My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week has a lot of coverage on the new Tequatl Rising event — with lots of complaints from the cheap seats that the newly revamped dragon event is too hard. In addition, we’ve also got the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
September 20, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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The IPCC’s new, more cautious tone
In The Spectator, a muted tone of “we told you so” about the upcoming IPCC report:
Next week, those who made dire predictions of ruinous climate change face their own inconvenient truth. The summary of the fifth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be published, showing that global temperatures are refusing to follow the path which was predicted for them by almost all climatic models. Since its first report in 1990, the IPCC has been predicting that global temperatures would be rising at an average of 0.2° Celsius per decade. Now, the IPCC acknowledges that there has been no statistically significant rise at all over the past 16 years.
It is difficult to over-emphasise the significance of this report. The IPCC is not simply a research body making reports and declarations which are merely absorbed into political debate. Its word has been taken as gospel, and its research has been used to justify all manner of schemes to make carbon-based energy more expensive while subsidising renewable energy.
The failure of its predictions undermines the certainties which have been placed upon the science of climate change. Previous IPCC reports — and much of the debate over how to react to them — have appeared to treat the Earth’s climate as if it were a domestic central heating system, with carbon emissions analogous to the dial on the thermostat: a small tweak here will result in a temperature rise of precisely 0.2°C and so on. What is clear from the new IPCC report is that the science is not nearly advanced enough to make useful predictions on the future rise of global temperatures. Perhaps it never will be.
Some climate scientists themselves, to give them credit, have admitted as much. Their papers now incorporate a degree of caution, as you would expect from genuine scientists. The problems arise when the non-scientists leap upon the climate change bandwagon and assume that anything marked ‘science’ must be the final word. As the chemist and novelist C.P. Snow once warned in his lecture about the ‘two cultures’, you end up in a situation where non-scientists use half-understood reports to silence debate — not realising that proper science welcomes refutation and is wary of the notion of absolute truths.
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A few setting changes for more annoying iOS 7 features
I haven’t yet upgraded my iPhone to the latest OS — I don’t want to be one of the doughty pioneers who discovers new bugs on my own phone — but many others have already made the plunge. While I’m sure some of the new features are great, there are bound to be some changes which are less-than-stellar. In the Telegraph, Richard Gray has a few things you might want to change:
Contacts names on text messages
On the locked screen, messages flash up with the contacts name and a fragment of their message. However, in the new iOS, the message no long displays their full name by default.
Instead it will only show their first name. While this may feel friendlier, for anyone with more than one David or John in their contacts book, it will be confusing.
To restore formality back to your world, access Settings, select Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
Then under the Contacts section, select Short Name and then select the option you prefer — First & Last Name, First Initial & Last Name or just if you are the public school sort, pick Last Name Only.
Control Centre while using an App
The new look control centre is designed to be easy to access — simply swipe up from the bottom of the screen and the frosted-glass effect pane will appear.
Great. Unless of course you are using an app or playing a game that requires just such an action, like the hugely popular Temple Run — then up pops the control centre exactly when you don’t want it.
Fortunately it is possible to turn this off so the control centre will not open when you are using apps.
Access Settings and then select Control Centre. Turn off Access with Apps and no longer will the Control Centre intrude upon your App using experience.
H/T to Nicholas Packwood for the link.
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Not “lovingly crafted”, but made with craftsmanship
Sippican Cottage posted this the other day, and I have to admit I was vastly impressed with the skills of these workers:
That workshop has nothing that I don’t understand going on it it. It’s a very safe place to work, although the State of California would tell you that every single thing in it is known to give you cancer. But they say that about a glass of tapwater. The finish that the woman’s applying is shellac, which you can eat after is dries, and the glue pot is filled with hide glue, which is just horses that came in last, and most of the tools make wood shavings, not sawdust, and the sanding is done by hand, so the sawdust isn’t copious or particularly dangerous. No one in the video is missing a digit, or has any visible scars from working with their hands all day. They all have fans pointed at them, but that’s no doubt because it’s too warm for comfort wherever they are. That place is not full of toxic fumes. You’d pay money to smell the smells in there. Shellac and hide glue and wood shavings smell wonderful. I hear laughter in there, and people smile when a camera is pointed at them. It’s a sheepish smile I understand. They are not used to people being interested in their mundane life. No one is wearing safety glasses or ear protection, and no one needs them, either.
No one is LOVINGLY CRAFTING anything in the video, although the violins they make will be sold for huge money in Europe, and the customers will be told that their violins were… LOVINGLY CRAFTED. But then again, no one I’ve seen in five thousand LOVINGLY CRAFTED videos have one-tenth the hand skills I see demonstrated by everyone in the video. It’s important work to them, so they do it to the best of their ability. People that do things over and over get really good at them. I wish them all well — and hope on my best day, I’m as good as they are on their worst.
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