Category: politics

Mortality rates are still rising in the UK – and everyone is ignoring how many more people are dying.

Interestingly my age group is still doing OK as you can see from the above chart.

As the article says:

Warnings for the future

Something is going very wrong. And whatever is going on is unique to the UK because in no other European country have there been overall falls in life expectancy that look at all like this. The figures for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are almost certainly as bad as England, but no one has as yet bothered to study them in any detail – let alone tried to work out where they are heading.

Very interesting the full article is here 

Today I ventured out of Quito with Margaret (who I met in Samara in my first language class) to find The Equator.

Armed with my Garmin GPS we took the public transport buses, 50 cents for a 30km journey, to Mitad del Mundo where the Equator was determined in 1736 and the nearby Museo Inti-Nan which claims to be on the actual equator as determined by someones GPS. However , my Garmin told a different story! Here are the traces for the day:-

The lower trace is Mitad del Mundo, the centre one is museo inti-Nan and the one at zero is my Garmin…
Wikipedia has more on the subject here

Before we did the Equator we visited the rim of the old Pululahua crater which was interesting to see a community sitting on top of a volcano, like Yellowstone National Park in the USA!

The photographs of the day are on Picasa.

B

By the way the trick of showing the water going down the plughole in opposite directions in each hemisphere is revealed in some detail here