Just in case you were thinking of emigrating Down Under, here’s a salutary thought…

Within less than the span of a lifetime, Sydney could resemble a desert town like Alice Springs, or even the apocalyptic landscape from Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Road.

Scorched by temperatures five degrees higher than today, lacking drinking water and yet battered by rising seas and ravaged by bush fires of the ferocity that last month blackened huge areas of Victoria and Tasmania, one of the world’s most spectacular cities could be virtually uninhabitable.

So suggests a scientific report on climate change commissioned by the New South Wales government.

The report, which forecasts a 40 per cent drop in rainfall by 2070, presses hard on the heels of the shock announcement by Queensland’s Premier that from next December state residents stand to drink recycled sewerage…

At last — an argument for drinking Fosters.

Well, well. The British Library is trumpeting the findings of a research survey:

A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

That’s precisely why my Relevant Knowledge Programme at the Open University created Beyond Google: working with information online, a ten-week online course that reveals that there’s far more to search than typing words into Google.

The full text of the BL/UCL report is available (in pdf format) from here.

Nicholas Carr is chortling about it:

By breaking the linear print model that has dominated the transmission of information for the past five centuries, the hyperlinked web seems to be instilling a hyperactive approach to gathering and digesting information, an approach that emphasizes speed, scanning, and skimming. In one sense, the process of information retrieval seems to have become more important than the information retrieved. We store lots of information, but like distracted squirrels we rarely go back to examine it in depth. We want more acorns.

Personally, like Piglet, I prefer haycorns.

… in 1965, Winston Churchill died at the ripe old age of 90. He drank a bottle of champagne at lunch every day, took a proper nap in the afternoon, smoked huge cigars incessantly, ate a hearty dinner with wine every evening and finished off each day with copious quantities of brandy. Truly, an example to us all.

He was IMHO a rather good painter, despite taking up the pastime relatively late in life (aged 41). There’s a nice memoir of his painterly side here. The photograph shows a wartime painting of Marrakesh by him, which he gave as a gift to Harry Truman.

Q: Who wrote this?

“To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.”

A: Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve in his book Essays on the Great Depression.

“Due to an extreme surplus (of) withdrawals since the announcement of the Linden Labs new policy regarding inworld banks, we have temporarily disabled the withdraw feature on ATMs until further notice.”

A sign in the lobby of JT Financial, a Second Life bank. A rule change has led to old-fashioned bank runs across the virtual world, costing depositors real-world money. As reported in a story in the Wall Street Journal which begins: “In the real world, banks are reeling from the subprime-mortgage mess. In the online game Second Life, a shutdown of the make-believe banking system is causing real-life havoc for thousands of people…”

Thanks to Good Morning Silicon Valley.