Author: DB

About the Indian Rail crash

“India’s rail network has seen 58.580 lakh passengers in 2022-23, but has fallen short of the traffic measured during 2019-20, before the COVID-19 pandemic, by 24%” (the Indian Times)

A lakh is 100,000 – so 58,580 lakh is 5,858,000,000 or nearly six billion journeys

I couldn’t find stats for fatalities, but I found this on Sky News about notable crashes

November 2016: An express train derailed in Uttar Pradesh, killing 146 people and injuring more than 200.

January 2017: In Andhra Pradesh, 41 people died when several coaches of a passenger train left the track.

October 2018: At least 59 people died in Amritsar city, northern India when a commuter train crashed into a crowd gathered on the track for a festival. Fifty-seven people were injured.

So put all this together and that is a very very low accident rate on the railways. Just to give a more rounded picture – and it doesn’t take away from the poverty, and the sadness of it.

For comparison of fatalities only –  893 railroad deaths in the United States in 2021

How many passenger journeys? Difficult to get statistics because of all the separate railways, but for Amtrak – over 30 million passengers per year – only a fraction of the rail journeys in India

Answer from David Martin, a happiness engineer from Automattic in his post – reblogging gets a refresh.

 To prevent your site’s content from being reblogged, you can go to Tools, then navigate to Marketing, and finally click on the “Sharing Buttons” tab. From there, you can disable reblogging for your entire site. Unfortunately, there isn’t an option to turn off reblogging on a post-by-post basis

Actually, now that the original post gets the benefit of the reblog, all my objections to reblogging have gone away. See this from David Martin that explains why:

We made a significant change in this release by replacing the quote block with the embed block. This new block prominently displays the original author’s information and limits the content shown from the original post. Rather than replicating the entire post, only a snippet of the original content is displayed, along with a “continue reading” link that directs readers to the original post. This approach ensures that the original author receives proper credit and encourages visitors to visit their site for the full content. In essence, reblogged posts now function more like a link with additional context, rather than a complete reposting of someone else’s content.

From The Week 27 May 2023 edition, page 15

“One of the most significant shifts in American politics and religion just took place and it barely got any notice,” says Ryan Burge. The latest US Religion Census reveals that between 2010 and 2020, the share of Americans with a religious affiliation dropped 11 percentage points. This change “will ripple across the political landscape”, shifting voting patterns in states critical to presidential elections, because the “God Gap” is a real phenomenon.

Religiously observant people, especially white Christians, have for years been much more likely to vote Republican than those who have a secular worldview, who are far more likely to vote Democrat. Analysis of the latest data shows that religious affiliation is not just fading in New England and the Pacific Northwest, but “taking a beating across the middle part of the country” – in Rust Belt states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

That gives Democrats a much better chance of winning those swing states. However, the results also show that religiosity is surging in Florida and Texas, owing to the influx of Hispanic immigrants, which is likely to lock them in as red states…”

At an exhibition on Island Peoples at the Fizwilliam Museum today, there were two samples of Covellite, also known as covelline. It is a rare copper sulfide mineral with the formula CuS. Also, two ‘ox hides’ I think they were called. They were not the hide of any animal but rather the shape is reminiscent of the hide of an animal. In fact there are ingots of bronze or copper wide enough for a man to carry on his back, holding on to them by the spurs at the ends of the block. They were made to a certain standard size so they could be used as trade goods with a specific value owing to their known size.

2023 World Press Photo Contest, South America, Singles – photographer Musuk Nolte ‘Oil Spill in Lima‘

Caption:

Workers at Playa Cavero, Peru, deal with the environmental disaster caused by an oil spill at Spanish transnational oil company Repsol’s La Pampilla refinery nearby.

Background:

On 15 January, nearly 12,000 barrels of crude oil spilled into the sea while a tanker was unloading at Repsol’s La Pampilla refinery. Repsol, the Peruvian government, and the Italian tanker company each disputed the cause of the spillage, trading accusations of negligence, inadequacy of equipment, and mismanagement.

The spill extended over 7.13 square kilometers, polluting beaches, killing wildlife, and impacting livelihoods, in what the Peruvian government termed the country’s worst ecological disaster in recent memory.

The oil reached three marine protected areas: Lomas de Ancon, the Pescadores Islets, and Punta Salina. The plankton-rich Peruvian Pacific waters sustain a chain of marine life, from anchovies to dolphins and seabirds. Marine mammals and birds are especially vulnerable, as the oil affects their eyes, nasal tissue and their insulating capacity, potentially leading to suffocation and hypothermia. Commercial fisheries, people relying on tourism, and local communities dependent on seafood for their diets also suffered. UN experts believe the effects of the spill will last up to ten years.

The Weald is an area of upland that covers most of Kent. Looking north you can see the flat plain and then the sandstone ridge that runs east-west across the north part of Kent.

Iron-rich sandstone was mined in the High Weald, beginning in the Iron Age (around 2,500 years ago), while the surrounding woodlands provided charcoal for heating the furnaces. Then when the Romans invaded, they managed and expanded the iron industry to for their navy.

Then came the blast furnace – a technological advance in the late 1400s, NS the High Weald became the industrial centre of England. That went on until the ndustry declined in the 1700s, as ironmaking shifted northwards.