testing out windows 7 and excel 2010
Top 20 countries increase in confirmed swine flu cases:

and using wolframalpha for population figures to produce table of percent of confirmed cases:

This picture keeps entering my consciousness, not sure why but still I'm hoping for a miracle.

Commonsense, statistics and reality all tell me that life has moved on, has changed not ended, but there are no easy explanations.

So I pick up one foot drag it forward and keep moving forward!

I'm taking a leap into the unknown over the next few weeks.

I'll keep on riding the dragon, high or low!

Australia confirms first swine flu case

Australia confirms first swine flu case: "Australia has its first confirmed case of swine flu.
But the NSW woman who arrived in Brisbane on Thursday on flight QF16 from Los Angeles is no longer infectious and had a weak strain of the virus, authorities say.
Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the woman, who cannot be identified for privacy reasons, contracted the disease in late April while overseas and had recovered before returning to Australia"

SICK of garlic and wed rine? hic burp

try Oinksip!

It's a real worry! The Australian Department of Health and Ageing has issued a press release that states inter alia that "unlike bird flu, strains of swine influenza do not usually cause illness in humans, and in developed countries like Australia, relatively few people are regularly exposed to pigs."


Sheesh, the issue is that a H1N1 infection is killing people in Mexico, and has also been diagnosed in the USA, whilst closer to home twenty-two students from Auckland's Rangitoto College, may have been infected with the Swine Flu.

Someone at the DHA is blissfully ignorant of what is actually happening.

This nasty may mash up with avian flu components, or may burn itself out...

Latest updates http://agonist.org/topic/bird_flu





Reference: bird flu swine flu agonist H1N1 pandemic WHO

from The Australian

IAN Plimer calls himself an old-fashioned scientist. That means you question what others won't. You marry yourself to the data; you buck the received wisdom and political correctness of your colleagues.

When it comes to climate change, you say: "I was trained to be sceptical."

This is not exactly the view de jour when the great and the good, from Kevin Rudd to 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery and former US vice-president Al Gore, are singing from the same hymn sheet about the hydra-headed menace of global warming.

Australia's top earth scientist has inserted a typically discordant note into the chorus. In his latest book, Heaven and Earth, Plimer sets out the "missing science" of climate change and challenges the assumption that the world's warming is down to human activity.

Far from heating up to dangerous levels, the planet is in a lull in an ice age that began 37million years ago, he says.

True, the climate is changing within these cyclical parameters, but less dramatically than it has at other times in Earth's history and with none of the catastrophic consequences talked up by the doom-and-gloom merchants.

"There is always change going on," he tells Inquirer. "I don't dispute that. The extent and origin of it are another matter."

Plimer puts forward the case, in 485 closely argued pages, that far too much emphasis has been given to the level of atmospheric carbondioxide in the scientific modelling of climate change.

Contrary to what the Prime Minister may say in spruiking the carbon pollution reduction scheme, Plimer's position is that CO2 is not a pollutant but a necessity of life. For a start, it is food for plants. "Global warming and a high CO2 content bring prosperity and lengthen your life ... without CO2 there would be no complex life on Earth," he writes.

While an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide theoretically may contribute to temperature rise, Plimer says there is no evidence to show this and plenty of proof, if you choose to look for it, to the contrary.

He accepts that people can alter the weather: the "urban heat island effect" has proved towns and cities are warmer than thesurrounding countryside, and in Europe there is evidence that weekends tend to be cooler and wetter because of the drop in human activity.

But that is not the same as changing the climate of the planet as a whole; Plimer takes a very long view of the forces at play here.

By his reasoning, climate changes are cyclical and driven by the Earth's position in the galaxy, the sun, wobbles in the planet's orbit, ocean currents and plate tectonics. When he peers back in time, there were periods when atmospheric CO2 was much higher than it is now yet produced no disastrous shift in the climate.

To reduce climate change to the single variable of carbon emissions abandons "all we know about planet Earth, the sun and the cosmos", Plimer says, and that is a leap of faith no self-respecting scientist should take.

"Global warming has become the secular religion of today," he writes in the powerful conclusion to his book. Logic, questioning or contrary data are not permitted. To thumb your nose at the prevailing orthodoxy is to risk being branded a climate-change denier, a scientific knuckle-dragger, or worse. Plimer doesn't let it worry him. "My job is to profess my discipline and, if people don't like that, bad luck," he says.

WE'RE talking in a borrowed office at the back of the printing works where his new book is being packed. Plimer has been here since 6.30am signing copies. It is a cool morning, overcast outside, with rain spitting from the sky. A nice change for dry-as-a-bone Adelaide, his home for the past three years.

If climate change is biting, this is where the hurt could be most acute. When the PM toured the Murray River's dying lower lakes last winter, he said the parched expanse of exposed soilbed, southeast of the city, testified to the reach of global warming.

Adelaide's water supply is in serious trouble. Despite the state Government's insistence that water for households is guaranteed, the boss of the new Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Rob Freeman, blew the whistle this week when he told The Australian there might not be sufficient "carry" water to offset evaporation and seepage losses of moving supplies to the city's reservoirs.

This after a summer where up to 80 Adelaideans died in a record-setting heatwave and 173 Victorians died in the Black Saturday bushfires. Queensland and northern NSW were inundated with the worst flooding in years; a powerful cyclone threatened coastal communities between Townsville and Gladstone but spun out to sea. More frequent and fierce weather-related disasters, wasn't that what the global warmers were predicting?

Plimer agrees people are right to worry about what's next. Nature, however, has always shown a fierce face in Australia and the destructive summer of 2008-09 should be kept in perspective.

"We should be concerned about bushfires, cyclones," he says. "But they are natural disasters and this is a dry continent prone to them. Things come to pass."

Plimer knows a thing or two about taking on powerful interests. He is not a man to be dismissed easily; his impressive academic and publishing record attests to that.

In addition to his day job at the University of Adelaide's school of environmental sciences, he is emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and the author of seven books and 120 scholarly papers.

He is Australia's best-known academic geologist and certainly one of the most outspoken. Plimer has never backed away from a fight. In Telling Lies for God, he took on the creationists. When a group of them from Sydney, claiming to have evidence the wreck of Noah's Ark reposed on a mountain in Turkey, sued him for alleged defamation, Plimer hit straight back by mortgaging his house to cross-litigate in the Federal Court.

In part, he alleged that the creationists had breached the Trade Practices Act by engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct. The court disagreed but upheld an aspect of his case over copyright; the German Geological Society made him the first Australian to receive its Leopold von Buch medal.

Plimer went on to win one of Australia's top science awards, the Eureka prize, for his first book on global warming, A Short History of Planet Earth.

Plimer, 62, see parallels with his fight with the Christian fundamentalists. "The creationists were trying to teach a religious fundamentalism dressed up as science ... and they totally changed the nature science," he says.

"The science is now based on consensus, and we have thousands of scientists who have got everything to gain by saying the world is going to end. We have lost the tie to evidence. So I make great comparison ... between the way creationists operate and the way some of the rabid environmentalists and global warmers operate. The parallels are quite similar."

Plimer reserves his sharpest criticism for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has driven the international debate. Very much for the worse, in the professor's judgment. "The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism," he writes in Heaven and Earth.

Plimer argues that the IPCC is dominated by atmospheric scientists, who in turn are obsessed by carbon dioxide emissions, skewing the process. The problems are compounded by primitive computer modelling. He reviewed five computer predictions of climate made in 2000, underpinning IPCC findings, and found there was no relationship between predicted future temperature and actual measured temperature even during a short period. Ditto for a link between temperature and the atmospheric CO2 content.

"To get a complete view of the planet, you need to have far more than atmospheric scientists on the IPCC," Plimer says. "What they have done is separate the atmosphere from the way the world works ... you need solar physicists, you need cosmologists, you need astronomers, you need geologists, bacterial specialists and on you go ... we don't hear anything about those things from the IPCC."

But what about this ice age business? How does that square with melting polar ice, rising sea levels and 40C summers in northern Europe? Well, taking the last point first, Plimer says none of the temperature variations in the 20th century was outside the range of normal variability. There was alarm in the 1970s that the decreasing temperature was heralding another ice age, he says. After 1976, when temperatures started to rise again, the clamour broke out over the greenhouse effect and global warming. Yet since 1998 temperatures have been falling, to profound scientific silence, he says. "It is not possible to make computer model forecasts of climate change for the year 2040, 2100 or 2300 based on a few decades of data," he says.

The history of the planet is etched in rock, and Plimer says it shows that for half of the past six million years the Earth was warmer than it is now. The ice caps are geologically unusual; people were growing barley and wheat in Greenland 1000 years ago. Ice ages come and go, yet no one knows precisely why. Sea levels rise and fall. It was ever thus, Plimer says. The planet is in a constant state of flux. Why would that dynamic suddenly change?

buy a copy here: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

Susan Boyle from 1999 Cry me a river charity CD

hattip sandyd

Fastest rise to fame of anybody ever? 28 million you tube hits when you add up the different tubes.



From emails, blogs, twitters, bbs, newspapers, tv shows, phone texts, Susan Boyle is the name on everyones lips.

24 48 72 96 120 144 168 hours of increasing exposure to the world.

I’ve read countless posts and reports of people moved to tears and joy, revelling in the sound of music sung with such joy regardless of the cynical audience.

It’s a long way to the semi-final, and Susan is having some time-out from the media frenzy.

Time will tell if Susan can be someone to unite people in caring again about all folk, maybe too much too expect of her, but she sure has made some folk take a second look at what is important, and to top it all off she sang one of my all time fav songs. w00t!

A song I love, and a version that brings a tear to the eye and joy to the heart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
embedding disabled by request

Without a doubt that is the biggest surprise I have had in three years on this show! HQ version.

Funny how life happens when you least expect it. An email enquiry from a young lady in her first year at uni, about Catholic mens attitudes to women, led me to some googling, and then I re-discovered this post http://graham72.blogspot.com/2007/07/life-is-living-day-today.html

and serendipity or synchronicity gentle reader had me reflecting on this picture:



look at the flow of direction of the surroundings of both Mary and Martha, Jesus is conscious of both women, and there is a balance and equilibrium at work in Vermeers depiction of the scene.

I fail so often to maintain that balance, juggling so many things and not stopping to smell the flowers or to really revel in a wonderful sunset.

hattip Neil for the painting, and kudos to Erin for asking a question, that has far more import for me than she can realise in her tender years.

YAY life is wonderful, and it's almost


and work, meditation, worship and family will all intersect once again. w00t!

Ya just got to love google, the goddess does not always manage to index stuff.

So I wanted to find out who supplied Inform, INFORM, brochures pamphlets etc

no joy

so had to ring around, and finally got the information.

and edited it unto the highest edit to get it to fit without crashing the CSS!

INFORM

original site here inform

in memory of Scott, a kindred spirit.

From zerohedge blogspot hattip tjfxh @ agonist.org

When the data is too depressing whiz over to Dear Planetary Astronomer Mike for some out of this world stuff!

come back and let's try again!

graham waves gently at Cranbourne visitor!