【ECO】阅读积累 by cmj 以前看的。

ddcmj519UID: 176326

我就不无耻了。老实交代这是以前的额。。今天的一会儿看了帖。。
然后发现我还不够认真额。。拍脑袋。。


Climate change
The illusion of clean coalMar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The world is investing too much cash and hope in carbon capture and storage

“FACTORIES of death” is how James Hansen, a crusading American scientist, describes power stations that burn coal. Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, producing twice the carbon dioxide that natural gas does when it is burned. That makes it a big cause of global warming.
But some of the world’s biggest economies rely on coal. It provides almost 50% of America’s and Germany’s power, 70% of India’s and 80% of China’s. Digging up coal provides a livelihood for millions of people. And secure domestic sources of energy are particularly prized at a time when prices are volatile（动荡不定的） and many of the big oil and gas exporters are becoming worryingly nationalistic. It is hard to see how governments can turn their backs on such a cheap and reliable fuel.
There does, however, seem to be a way of reconciling coal and climate. It is called carbon capture and storage (CCS), or carbon sequestration, and entails hoovering up（） carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of power plants and other big industrial facilities and storing it safely underground, where it will have no effect on the atmosphere. The technologies for this are already widely used in the oil and chemical industries, and saltwater aquifers and depleted oilfields offer plenty of promising storage space. Politicians are pinning their hopes on clean coal: Angela Merkel and Barack Obama, among others, are keen on the idea.
But CCS is proving easier to talk up than to get going (see article). There are no big power plants using it, just a handful of small demonstration projects. Utilities refuse to make bigger investments because power plants with CCS would be much more expensive to build and run than the ordinary sort. They seem more inclined to invest in other low-carbon power sources, such as nuclear, solar and wind. Inventors and venture capitalists, in the meantime, are striving to create all manner of new technologies—bugs for biofuels, revolutionary solar panels, smart-grid applications—but it is hard to find anyone working on CCS in their garage (although some scientists are toying with pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the air instead of from smokestacks: see Technology Quarterly in this issue). Several green pressure groups, and even some energy and power company bosses, think that the whole idea is unworkable.
With the private sector sitting on its hands, Western governments are lavishing subsidies（挥霍补贴） on CCS. Some $3.4 billion earmarked for CCS found its way into America’s stimulus bill. The European Union, which already restricts greenhouse-gas emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme, unveiled 揭露further incentives for CCS last year. Britain, Australia and others have also vowed to help fund demonstration plants partly because they reckon the private sector is put off by the huge price-tag on a single CCS power plant, and also in the belief that the cost of CCS will fall with experience.
Burning cashThe private sector, however, is reluctant to fork out not just because of the upfront cost of power plants, but also because, tonne for tonne不懂, CCS looks like an expensive way of cutting carbon. The cost of it may fall, but probably not by much, given the familiarity of the technologies it uses.
Politicians should indeed encourage investment in clean technologies, but direct subsidies are not the way to do it. A carbon price or tax, which raises the cost of emitting carbon dioxide while leaving it up to the private sector to pick technologies, is the better approach. CCS is not just a potential waste of money. It might also create a false sense of security about climate change, while depriving potentially cheaper methods of cutting emissions of cash and attention—all for the sake of placating the coal lobby.结尾很逻辑嘛~
Coal 危机，石油战略储备。处理。
貌似还有种东西叫甲烷。。。不过可能因为也产生CO2，所以被忽略了？


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Shapes
蜜蜂的 六角房产因？
Nature's patterns
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

WHY do honeycombs have hexagonal cells? Why are the florets（小花） in a sunflower arranged in a double spiral? In medieval times, these questions would have been met with a simple answer. God established the heavens, setting “a compass on the face of the deep”, leaving evidence of His presence in all creation. Most scientists today would rather invoke Charles Darwin to explain these patterns as products of evolution. They emerged from myriad possible shapes through natural selection. In other words, they are particularly suited to the task at hand. 想起来前段时间看的BL里面有集就是说神创论&进化论的，有些东西还是不能完全用进化论解释哇~况且G现在是那么滴批判达尔文兄~虽然，突变理论实在太冲击进化论嘞~

Philip Ball, a British science writer, sets out to document the current understanding of what caused nature’s multifarious（多样的） shapes. Is it just evolution or are there physical and chemical forces at work? One of Mr Ball’s heroes is Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, a Scottish biologist and polymath, who in 1917 wrote “On Growth and Form”. This mammoth and erudite tome, the first formal attempt to analyse patterns and shapes in nature, was described by a colleague, Sir Peter Medawar, as “the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue.” Yet it was a difficult task, and Thompson never quite achieved the results he hoped for.

Take the beehive, and its hexagonal honeycomb. Why does a hive not have triangular or square cells instead? In the 18th century a French scientist, René de Réaumur, worked out that the hexagonal structure ensures that bees fill the volume efficiently yet limit the total wall area of the cells. Put slightly differently, hexagonal cells allow bees to focus on producing honey and expend the least amount of energy making wax. Darwin used the beehive as an example of evolution, saying it “was absolutely perfect in economising labour and wax”.

Thompson argued for a simpler physical explanation, saying that natural selection need not enter the picture at all. If one treated each individual cell as a bubble of wax created by a bee, and every bee was trying to create as large a cell as possible, the physics of surface tension would ensure that all the bubbles took on a hexagonal shape within the hive.

Mr Ball finds the real answer to be more complex than either explanation. To Darwin’s supporters, Mr Ball points out that decoding the honeybee genome still does not explain how the bee makes the honeycomb. On the other hand, Thompson’s explanation of surface tension ignores the bees, which painstakingly费力的，苦心的 build the honeycomb, and possess capabilities that are not yet fully understood. For example, the honeycomb is somehow aligned to the earth’s magnetic field, though no one quite knows why. From the curl of a ram’s horn to patterns of spider webs and the development of an embryo, Mr Ball examines the possible causes of the shapes and forms we observe. His book contains a lot of fascinating detail about the different physical, chemical and evolutionary processes at work. In the end, he concludes, nature is an opportunist. 还是没解释哇。。


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Education

A handwaving approach to arithmetic
Feb 19th 2009 | CHICAGO
From The Economist print edition

Gesticulating helps children to learn


HUMAN language is the subject of endless scientific investigation, but the gestures that accompany speech are a surprisingly neglected area. It is sometimes jokingly said that the way to render翻译 an Italian speechless is to tie his wrists together没懂？, but almost everyone moves their hands in meaningful ways when they talk. Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, however, studies gestures carefully—and not out of idle curiosity. Introspection反省 suggests that gesturing not only helps people communicate but also helps them to think. She set out to test this, and specifically to find out whether gestures might be used as an aid to children’s learning. It turns out, as she told the AAAS, that they can.

The experiment she conducted involved balancing equations. Presented with an equation of the form , written on a blackboard, a child is asked to calculate the value of x. In the equations Dr Goldin-Meadow always made the last number on the left the same as the last on the right; so x was the sum of the first two numbers. Commonly, however, children who are learning arithmetic will add all three of the numbers on the left to arrive at the value of x. 严肃。。虽然很想嘲笑下。。。

In her previous work Dr Goldin-Meadow had noted that children often use spontaneous gestures when explaining how they solve mathematical puzzles so, to see if these hand-movements actually help a child to think, or are merely descriptive, she divided a group of children into two and asked them to balance equations. One group was asked to gesture while doing so. A second was asked not to. Both groups were then given a lesson in how to solve problems of this sort.

As Dr Goldin-Meadow suspected, the first group learnt more from the lesson than the second. By observing their gestures she refined the experiment. Often, a child would touch or point to the first two numbers on the left with the first two fingers of one hand. Dr Goldin-Meadow therefore taught this gesture explicitly to another group of children. Or, rather, she taught a third of them, taught another third to point to the second and third numbers this way, and told the remainder to use no gestures. When all were given the same lesson it was found those gesturing “correctly” learnt the most. But those gesturing “incorrectly” still outperformed the non-gesturers.

Gesturing, therefore, clearly does help thought. Indeed, it is so thought-provoking that even the wrong gestures have some value. Perhaps this helps to explain why the arithmetic-intensive profession of banking was invented in Italy.
意大利数学家密集与他们手势用的频繁有关。情不自禁argue一下。1这个实验只是针对小孩子诶。。2所用的都是简单的扳手指算数诶。。