In grasping the basic inequity of the situation, students themselves were ahead of the journalists and commentators. As early as 2009 students in the self-designated "Research and Destroy" collective at the University of California, Santa Cruz, issued their famous "Communique from an absent future": "'Work hard, play hard' has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for ... what? - drawing hearts in cappuccino foam ... We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives."

...

As I've toured universities, squats and occupation camps to talk about the roots of the crisis there have been times when I've had to say: "The term graduate without a future does not mean you literally have no future." Because the prevalent psychology among young people has become dangerously nihilistic, even for the activists.

...

As the years have ticked by - with the freshmen of the Lehman Brothers year now into their second year as postgrads, or second year on the dole - the realisation has dawned on the graduate without a future: you have to make the future yourself. And if you look hard enough - look past the unkempt beards and the party-smeared mascara - they are having a pretty good go at it.

Government corruption in Puerto Rico has reached the point where employers admit that in recent decades has become a game of routine separate budgets to ensure their contracts with the government and are willing to pay officials good slice of the profits of these contracts if the favor.

That point where a vague disquiet about the behaviour of a certain group of people goes from being a minority concern to being a societal disgust. I have just felt listening to conversations and reading around that the whole nature of the debate is now on a different ground: Its no longer "should we do something about the banks..?" and has moved on to "what shall we do about the banks?"

Nobody seems to understand why there are no bnkers in handcuffs when it is quite plain that a fraud has taken place. Politicians who try to hide their inaction behind banking rules may find themselves swept away; people want these guys to get prison, not a pension.

vince Cable must be haivng the time of his life right now, he's going around talking about breaking up banks nd he's being taken seriously and being regarded as "The Man with the Plan". If he plays his cards right he might even ride the wave of public revulsion into an unstoppable force for legislation within the year.

But they've got to keep the drip feed of new debaucheries coming or the publicwill move on to new candy. suddenly the upcoming party conferences look very interesting. Labour may have to do a very public renunciation of Blairism in order to gain credibility on the subject, at which point things will get very fun very quickly

keep to the Fen Causeway

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995(1). In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010(2). In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99 per cent confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004(3). In 2004, the Texas tycoon T. Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82 million barrels" per day of liquid fuels(4). (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91 million(5)). In 2005, the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia ... cannot materially grow its oil production."(6) (Since then its output has risen from 9 million barrels a day to 10, and it has another 1.5 million in spare capacity(7,8)).

Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time. A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun(9). The constraints on oil supply over the past ten years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that.

Maugeri's analysis of projects in 23 countries suggests that global oil supplies are likely to rise by a net 17m barrels per day (to 110m) by 2020. This, he says, is "the largest potential addition to the world's oil supply capacity since the 1980s." The investments required to make this boom happen depend on a long-term price of $70 a barrel. The current cost of Brent crude is $95(10). Money is now flooding into new oil: a trillion dollars was spent over the past two years, a record $600bn is lined up for 2012(11).

In more than one presentation the figure of 100 Mb/d for oil production in 2020 was put forth. The same old discourse sides these forecasts: technological development is unlocking new reserves, as long as the capital and the investment are there production can continue growing, or at least remain at present levels. This provided, of course, the incentive from high oil prices.

Strikingly this is the same rhetoric underlying the renewable energy optimistic thinking: as long as oil prices remain high and the capital is there, the infrastructure can expand to cover the gap left by declining fossil fuel production. Maybe even to support further economic growth. This is all supposed to happen within the current economic framework, in just a few years and without feed-in tariffs.

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Many of us question ourselves what future ASPO can have in the present setting. It can either remain a loose scientific organisation or push a more political structure to lobby on the institutions that have the means to act. I don't think ASPO should take the latter path, but more than that, it seems that it is presently unable to do so. Is there place for ASPO after the peak? This is the question many of us are facing.

Cow

The Venn diagram is the Algebra 1 of data visualization and no, this is not how they work.

Approximately 47% of US voters will cast their ballot for this doofus.

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

Even as rumours fly in the popular media, physicists have begun quietly cheering at CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland. "Without a doubt, we have a discovery," says one member of the team working on the ATLAS experiment, who wished to remain anonymous. "It is pure elation!"

...

Physicists working on ATLAS saw hints of a Higgs particle last year (see: 'Detectors home in on Higgs boson'), but the first solid results from the full 2012 data set arrived last week. The signal was seen in the decay of a Higgs-like particle into two high-energy photons -- one of the cleanest ways to glimpse a Higgs among the hundreds of trillions proton-proton collisions recorded in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The data contained "a significant excess" of collision events at a mass of around 125 gigaelectronvolts, the ATLAS researcher told Nature, which is the same value suggested by last year's data. The same signal is present in other Higgs decay channels, too, such as those in which the new Higgs-like particle decays into four leptons.

...

"Fine, there is something there -- a resonance," says Martinus Veltman, emeritus professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the standard model. "Now we have to find out if it has all the properties that the Higgs is supposed to have."

Yet despite the Home Office's obsession with language qualifications, each official I have come into personal contact with in this process - the test staff, the council official who checked my form, the Home Office call centre staff, the officers presiding over my naturalisation ceremony - all demonstrated a striking difficulty in structuring a grammatical English sentence, making the whole exercise descend into farce. I remember being asked, `Is you here for the English test?' and `Was you able to pass an English test, and can you talk proper?' without a trace of irony.

The test takes the form of 20 multiple-choice questions, which one can only revise for by buying the official Life in the UK handbook from the Home Office (RRP £9.99) and the accompanying revision guide (RRP £5.99). One cannot simply take the test using common sense, because the Life in the UK book is so riddled with factual errors that if I were to give the correct answers, I would fail the test. I could only pass the test by memorising erroneous material.

From the Life in the UK handbook I learned many new and interesting things. Apparently, Magna Carta was signed in 1316, some 101 years later than is commonly thought, and Hitler invaded Russia in 1942 - which must have come as a shock to those Russians fighting the invading Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941. Being a political historian, I naturally homed in on the fact that every single description of who was allowed to vote at various times in British history was comically wrong. Had it been an essay I was marking for my students, I would have given it a Fail.