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Showing posts from October, 2017

Follow Leo Houlding's latest adventure...

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“It’s 21st-century exploration, at the edge of impossible.” An excellent article in The Financial Times on the latest expedition of Leo Houlding. He is planning to conquer a peak called the Spectre. A few years ago, I heard Leo speak at the GA Conference on a previous expedition to Antarctica, and the logistics of getting there and completing the climb. My notes and some links from that 2015 lecture are here.  He will be using Union Glacier as a base: a location which I have used many times before with students as a place to teach about. The expedition website is here. Good luck to Leo when he heads off next month...

Planetary boundaries

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Interesting... the full paper isn't open access, but some ideas explored here...

Geddy Lee Interview

Rush are a band I've been listening to for over 35 years... This is a powerful section from an interview which is being aired this week in the US...

Island Story

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Writer J D Taylor spent four months on a bike a few years ago, travelling around Britain and seeing it in a way that many other travel writers have failed to do. The value of cycling is that you see the world at a slower pace, and are actually in the environments you are travelling through. The author has created a very useful blog to follow the journey, and includes a whole range of additional resources and ideas that underpin the journey including some additional writing. You can follow the journey with images and text from each stage of the journey. The book is fantastic to, and I've just been reading it. A part of this journey was a search for the UK's identity as the Brexit vote approached. This is excellent for older students exploring such ideas as Changing Places , and also the GCSE unit on UK in the 21st Century. There is a New Statesmen article here by the author, which identifies some of the themes in the book, which is certainly political in its nature

Monopoly Money...

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Alexandra Sims has written in Time Out about the growing property values in London, and how they have risen. In the 1930s, the makers of Monopoly placed 22 iconic London streets on their game board for wannabe property tycoons. Eighty years on, however, the price you’d pay in Monopoly money to own a slice of the capital hardly reflects the twenty-first-century reality. Giving the game a 2017 reality check, London Fox Lettings has used data from Zoopla and the Government’s London Rents Map to show what you’d be paying IRL to rent and own property on the classic game’s streets. To give things an added flavour of authenticity they’ve even replaced the £200 you get for passing 'go', with the £27,531 average London salary, which is growing at a snail’s pace compared to rapidly rising house prices. Here's the infographic.... What Would The Monopoly Board Look Like Today? – An infographic by the team at Splitrent

Allemansrätten

This is a beautiful film by Al Humphreys who has produced a range of videos and books related to the theme of exploration. It explores the idea of access to land, which in some Scandinavian countries is a 'right' open to all men (and women). They have free access to land and can camp or walk across it. “Don’t disturb – Don’t destroy" is the mantra here. In the UK, there was recently an expansion of the right of access to include CROW land (Countryside Right of Way) Allemansrätten from Alastair Humphreys on Vimeo . Allemansrätten is the right, in much of Scandinavia, for every man and woman to roam the countryside. But with rights must come responsibilities too. Should there be an expansion of this type of rights in the UK? I met Al quite a few years ago now, when he was keynoting the SAGT conference that I was also speaking at, up in Glasgow. I took advantage of this some years ago, when camping in Norway for several weeks and travelling up the coas