You should read this report on Russian demographics because it is scary and it goes with an upcoming Chieftain of Seir essay.

If you are intimidated by the size of the document you can just consider the executive summary to be an essay (which it practically is) and skip the rest.) Keep in mind as you are reading it that this document was put together by Russians. As such they pulled a lot of punches because they were afraid of the government.

At least, in the executive summary they did. The main body of the text is a little more hard hitting. But it still glossed over some serious issues.

This article provided a good overview of the problems Israel faced when it was bombing Orsirak. This is why I have always been skeptical that Israel could damage Iran’s nuclear program by itself. At least, if it restricted itself to conventional air attacks. As the article hints, there may be other options under consideration.

I found this story interesting mostly because I remembered the cover of the Economist so clearly. It must of been one of their better covers.

It is hard to take this article too seriously–the conclusions seem too sweeping and too simple–but it is worth the amusement of this sentence alone:

“A safer environment leads to smaller families with larger offspring, but places species at greater risk of extinction, according to research.”

If that doesn’t make you smirk, you probably have never met the barbarian horde of the Ethereal Land.

From AP…

Drug safety officials are calling for an urgent safety warning for Cipro and similar antibiotics.

The Food and Drug Administration is ordering the “black box” wording due to evidence the drugs may lead to tendon ruptures. They say the ruptures could result in serious injury that can leave patients incapacitated and in need of extensive surgery.

Demography Matters on Germany….

Germany lost about 97,000 inhabitants in 2007.

And Japan…

The Japanese government reported at the end of May that the number of children (all individuals under the age of 15 years old) had fallen to approximately 17,400,000. According to Japanese government estimates, if this trend continues, Japan is on course to lose somewhere between 26% and 31% of its total population.

From Russell Shorto essay in the New York Times….

I put this to Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau, who monitors global fertility on a daily basis from his perch in Washington. Is it possible that these are basically “good problems,” that Europeans, having trimmed their birthrates, are actually on the right path? That all they have to do is adjust their economies, find creative ways to shrink their cities, get more young and old people into jobs, so that they can keep their pension and health-care systems functioning?

Haub wasn’t buying it. “Maybe tinkering with the retirement age and making other economic adjustments is good,” he said. “But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”

Go to this Blog post by Gene Logsdon and look at the picture. Then go for a drive in the country and look at the pasture that the cows are eating on. It makes Logsdon’s argument for him.

From MSU News…..

Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. Minimum activity generally occurs as the cycles change. Solar activity refers to phenomena like sunspots, solar flares and solar eruptions. Together, they create the weather than can disrupt satellites in space and technology on earth.

The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today’s sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren’t sure why.

“It’s a dead face,” Tsuneta said of the sun’s appearance.

Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t like weather forecasters; They can’t predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700.

I would like to know how they know that there where no sunspots from 1650 to 1700. Where they looking at the sun back then?

First SAS Survival Secrets episode. Well worth watching if you have any interest at all in basic special forces craft. Unlike some many others this is realistic and not over the top.

The squeal can be found here.

From R-Squared…..

Based on some of the comments following my post on the “water car”, I think several people misunderstood the point. It was not to debunk the water car. You can in fact run a car with water as one of the reactants. I could even run a car on crushed ice or Jell-O, if I used the right second reactant.

My point was merely to show how a car could be run on water, and to further point out that it requires a second, very reactive substance. In other words, the “water car” is not running solely on water. The other point was that the reactive substance will always take more energy to produce than you will get back from splitting the water. That’s simply pointing out the thermodynamics. It doesn’t mean that there might not be times that it makes economic sense to do this – just that there is much more to the story than a car that runs on water.

I always thought that running car on water was just a myth cooked up by conspiracy buffs. Turns out, it can be done in theory, but it is just not economical because of the cost of the reactants.