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The world's third-biggest economy grew 11.9 per cent in the first quarter, beating forecasts as its strongest performance since 2007.

Chinese annual growth has soared to its fastest pace for three years, official figures showed today.

The world's third-biggest economy grew 11.9 per cent in the first quarter, beating forecasts as its strongest performance since 2007.

The year-on-year growth has fuelled calls for tighter policies to prevent the Chinese economy from overheating as Beijing considers a real estate tax to cool down its rampant property market.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1266166/Chinas-economy-marches-growth-rate-soars-nearly-12.html#ixzz0lJn9LOW8

...a foreseeable transformative event will happen on or near this year.

That event is that the trend of exponentially accelerating technological capability (the ability to inform matter...or "information") will hit the elbow of the hockey stick...that is, the line representing this trend, when charted on a graph, will change from near horizontal to near vertical.

Even now, brain function is being mapped; individual genome mapping and manipulation is progressing rapidly; nanotechnology is being applied through biotechnology to medicine. These things are happening fast, and accelerating. Our experience of the world is also changing quickly through the internet, and it's rapidly proliferating new applications.

When you imagine the moment when this acceleration itself accelerates by an order of magnitude, you get an event horizon.

In reality, it's just a continuation of what has been happening forever, throughout evolution, and history. The very idea of evolution, vis a vis "revolution," is that rather than a cyclical series of repeating events, you get a series in which each milestone marks a change, or transformation, that is more complex, more advanced, more adapted to circumstances, than previous versions. The fossil record verifies this.

So this sudden flash in which humanity as a whole will be able to process, contain and apply information will certainly constitute a drastic change. Whether is has anything to do with astronomical alignments, or if Mayans could foresee the event, seems to me mostly speculation.

However, there is a good change with our increased processing power, humanity as a whole will know a lot more about the implications and causes of this event when it happens.

For charts that map these exponential trends in detail, see Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near."

http://www.levity.com/eschaton/Why2012.html

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Icelandic volcano still spewing huge ash plume

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REYKJAVIK (Reuters) – An Icelandic volcano is still spewing ash into the air in a massive plume that has disrupted air traffic across Europe and shows little sign of letting up, officials said on Friday.

One expert said the eruption could abate in the coming days, but a government spokesman said ash would keep drifting into the skies of Europe.

The thick, dark brown ash cloud has shut down air traffic across northern Europe and restrictions remained in place in many areas. However, Norway said it had resumed some limited flights in the north of the country.

"It is more or less the same situation as yesterday, it is still erupting, still exploding, still producing gas," University of Iceland professor Armann Hoskuldsson told Reuters.

"We expect it to last for two days or more or something. It cannot continue at this rate for many days. There is a limited amount of magma that can spew out," he added, saying it was the magma, or molten rock beneath the Earth's surface, coming out of the volcano that turned into ash.

Environment Ministry spokesman Gudmundur Gudmundsson agreed.

"The eruption is ongoing and we are not expecting any change in the production of ash...High level winds will keep dispersing the plume over Europe," he said.

The eruption has taken place under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier, normally a popular hiking ground in southern Iceland.

Another professor said on Thursday that the heat had melted up to a third of the glacial ice covering the crater, causing a nearby river to burst its banks.

Icelandic radio said part of the ring road that goes around the small north Atlantic island had been swept away.

To the east of the volcano, thousands of hectares of land are covered by a thick layer of ash.

The cloud of ash from the eruption has hit air travel all over northern Europe, with flights grounded or diverted due to the risk of engine damage from sucking in particles of ash from the volcanic cloud.

The volcano under the Ejfjallajokull glacier, Iceland's fifth largest glacier, has erupted five times since Iceland was settled in the ninth century.

Iceland sits on a volcanic hotspot in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and has relatively frequent eruptions, although most occur in sparsely populated areas and pose little danger to people or property. Before March, the last eruption took place in 2004.

(Reporting by Omar Valdimarsson; writing by Patrick Lannin; Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)

I've reported the bug.