Guyana and climate change - Jan 2017

Some recent developments reported locally:

Integrated approach to tackle climate change (Guyana Chronicle)
"The need for closer collaboration between agencies here in addressing climate change was raised on Thursday as the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) commenced a two-day stakeholder engagement in Georgetown.
..provision will be made through the Climate Change Adaptation Programme (CCAP), which will be implemented in several Caribbean countries, including Guyana."

Guyana to participate in Climate Change & ACTO Meetings (GINA)
"Guyana will participate in fourth board meeting of Japan Caribbean Climate Change Partnership Project (JCCCP) at the invitation of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) which will be held in Jamaica from February 1- 2 2017."

So why is climate change so important to Guyana? We need to pay more attention to this issue so here are a few things which come to mind:
- it is causing sea-level rise which will become a critical issue for obvious reasons, eventually much of our best farm land will be lost plus our capital
- the slowly rising temperature will have very serious effects in the future, agriculture will have to adapt
- there is a global shift away from using oil which has important implications
- we need to shift our energy sector (and transportation) away from fossil fuels to hydro and solar.

Internet troubles - DNS settings

If you are using DSL and sometimes you just cannot get any websites though you are still connected then this advice may help you.

The problem is often that your browser cannot reach the GTT-provided name server (DNS) which is required to translate the website name into the internet (IP) address needed to reach it. The permanent solution is to provide a public name server address to your computer to meet the need.

A commonly used public name server address is that of Google: 8.8.4.4 or 8.8.8.8.
To add this name server address to your computer please see one of these tutorials below. Note - this needs some experience so ask for help if you are unsure. You can cause more trouble if you make mistakes.

How to change DNS Servers in Windows 7
How to change DNS settings in Windows 7 | 8

You can diagnose the problem more accurately by pasting the following address into your browser where I use the IP address directly not the name so DNS is not used:
http://173.203.187.14
If you get a webmail login site (this is just a random site to use as a test) then you do have an internet connection but the DNS may not be working so try the above solution. If you get nothing then you have some other problem or GTT does.

Another, temporary, solution is to close down your PC and modem, restart and hope for the best...

Google Street View continues to expand

Thanks to continued technological advances it is now possible to become an armchair tourist and visit (some) distant lands virtually using Google Steet View. North America seems to have the best coverage but some other countries also have good or partial coverage - I have not come across a list but see Wikipedia which has a map showing coverage.

After touring some places in the UK I discovered that some important Baha'i sites can be visited including some in Israel (the gardens in Haifa, Bahji, part of Akka) and also the Houses of Worship in the US and Australia (search for Bahai Temple Australia etc). See this post for links.

Google has an excellent gallery with many collections of locations.

Now we need Street View for Mount Roraima and Kaiteur falls...

Guyana woodpecker

One of my daughters caught this picture of a woodpecker in our backyard on the mango tree.

It looks like either the Crimson-crested Woodpecker or the Lineated Woodpecker. Mostly likely the former.

Good thing it was not eating the mangoes... it is welcome to the bugs. Thanks Wikipedia!

Our friendly local gecko

Here is a picture of one of our 'house geckos' caught on a window pane.

These geckos are common in houses here and eat many mosquitos and other bugs.

Sometimes one waits on the outside of our mosquito net at night for dinner to arrive. At other times one lurks under a couch and runs out to pounce on a mosquito sitting on my foot - I try not jump when it runs over my foot...

They lay small white eggs, may be 4 or 5, in some corner such as an open box or drawer. They seem to fit the description of the 'common house gecko'.

3D printing

Have you heard of this? Most people have not but it is an exciting area of technology destined to have a major impact.
According to one definition it is "a form of additive manufacturing technology where a three dimensional object is created by laying down successive layers of material".
Basically you take a digital file (e.g. from an email), give it to the 3D printer and it recreates an object from scratch out of a polymer.
Here is an article on it from Wikipedia.

Some advice on using Power Point

Just came across an excellent and rather pointed article on the BBC site concerning the use and (often) misuse of Power Point. A couple of quotes are in order:

"If there's nothing but text on the screen, people will try to read and listen at the same time - and won't succeed in doing either very well."

"This highlights the biggest problem with slide-based presentations, which is that speakers mistakenly think that they can get far more information across than is actually possible in a presentation. At the heart of this is a widespread failure to appreciate that speaking and listening are fundamentally different from writing and reading."

"...we've known for years that audiences don't much like wordy slides and don't find them as helpful as pictorial visual aids."

Angels and Demons - the movie

An exciting movie but not so accurate from a physics point of view. See here for a discussion. The part played by antimatter is especially misleading.