- Gotta love German. Try saying it out loud: “Die Beobachtung ferner Quasare, das holografische Prinzip und der Quantenschaum der Raumzeit”.
- Resolutely put away my phone in order to read a book instead. Then remembered that the book is in the phone.
- Ever wonder what the scarf-wearing Somali girls are going to do with their lives? Judging from two of Jr’s classmates in junior high, they’re going to be software engineers.
- The question of archaeology’s practical usefulness should be treated as an empirical issue, open to unprejudiced investigation. Nobody will believe us if we just claim that what we do is self-evidently useful. I believe that almost all archaeology is useless from the practical perspective, but fun. In the unlikely event of any practical benefit, it must be solidly documented before we make claims.
- Headphones with meaty bass. One of the best investments in sheer enjoyment I’ve made in ages.
- I have no gravitas. Students keep asking me how old I am. Oh well, an archaeologist is never older than the last grave she excavated.
- In about 1280, French sculptors worked on both the Cathedral and the main synagogue of Cologne.
- My wife’s the hardest-working woman in the sunflower seed shelling business.
- Strange to read this R.E. Howard bio by Mark Finn. He has considerable stylistic ambition, but shaky ability, and very emphatically no copy editor. I rarely read books that feel this home-made.
- I’m starting a Christian splinter group. I teach that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. And that he acts in the world. And that this means that it is neither possible nor useful to influence his actions through deeds or faith. He careth not for praise, prayer, ritual nor sin. He is busy running every aspect of the world in an optimal way.
- Movie: Mad Max Fury Road. Post-apocalyptic grotesque road warrior story with extra everything. Grade: Pass with distinction.
- Middle age: when you no longer keep track of your grownup points, but of your youth points.
- I’m deeply hostile to any research strategy that aims to propagate a pre-formulated view of a matter rather than investigate whether that view has empirical support. Even in cases where I find the viewpoint politically sympathetic.
- In the 11th and 12th centuries, French and English cemeteries were often inhabited, particularly by war refugees. You find lots of pottery and other household waste.
- Robert E. Howard created Conan the Barbarian and wrote hundreds of stories. His neighbours thought he was crazy: while writing he would shout the dialogue.
- June sun woke me at 05:15. These swings in day length are why Swedes have such a bipolar national character.
- Jrette reads stuff she wrote four years ago in 1st grade and is embarrassed about her spelling. I’m like dude, my spelling hasn’t improved one bit in the past four years.
- Jrette’s entire school sings to us. Only one of the teachers has a mike. She’s the only audible participant.
- Wonder if L.S. de Camp ever tried LSD.
- I’m rapidly becoming post-parental. I left for work before Jrette and her buddy had even woken up. Jrette called me to ask for some money zapped onto her visa card so she can buy a birthday present for another buddy. She’s buying the present and going to the party by public transport without any help from grownups. The girl is still eleven! I guess this is what you get when you aim to raise capable and independent kids.
- Gómez is a Gothic loan word and cognate with Lat. homo.
- Falafel is fried pea soup.
- Robert E. Howard lived all his life with his TB suffering mother and killed himself when it was clear that she had only hours left to live. This has often been interpreted as him being unable to live without her. In his REH bio, Mark Finn makes an interesting and well-supported argument that turns this on its head. REH had been suicidal for years, but lived on because he was his mother’s primary care giver. He had in fact waited to be released from his duties.
- Jrette’s 30-week run as a Swedish kids’ TV celebrity has started. The show is called Superhemligt.
- The tooth layout of my jawbone is completely asymmetrical. One half is regular, the other half all curved and squiggly. Good thing the soft stuff covers it up and evens things out, or I would never have been able to reproduce. People have a hard-wired attraction towards symmetrical partners.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
Something I picked up somewhere: “You are middle aged if you, when faced with two different temptations, choose the one you will come home earliest from…”
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Useful German science phrase: “Nicht eben falsch”.
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She’s buying the present and going to the party by public transport without any help from grownups. The girl is still eleven!
Quite a contrast to the US, where she would not be allowed to ride Amtrak by herself. Amtrak will not sell tickets to unaccompanied minors under age 12. Airlines will, but you have to designate an adult at each end of the journey for drop-off and pickup (it’s one of the few exceptions to the rule that only passengers and airline/airport employees can enter the secure zone). And don’t get me started on the subject of helicopter parenting–just be thankful that it’s rare to nonexistent in your country.
Useful German science phrase: “Nicht eben falsch”.
The version I’ve heard is, “Das ist nicht recht; das ist doch nicht falsch.” The second clause is usually translated to English as, “That is not even wrong,” although “nevertheless” would be a closer translation of “doch” in that context.
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You know, I always wonder why the skeptical movement does not talk more about de Camp. He was happily poking away at misconceptions in the 1950s, even if his approach was less “let us smite and scorn the wicked conmen” than “aren’t we humans funny creatures! Look at some of the ways we deceive ourselves. But the surer we are that we are the civilized and rational ones, the more likely we are doing something even sillier.” He did a lot more than using bad pop psychology to write two biographies.
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Eric, Amtrak is the interurban lines I believe. Kids are allowed to ride those like anybody else in Sweden, except the overnight services. The trains that Jrette uses are the commuter train into town and the Stockholm subway.
I’ve read some Lin Carter but never to my knowledge any LSD Camp.
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Amtrak does run the interurban and long-distance services in the US. But they also run quite a few regional services. The Amtrak service in my town is the Downeaster line, from Boston North Station to Portland and Brunswick in Maine. (To go beyond Boston I would have to take the subway to either South Station or Back Bay Station, which serve the lines going south and west from Boston.) Scheduled time from here to Boston is about 80 minutes, not that much different from commuter lines to outlying areas. Your daughter would not be allowed to go from here to Boston on her own. And there are many parents in the US who would be shocked to hear that a kid her age was allowed to use a big-city metro system on her own. Not that I agree with those parents, but the threat that one of those busybodies might call Child Protective Services is something that parents of kids that age cannot ignore. And yes, that means we have been raising a generation of kids so coddled that they would have a hard time getting around on their own.
Part of it is racism. There is an assumption among many Americans (especially those who aren’t from big cities; those who are can readily see that this isn’t true) that buses and subways are for people with darker skin than you and I. A big part of what drove suburbanization in this country from 1945 into at least the 1990s was the desire of many light-skinned people to move away from people with darker skin. Public transport options in most of those suburbs are between paltry and nonexistent, and in many of them the prevalence of automobile traffic (often at high speed–many US local streets have wider lanes than German Autobahns) coupled with inadequate or nonexistent sidewalks makes walking a not-very-safe option as well.
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To be fair, Scandinavia has no big cities. At 1.4 million, Stockholm is the biggest one we’ve got. But why whould the size of the city correlate with risk to children? Sure, there are more homicidal maniacs in New York than in Stockholm. But there are also a much greater number of potential victims, so the risk of any one child getting attacked probably isn’t significantly different.
My wife and I saw the bus-and-skin-colour thing in Minneapolis once. Everybody on the bus looked either African American or Native American. A friend of mine reports that if you cycle to work in Mississippi wearing middle-class clothes, then you are assumed to belong to another demographic: the mentally ill.
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Martin, you would like him, especially his nonfiction. He was an educated layman in several humanities fields, publishing in “Technology and Culture” and volunteering on archaeological excavations. This created problems when he read an earlier generation of writers who were better storytellers but were not so widely travelled or well-educated. His wandering swordsmen tend to worry about their budgets, get day jobs between adventures, and survive through technical knowledge or equipment not by sheer prowess. But popular books on ancient engineers, the Atlantis myth, and the Scopes trial have a shorter half-life than cracking good yarns about cossacks waving sabres and colours out of space.
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Not so may of de Camp’s novels were translated. I seem to recall that he was good at getting the nuts and bolts right, but was not always inspiring.
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Of course archaeology has no practical value! But that statement ignores its true importance. Practical things are important because they give us food, shelter, better ways to kill each other… in other words, the same basic things every animal wants and needs.
Archaeology is different. It (and some other disciplines) are like art and sculpture. They fill a place in our lives that enriches us emotionally. They define us as human, and we like them because we are human. They are part of us. Any attempt to describe them in purely practical terms must fail, because it assumes that humans can be valued in strictly practical terms. We can’t. If you take away our fascination with art, music, literature, archaeology, palaeontology etc, you no longer have a human. Just a rather poorly insulated ape.
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But why whould the size of the city correlate with risk to children?
I suspect the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is at work. The combination of lead-based paint in older housing stock and emissions from vehicles burning leaded gasoline is now believed to have played a major role in the rise of crime rates in the 1960s-1980s (crime has been dropping since the 1990s), and of course the impacts were heaviest in larger cities, which had more traffic. But the lead poisoning angle is something that has only gotten attention in the last few years, so the gullible tend to associate crime with big cities. The association doesn’t hold up under a detailed look: Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis are significantly more dangerous than New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. (This isn’t only true of the US either: many Brazilian and Mexican cities are more dangerous than São Paulo and Mexico City, the two largest cities in the Western Hemisphere.)
The 24/7 cable news cycle doesn’t help here. Today, people throughout the US hear about incidents that 30 years ago would have been at most local stories. But there is more to it than that. I lived in Miami during the era of the cocaine cowboys, when the city had the highest murder rate in the US. But it was generally understood that if you weren’t in one of the high risk groups (drug dealers, Mariel refugees, or people in families where domestic disputes were settled with guns), you were unlikely to be murdered unless you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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As if we didn’t already know – but this seals it for good:
http://dienekes.blogspot.hk/2015/06/kennewick-man-was-native-american.html
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This is a funny one:
http://shanghaiist.com/2015/06/19/cfa-apologizes-racist-posters-blames-french-designer.php
At the Asian football cup, the Mainland football association put up posters warning players and supporters to watch out for the “Black skinned, yellow skinned, white skinned team.” They were of course talking about the Hong Kong team, which has some African and European players who are eligible to play for Hong Kong by virtue of length of residency, along with a majority of local Chinese players.
Hong Kong football supporters took deep offence at being described in this manner, and so did the Hong Kong football federation.
So at the first match, when Hong Kong were playing Bhutan (who we beat 7 – 0; no real surprise), when the Bhutanese national anthem was played, the Hong Kong spectators all politely applauded. But then when the Chinese national anthem was played (representing Hong Kong) all of the Hong Kong spectators booed.
Mainlanders were horrified.
Yes, Hong Kong people really are different from their Chinese compatriots over the border in the Mainland, and Mainlanders keep not understanding why.
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This is another funny one.
I wanna go to the Spratly Islands for my next holiday – they have tropical weather, fresh tomatoes and eggplant, pork chops and…and…and some really menacing looking PLA soldiers stationed down there.
http://shanghaiist.com/2015/06/19/south-china-sea-paradise-of-veggie-gardens.php
No wonder the Americans have been flying spy planes over the place – they’re trying to figure out whether it’s safe to land so they can engage in some erm joint military exercises.
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Martin, here is a language lesson for how to dismiss charlatans. While the US National Review is conservative, it wastes no time chewing out nominally Republican presidential contender Donald Trump in a “colourful” way. http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2015/06/19/national-review-goes-oh-snap-on-donald-trump/#more-35897
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Whole paper: “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe” by Haak et al.
http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14317.epdf?referrer_access_token=XLqAYn7fHKVAHQ1DPSqJlNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0Pp60Qt_x2EIKCBsT-Ant7nQmJ6WsC7MN8BEbK44DH3tAJJSioK0v_t5dXCRw1SOT4Ti3P0v-iG7O7bK9xEx5ehsTixcfEtCnst6sOg6WUgv_FmUqPlgd_maC8U-gNPzuOpcaaVZxLY4UBnl0nRj57yKSXrWBaMQE3RAiOWc0llGQ%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=www.nature.com
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Their samples included Scandy HGs, BTW.
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Splinter group? Martin, Baal/Offler is too busy running things at Zeta Reticuli to be bothered with other stuff.
-More entrants in the presidential race make the field a target-rich environment for skeptics and comedy professionals alike…
Trump’s speech has a Chinese in it. And some raping, drug-trading Mexicans (but no racism at all, honest). At the end of the segment, the comedians who will be watching the election unfold are sent into orgiastic bliss.
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China obviously invested a lot in that island air base. But that kind of infrastructure can get old fast. During the cold war, the major powers showed interest in STOL/VTOL aircraft since airfields are such obvious target for nukes. When USSR collapsed, so did the interst in short-field performance.
-But with the recent invention of circuit boards that can scale up neural networks for massive parallel processing, we have the specter of cheap missiles that can interpret video input in real time.
Imagine a single missile who homes in on that island, and sends sub-munitions on to every aircraft while ignoring decoys, plus cratering the runway.
The American hardware is just as vulnerable, they depend on big fat aircraft that need a couple of miles of runway.
(Sweden used to be prepared for this kind of war, but the underground hangars and most of the road airfields have been decommissioned)
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“Neutron scattering helping conserve the world’s great historic monuments” http://phys.org/news/2015-06-neutron-world-great-historic-monuments.html
Actually it is just a diagnostic tool, but it shows which artefacts are in danger.
— — — — —
“He is busy running every aspect of the world in an optimal way”.
But some of the demands contradict the others. The software cannot always handle this, leading to system crashes. We now have theo-cybernetic explanation for disasters and war!
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Pardon me for adding so many comments, I just had to get this in before Sunday:
The summer solstice will occur 21 june kl. 18:38 (Swedish time) (Beware of hippies crowding Stonehenge). Then we will face winter again.
In some countries, Sunday is also father’s day.
“Being a father finally pays off” http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/being-a-father-finally-pays-off-2015061999444
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More entrants in the presidential race make the field a target-rich environment for skeptics and comedy professionals alike
Tell me about it. I get to put up with these loons gallivanting about the region for the next seven months or so. Gov. Christie’s campaign (he hasn’t announced yet, but that doesn’t mean he’s not running) seems to have mistaken me for someone likely to vote for him, so they send me e-mails which I promptly move to the junk folder, along with those from the slimy jerk who allegedly represents my district in Congress, and various other political missives in a similar vein. The scary thing is that one of these idiots is going to win the Republican nomination for President, and have a non-negligible chance of winning. That kind of politics sometimes works–see what happened in Denmark this week.
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#19 – Birger: No. China has a sizeable domestic fleet of large trailer suction hopper dredgers (like Holland and Belgium) because it has to do a large amount of annual maintenance dredging to keep ports like Shanghai and Tianjin open to deep draught container vessels. A bit of reclamation like that is just a short, quick job – not costly at all.
The West (apparently including you) are assuming it is intended as an offensive military base. But as you observe, viewed that way, it makes to sense at all – very easy to attack and destroy, with no defensive capability at all. The Chinese are not total fools – they wouldn’t build such a vulnerable base if they intended it for offensive military purposes.
The Chinese have been saying all along that it is (a) a forward base for marine search and rescue operations, and (b) research.
Having seen the thing completed, I conclude they are telling the truth. It is little more than a landing strip and vegetable garden. It is not intended for military dominance of the South China Sea at all – it is an advance base for peaceful purposes. The most sinister purpose (if that is the right word) is that it could be a forward base for oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea, something they have been doing for decades.
Just occasionally, it pays to suspend cynicism and just listen to what people are actually saying. The Americans are grand-standing, sabre rattling and trying to make political capital out of what is just a forward air base for peaceful purposes. The only real point of contention is that the ownership of the Spratly Islands is disputed by several different countries, and China has just unilaterally taken ownership – but not for the purpose of attacking other countries. If that had been the purpose, then they have just built the most stupid, useless, vulnerable air base imaginable.
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The Allentoft et al. paper is here:
http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2015/06/17/june-pieces-of-my-mind-1-2/
This and the Haak et al. paper both come to broadly the same conclusions, using different data sets.
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Haha! No it’s not.
Here it is:
http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14507.epdf?referrer_access_token=zWo-VRrH1I5xV5EsT97V2dRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NHq_Jtpws9ynxYZjlxxztaCz7tPh7sUO0pVfwYEbQOc-eZBRmB_Vy653FgC0Pw5zM0ssBgQ7zdnrA6GVPdkhgNgzNFNaCR2-_1hz3R_vDvSfks3nKPjJe6OUYe1U3YBZj7aNIoQFCDV1n1LHsNPKSt61c-cAHhOFLQFEho8hGcnQ%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=www.nature.com
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I had to laugh at this, from Birger’s link:
‘But George Logan, aged eight, said: “Christ, I’ll be glad when it’s over. There’s no gratitude, that’s what gets me. He struts around all day like Billy Big Bollocks, acting like a handmade card and being served toast in bed is his absolute due. First thing Monday morning I’m going to make him wish he’d had the snip. If I have to pay my Father’s Day tax that bastard’s going to earn it.” ‘
It makes me glad my daughter has almost always totally ignored Father’s Day, with the sole exception of last year – and there is no rational explanation for that rather odd departure from her normal behaviour.
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The most sinister purpose (if that is the right word) is that it could be a forward base for oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea, something they have been doing for decades.
The context here is that there are overlapping territorial claims in those waters. Vietnam and the Philippines have claims here in addition to China’s claims, and before that base was built, the other two countries had much stronger claims than China’s. So I would expect reasonable people in Hanoi and Manila to take exception to this base. I agree that it’s not primarily intended as a military base, but there is a large military force available to back up the claims China is making in the area. Rather, the effect of this base (and perhaps its intent, though I don’t claim to be able to read the minds of China’s leaders) is to strengthen the Chinese claims. It feels a bit like Russia taking the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine: no (or not many) shots fired, but an annexation all the same.
China is now the world’s #2 military power. If someone takes a cynical view of what the US and Russian governments do, it’s also rational to take a cynical view of what China’s government does.
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China is not the world’s #2 military power. It’s air force and navy are nowhere close. It has defensive capability, but not offensive capability.
China has one refitted outdated Russian aircraft carrier, which it uses for training.
America has armed Taiwan with 150 fighter aircraft that are far superior to anything that China has.
This is in no way comparable to the Ukraine.
China has a lot of merchant shipping passing through the southern part of the South China Sea, which is very vulnerable to bad weather, and they have a lot of problems every year. They are establishing forward capability for weather forecasting and search and rescue, and they have offered to extend the availability of these services to other countries in the region.
No one was stopping Vietnam or the Philippines from establishing similar facilities, but they didn’t do it.
What right has America got to dictate to China that it can’t take steps to improve the safety of its own merchant shipping?
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“What right has America got to dictate to China that it can’t take steps to improve the safety of its own merchant shipping?”
None. Or rather, the right of might. Which will of course become the sacred ststus quo after a few decades. As for “human rights” it is a matter of trade and $$$ as we have seen in the conflict between Sweden and Saudi Arabia about wether flogging bloggers is bad or not. The Saudis bought the votes of all members of the Arab League to condemn Sweden for condemning flogging.
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Sorry that I have not managed to find more local Swedish causes of interest for skeptics. There ar plenty of Swedes who claim outrageous things but they are rarely in a position of power and influence.
The “VIP” mistakes are usually mundane and boring. (I would love it if some Swedish cleric followed the Iranian example of blaming earthquakes on immodestly clad women)
So my reliance on USA-ian examples simply reflect what is easily found in media, not an anti-American bias. Or anti-British, or whoever.
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Birger – It’s no good being sorry. It’s thanks to you that I am having to watch Alien the Director’s Cut *again* because I don’t remember feeling empathy for the navigator, and want to know whether I did and forgot, or whether you are more empathic to not overly bright navigators than I am.
Mind you, I’m enjoying watching it for the umpteenth time, so no harm done. But after this I will have to watch Aliens *again*.
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John, the navigator is annoying and yellow, just like me!
— — —
Addendum: The reason why USA has become such a “target-rich” environment depends to a great deal on a certain media mogul.
When he started Fox News he followed the cynical advice of Doktor Göbbels: “for propaganda to be effective, it must be aimed at the least intelligent segment of the people”.
This gave Death Panels, terrorist camps* on the Mexican border, Obama apparently going back in time to cause the Iraq War and other Monthy Python stuff being discussed on prime time.
(I do not hold you ordinary Americans responsible for this)
*Mexican-Syrian terrorists with Ebola*
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Finished it. I wondered why I didn’t remember feeling any empathy for the navigator – it was because I didn’t feel any 🙂
I didn’t feel any empathy for the cat either, but then I have a genuine dislike of domestic cats, fuelled by a powerful allergy to them and a pretty fair grasp of Toxoplasma gondii and what it can do to people. But then, I’m not too fond of pit bull terriers either, for other equally rational reasons.
In Aliens I felt empathy for the tough little female Hispanic marine. I’m going to have to watch the director’s cut of that again next.
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I would argue the xenomorph is a more ambitious predator than the cat, and thus more interesting. I look forward to an Attenborough documentary on the subject.
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other Monthy Python stuff
Please, Birger, don’t insult Monty Python by comparing them to the ridiculous stuff being discussed on American TV “news” channels. Monty Python tried to be funny, and usually succeeded. At least some of the newsreaders in the US actually believe the stuff they are spouting. And more importantly, so does a large fraction of their audience. You can draw a straight line from there to what happened in Charleston last week.
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Yes, Eric, it is no coincidence that the “mainstreaming” of extremism coincides with hate crimes.
— — — —
Baby in coffin of Swedish bishop was ‘deliberately concealed’ – video http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/jun/22/baby-coffin-swedish-bishop-peder-winstrup-video
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You’re saying cats are not dangerous?
http://shanghaiist.com/2015/06/22/land-rover-veers-into-river-driver-dodges-stray-cat.php
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Pets are useful. “Scarlet macaw skeletons point to early emergence of Pueblo hierarchy (Update)” http://phys.org/news/2015-06-scarlet-macaw-skeletons-early-emergence.html
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The problem of accurately re-enacting ancient times http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3773
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You’re saying cats are not dangerous?
No more so than other animals. The biggest hazard of cats around here is the rate at which they kill birds: a cat with a functional hunting instinct can easily average one bird kill a day. But dogs, rodents, and even small children sometimes run into the road, with similar results to that driver in Jiangsu.
Then there are the deer and moose. Deer have become quite well adapted to American suburban environments, where they cannot be hunted because there are so many dwellings around, and car-deer collisions are a regular hazard throughout the eastern US. Moose tend to live in areas with lower human population, but if you should hit one with a car, expect the car to be destroyed, and your own chances of surviving won’t be that great. If I were forced to make the choice, I would rather hit a concrete wall than a moose, because I might be able to walk away after hitting the wall.
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It was a joke, Eric.
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“der Quantenschaum der Raumzeit” -the foamy state of spacetime itself at the smallest meaningful scales.
— — — —
More dangerous parasites: If we are talking films, the telepathic kids in “The Midwich Cuckoos” are scary in a more insidous manner.
The last film version was also one of the last film roles for wossname, paraphlegic actor who quit the Scientology crew.
Underrated films: Dark City.
The Sticky Fingers of Time.
And (title forgotten) where Max von Sydow et al are literally trading with luck as a commodity.
I am told that the graphic novel series “Lucifer” (inspired by Neil Gaiman) will be a TV series but I do not know when it will be available4.
(Ironically, the name comes from a third century mistranslation of an aramaic text relating to a Babylonian king. I have mentioned this before, but it deserves repeating)
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Swedish discrimination exposed in bus video http://www.thelocal.se/20150624/swedish-class-divides-exposed-in-fare-dodging-clip
We are all probably prone to treat “the other” differently, especially when facing cues of “low status”…
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National trauma partially resolved!
“Swedish police recover stolen strawberry haul” http://www.thelocal.se/20150622/swedish-police-recover-stolen-strawberry-haul
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I watched the film Chappie last night.
I had missed that Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman are in it, mostly because they don’t have lead parts.
In any case, I can’t honestly recommend it. It’s sort of violent, very unattractive and childish all at the same time.
As AI films go, Ex Machina is an infinitely better film in my view.
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For anyone who missed this, the full paper is available on open access:
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/03/21/003517
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A piece related to the above:
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-false-dawn-of-modern-humans-in-eurasia/
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And another one:
http://dienekes.blogspot.hk/2015/06/oase1-had-neandertal-ancestor-no.html
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Conspiray theories make me sad http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3778
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Beijing quadrupled in size in a decade, NASA finds http://phys.org/news/2015-06-beijing-quadrupled-size-decade-nasa.html
This has increased winter temperatures and made the air more stagnant
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