 20 years so we have to get it right.”

The committee eventually agreed that Falmouth and Penryn’s target provision for new housing over the next 20 years should be reduced from the 3,200 earmarked in the Cornwall Local Plan to a maximum of 2,300 new homes.

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/10367913._Local_plan__would_see_4_000_homes_built_around_Falmouth_and_Penryn/

Posted: 17-05-2013 08:57 Post subject:

Better keep building those houses - here come more people... Sad

The Quiverfull: The evangelical Christians opposed to contraception
By Cat McShane, BBC World Service

A Christian evangelical movement where followers avoid contraception and have as many children as they can is spreading to the UK. They are The Quiverfull.

"Get married. Have a quiver full of kids if you can."
So said unsuccessful presidential candidate Mitt Romney in a recent speech to graduates. It was a conscious echo of Psalm 127.
The psalm - where children are compared to arrows for war - is the inspiration for the Quiverfull movement.
"Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They shall not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate."

Christians in the movement believe in giving up all forms of contraception and accepting as many children as God gives, both as a sign of obedience to God and in a bid to ensure the future of the faith.

In the US, Quiverfull families frequently reach up to a dozen children with the numbers of adherents in the tens of thousands. But now the movement is gaining popularity in other countries.

In the UK, where the average family size is 1.7 children, this makes couples who follow its teachings stand out.
Vicki and Phil have just had their sixth child. "I feel this is the normal [situation] God created and God initially wanted, and that actually society has gone a little skew-whiff," says Vicki, of south London.

Vicki and Phil were both raised as Christians, but came to Quiverfull ideas after they were married. Early on, they used contraception, but after Vicki responded badly to the contraceptive pill, they began merely avoiding sex during Vicki's most fertile time of the month. From there they decided to do without contraception completely.

"Over time, we realised that actually if He [God] wants to conceive a baby during that time, and he made her naturally desire her husband more, maybe that's what he'd prefer us to do," she says.

In common with other Quiverfull families, Vicki had to wait for her husband to come round to her ideas.
"He saw it wasn't such a scary thing to do after all, and that God wouldn't overwhelm us with more than we could handle. One baby at a time arrived, and we were handling it, so we felt our marriage was being blessed by this choice and we continued."

Vicki and Phil were encouraged by the teachings of Nancy Campbell, a Tennessee-based preacher influential in the movement. Her ministry, Above Rubies, advocates motherhood as a woman's highest calling. Its magazine is distributed to more than 100 countries worldwide, with a circulation topping 160,000.

Vicki found out about the ministry through a blog by a mother and began subscribing to the magazine and attending Campbell's annual retreats. This year's European tour saw Campbell visit six countries in a month, preaching at women-only and also family retreats attended by like-minded couples and their burgeoning broods.

Campbell believes that many women have forgotten their biological, and for her, God-given function. "He created her with a womb. And in fact that's the most distinguishing characteristic of a woman. In the American Webster's 1928 dictionary, it says that woman is combination of two words: womb and man. She is a womb-man."

But there's more to the Quiverfull mindset than a love of big families. It's based on a backlash against the growing acceptance of birth control and feminism within Christianity.

Sarah Dawes, 34, from Derbyshire, has six children. She had worked in an office and a shoe shop before embracing the Quiverfull life. "I always wanted a big family, but when I read Above Rubies it was like drinking when you're thirsty," she says.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22526252

Posted: 17-05-2013 16:41 Post subject:

See, I always thought that the ability of humans to have lots of offspring was to balance the frequency of infant mortality and death in childbirth. I wonder if these 'ere 'quakabreds' are really committed to leaving it all in Gods hands, and knock back such things as hospital births and immunisations? Confused

Posted: 17-05-2013 16:52 Post subject:

These seem to be women who feel they can do as they like; no concern for welfare of husband or children.

Its a fine thing to talk about a happy family, but a family wont be happy if they have money problems, which is a major issue with childrearing in most parts of the world.

Posted: 17-05-2013 17:55 Post subject: