Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg drives a taxi for a day, doesn’t reveal who he is until the passenger gets an inkling. Fascinating to see the attitudes on display, and how comfortable and casual things are. Can’t imagine that happening with any of the Aussie PMs since Hawke.
See that pale whitish-blue dot over on the right, under the rings? That’s the Earth as seen from Cassini, orbiting around Saturn. Beautiful.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear this from the US, but Australia, really? 41% of Australians don’t know the Earth takes a year to orbit the sun: Three in 10 people aren’t aware that evolution is still occurring, with a similar proportion of the public dismissing the idea that humans influence evolution in other creatures. On all of these measures, Australians’ knowledge has declined in the past three years, when the academy last polled the public. ...
Hey, just a little cross-promotion, my dad’s new site for his consulting firm is up at Lean Pursuit - they specialize in implementation of Lean principles for process improvement in a variety of companies, such as the manufacturing industry. If you haven’t heard of Lean techniques, you might know of Six Sigma - similar concept, all about reducing defects and smoothing the process of production. Anyway, I’m helping out with the site, so fingers crossed it gets up and running soon enough. ...
I’m sure this is going to get this little website banned in China, but yesterday the censorship of the internet there went through the looking glass: In an unlikely coincidence certainly unwelcome to China’s communist rulers, the stock benchmark fell 64.89 points on Monday, matching the numbers of the June 4, 1989 crackdown in the heart of Beijing. On the popular Sina microblog site, searches using ‘June 4’, ‘64.89’, ‘stock market’, and ‘benchmark Shanghai Composite Index’ were all blocked. ...