Greece

Or rather, drops euro referendum plan1 but the effect is much the same. When the referendum was announced a few days ago, some thought he had played a blindingly good political hand. Which just goes to show that economists aren't so great at politics and the cobbler should stick to his last. Which is why I'm commenting, obviously. But the argument - that he had magically got out of a difficult position (the Greek public didn't like the deal that was struck, this was he evaded responsibility, and maybe the need to buy off the public might result in a better deal) sounded quite plausible to me…
There have been a number of articles floating around the popular press for the last week that I thought I would touch on briefly ... always fun to decipher the real news from the hype. Active fumaroles on Datun Mountain in Taipei. An article out of the Taipei Times suggests that the city of Taipei in Taiwan is in great peril from Datun Mountain/volcano. The volcano, which was previously thought to have erupted ~200,000 years ago is now thought to have erupted only 5,000 years ago. That 195,000 years really does make a difference in terms of worrying about potential future eruptions, but there…
First day of class! As you might imagine, I'm a little scattered (well, with classes and the fact that we bought a house over the weekend. You know, just that). The Tavurvur Crater at Rabaul erupting in 1994. News! The Examiner.com (SF) has a slideshow and brief article on the current excavations of ruins buried by the Santorini/Minoan eruption that occurred ~3950 years ago. The eruption wiped out much of the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea, but whether there was anyone actually still living on the island when it happened is still a mystery. It seems that most of the Minoans left the…
I won't try to recap all the news from last week, but I did notice a few articles from this weekend worth noting: The Big Obsidian Flow at Newberry Volcano. This rhyolite lava flow erupted at ~1,300 years ago. Geologists in Greece are keeping an eye on a submarine volcano called Columbus. Apparently a number of M4+ earthquakes have been reported, the sea floor has deformed and there have been "hot air eruption" (? ... I am a little skeptical of the last one without more details). The article is a little fuzzy on the details: the volcano is 6.5 meters southeast of Santorini and the Santorini…