[jules' pics] fire-flowers

Cancelled last year due to self-restraint, last night was Kamakura hanabitaikai (fireworks).

As the sun set, a zillion people gathered on the beach
The Japanese don't need telling to be self-restrained. It was all very calm - these girls hardly moved during this 8 second exposure.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 7/26/2012 12:51:00 PM

Loss of Arctic sea ice '70% man-made'

Inevitably, this news article is illustrated with a poor polar bear standing on an iceberg. But the study wasn't really anything to do with polar bears:

The radical decline in sea ice around the Arctic is at least 70% due to human-induced climate change, according to a new study, and may even be up to 95% down to humans – rather higher than scientists had previously thought.

You wouldn't have guessed it from the write up, but this is work that Jonny Day did last year while he was working with us here at RIGC (he did revise it at Reading University, so it's entirely reasonable that they get some credit too). Hopefully our next recruit (advert) will be similarly successful! Jonny was only here for about 8 months (filling in at the end of the last 5 year project) so a high-profile paper in ERL seems like a pretty good return. The paper investigated how much of the decline in sea ice was plausibly due to various natural phenomena like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Arctic Oscillation. The answer...maybe a little, but not a lot.

It was nearly published in GRL some months ago, but after several increasingly positive review cycles (by which time all the original reviewers had recommended acceptance), the editor then found yet another new one (by this time we were on reviewer #6!!) who asked for yet more analyses, at which point it was rejected...and a few days later, another paper on the same topic appeared in that journal.

It doesn't seem to be up on line quite yet but is probably due later today. Rumour has it that Jonny is also making his screen début - I'll be sure to put a link up when it appears :-)

Ok, it's up now. Enjoy!

[jules' pics] Wisteria muncher

I wonder what he or she will be when they grow up.
Evening:

Morning: There are now several tendrils free of leaves.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 7/25/2012 01:41:00 PM

[jules' pics] Not a flower

I expect there are more flowers to blog, but then I saw this car outside Motomachi Starbucks (of course). Perhaps the reader will tell me if it is fundamentally a special car, or just a specially decorated normal car.

Perhaps the reason for all the funny cars in that part of Yokohama is that, in the city, cars are pretty useless if used only for transport. Here is something far more useful - the "one touch picnica". Those who care to check the EXIF, will see that poor James has crumbled, and bought me a nice new P&S camera. He made me wait until it had gone down by 10,000¥ and the Panasonic vapourware competitor had been announced, but my argument of taking it on our upcoming trip to the mountains seemed to finally tip the scales. With a minor alteration(*), it just fits in the Goretex case I made for the S100. Note handy usefulness of EGU badge lanyards!
(*It is a slightly tight fit, so I sewed some ribbon to the outside of the case which enables it to be eased over the lens. Will just have to wait and see if the tightness/friction causes the case to wear out too fast.)

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 7/24/2012 10:05:00 AM

Heatstroke

We seem to have missed rainy season this year (not all of Japan was so lucky) and moved straight into heatstroke season, which means it's time for the locals to go and run around all day outside in full sun until they collapse.

Apparently, some local idiot thought it might be fun to run 10km to work a couple of mornings ago. But other than losing several pounds of fluid and nearly drowning in his own sweat, he is no worse for it and is threatening to repeat the feat occasionally over the summer. In my defence, it was actually cloudy and relatively unsweltering that morning, and most of the route is under trees. Still broke all previous records for slowness though.

[jules' pics] Aliens

While we're on purpley theme, here is a photo from December that I seem to have forgotten to blog...

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 7/20/2012 02:35:00 PM

[jules' pics] Employment Opportunity!!!

Come and work with this nice man (and me) in lovely Japan! The position is part of a big new multi-centre project which has just got its English name, ICA-RUS: "Integrated Climate Assessment - Risks, Uncertainties and Society". There is the opportunity to work with many of the most active climate scientists in Japan as well as scary James. Actually James is the nice one - and he only uses his scathing expressions on me! The working conditions are pretty good too...

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 7/19/2012 10:00:00 PM

[jules' pics] Agapanthus

I used to call these plants "those oniony things", but now I can never forget their real name, since my mother-in-law corrected me. These days I bewilder poor James by squealing "agapanthus" from the back of the tandem every few minutes (they are very common flowers).

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 7/19/2012 01:39:00 PM

The writing on the (open access) wall

I've been meaning to write something about open access for some time. There seems to be quite a head of steam building up, especially in the UK with several kites flown about making all publicly-funded research open access. This is the latest: 

The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet.

Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world.

The bleating from the paywall-protected publishing industry has been shrill and feeble in equal measure. Good riddance to them.

Sticking out nail

Just had the results from the annual health check farce. Again, I got a fairly dismal report. Well, actually, that's too pessimistic. I only had two poor results out of the battery of tests, but the overall score assigned seems to be the worst of any individual test, so the headline result doesn't look great.

My "problems"? Firstly, my pulse is low, in a typical (and entirely benign, so far at least) case of "athlete's heart" (though it might well be as much genetic as athletic in my case). And secondly, my waist is a few mm over the threshold for "Metabolic Syndrome", aka "being fat". As an average Japanese person, I'm quite the failure.