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Those arguments seem hilarious to me. Furthermore, whenever someone visits a foreign place and writes about it, for every thing he writes about, you can find a dozen others that he omitted! What exactly does that prove?

Thanks for that - I'd just assumed it'd be in the Americas from what I read until your comment. If I'm really determined, I might go straight to bed when I get home on Tuesday, and try to wake up for 3am or so (I get up at 6 for work anyway), but I doubt that will happen. If anyone else in the UK (and most of western Europe) is interested, here's what I found out about times from Alpha Galileo :

It begins at 0035 GMT when the Moon enters the lightest part of the Earth's shadow, the penumbra. Soon after the Moon will have a slight yellowish hue. At 0142 GMT the Moon starts to enter the dark core of the Earth's shadow, the umbra. At 0301 GMT the Moon will be completely within the umbra - the 'total' part of the eclipse has begun. This is the time when it should have an obvious red colour. Mid-eclipse is at 0326 GMT and the total phase ends at 0352 GMT. At 0509 GMT the Moon leaves the umbra and the eclipse ends when the Moon leaves the penumbra at 0617 GMT.

About Indonesian islands being submerged? It's been going on for 8,000 years at least; this is nothing new. At the same time, the big island of Hawaii is adding area daily. Guess what: islands - and coastlines - always change. Always have, always will.

Oh, and about the air in China being unbreathable? I just got back from 25 days working in the Shanghai area (from Suzhou down to Ningbo). I can assure you I didn't hold my breath for 25 days. And in fact the air was cleaner than what I was breathing 40 days ago in LA. Thick dust blew into Shanghai one day, but no worse than the dust I've experienced in McPherson, Kansas or Lubbock, Texas. Thankfully the dust was gone in a day as we had some strong thunderstorms roll in...

Lastly, you're correct that "climate scientists *have* shown that increased CO2 can lead to warming in all kinds of closed systems". However, the Earth is NOT a closed system. Over 30,000 metric tons of space dust are added to the Earth each year, and the dominant source of energy - the Sun - is constantly changing it's input to the Earth.

http://alphagalileo.org/ - a good source of science news. It is free and mostly based on press-releases from research organisations around Europe as far as Russia. The only inconviniance is that you neen registeration to see news.

Title: The Mass Appeal Of Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings Is Rooted In Racism, Says University Lecturer
Organisation: University of Warwick
Release Date: 13 Dec 2002

"The Two Towers, Tolkien's second installment of The Lord of the Rings, is an epic rooted in racism and Middle Earth's mythology represents anxieties about the immigration taking place in mid-1950s Britain, says Dr Stephen Shapiro, an English Lecturer at the University of Warwick."

http://www.AlphaGalileo.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=r eadRelease&Releaseid=12032 Registration required.

According to a different article here, they solved the game by developing a program that computes the best move and eventual outcome for all trillions of positions that can possibly occur in a game. The results are stored in a database, and then they crunch the numbers. Not very elegant.

There really is nothing new about this, much like there is nothing new about linux users stuffing large sausages into their rectums.