Builders demolish Russian oligarch's French chateau

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20616993

5 December 2012

Polish builders have demolished an 18th Century chateau in Bordeaux belonging to a Russian businessman, apparently by mistake.

Owner Dmitry Stroskin said he was shocked and had only ordered them to knock down an adjacent outhouse.

The local mayor in the nearby French village of Yvrac is said to be furious.

Chateau de Bellevue had been due to be renovated to its former glory - Mr Stroskin has said he will rebuild it exactly as it was.

The original 13,000 sq m chateau, which featured grand horseshoe steps and a once palatial ballroom, was previously hired out for wedding receptions and functions.

It sat within an imposing vineyard estate, where now only the rundown outhouse is still standing...................>

Daniel J. Bier goes over the statistics. He finds that, “In 2013, out of 900,000 sworn officers, just 100 died from a job-related injury. That’s about 11.1 per 100,000, or a rate of 0.001% 0.01%”:

Policing doesn’t even make it into the top 10 most dangerous American professions. Logging has a fatality rate 11 times higher, at 127.8 per 100,000. Fishing: 117 per 100,000. Pilot/flight engineer: 53.4 per 100,000. It’s twice as dangerous to be a truck driver as a cop—at 22.1 per 100,000.

Another point to bear in mind is that not all officer fatalities are homicides. Out of the 100 deaths in 2013, 31 were shot, 11 were struck by a vehicle, 2 were stabbed, and 1 died in a “bomb-related incident.” Other causes of death were: aircraft accident (1), automobile accident (28), motorcycle accident (4), falling (6), drowning (2), electrocution (1), and job-related illness (13).

Even assuming that half these deaths were homicides, policing would have a murder rate of 5.55 per 100,000, comparable to the average murder rate of U.S. cities: 5.6 per 100,000. It’s more dangerous to live in Baltimore (35.01 murders per 100,000 residents) than to be a cop in 2014.

Chinese move into luxury Manhattan property

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28894478

Owning a home on US soil is no longer only an American dream. Increasingly, buyers from China are snapping up luxury property in America, particularly in high-priced markets like New York.

Cynthia Liu, 26, is among the Chinese buyers who have decided to invest in upmarket residential real estate here.

Ms Liu grew up in Beijing but now works in Manhattan, where she recently bought a spacious one-bedroom flat in a high-rise with a view of the city's famous skyline. She is still unpacking boxes, but says she is very happy with her new home.............

..........According to the Shanghai research firm Hurun Report, 64% of Chinese individuals with a net worth of more than £1m are either emigrating or planning to do so.........>

Somalia's government launches postal service

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-29606447

Somalia's government has launched its first postal service in more than two decades.

It has also introduced postcodes nationwide for the first time in the country's history.

The postal service fell into disuse when long-serving ruler Siad Barre's regime collapsed in 1991.

Its reintroduction is the latest sign that some normality is returning to Somalia after more than two decades of clan and religious-based conflict.

Last week, Somalia's first-ever cash withdrawal machine was installed in the capital, Mogadishu..............>

Ed Miliband secured 1.6 million ethnic minority votes, while the Tories reached a million, according to estimates. The Liberal Democrats and Greens both secured but 150,000 ethnic minority votes, with Ukip even further behind on 75,000.

Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future, said the research by pollsters Survation showed the ethnic minority voters were more "up for grabs" than at previous elections.

He said: “While David Cameron clearly took a lot of votes from the Lib Dems in the election, he also seems to have extended his party's appeal to ethnic minority voters too.

“Labour remains ahead with minority voters, but the party may have won too many of its minority votes in the wrong places electorally – doubling majorities in heartland urban seats that were already safe but slipping in the southern marginals.

“But in places like Watford, Swindon and Milton Keynes, Conservatives can be increasingly confident of their appeal to aspirational ethnic minority voters.

“The middle-England 'Mondeo Man' of the 2015 election could well be a British Asian.”

Minibus drivers in a Russian city have said they'll start observing traffic rules in protest against a recent fare reduction, it's reported.

Drivers in the Siberian city of Omsk are unhappy about a cut in the bus fare from 22 roubles ($0.40; 26p) down to 18, and as a result have decided to stop bending the rules for the convenience of passengers, the Lenta news website reports. Russian minibus drivers are notorious for their unwillingness to observe traffic laws, often letting passengers off wherever they like, rather than at recognised bus stops. The local Omskinform news agency says that a sign has appeared inside the minibuses stating: "Since the passenger fares are 18 roubles again, passengers will be put down ONLY at official bus stops." The fare cut was ordered by a local court, which said a previous increase had been unjustified.

But in a city where police say about one in 10 road collisions involve minibuses, the "protest" doesn't seem to have upset many people. "I totally approve of the drivers' behaviour, but I would like them to observe the rules at other times as well - not only in protest," says one person on the VKontakte social network. "Only in Omsk can minibus drivers follow rules as a protest," writes a Twitter user. And another person thinks it's clear what should happen next: "Let's lower the fares to 16 roubles, then minibuses will observe the rest of the rules in revenge!"

Officials in western Canada are urging people not to flush their pet goldfish down the toilet because they're surviving and multiplying at an alarming rate.

Environmental officers in the province of Alberta say they've found goldfish the size of dinner plates in the region's storm ponds. Forty of the fish were pulled from a single pond in the north of the province earlier this year, the CBC News website reports. "That's really scary because it means they're reproducing in the wild, they are getting quite large and they are surviving the winters that far north," says Kate Wilson from Alberta's environment department. Goldfish are considered an invasive species in Canada, and the government is worried they could upset fragile local ecosystems.

As a result, it has launched a campaign warning people of the trouble flushed pets can cause - even if they have already gone to the big goldfish pond in the sky. "Even if the fish are dead, they could have diseases or parasites that could be introduced, especially if the water treatment system is not top notch," Ms Wilson tells Fort McMurray Today. The campaign will also target pet stores and markets, as well as groups that engage in "mercy releases", where captive animals are set free in the belief it will create spiritual "good karma", CBC News says.

Alberta has good form when it comes to banishing non-native species. For decades the region has proudly declared itself "rat-free", meaning it has no resident rat population. Occasional infestations do occur, but the government recently set up a rat hotline for residents to report any rodent sightings.

(PS, when oversized goldfish established themselves in my local canal people came from 200 miles away to catch them)

“Perhaps a new marker should be installed in the Greenwich Park for the new Prime Meridian.".............>

Answer - the GPS Prime Meridian is a different standard, set in 1884 - and did not account for Continental Drift - see:

http://www.thegreenwichmeridian.org/tgm/articles.php?article=7

WGS84 and the Greenwich Meridian

When visitors to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich stand astride the Meridian, they are often perplexed to discover that their GPS does not give their longitude as zero. Likewise, users of Google Earth are sometimes surprised to see that the Meridian as marked, appears to pass around 100 m to the east of where they expected.

The explanation for these apparent anomalies is rooted in the history of longitude determinations, the assumed shape of the Earth and the way in which maps have been historically constructed.

When the Royal Observatory was founded back in 1675, it was widely believed that the Earth was spherical. This notion was challenged by Newton with the publication of the third volume of his Principia in 1687 in which he hypothesized that the Earth was an oblate spheroid, also known as an ellipsoid, the shape generated by spinning an ellipse on its minor axis. He estimated the equatorial diameter would differ from the polar by about 1 part in 230. The parameters of the ellipsoid have since been refined, but the ellipsoid is not a perfect fit either.

From the earliest of times, it was a priority for astronomers to get an accurate determination of the difference in longitude between the observatory at Greenwich and ones elsewhere. In the case of the Paris Observatory, there had been at least 18 different determinations by the 1920s. The first attempt to accurately fix the relative longitude of an American observatory, that of Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took place in the 1840s when nearly four hundred chronometers were transported back and forth across the Atlantic. From the 1860s onwards, following the laying of the first transatlantic cable, the time difference, and hence longitude difference between the two observatories, was determined with even greater precision by telegraphic means. It was through this single connection that the longitude (relative to Greenwich) of all other places in the United States was originally determined.

Most accurate maps show only a small part of the Earth’s surface. Before the space age, when choosing an ellipsoid to represent the shape of the Earth, it was the practice to pick one whose surface had a good alignment with reality over the area of the map. In the UK for example, the maps produced by the Ordnance Survey were (and still are) based on the ‘Airy Ellipsoid’ – an ellipsoid defined by the seventh Astronomer Royal George Airy in 1830. The chosen ellipsoids differed slightly in centre position and orientation as well as in size and shape. The advent of satellite technology enabled ellipsoids to be defined for the first time with their centre coincident with the Earth’s centre of mass.

Some relevant ellipsoids and their dates of adoption (from Wikipedia)

In the late 1950s (under the auspices of the US Navy), the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of the Johns Hopkins University began the development of what was to become the world's first operational satellite navigation system. Known as Transit, it worked by making use of the Doppler effect, the same effect that makes a siren carried by a moving vehicle change in pitch as it passes. The surveyed longitude of the Laboratory's site in Maryland, as measured in the North American Datum (NAD27), became its assumed longitude in the first World Datum, the APL datum. It was this pragmatic adoption of the longitude coordinate on one ellipsoid as the assumed value on another that has caused the apparent shift not only in the position of the Meridian, but also of all other locations.

The size of the shift remained unknown until the summer of 1969, when an opportunity arose to measure it. A satellite receiver was set up on a platform above the roof over the Airy Transit Circle at Greenwich. The results showed that fixes resulting from the use of the satellite navigation system should have their longitude values shifted by 5.64" if the Greenwich (Geodetic) Meridian was to have its longitude as zero in this system. Although an academic paper on this subject was published in 1971, it appears to have been largely forgotten about until the mid noughties. The offset (since refined) also applies to the WGS84 datum used by current GPS systems. WGS84 was adopted as the global standard for air navigation on 1 January 1998 and soon afterwards by hydrographers for use on electronic and nautical charts.

Until the advent of GPS, local datums were only ever used in a local context. Although usually inappropriate to do so, it is possible with GPS to set a receiver to get a latitude and longitude fix anywhere in the world in any of the different datums. The precise latitude and longitude of a place will vary with the particular coordinate system or datum that is used. Paradoxically, as we have already seen, this also applies to the Airy Transit Circle, whose longitude by definition one might reasonably expect to be zero. The difference between the co-ordinates on different datums also varies from place to place. Most datums agree with each other to within half a kilometre or so. The most commonly used in the UK are OSGB36 & WGS84.

At the time of the International Meridian Conference in 1884, the concepts of continental drift and plate tectonics did not exit. The first evidence of plate movement came in the mid 1950’s as the space age was about to begin. The Earth’s tectonic plates move relative to one another at about the same rate at which human finger nails grow – not much on a day to day basis, but a substantial amount over a period of decades and centuries. With the introduction of satellite technology, came the ability to create a more accurate global datum, and with it the necessity to define a reference meridian that, whilst being derived from the Airy Transit Circle, would also take into account the effects of plate movement and variations in the way that the Earth was spinning. The International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF), which defines the International Meridian and poles, is based on the combination of sets of station coordinates and velocities derived from a variety of different types of observations: Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR), and Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR). Data from Global Positioning System (GPS) was introduced in 1991 and from Doppler Orbitography and Radio-positioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) in 1994. The International Reference Meridian and Poles and, hence the WGS84 datum, are stationary with respect to the average motion of the Earth’s crustal plates. As a consequence, all individual locations are in motion relative to them. In the UK WGS84 latitudes and longitudes are changing at about 2.5 cm per year in a north-easterly direction. In 1989, the International Reference Meridian passed an estimated 102.478 m to the east of the Airy Transit Circle at Greenwich.

Links:

Transit navigation system
Ordnance Survey – A guide to coordinate systems in Great Britain

Further reading

G. Gebel and B. Matthews, Navigation at the Prime Meridian, Navigation: Journal of the Institute of Navigation (Washington, DC) 18/2 (Summer 1971) 141-146.

Rear Admiral Robert W. Knox, Precise determination of Longitude in the United States, Geographical Review, Vol 47, No. 4 (Oct 1957), pp555-563 American Geographical Society.

Prostitutes forced to swap miniskirts for high-vis jackets and trousers worn by road workers or face a 500 euro fine

................Authorities in the town of Spino d'Adda say the prostitutes cause a road-safety problem on the route from Milan to Cremona, and should be treated as construction workers.............

Attire: Prostitutes are being forced to wear high visibility jackets in an area of Italy, similar to these sex workers pictured in Spain

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3203182/Prostitutes-forced-swap-miniskirts-high-vis-jackets-trousers-worn-road-workers-face-360-fine-bid-improve-highway-safety-Italy.html#ixzz3jIHS7W5f

Yeppir, what's the going rate now?

Tdog

The Moon will turn a rusty hue in the early hours of Monday and may seem larger in the sky.

The event is caused by a total lunar eclipse coinciding with another astronomical event called a supermoon.

It's the second total lunar eclipse this year, but the first since 2008 where the whole eclipse will be visible from the UK.

The entire eclipse will be visible from eastern North America, South America, West Africa and western Europe.

Skywatchers in the western half of North America, the rest of Europe and Africa, the Middle East and South Asia will see a partial one.

From the UK, observers will see the Moon pass through the Earth's shadow in the early hours of Monday morning. In North and South America the eclipse will be seen on Sunday evening.

Eclipse facts

• The last time a total lunar eclipse was visible in its entirety from the UK was 2008; the next time one will be visible after this is in 2019
• The supermoon, where Earth's satellite is near its minimum distance from our planet, means that the Moon will appear 7-8% larger in the sky.
• The moon may look rust-coloured during a total lunar eclipse - giving rise to its nickname Blood Moon. This is because the Earth's atmosphere scatters blue light more strongly than red light, and it is this red light that reaches lunar surface
• During the eclipse, the Moon lies in front of the stars of the constellation Pisces.............>

Rare full moon on Christmas Day

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Not since 1977 has a full moon dawned in the skies on Christmas. But this year, a bright full moon will be an added gift for the holidays.

December's full moon, the last of the year, is called the Full Cold Moon because it occurs during the beginning of winter. The moon's peak this year will occur at 6:11 a.m. EST.

This rare event won't happen again until 2034. That's a long time to wait, so make sure to look up to the skies on Christmas Day...........>