Connie Hedegaard met with California’s governor, Jerry Brown, and Mary Nicholls, who chairs the Californian Air Resources Board, in Sacramento to discuss how future co-operation might work to join the world’s largest and second largest carbon markets.

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So if currents change with global warming, which is expected – and if regions such as the Arctic Ocean become less saline as ice sheets discharge their contents into the sea – the regional patterns of peaks and troughs will also change.

“Everybody will still have the impact, and in many places they will get the average rise,” said Roderik van der Wal from the University of Utrecht, one of the team presenting their regional projections at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna.

“But places like New York are going to have a larger contribution than the average – 20% more in this case – and Reykjavik will be better off.”

Of the 13 regions where the team makes specific projections, New York sees the biggest increase from the global average, although Vancouver, Tasmania and The Maldives are also forecast to see above-average impacts.

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The Congressional Research Service found that during the Clinton-era shutdowns – which lasted 26 days – veterans’ services all but ceased, the National Park Service shuttered 368 sites, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped disease monitoring and toxic waste clean-up was suspended.

Over 30,000 applications for US visas were stalled each day and 200,000 passport applications sat unattended on desks.

Like all other departments, the State Department will have to determine which of the services it provides in foreign embassies are “essential”, but they would probably shut down or operate on skeleton staffing.

Customs and immigration at US airports and borders however would continue to function.

No new patients were enrolled in clinical research trials at the National Institute of Health, and its disease hotline went unanswered.

Alcohol, tobacco and firearms applications were affected, as were border patrol and law enforcement recruitment, delinquent child support case management and all of the national monuments in Washington DC.

Social security cheques were mailed, but administrators were unable to handle queries about address changes, lost cheques, new enrolees and the like.

This time around, government workers will likely have to shut off their Blackberries. Answering work emails is in contravention of the 1870 act which prohibits the government from receiving free labour.

Employees who try to sneak in some free work could land themselves a $5,000 (£3,118) fine or two years in prison.

Mostly a government shutdown works by furloughing nonessential government workers.

They are usually suspended without pay and later given back pay, even though they had not worked during that period.

That helps contribute to the irony: shutting down the government is expensive.

Fines and fees aren’t collected, the tourism industry suffers from the closure of national parks and employees are ultimately paid for not doing any work.

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Writing is a form of Thought Engineering. The works created are Machines that operate on the minds of those that choose to activate them, producing for each a unique result.

This is why the State, in its Monopoly of Force, controls Language. Prohibiting the assembly & distribution of Dangerous Machines that threaten to impair or destroy the operation of its own.

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The company’s Recycler robot uses data from a combination of visual sensors, metal detectors, weight measurements and tactile feedback from a robotic arm to pick out likely pieces of refuse and categorise them.

Through trial and error its machine learning software has been taught to recognise around a dozen types of material, including different plastics. And it can pluck out concrete, metal and wood from a stream of waste as it moves along a conveyor belt.

For more ambiguous types of waste, such as a piece of plywood with nails driven through it, the robot uses a spectrometer to recognise objects based on the unique patterns of light they reflect. This means the robot can distinguish the type of waste based on its colour and drop it into the appropriate bin.

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These are what the Victorians would have called occasional pieces: ‘on the occasion of the great earthquake.’ The form is an ancient one, but the platform is up to date. … In the past, it was gathered after the fact. Now, we have this facility to respond in real time.

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Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labour required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time, all the men in the armed forces, all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of physical well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry. This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins arc already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world., everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

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Indeed, a large proportion of our drugs and medicines come from plants, or are closely related to plant chemicals. There’s aspirin, morphine, caffeine, cocaine, quinine, and many more. It’s as if plants were going out of their way to help us.

In fact, it’s more like the opposite. Most of these drugs are poisons, produced by the plant to stop animals (that means you) from eating them. As a plant, you don’t want to get eaten, but being, well, rooted to the spot, you can’t exactly run away. All you can do is to make animals not want to eat you. So you fill yourself with noxious, or at least nasty-tasting, chemicals.

By contrast, many plants do want their seeds to get swallowed (but not chewed) by animals and birds, because this ensures that they are spread over a wide area. So they wrap them in delicious, colourful packages. This is why, with only a few exceptions, fruit are sweet and safe while while plant leaves, roots and stems are unpleasant, and often toxic.

In fact, this is quite possibly why the taste of bitter is so unpleasant. Plant toxins are usually alkaloids. Animals must have evolved to find alkaloids nasty, because many of them are poisonous and you survive longer if you don’t enjoy eating poison.

Caffeine, for example, is found in the seeds (“beans”) of the coffee plant, and it makes them taste bitter, to deter herbivores. But those seeds are themselves wrapped in a fruit called the coffee cherry, which is apparently sweet and tasty, although most of them get thrown away in the production of coffee. Coffee wants you to eat the fruit, but swallow the seeds whole, and thereby help spread its DNA. Quinine is one of the bitterest substances on earth, and it’s there to protect the bark of the tree. Nicotine is a bitter insecticide. And so on.

There are some plant chemicals which have medicinal effects which are entirely coincidental: St John’s Wort for example contains some molecules with interesting effects on animals, which are probably quite unrelated to its role in the plant (it absorbs light). It’s also true that plants contain lots of nutrients and the non-toxic ones are, by and large, “healthy” foods, compared to animal products. I say this as a vegetarian. But that doesn’t mean that they cure anything.

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The new tribes are global, fluid; unstuck in time & place. To find one another,simply live your truths out loud, without shame. Then listen.

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Dr. Young represents the surging interest of young Americans in combating the deadly epidemics ravaging the world’s poorest countries, fueled in part by the billions of dollars that the American government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations have poured into international health in recent year.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, an extreme shortage of health workers remains a critical barrier to fighting illness. The region bears a quarter of the world’s burden of disease, but has only 3 percent of its health care workers, according to the World Health Organization.

Public health experts say efforts like the one involving Dr. Young have proved particularly useful on a continent that sorely needs pediatricians, surgeons and other specialists to train African doctors and nurses in the field.

And demand for such opportunities is rising. More than 70 universities in the United States and Canada now offer formal academic programs in global health, most of them developed in just the past five years, according to the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.

“Today’s students really want to make a difference in the world,” said Michael H. Merson, director of Duke University’s Global Health Institute. “They have a passion for sacrifice and service. It reminds me of the ’60s.”

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