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Yeah. In the form of welfare from the federal government.

The $346 million dollars that Alaska received is about three times what Arizona (the lowest earmark beneficiary) got. Alaska is over 5 times as large as Arizona -- Alaska has a land area of 570,380 square miles, Arizona has 113,634 square miles.

When you consider the sheer size of Alaska, along with the remote setting, and that the federal government has prevented Alaska's economic development due to environmentalist protests, I'd say that implying that Alaska is a welfare state is unfair.

Could have something to do with three volcanos going off in Alaska and the Aleutian islands. I've noticed the temperature in Texas drop and we've gotten a lot of rain after the 3rd one went off and cold fronts have come down from that area.

Here's an interesting summary of Federal spending in Alaska from 2001. Also this has some analysis of how Federal spending is broken up.

Overall, a lot of Federal money is spent in Alaska, but not much (~20% at most) could be classified as "pork." There are several military bases, the missile defense project, a large native population, and then the typical things that the Federal government funds in other states.

I think the real issue is that Alaska doesn't have a large enough internal industry to match the Federal dollars that are available. Drilling in ANWAR or a natural gas pipeline would probably decrease the ratio of federal to state spending for at least a few years.

Here's an interesting summary of Federal spending in Alaska from 2001. Also this has some analysis of how Federal spending is broken up.

Overall, a lot of Federal money is spent in Alaska, but not much (~20% at most) could be classified as "pork." There are several military bases, the missile defense project, a large native population, and then the typical things that the Federal government funds in other states.

I think the real issue is that Alaska doesn't have a large enough internal industry to match the Federal dollars that are available. Drilling in ANWAR or a natural gas pipeline would probably decrease the ratio of federal to state spending for at least a few years.

The Alaska Science Forum did an article on this problem back in 1990. Unfortunately I haven't found the promised followup. This contains a lot more information than the wikipedia articles.

Basically it involves information on why the bananas are hard to breed for a better strain. (they have no seeds) The Honduras Foundation for Agricultural Research has found way of crossbreeding in wild strains to produce seeds. Looks like it's slow going, but genetic mutation is pretty much the only way to engineer in resistance to new disease, and that will require seeds, not cuttings.

I wasn't able to find any updates on the HFAR's progress. Anyone else have any luck?

Human hair does a great job of adsorbing oil, is renewable, and reusable. It can also be burned as fuel when you're done with it. 200,000 pounds of it goes into landfills every day. You could have enough to adsorb the entirety of Exxon Valdez by collecting what is produced in this country in a week.... and it would be essentially free.

You kids and your fancy nanowire meshes... ;-)

Alaska is LOADED with volcanoes (nearly all located in the south, where the bulk of the ppl are)

Actually, most of the volcanoes are in in the Aleutian island chain. Most of the population in Alaska in in the Matsu Valley (pdf warning) near Anchorage. Several hundred to a thousand miles away. The only thing in between is Kodiak Island which has a Coast Guard base and a bunch of Grizzly bears.

As was pointed out earlier, the Aleutians aren't a very good place to put data centers. No cable. Not much of anything else except drunken fisherman, rocks and the occasional shipwreck. While there are good geothermal regions there, it's just too damned remote to do anything economically useful except fish.

Same general argument goes for the other isolated geothermal hot spots in Alaska - too much space, not enough infrastructure. Some of us like it that way, so stay the hell out of here....

http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/

Tell them that. For something based on physics that don't work, they sure seem to be spending a lot of time and effort working on it.

I admit to not having a clue about it, but wonder if these devices could be stacked to make a very thin personal cooling fan. It'd probably be a tad expensive, but I can see a market for it even so, especially in offices. If nothing else, it'd be a new toy for the moderately wealthy, leading to larger economies of scale that let ordinary slobs like us own it too. What with all this talk about ions, I wonder if it could be tweaked to pump out negative ions, which allegedly improve mood.

mosquito larvae might be pictured as: "small machines that transform algae, bacteria and organic matter into compact packages of protein.

The difference here is that a police helicopter is extremely expensive, and is therefore reserved for only the most serious of crimes. There are understandably very few of them, and I'll agree that they're mostly a good thing.

However, if they truly can purchase a UAV for $30k, you'll see these things buzzing around EVERYWHERE. I don't doubt that if purchased and deployed in quantity, you could purchase and operate a UAV for the fraction of the cost of a patrol car.

Earlier in the year, I got to get up close with the UAV equipment operated by PFRR, and was extremely impressed by the simplicity and portability of the system. There's really not a whole lot to it, and UAVs do indeed have some pretty awesome potential applications (military recon is an obvious one -- I'm not too keen on the moral implications of sending in automated kill-bots, but that's another discussion....). I'm just not sure that police patrols should be one of them...

I'd love to see fewer highway patrols. However, I'd also love to see fewer assholes weaving through traffic 30mph+ over the speed of the "flow", avoiding arrest by using a radar detector. Those guys are dangerous, and the speed traps to catch them are dangerous.

Unfortunately, I fear that the police will simply use this as a cash cow, and use it to ticket the average Joe going 75-80mph on an empty straight highway, which is what most highway patrols tend to do. (If you've ever driven across Pennsylvania, you'll know what I'm talking about -- it's a vast expanse of nothing).

At least give a link, especially to their torrent page.

Although the Aurora will be out on the 18th and 19th, it's not going to be anything fantastic. Don't expect too much south of Anchorage.

The sort of 'storm' we're going to see in the next few days is more of a 'once a month' thing than a 'once every few years' thing. Nothing to get too excited about.

But since the 1985 air-launch satellite intercept, a project cancelled by Congress (see "Blunt arrows: the limited utility of ASATs", The Space Review, June 6, 2005), there is no evidence that a new satellite-killer technology has been developed.

Oh no? HAARP can, according to people who work for the project, and according to the person who first showed that this project was feasible, push portions of the atmosphere into space to a sufficient degree to interrupt satellites. I found out about this from a highly paranoid documentary called HAARP: Holes in Heaven? which had a lot of unproven schlocky nonsense but also had some VERY interesting commentary from people actually currently working for the HAARP project. I won't go into it too much but the biggest cheese they had on video was cross-signaling more strongly than I've ever seen. He would be asked a question about whether the project was dangerous and he would say no, but his whole BODY would actually rock his head into a "yes" and he would be nodding. When he talked about technical issues, you could see him almost become a different person as he talked about something he believed in.

Anyway, put that aside for a moment...

The US is planning to deploy space-based weapons (including nuclear weapons) to attack other objects in space and on the ground.

The article says this is infeasible. What? That's a bunch of crap. There are two arguments given for this. One is "Even planning a space-to-space attack can take hours or days or longer for the moving attacker and target to line up in a proper position." That's only true if you have a small number of weapons, and if they don't use a laser or maser weapon. We have both laser and masers up to significant levels of power output.

The other is that it is expensive. So? Since when has the US government displayed an unwillingness to unnecessarily spend taxpayer money?

We all know that space-based weapons are possible (the soviets are well-known to have actually built killer satellites which work, and the article references this fact several times) and desirable (even if they are not effective against ground-based targets, which has never been proven, they are useful against space-based ones) so why do we think that more of them will not be built? That is patently ridiculous.

I wonder why they said in the article "Scientists have little information on how the storms that produce the northern lights affect spacecraft." Scientific research on the Aurora Borealis has been ongoing at the Poker Flat Research Range, located 30 miles north of Fairbanks Alaska, for almost 40 years where they have been routinely launching sounding rockets into the Aurora Borealis to study it's characteristics. http://www.pfrr.alaska.edu/ .

BTM

So, we were doing it 25 years ago, we still need to do it today, what have the schools been doing in the time in between?

http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/

It doesn't seem surprising that they're considering measures like this to protect satellites, considering nutbag states like North Korea and their fondness for testing missiles (Oops! tee hee, we didnt mean to do that to your satellites). Even if there was a massive solar storm that threatened low-orbiting sats instead of an act of malice, it might be preferable to disrupt communication and navigation for a couple weeks than potentially lose hundreds of billions in satellite infrastructure.

I bet they're doing this using HAARP. The ionosphere is now under our control. Bahahahaha....zap....oooops.

http://www.enterprisemission.com/
http://www.xenotechresearch.com/
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/
http://www.divinecosmos.com/
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/
http://einstein.stanford.edu/
http://www.biocybernaut.com/
http://www.lod.org/
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
http://www.sitchin.com/
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
http://www.zptech.net/
http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/dag/meditationroom.htm
http://www.starchildproject.com/

That should keep everybody busy ..

"Glaciers and ice shelfs are melting. Everywhere. Now."

Nope.

http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/arctic99/htm l/content/factsheets/oldreports/glaciers2.html

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID =3504064&thesection=news&thesubsection=general

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF16/1678.h tml

I appreciate how attached you are to your opinions. Now, stop making up facts to support them, like ALL glaciers are melting NOW, and we can talk.

But you won't. You're too attached to what you think to bother with what the facts are.

And that first link? It's from Greenpeace. Question their bias, please. I could use a good laugh.

They're not ALL melting. Educate yourself.

I work with geologists, glaciologists, climatologists, and meteorologists all days, and there are several signs that warming is occuring- the most convincing being the melt of tropical glaciers, of which all of them are melting."

No, they're not. And yours is a perfect example of why this subject is so divisive. If you genuinely are a grad student in atmospheric sciences, then you'd know that not all glaciers are melting.

So, either you're lying or you're a poor student. Either way, you're wrong.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id= 26&objectid=3504064

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF16/1678.h tml

http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/arctic99/htm l/content/factsheets/oldreports/glaciers2.html

...then the plasma discharges probably will. Shuttles come in relatively slowly, yet at least one of them has been photographed with something that looks suspiciously like a "Blue" Jet (they aren't all blue) striking it, immediately before it blew up.

Interestingly, one of the analyses used to back statements that there was no lightning involved provides a fairly sound reason for it: there was no warning, no change in the Shuttle's acoustics right up to the point when it all came apart. A strike that high, coming down would be nearly soundless, quickly drowned in the breakup noises, and recovered pieces of the damaged wing show damage characteristic of a high-powered electrical discharge.

Anyone who wishes to assert that such things don't happen is invited to read up on Positive Giants, Rocket Lightning, Geophysical Meteors and Ball Lightning before replying.

Recently I started wondering what evidence there was against human-caused global warming. I found some items on what's been going on in Alaska:

http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/490 4Change.html

http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/770 4Change.html

The two graphs above show that the average temps rose in 1977 and have remained fairly steady ever since.

http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Moberg2005.ht m

This graph shows the Little Ice Age and that today's temperatures have barely reached the Medieval Climactic Optimum.

And here's a Newsweek article from 1975 about... global cooling:

http://www.junkscience.com/apr05/coolingworld.pdf

I'm sure some will discard the Junk Science site because of its political bent. I encourage people to ignore that and look at the data he presents as well as the links to climatology articles published in scientific journals. We know far less about how climate works than we think we do.

http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Glanc e.htm

Recently I started wondering what evidence there was against human-caused global warming. I found some items on what's been going on in Alaska:

http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/490 4Change.html

http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/770 4Change.html

The two graphs above show that the average temps rose in 1977 and have remained fairly steady ever since.

http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Moberg2005.ht m

This graph shows the Little Ice Age and that today's temperatures have barely reached the Medieval Climactic Optimum.

And here's a Newsweek article from 1975 about... global cooling:

http://www.junkscience.com/apr05/coolingworld.pdf

I'm sure some will discard the Junk Science site because of its political bent. I encourage people to ignore that and look at the data he presents as well as the links to climatology articles published in scientific journals. We know far less about how climate works than we think we do.

http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Glanc e.htm

A major problem they will encounter is the plasticity of rocks as the approach the mantle -- the heat and pressure allows rocks to flow, much like silly putty will ooze. That plasticity make it difficult to maintain an open well for the bit to drill through.

I don't think people realize the extent of what 'Global Warming' refers to. I'm sure we can thank the media as they turn into Chicken Little whenever someone mentions 'sky' and 'falling' in the same sentance. Don't educate yourself at cnn.com for, well, anything. The news media is whoring drama pimping for ratings, and that is it.

Did you know that the alaskan permafrost hovers right around freezing all year long? When Global Warming affects the earth's temperature causing it to rise just a couple degrees, this inches the 500 some thousand square miles of frozen ground closer to melting. Frozen into this large landmass is thousands of years biological matter which has never had the chance to decay yet. When the permafrost thaws, this matter begins it's decaying process and releases carbon dioxide into the air which accelerates the greenhouse effect even more, raising the earth's temperature even higher.

Part of the problem with the ocean current, as described in the article, is that this current is a large 'pump' which cools the tropics, and warms the arctic (think of a liquid cooled cpu cooler). 'Hot' water from the tropics rises to the arctic which pushes the 'cold' water from the arctic, back to the tropics. It's just a large heat exchanger.

When the earth's temperature rises, the water that is exchaned is warmer which causes more melting of the polar caps (glaciers) in order to cool it.
In turn, however, the polar caps begin to receed as they are subjected to higher temps. As the polar caps receed, it exposes more ground cover in the arctic which absorbs more sunlight than what is reflected back off the glaciers that used to be there. This heat absorbtion also, as you would guess, contributes to Global Warming.

So as you can see, saying "it's going to get cold" in western europe is really just the tip of the iceberg. Remember how people figured the Titanic was unsinkable?

It is vital for the US military to talk to its submerged nuclear ballistic missile submarines, "boomers" (you'd forgotten about them hadn't you :-) Yes, they are still out there patrolling and for obvious reasons have to stay submerged. A traditional method is via radio at VLF and ELF frequencies as these can penetrate even seawater to useful depths. But antennae at these frequencies are ackwardly long (think miles not feet), and copper wire that long is a problem resistively speaking. But the Soviets discovered that HF beamed into the ionesphere can effectively modulate ionised particles at ELF frequencies. I don't recall the physics as that was someone else's job. So, use ionospheric modulation to generate ELF signals to talk with deployed submerged submarines. Cool, eh? Think this is a crock? Well this tells you the principles are being studied using HAARP. And this tells you it's for talking to boomers.

And this is the HAARP site.

The jamming theory is useless. You get much better mileage using directed jamming on a missile or by taking out the station communicating with it. Occam's razor, people.

It is vital for the US military to talk to its submerged nuclear ballistic missile submarines, "boomers" (you'd forgotten about them hadn't you :-) Yes, they are still out there patrolling and for obvious reasons have to stay submerged. A traditional method is via radio at VLF and ELF frequencies as these can penetrate even seawater to useful depths. But antennae at these frequencies are ackwardly long (think miles not feet), and copper wire that long is a problem resistively speaking. But the Soviets discovered that HF beamed into the ionesphere can effectively modulate ionised particles at ELF frequencies. I don't recall the physics as that was someone else's job. So, use ionospheric modulation to generate ELF signals to talk with deployed submerged submarines. Cool, eh? Think this is a crock? Well this tells you the principles are being studied using HAARP. And this tells you it's for talking to boomers.

And this is the HAARP site.

The jamming theory is useless. You get much better mileage using directed jamming on a missile or by taking out the station communicating with it. Occam's razor, people.

When correcting others, it's usually good to have a clue yourself.

"The IRI would transmit radio waves over the frequency range 2.8 to 10 MHz." from "Effects in the Ionosphere" http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/ion5.html

This is NOT a radar! It must be difficult to make a living calculate exactly what the radar is doing if you don't know the difference between radar frequencies (in the gigihertz region) and HF in the range 2.8 to 10 MHz.

Actually radar stands for RAdio Detection And Ranging. It is not specific to a frequency range. While most current radar systems may be in the microwave range, many early radar systems were, in fact, in the HF portion of the spectrum. (Scroll down to the "Frequency Bands"section of the above wikipedia article for more info.)

that's because somehow we've become some stupid global police force so whenever there's an injustice in the world everyone cries to the US to come save their a$$. It kinda started with WWI and went from there.

Sometimes i just wish we could say "look, i know your people are getting slaughtered by the thousands and it's sad, really, but we're trying to study the properties and behavior of the ionosphere here!" (that's what HAARP does btw)

hey least i tied this into the article, which is more than i can say for most the posts on here...

iamhassi
(email not shown publicly)
Karma: Excellent

I'm one of the "experts" quoted on the HAARP site

The radar heats ionospheric electrons ... I can calculate exactly what the radar is doing - that's how I make my living.

"The IRI would transmit radio waves over the frequency range 2.8 to 10 MHz." from "Effects in the Ionosphere" http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/ion5.html

This is NOT a radar! It must be difficult to make a living calculate exactly what the radar is doing if you don't know the difference between radar frequencies (in the gigihertz region) and HF in the range 2.8 to 10 MHz.

but blazing blind into something that has the potential to produce huge global problems is not something I would recommend or support.

Then don't blaze blindly - just read a bit about it before you condem it.

The following is carefully summarized from "Effects in the Ionosphere - As stated in the Environmental Impact Statement" http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/ion5.html

The environmental impact was thoroughly studied by experts in the field prior to granting permission to proceed with the project. The transmitted radio waves would have a power level only slightly higher than radio and television stations. The intensity of the HF signal in the ionosphere is hundreds of times less than even the normal random variations in intensity of the Sun's natural ultraviolet energy which creates the ionosphere. Radiation in the HF frequency range is non-ionizing. HAARP only affects the 0.2% of the ionospheric volume directly over the facility, and does not interact with the remaining 99.8% neutral atoms and molecules in this limited volume. The conclusion of the environmental impact process was that there would be no significant impacts to the ionosphere.

You've gotta love the unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP. Jamming the Chinese is the only plausible alternate explanation I've heard yet. If people are so convinced that something evil is going on up there, how about asking some of the grad students at University of Alaska? Everybody knows grad students will sing for a mere six pack or an offer to show their resume to your boss.

The array has so far produced localized auroras (go Google it yourself, I'm not your mother), which is one of the effects it was predicted to be able to achieve in addition to providing a theoretical way to improve radio reception, but I've heard some great crackpot theories. Most come from the tin-foil hat people who think it's a mind control device, but there's some lame stuff like destroying the ozone layer over only blue or only red states so Democrats/Republicans will all die of skin cancer or find oil sources for the big companies with government funding. The best, however, is the suggestion that it controls earthquakes. 'HAARP' + 'earthquake' is an entertaining google search. Iran, Sumatra, you name it. It was a secret government attack. Oh yeah, don't forget Hurricane Katrina. Obviously a creation of HAARP.

...how much RF energy it takes to damage a missile. But, by the time it flies over Alaska, the missile would be a ballistic warhead that has to do nothing more than detonate at a predetermined altitude. I imagine it could be made pretty simple, and therefore hard to kill.

But, four billion watts is a lot of power. The HAARP power page says that for every four watts of power transmitted, ten must be generated (40% efficiency). That's ten gigawatts, and the six diesel generators mentioned on the site produce only fifteen megawatts. Where does the extra power come from? Capacitors? If so, it would only be able to produce a single large pulse. That would be pretty useless against missiles (which wouldn't all come at once).

The proper role of an editor is to properly categorize material which is suitable for the publication, and reject that which is not. Taco's judgement in this case is, shall we say, questionable. The source website is full of logical and scientific garbage, so it doesn't belong in the science category. The talk of "particle accelerators" is bunkum too, unless you are talking about phenomena like sprites and jets which also occur in thunderstorms (and are at least somewhat understood but still under research), or perhaps if you are talking about particles from shingles and 4x8 sheets of plywood up to whole trees accelerated to 150 knots. Thus it doesn't belong in the hardware category either. And it takes itself far too seriously to be funny.

There really is no legitimate Slashdot heading under which this piece fits. Accordingly, I suggest a new one: the duncecap. This is for articles (or editorial decisions to post articles) which are too stupid for words, and to properly categorize such errors in judgement rather than throwing them down the memory hole.

Any editor posting a mis-categorized article which really ought to be filed in "It's stupid. Ask your editor why this is here" should have to wear a real duncecap during the performance of their duties for the next 24 hours. That sort of reminder is necessary to keep editors from shirking their responsibility to be, you know, editors.

Please visit http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/ for
much faster download links (we redirected the
traffic to a far fatter 'net pipe). Apologies to
people who have been trying to get the data, but
found the bandwidth insufficient. Greg

(I'm replying to the first-showing comment for visibility, since
this story is already a little old)

Please visit http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/ for
much faster download links (we redirected the
traffic to a far fatter 'net pipe). Apologies to
people who have been trying to get the data, but
found the bandwidth insufficient. Greg

Meanwhile, we finally have BitTorrent trackers available.

If you have a big network pipe (OC3 or better) and would like a backdoor way to download the data more quickly (or would like me to push the collection to you), drop me a note. It would be good to get the whole collection out for mirroring, and although many people have retrieved files there have not been too many who were able to download the whole 170GB collection yet.

Meanwhile, we finally have BitTorrent trackers available.

If you have a big network pipe (OC3 or better) and would like a backdoor way to download the data more quickly (or would like me to push the collection to you), drop me a note. It would be good to get the whole collection out for mirroring, and although many people have retrieved files there have not been too many who were able to download the whole 170GB collection yet.

At EarthSLOT you can:
- see all 12 months in a 3D viewer similar to GoogleEarth and WorldWind (neither of which have new BMs online yet)
- use html code snippets to embed a 3D viewer into your own web page
- download a complete 3D application of all 12 scenes for use on your computer w/o being online (currently slashdotted)
- use a slightly buggy pure HTML viewer to get 3D perspective of the data using mac/linux/etc
- use the API to code your own applications with the data
- see dozens of 3D applications unrelated to blue marbles at much higher resolution (15 meter typ.)

At GeoFusion you can:
- See all 12 monthly scenes in 3D at the same time and blend between them
- see katrina damage in a new way
- blend between cloud free earth during the day and night

The torrents in http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/nasa/torrents/world_b ig/ doesn't work. The tracker says it wants nothing to do with them.

Interestingly, this Earth image is a great illustration to why Soviet Union was having great difficulties competing with other countries.

The common answer is "communism is evil" or "planned economy is inefficient", but I suggest you look at the above image and find the Soviet Union there. Can you guess what substance the whole territory of the USSR is covered with? Hint: it's white, cold and tasteless.

Yep, you probably guessed right, even if you rarely see it in your country. Because you are so forunate to have warmer climate, the agricultural productivity in your country is probably several times higher, the investments required are several times lower.

Interesting what an innocuous satellite image can reveal...

http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu:6969/ now claims that the "requested download is not authorized for use with this tracker". DHT doesn't help much either. :/

Anyway, thanks for making this available and for all the bandwidth :)

The University of Alaska has another "fly-over navigation program" called Swath Viewer - http://sv.gina.alaska.edu/ . It is a java applet and reasonably friendly to the non Windows-centric world. It does not have the new Blue Marble dataset in it yet, but does have original Blue Marble.

the global 500m composites stored in the world big directory are raw binary files with the dimensions 3 x 86400 x 43200 (channels x columns x rows); data type is unsigned byte, with no header. They can be used for direct file access by data processing software (e.g. for subsetting, web-streaming etc.)

Pretty raw, eh?

here

Has anyone heard of a US government project called HAARP?

Of course, many of the sites that list HAARP as capable of controlling the weather also suspect that it can control your **MIND**, and then go into a series of prophesies, alien channelings, etc.