Volcano

[the_future_modernes]

Icelandic Volcano's ash cloud causes flight chaos across Europe

Tens of thousands of people across northern Europe have faced flight disruptions after a dangerous ash cloud from a volcano eruption in Iceland billowed throughout the region's skies.

Airports across UK, Ireland, Norway, Holland and Finland have closed down their airspaces, cancelling all flights.

Al Jazeera's Emma Hayward reports.

From the BBC

The eruption under a glacier in the Eyjafjallajoekull area of Iceland is the second in the country in less than a month.

Prof Bill McGuire, professor at the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, said it was not "particularly unusual" for ash from Icelandic eruptions to reach the UK.

"Such a large eruption... would have the potential to severely affect air travel at high northern latitudes for six months or more.

"In relation to the current eruption, it is worth noting that the last eruption of Eyjafjallajoekull lasted more than 12 months." MORE

I hope when I grow old I'll be among the healthy and active ones

[the_future_modernes]

The shock of the old: Welcome to the elderly age

Homo sapiens is aging fast, and the implications of this may overwhelm all other factors shaping the species over the coming decades - with more wrinklies than pimplies, more walking frames than bike stabilisers, more slippers and pipes than bootees and buggies, and more grey power than student power. The longevity revolution affects every country, every community and almost every household. It promises to restructure the economy, reshape the family, redefine politics and even rearrange the geopolitical order over the coming century.


...


Non-celebrities also remain active, assertive and independent as they age. They fill library and seminar halls once crammed with callow youths. They run picket lines - or marathons. Far from being a weight round society's neck, many of them look like a new human resource waiting to be tapped. Millions of the middle-class retired continue working at everything from lucrative consultancies to teaching literacy or finally finishing that PhD. They are often more valuable than the young workers the demographers imagine are supporting them: in fact, the growing number of society's most qualified, most experienced individuals is potentially a huge demographic dividend.

In future, old people will be expected to stay in the formal economy for longer. The idea of a retirement age was invented by Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s, when as chancellor of Germany he needed a starting age for paying war pensions. He chose the age of 65 because that was typically when ex-soldiers died. But today in developed countries, and soon in poorer ones, women can expect nearly 30 years of retirement, and men 20 years.

There is a deal to be done: longer working in return for more, and more powerful, legislation to outlaw the ageism that blights the working lives of many in late middle age. The old will also expect a society that does not marginalise them; they will consider it a right to live in homes, cities and workplaces redesigned to meet their physical requirements.

Some worry that an older workforce will be less innovative and adaptable, but there is evidence that companies with a decent proportion of older workers are more productive than those addicted to youth. This is sometimes called the Horndal effect, after a Swedish steel mill where productivity rose by 15 per cent as the workforce got older. Age brings experience and wisdom. Think what it could mean when the Edisons and Einsteins of the future, the doctors and technicians, the artists and engineers, have 20 or 30 more years to give us.MORE

(no subject)

[la_vie_noire]

Via, of course, where else, QT:

My Dissonance Doesn’t Need to Make Sense to You.

My dissonance has absolutely nothing to do with what cis girls have. In fact, I am entirely indifferent to what cis girls have. You (you being directed at a hypothetical cis woman) could have a big bushy beard that birds live in and breasts flatter than a Plexiglas window for all I care. It is irrelevant (unless the birds were shitting everywhere, then it would be relevant to hygiene). Furthermore, and this goes back to all of this bullshit about how dissonance doesn’t make sense, who are you to expect a feeling, a deep psychological and instinctual feeling, regarding body structure, to be rational and easily explained? Last I checked, I didn’t have an awful lot to be sad about in my life (I actually do pretty well for myself, all things considered) yet I have depression. One could easily talk about how irrational my depression is. Yeah, except that depression isn’t rational. It just is. It’s a present internal feeling that has an effect on the mind and well being. It does not need to have a rational reason, just a cause.