Let the good times average out nicely

Random Walk, by Rob Peebles ...Take California home prices, the turbo charger on the newfangled engine. In fact, take the number of homes in California that sold for more than $1 million last year, and this is what you get: You get 48,666 million dollar homes. That’s 47% more million dollar homes sold in 2005 than in 2004, according to the Los Angeles Times.  For the record, 48,666 million dollar transactions comes to 1 in 13 California home sales achieving status as a million dollar deal. That’s a nice ratio. And that ratio compares to “just” 1 in 20 in 2004. And that compares to 1 in 2, which is the ratio of Californians who want to quit their jobs to become real estate agents once they do the math on the commission involved in a million dollar transaction. According to DataQuick’s numbers quoted in the article, a million dollars in California will get you four bedrooms and 2,480 square feet, assuming you spring for the median million dollar home. Now 2,480 square feet is a fine sized home, but it wasn’t that long ago that for a million bucks you could get another couple of thousand feet and a butler.  The LA Times notes that there were 2,902 condo sales in the $1 million or more category last year, up a smart 73% from 2004. Sure, California real estate is hot, but homes are hot nationwide. Apparently there are one million homes around the country now worth at least $1 million. That compares to only 350,000 as recently as 2000.

'Doomsday' seed bank to be built

Rice is one of the world's most important crops Norway is planning to build a "doomsday vault" inside a mountain on an Arctic island to hold a seed bank of all known varieties of the world's crops. The Norwegian government will hollow out a cave on the ice-bound island of Spitsbergen to hold the seed bank. It will be designed to withstand global catastrophes like nuclear war or natural disasters that would destroy the planet's sources of food. Seed collection is being organised by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. "What will go into the cave is a copy of all the material that is currently in collections [spread] all around the world," Geoff Hawtin of the Trust told the BBC's Today programme. Mr Hawtin said there were currently about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but a large number of these were located in countries that were either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment. "What we're trying to do is build a back-up to these, so that a sample of all the material in these gene banks can be kept in the gene bank in Spitsbergen. The Norwegian government is due to start work on the seed vault next year, when it will drill into a sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago, about 966km (600 miles) from the North Pole. Permafrost will keep the vault below freezing point and the seeds will further be protected by metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete, two airlocks and high security blast-proof doors. The number of seeds and types of plants in the bank would be determined by the countries wishing to use it. Rice paddy, AP http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4605398.stm

Increasingly uncomfortable living in a material world

Optimism about quality of life has slumped among Australians. ...In other words, we are seeing a profound loss of faith in a future constructed around notions of material progress, economic growth and scientific and technological fixes to the challenges we face. We no longer believe in the "official story" of the future on which our governments base their policies. Environmentalists and scientists have won the minds of the public. Now they need to win our hearts, to give us the courage to act on our convictions. Richard Eckersley is at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the ANU, and is the author of Well & Good: Morality, Meaning and Happiness (Text, 2005). SMH