User:Wiki User 68/My Portal
Wiki User 68/My Portal
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Wiki User 68 hails from the Great British Isles specifically England 
/ˈɪŋɡlənd/ (help·info) which is a country that is part of the United Kingdom.[1][2][3] Its inhabitants account for more than 83% of the total UK population,[4] whilst its mainland territory occupies most of the southern two-thirds of the island of Great Britain. England shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west and elsewhere is bordered by the North Sea, Irish Sea, Celtic Sea, Bristol Channel and English Channel. The capital is London, the largest urban area in Great Britain, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most, but not all, measures.[5]
England became a unified state in the year 927 and takes its name from the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes who settled there during the 5th and 6th centuries. It has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world[6] being the place of origin of the English language, the Church of England, and English law, which forms the basis of the common law legal systems of countries around the world. In addition, England was the birth place of the Industrial Revolution and the first country in the world to industrialise.[7] It is home to the Royal Society, which laid the foundations of modern experimental science.[8] England is the world's oldest parliamentary system[9] and consequently constitutional, governmental and legal innovations that had their origin in England have been widely adopted by other nations.
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Rockingham Castle formerly a royal castle and hunting lodge, now the family home of the Saunders Watson family, in Rockingham Forest on the northern edge of the English county of Northamptonshire a mile to the north of Corby.
Rockingham Castle is often stated as being in the county of Leicestershire. This mistake arises due to Rockingham having a Market Harborough postal address.
It was formerly a Saxon fort and the castle was founded shortly after William the Conqueror arrived in England. It was created because its elevated terrain provided an excellent defence of the surrounding land from the local population. It was used by Norman kings as a retreat when travelling because Rockingham Forest was good for hunting wild boar and deer.
By the time that Henry VIII came to power the castle was in decline and was no more than a hunting lodge for nobles. It was restored during the ensuing centuries following several small skirmishes in the English Civil War and finally restored to its full elegance and grace in the late nineteenth century.
It overlooks the villages of Rockingham and Caldecott and enjoys good views over the Welland Valley. Now privately owned, it is open to the public on certain days.
Rockingham Castle was a popular haunt of writer Charles Dickens who was a great friend of Richard & Levinia Watson, ancestors of the current family. The Castle is the inspiration for Chesney Wold in one of his greatest works, Bleak House.
A cricket pitch lies within the grounds of the castle and is home to Old Eastonians Cricket Club.
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Desertification is the degradation of land in arid and dry sub-humid areas, resulting primarily from natural activities and influenced by climatic variations. It is also a failure of the ecological succession process. A major impact of desertification is biodiversity loss and loss of productive capacity, for example, by transition from land dominated by shrublands to non-native grasslands. In the semi-arid regions of southern California, many coastal sage scrub and chaparral ecosystems have been replaced by non-native, invasive grasses due to the shortening of fire return intervals. This can create a monoculture of annual grass that cannot support the wide range of animals once found in the original ecosystem. In Madagascar's central highland plateau, 10% of the entire country has been lost to desertification due to slash and burn agriculture by indigenous peoples. In Africa, if current trends of soil degradation continue, the continent will be able to feed only 25% of its population by 2025, according to UNU's Ghana-based Institute for Natural Resources in Africa.[10] Globally, desertification claims a Nebraska-sized area of productive capacity each year.[11]
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The Seawater Greenhouse is an established technology with the potential to create surplus fresh water from seawater, using a novel form of greenhouse that also provides suitable food-growing conditions in arid regions. Three such units have been built so far. The technique is applicable to only a very limited number of world sites due to the topographic elements essential to the process. The technology won the Tech Museum Award for a 2006 project in Oman,[12] and was a finalist in the 2007 St Andrews Prize for the Environment.[13]
Proposals for the Seawater Greenhouse include the Sahara Forest Project[14][15][16], a scheme that aims to provide fresh water, food and renewable energy in hot arid regions as well as re-vegetating areas of uninhabited desert. This ambitious proposal combines the Seawater Greenhouse and concentrating solar power (CSP) to achieve highly efficient synergies. CSP is increasingly seen as a promising form of renewable energy, producing electricity from sunlight at a fraction of the cost of photovoltaics. By combining these technologies there is huge commercial potential to create a sustainable source of energy, food and water.
The scheme is proposed at a significant scale such that very large quantities of seawater can be evaporated. By using a location that lies below sea level, this can be achieved without pumping and there is an opportunity to capture some of the substantial volumes of residual humidity that leave the greenhouses. A 20,000 hectare area of Seawater Greenhouses will evaporate a million tonnes of seawater per day. If the scheme were located upwind of higher terrain then the air carrying this ‘lost’ humidity would rise and contribute to forming mist, cloud and dew. It would then be possible to harvest this precipitate using fog-nets that can supply tree saplings with water and thereby reverse the process of desertification, returning barren land to forest[17].
The scheme was first publicly proposed to a group of energy specialists at the third Claverton Energy GroupConference held at the Headquarters of Wessex Water Plc on April 13 2008 updated [18]
In the news
- 15 July 2023 –
- A fire breaks out and destroys the Royal Albion Hotel, a 196-year-old Grade II;15 July 2023 – : listed building, in Brighton and Hove, England, United Kingdom. (Sky News) (iNews)
- 9 July 2023 – 2023 LPGA Tour
- In golf, American Allisen Corpuz wins the 78th U.S. Women's Open at the Pebble Beach Golf Links in Pebble Beach, California, United States, after firing a three-under 69 to finish on nine under, three shots ahead of England's Charley Hull and South Korea's Jiyai Shin. (BBC Sport)
- 6 July 2023 – Wimbledon Land Rover school crash
- Two children are killed and 16 other people are injured when a car crashes into a primary school in Wimbledon, London, United Kingdom. (BBC News)
- 2 July 2023 – 2023 Ashes series
- In Test cricket, the Marylebone Cricket Club suspends three members following allegations of unsportsmanlike conduct towards the Australian national team during the final day of the second Test at Lord's in London, United Kingdom. (The Guardian)
- 29 June 2023 – Rwanda asylum plan
- The Court of Appeal rejects the British government's plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda, deeming the plan to be unlawful. (The New York Times) (The Guardian)
- 27 June 2023 –
- Austrian painter Gustav Klimt's last completed oil painting, Lady with a Fan, sets a new European art auction record when an unnamed art dealer buys it for £85.3 million (US$108.4M), including the buyer's premium, at Sotheby's in London, UK. (AFP via The Straits Times)
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Barack Hussein Obama II (/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/ (listen) bə-RAHK hoo-SAYN oh-BAH-mə; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African-American president of the United States. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and worked as a civil rights lawyer and university lecturer. (Full article...)
Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree, and practiced as a civil rights attorney in Chicago before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.
Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for United States Senate in 2004. Obama's unexpected landslide victory in the March 2004 U.S. Senate primary made him a rising star in the national Democratic Party, with his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 further raising his visibility. He was elected by a landslide margin to the U.S. Senate in November 2004.
After a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination, becoming the first major African American candidate for President. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican candidate John McCain and was inaugurated as President on January 20, 2009.
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The Arctic Ocean, located in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Arctic north polar region, is the smallest, and shallowest of the world's five major oceanic divisions.[19] The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers call it the Arctic Mediterranean Sea or simply the Arctic Sea, classifying it as one of the mediterranean seas of the Atlantic Ocean.
Almost completely surrounded by Eurasia and North America, the Arctic Ocean is largely covered by sea ice throughout the year. The Arctic Ocean's temperature and salinity vary seasonally as the ice cover melts and freezes;[20] its salinity is the lowest on average of the five major oceans, due to low evaporation, heavy freshwater inflow from rivers and streams, and limited connection and outflow to surrounding oceanic waters with higher salinities. The summer shrinking of the ice has been quoted at 50%.[19] The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) use satellite data to provide a daily record of Arctic sea ice cover and the rate of melting compared to an average period and specific past years.
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A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.
- Max Weinreich
- linguist and author (1894-1969)
Did you know?
- ...that optimistic estimations of peak oil production forecast the global decline will begin by 2020 or later, and assume major investments in alternatives will occur before a crisis, without requiring major changes in the lifestyle of heavily oil-consuming nations. These models show the price of oil at first escalating and then retreating as other types of fuel and energy sources are used?[21]
- ...that if the Greenland ice-sheet melted through global warming, it would raise the global sea level by 7 meters, or 22 feet?
Topics
Related portals
WikiProjects
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| WikiProject Africa | WikiProject Cape Verde | WikiProject Council |
Things to do
- Keep finishing off the various Portals that need creating/completing and start writing content on the relevant interested issues.
- Be bold. Wikipedia is for the people, by the people and needs YOU as a contributor to spread global knowledge.
Wikimedia
- ^ The Countries of the UK statistics.gov.uk, accessed 10 October, 2008
- ^ "Countries within a country". 10 Downing Street. Retrieved 2007-09-10.
The United Kingdom is made up of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
- ^ "ISO 3166-2 Newsletter Date: 2007-11-28 No I-9. "Changes in the list of subdivision names and code elements" (Page 11)" (PDF). International Organisation for Standardisation codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions -- Part 2: Country subdivision codes. Retrieved 2008-05-31.
ENG England country
- ^ National Statistics Online - Population Estimates. Retrieved 6 June 2007.
- ^ The official definition of LUZ (Larger Urban Zone) is used by the European Statistical Agency (Eurostat) when describing conurbations and areas of high population. This definition ranks London highest, above Paris (see Larger Urban Zones (LUZ) in the European Union); and a ranking of population within municipal boundaries also puts London on top (see Largest cities of the European Union by population within city limits). However, research by the University of Avignon in France ranks Paris first and London second when including the whole urban area and hinterland, that is the outlying cities as well (see Largest urban areas of the European Union).
- ^ England - Culture. Britain USA. Retrieved 12 September 2006.
- ^ "Industrial Revolution". Retrieved 2008-04-27.
- ^ "History of the Royal Society". The Royal Society. Retrieved 2008-09-03.
- ^ "Country profile: United Kingdom". BBC News. Retrieved 2009-04-27.
- ^ Africa may be able to feed only 25% of its population by 2025
- ^ Environmental failure: a case for a new green politics
- ^ Tech Museum Award 2006
- ^ St Andrews Prize for the Environment
- ^ The Sahara Forest Project http://www.exploration-architecture.com/section.php?xSec=35
- ^ "Seawater greenhouses to bring life to the desert". The Guardian. 2008-08-03.
- ^ Fourth World Conference on the Future of Science "Food and Water for Life" - Venice, September 24-27, 2008
- ^ The Sahara Forest Project - food, water, biomass from the uninhabited Sahara Desert http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/waterenergygroup/message/48
- ^ http://www.claverton-energy.com/the-sahara-forest-project-%E2%80%93-a-new-source-of-fresh-water-food-and-energy.html
- ^ a b Michael Pidwirny (2006). "Introduction to the Oceans". www.physicalgeography.net. Retrieved 2006-12-07.
- ^ Some Thoughts on the Freezing and Melting of Sea Ice and Their Effects on the Ocean K. Aagaard and R. A. Woodgate, Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory University of Washington, January 2001. Retrieved 7 December 2006.
- ^ "CERA says peak oil theory is faulty". Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA). 2006-11-14. Retrieved 2008-07-27.