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.

From the Washington Post….

Watch out for cars with bumper stickers.

That’s the surprising conclusion of a recent study by Colorado State University social psychologist William Szlemko. Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other “territorial markers” not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage — by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

It does not seem to matter whether the messages on the stickers are about peace and love — “Visualize World Peace,” “My Kid Is an Honor Student” — or angry and in your face — “Don’t Mess With Texas,” “My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student.”

H/T Marginal Revolution

Part one below….

The rest can be found in the sidebar here….

To much feel good fluff. But well worth watching to the end.

The Midwest is getting soaked…..

At 90, Mary McMahon is old enough to remember the record-setting floods of 1929, when the Cedar River crested at 20 feet. Thursday morning, she came downtown with her son to compare the flood of her childhood with the flood of 2008.

“I just can’t believe it,” she said, as she stood in front of U.S. Bank on Second Avenue and watched dirty brown river water flowing up the street in front of her. “It was bad then, but it was nothing like this… This is worse, a lot worse.”

Infrastructure is failing….

Engineers and National Guard teams examined dams across this storm-deluged state Tuesday looking for signs of damage from the high water that led to the major collapse that nearly emptied Lake Delton.

The huge breach in an embankment holding back Lake Delton released a torrent that washed away three houses and a stretch of highway. The weekend’s storm also displaced thousands of Indiana residents and was blamed for 15 deaths in the Midwest and elsewhere.

And cities are being evacuated……

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — The Des Moines River has punched a 100-foot wide hole in a levee, allowing water to gush into an area near the downtown of Iowa’s capital and largest city early this morning.

A mandatory evacuation has been ordered for 270 homes in Des Moines. Many residents have already left the area under a voluntary evacuation request issued yesterday.

From China Daily……

A draft law in Liaoning province makes it an obligation for adult children to contact or visit their parents regularly.

It is the first legislation of its kind in the country.

The province’s standing committee of the people’s congress recently released the draft – Regulation on Protection of Rights and Interests of the Aged – to seek public opinion.

It is expected to become law by the end of the year.

An article says if children do not live with their parents, they should “often send greetings or go home to visit them”.