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Blue sky postcard from St. George’s Chapel Windsor Castle

This is just to show you all in the Bay Area that we do get some California blue sky days here, once in a while. Continue reading Blue sky postcard from St. George’s Chapel Windsor Castle…

Today’s glorious sunshine highlighted the flying buttresses on the south side of St. George’s Chapel nave.

These sun-struck arches transmit the horizontal force from the high nave vault to the external buttresses or piers. They form an exoskeleton along north and south sides of the nave, as shown below. (Another set of arc-boutants provide the same function for the quire to the east). Continue reading Perpendicular Gothic architecture: sunlit flying buttresses on St. George’s Chapel…

The three-day Nobel Laureate Symposium at St. James’s Palace, London concluded today, Thursday 28 May 2009, with a fierce, urgent call for

“a global deal on climate change that matches the scale and urgency of the human, ecological and economic crises facing the world today.”

You can read the full text of The St. James’s Palace Memorandum and there’s front page coverage in today’s Times Online in the Environment section under the heading Global warming must stay below 2˙C or world faces ruin, scientists declare. (The pre-symposium press release gives more background on the hosting parties and intent.)

The emphasis is underscored literally: almost every time the word ‘now’ appears in the memorandum text, it is underlined. The other word that gets that emphatic treatment is ‘all’. Here are a few examples to reinforce the point: Continue reading The St. James’s Palace Memorandum on Action for a Low Carbon and Equitable Future…