China has a population of just over 1.4 billion people with a density of 151 people per square kilometre, while the United States has a population of just over 347 million people with a density of 38 people per square kilometre1. Given the recent relatively rapid growth of the Chinese economy and its huge population it is likely that it will surpass the size of the US economy in the near future. There are several ways of measuring the size of an economy. They include:
I have been reading the book ‘The Great Wave’1 by Michiko Kakutani which was given to me by a mate who thought I would enjoy it. Kakutani is an American Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic and writer2. The book is subtitled ‘The era of radical disruption and the rise of the outsider’1.
As conservative commentator David Frum said several years ago: “If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy”1.
Like many inquisitive kids, I was fascinated with dinosaurs and knew the names of lots of them. When I was employed, I’d commonly see kids as young as 5, who could tell their parents (and me) the names of dozens of dinosaur genera. When I was about the same age as them, I was given a book on dinosaurs from the How and Why Wonder Book series. This series was turned out in large numbers on many topics, of which I had a few, but the dinosaur volume was my favourite1.
The Boyer Lectures are a series of talks by prominent Australians, presenting ideas on major social, scientific or cultural issues, and broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Radio National. The lectures began in 1959 and a couple of years later were named after Richard Boyer, the ABC board chairman who suggested them.
The first car I ever drove was my parents’ red and white EH Holden station wagon in which I started to learn to drive, with my father partly terrified in the front passenger’s seat. It had a radio which, when I could, was mostly tuned to whichever AM radio station played the music I liked (Beatles, Rolling Stones, and suchlike). My first car was a white second hand Mazda 1300 with whitewall tyres and rust in the bottom of all the doors.
In my palaeontological peregrinations, I occasionally refer to papers that may be everything from months to nearly two centuries old. For instance, one of the seminal papers in the early study of trilobites was a paper by Ignaz Hawle & August Corda entitled ‘Prodrom einer Monographie der böhmischen Trilobiten’ (Prodrome of a monograph on Bohemian trilobites)1.
Back in late 2017, less than a year after I started this blog, I wrote an item about how climate change deniers lied about sea level rise1. Later, in October 2023, I wrote an item about how the rate of sea level rise was itself increasing. The average rate of increase in sea level between 1993 and 2015 was 3.3 millimetres (mm) per annum, while the average sea level rise between 2013 and 2022 was 4.62 mm per annum2.