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According to this website on paleoclimatology, there are some long period weather oscillations such as:

the El Niño -Southern Oscillation (ENSO) - 6 to 18 months,

the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) - 20 to 30 years

the Pacific-North American Oscillation (PNA) - 3 to 10 years

the The North Atlantic Oscillation NAO - 5 to 10 years

the Artic Oscillation (AO)- 5 to 10 years

the Antartic Oscillation (AAO) - 5 to 10 years

Paleoclimatologists have the records of weather condifions going back thousands of years using information such as tree rings, snow, lava, and seed deposits.

If the researchers could develop a long timescale atmospheric simulator that could replicate this data, then maybe they could predict general trends 30 years into the
future. Although unpredictable events such as earthquakes and volcanos) make things
bit harder, although they will probably run a large number of possible scenarios
before making any conclusions.

If you were looking for a balanced view point on the dangers of tobacco smoking 30 years ago, would you have gone to the cigarette companies or the think tanks they supported? If not, why would you go to the think tanks of oil companies (mainly, if not exclusively, funded by ExxonMobil) today? This is, of course, in reference to climateaudit.org, which seems to be mainly written by Stephen McIntyre, who is funded (albeit indirectly through the George Marshall Institute) by ExxonMobil. If you doubt the veracity of ExxonSecrets.org, feel free to verify it against Exxon's own "giving report".

With regards to Climate Science and Roger Pielke, if you actually look at his publications, you'll find that he does believe that CO2 contributes to significant climate change. He is just a little more agnostic than many of his fellow researchers as to the nature of that climate change. I'm not sure if you want to count him as your ally.

1. The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally-averaged climate metrics would only be important to the extent that they provide useful information on these space scales.
2. Global and zonally-averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.
3. Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.
4. The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming.
5. In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.
6. Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.
7. Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO2 emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.
8. A vulnerability paradigm, focused on regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance, is a more inclusive, useful, and scientifically robust framework to interact with policymakers, than is the focus on global multi-decadal climate predictions which are downscaled to the regional and local scales. The vulnerability paradigm permits the evaluation of the entire spectrum of risks associated with different social and environmental threats, including climate variability and change.

1. The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally-averaged climate metrics would only be important to the extent that they provide useful information on these space scales.
2. Global and zonally-averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.
3. Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.
4. The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming.
5. In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.
6. Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.
7. Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO2 emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.
8. A vulnerability paradigm, focused on regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance, is a more inclusive, useful, and scientifically robust framework to interact with policymakers, than is the focus on global multi-decadal climate predictions which are downscaled to the regional and local scales. The vulnerability paradigm permits the evaluation of the entire spectrum of risks associated with different social and environmental threats, including climate variability and change.

Ignoring these science questions provides the perspective that the Report is intended to promote a particular perspective on climate science, rather than providing a balanced presentation on the issues. Indeed, the statement in Boston Globe that,

"Our conclusion is that this recent period of warming is likely the warmest in a (millennium),'' said John Wallace, one of the 12 members on the panel and professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington",

clearly shows such a biased view. The Report is a disappointment in not adequately addressing the accuracy of the global surface temperature trend data. Since its accuracy is at the foundation of the entire Report, the absence of such an evaluation very substantially weakens the value of the Report in climate science.

Ignoring these science questions provides the perspective that the Report is intended to promote a particular perspective on climate science, rather than providing a balanced presentation on the issues. Indeed, the statement in Boston Globe that,

"Our conclusion is that this recent period of warming is likely the warmest in a (millennium),'' said John Wallace, one of the 12 members on the panel and professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington",

clearly shows such a biased view. The Report is a disappointment in not adequately addressing the accuracy of the global surface temperature trend data. Since its accuracy is at the foundation of the entire Report, the absence of such an evaluation very substantially weakens the value of the Report in climate science.

And Dr. Richard Peilke of Colorado State says that only 28% of the observed warming is due to increases in CO2. There are scientists out there who are qualified to be skeptics. Also look at: http://www.climateaudit.org/

... and when you read it, remember that RealClimate is an advocacy site for the pro-anthropogenic warming theory.

Have a look at climate audit, which is a critical site, and Roger Pielke's Climate Science; Pielke is a famous climatologist and more middle of the road, accepting some anthropogenic warming, but questioning whether it's at all dominant in apparent overall warming.

>They have to point to flaws and holes in the current theory
Ideally with field data.

such as the temperatures recorded at sites that used to be in rural areas, but are now in suburban or urban areas, due to the growth of cities. The global-warming advocates admit that the urbanization itself causes the temperature readings to increase, but that they apply a correction factor to account for that increase. However, if you press them for details on the correction factor, it's based on estimates of how much a given amount of urbanization will increase the temperature -- making the resultant temperature data suspect. There are other 'corrections' that result in the warming being overstated, such as reduction in nighttime cooling due to increased cloudiness and other factors, which results in overstatement of temperature increases. For example, this page shows how improper data collection and adjustment skews the data (in this case, the premise that moving the data collection station can eliminate the urban heat island warming); after applying an empirical correction for the urban heat island, the average temperature at the Sydney station has decreased over the last century. While one data point is functionally useless for projecting an overall trend, it does illustrate the lack of scientific rigor in the collection of temperature data.

I don't remember how I stumbled on this web site. They seem to be pretty fair there. It looks like they have good information and discussion. Anyone know more about the "Roger A. Pielke Sr. Research Group" out of Colorado State?

Here is a article that includes a link to a paper on NASA temperature data.

New Christy and Spencer Report on Satellite Temperature Data

(As a side note: you can't play with liquid CO2, at least not on Earth. It's either solid or gas, coz you need about 5 atmospheres of pressure for it to be liquid.)

Dry ice is fun. If you buy a dewar from somewhere like Edmund or sometimes American Surplus And Science (amsci.com) you might be allowed to buy liquid nitrogen from a local welding supply place. There are scads of online instructions for making instant ice cream with liquid nitrogen. If you're *really* careful, there are lots of other fun things to do with it: blow up balloons and press them flat as pancakes in the LN2, then sail one like a frisbee and, if you do it right, it'll warm up and pop back into an inflated balloon in the air.

I used to work at the Litle Shop Of Physics and they have lots of suggestions about silly projects you can do, that illustrate basic science, or weird science. A lot of them use things like 2L bottles with aluminum foil wrapped around them, filled with salt water, as Leyden jars, charged by putting aluminum foil on TV screens -- you can get 30,000 volts from that and load up 50 Leyden jars and have a big chunk of power for some exciting projects.

Scitoys has lots of neat projects. I built a set of Franklin's Bells (Ben Franklin invented them to warn of oncoming lightning storms) that are functionally identical to the scitoys version (tho' I'd thought it up on my own) and that's a quick, funny project. Actually, looking around on their site, you could spend the rest of your life just building and playing with what they have. I think someone wrote a book called Gonzo Gizmos that's based on what they've done, and it's fantastic. The audio-via-laser-pointer is really easy to set up (hint: use the smallest solar cell you can find or a photodetector that the laser pointer beam nearly entirely covers, to get a better signal/noise ratio) and a lot of fun to play with.

You'll notice I'm not talking much about chemistry. There's some superb stuff to do there (speaking as a person with a degree in chemistry) but it is, simply, more dangerous, and it behooves you to know what you're doing before you let your kids do stuff. My dad made seriously dangerous stuff, like stuff that left pieces of copper embedded in some of his friends' internal organs, and while that's great fun and all, wait until your kids are a couple years older.

Did I mention how much fun you can have with microwaves? Particularly if you don't care about them very much? Neon bulbs are cheap. Put some in the microwave and turn it on. Microwave CD's. Microwave marshmallow peeps. Have grape races. Butterfly a grape to form a dipole antenna and watch it vaporize. You can even melt silver in a microwave (tho' I have yet to actually try this.)

... is irrelevant to this discussion.

There is something that he points out (in a roundabout way) that needs to be said: There is a lot of bad science going on in this debate. Both sides.

Now, granted, I'm a lowly Ph.D. student in Atmospheric Sciences studying hurricanes... what would I know about this, right? (Yes, that's slightly sarcastic.)

"Science" and "Nature" are hack journals nowadays. The only reason that one publishes in those is for publicity. Pure and simple. I haven't seen an article pertaining to atmospheric science come through there that I haven't been able to poke significant holes in for years now. (I speak mainly for atmospheric science articles in those journals. Other articles may be fine... I don't know.)

The real science happens in the less-public journals. And, believe it or not, the actual science always leads to more questions than answers. There are details that aren't covered in science news coverage that are vital to making valid conclusions in these issues. But, the nature of the "publish-or-perish" funding makes careful science difficult to do.

So, we're left with more questions than answers. Look at Dr. Denning's carbon cycle findings ( http://biocycle.atmos.colostate.edu/globalcarboncy cle.html ) as a prime example of what happens when we begin looking more closely at these problems. Many scientists are tossing out potential hypotheses in a science that is very difficult to easily test these hypotheses properly. There's a rush to put out results of any type by the P-or-P philosophy... easiest is verification of previous results in a slightly different regime.

I'm not claiming that the scientists in this debate are bad scientists... I'm claiming that they're getting caught up in a problem that is so incredibly complex that we're far from having a more-than-cursory handle on. A lot of this is pioneering work... and even pioneers in sciences can get things wrong or not understand everything (how many refinements of Einstein's relativity theory have there been in the last couple decades, for example?).

It's not just about politics or philosophy or science or anything like that. It's seeing the maturation of a whole discipline of science. Lindzen is completely right in claiming that alarmists may be taking things too far. Lindzen is completely right in claiming that there are politics involved here. He may be off-base in a number of points, but cooler heads will prevail eventually. This is an exciting time to watch all this... it's like our generation's relativity (20's and 30's) or nuclear chemistry (late-40's to 60's).

Those who are getting up in arms about all this... settle down. Seriously. Your hyperventilations are only speeding up the global warming process! ;) Cooler heads will prevail eventually.

-Jellisky

Degrees Kelvin is not a unit.

Uh, as long as we're being pedantic, yes, it is. It's just an obsolete unit. It's no less a unit than rods, chains, fathoms, cubits, or furlongs per fortnight.

More specifically, degrees Kelvin was replaced by "Kelvins" by decree of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (who specify the SI measurement system) back in 1967 in the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures (1). This does not mean that it suddenly ceases to be a unit, however deprecated a unit it might be.

On a side note, they decreed in 1948 that degrees Centigrade should be replaced by Celsius degrees. The fact that I, born in 1976, still originally learned it as Centigrade should give some indication about how slowly language changes.

The real problem is that every measure of temperature that people use in their daily lives is measured in degrees. People are used to saying "degrees Celsius" or "degrees Fahrenheit". I understand the desire to have all the SI units not be prefixed by such a term, but it does serve an important purpose in making temperature fairly easily distinguished from other numbers in common language use, and thus is unlikely to fade away easily. I would not be surprised if a large percentage of non-scientists were still calling it "degrees Kelvin" fifty years from now....

1. Source: U.S. Metric Association.

You did know ants can fly, didn't you?

So unless your the rare geek who staggers each $caffeinatedDrink with two glasses of water and a Flinstones vitamin - your on the loosing end. But what the hell, everything will kill you in one way or another...

I wonder if you would have been so quick to share your website if this was your job.

It must be very difficult to be humble for people who are as great as you.

First, as you undoubtly know, english is not spoken by everyone. Actually, Chinese and Hindi would be a better target language.

This is incorrect. English is the best language to use becuase it is the most spoken language worldwide. It isn't necessarily the most common first language, but more people can speak English than any other language in the world. According to "English as a Global Language", David Chrystal in the late 1990s statistics suggest that between 1.2 and 1.5 billion people are either fluent or competant in English, and this figure is growing. Chinese comes in at 1.1 billion, and what more Chinese has many dialects (although unified by a common written language).

Hindi is also a poor choice. While at uni I was chatting to an indian student who told me that the offical language of india is English because there are so many different language within India. According to this (first result returned by google), a mere 480 million people speak hindi (180 as mother tongue, 300 as second language).

Except that isn't the myth. The myth is that food is safe to eat after 5 seconds on the floor.

Colorado State University is offering an online MS in Comsci

http://www.cs.colostate.edu/cstop/csacademics/csde grees/onlinemcs.html

• The original proposal of the WWW
• HTTP, HTML and URLs
• History of the WWW

Therefore, following the logic shown by the above author when saying We *did* invent the damned thing... it is ours, there's no good reason to give it away! CERN should not have 'given away' control over WWW right?
Perhaps they ought to have patented the whole thing and prevent others from using it freely?

What about telephone? Who maintains world-wide numbering?

I am actually curious to see what yet another narrow-minded, self-serving isolationism will do to further the widening drift between the world and a certain country.

Yeah, just like we joined them in using the metric system.

1893 isn't that recent, especially in American consciousness http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/laws/mendenhal l.html

Webster et al. 2005. Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment. Science 309:1844-1846. (full text pdf)

Bingo. See American Association of State Climatologists President Dr. Roger Pielke Sr's. analysis of the Webster et al. paper, which was largely blown out of proportion by the press as a definitive link between global warming and increased hurricane activity.

I must say I am rather shocked by the Science Referees responses to your comment. The first seemed like a relatively balanced technical critique, but the second was a completely non-technical, vitriolic response by someone who writes as if they have a personal vendetta. Ive heard this paper referred to as the smoking gun of anthropogenically forced climate change, and to discover that such a title was awarded to a paper whose criticisms were dismissed without fair review, especially in a publication such as Science, is frankly rather disturbing.

I wish the best of luck to you in getting your voice heard, as it seems nowadays that taking a cautionary approach to climate change is becoming an increasingly unpopular standpoint, and I find it rather sad that legitimate scientific inquiry is being reduced to little more than a popularity contest.

But the most telling of all is that the author of the paper itself wrote in to Dr. Pielke's blog and noted that the second reviewer who you quoted is a total twit: http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/?p=26

The authoritative (sounding) 2nd referee doesnt realize how small the fluctuations of the global mean energy balance with space are, even in the presence of realistic ENSO and large scale ocean dynamics variability, in the absence of external forcings. The measured/inferred imbalance, as a decadal-mean global-mean, is huge. It implies a correspondingly large external forcing that has yet to be responded to. Any doubts about this interpretation should be erased by a few more years of data. Accurate measurements are continuing and the number of profiling floats is increasing. This planetary metric will become more precise and has the potential to become very useful as the record gets longer. However, to be most useful, its significance needs to be widely recognized. Hopefully any doubting oceanographers have an open mind I dont think that we have a decade to convince them.

So the guy you're using to argue that Dr. Pielke, director of the American Association of State Climatologists, is an "idiot", seems to be pretty damn clueless.

But hey, you duped all of /., I'm modded +4 and you're modded +5. Well done! Bullshit plays well here, I guess.

I must say I am rather shocked by the Science Referees responses to your comment. The first seemed like a relatively balanced technical critique, but the second was a completely non-technical, vitriolic response by someone who writes as if they have a personal vendetta. Ive heard this paper referred to as the smoking gun of anthropogenically forced climate change, and to discover that such a title was awarded to a paper whose criticisms were dismissed without fair review, especially in a publication such as Science, is frankly rather disturbing.

I wish the best of luck to you in getting your voice heard, as it seems nowadays that taking a cautionary approach to climate change is becoming an increasingly unpopular standpoint, and I find it rather sad that legitimate scientific inquiry is being reduced to little more than a popularity contest.

But the most telling of all is that the author of the paper itself wrote in to Dr. Pielke's blog and noted that the second reviewer who you quoted is a total twit: http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/?p=26

The authoritative (sounding) 2nd referee doesnt realize how small the fluctuations of the global mean energy balance with space are, even in the presence of realistic ENSO and large scale ocean dynamics variability, in the absence of external forcings. The measured/inferred imbalance, as a decadal-mean global-mean, is huge. It implies a correspondingly large external forcing that has yet to be responded to. Any doubts about this interpretation should be erased by a few more years of data. Accurate measurements are continuing and the number of profiling floats is increasing. This planetary metric will become more precise and has the potential to become very useful as the record gets longer. However, to be most useful, its significance needs to be widely recognized. Hopefully any doubting oceanographers have an open mind I dont think that we have a decade to convince them.

So the guy you're using to argue that Dr. Pielke, director of the American Association of State Climatologists, is an "idiot", seems to be pretty damn clueless.

But hey, you duped all of /., I'm modded +4 and you're modded +5. Well done! Bullshit plays well here, I guess.

Well, William Connolley works for the British Antarctic Survey as a climate modeller. He has plenty of peer reviewed papers published after peer review.

e.g. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=auth or%3A%22Connolley%22&btnG=Search

Secondly, the link you gave was to a blog, as well.

Thirdly, you can easily disprove my attack (or validate it) by finding an article criticising GW by Pielke published in a reputable paper. For my part, I can source Connolley's quotes back to Pielke's own site:

http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/P ielke_reviews.pdf

Where we can find even more damning criticism like:

"This is a serious accusation that does not appear to have any basis in fact."

Which Pielke cites as evidence of a conspiracy against him.

Not all scientists agree that anthropogenic climate forcings are the primary cause of global warming. And hey, this guy is director of the American Association of State Climatologists and he's peer reviewed. He also resigned Bush's panel on climate change because no one else wanted to listen to a dissenting opinion, they were too up in arms about global warming alarmism like this dude

Our government can't possibly control the weather!

It's seriously time to wake up, people!

Actually, they have not been fighting. The lead on that would be Bill Gray's model . They work with a lot of ncar/noaa people from boulder, whose models show the global warming. Within and between the groups, there is no disagreement that global warming will lead to bigger western atlantic huricanes.

Now, there are some people out of Miami who tend to disagree but they have issues with all else and their models tend to be way off base. IIRC, miami initially thought that this year was going to be a mild one with 4 weak hurricanes While gray was predicting something like 8-9 with one or two good ones.

Dosage is trickier with pills, because the skin will stop making D when it's had enough. But if you google, you'll find a lot of references saying it's safe to take quite a bit more D than the RDA.

Heh, US units are Metric, according to the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.

Well, remember, for the most part these are the same developers who wrote the all time best bug reports ever:
4256482 Banging on keyboard like a wild monkey during cde startup causes dtwm hang
4338420 cron is vulnerable to murder by its children
and my personal favorite
4110503 as_setprot heuristic gave my process a wedgie.

Hey, Slasdot! I'm in the God Damned USA here, how about some frickin inches, eh?

Oxytocin scented heavy duty condoms

This is great marketing, considering all condoms are oxytocin scented at some point.

"Males synthesize oxytocin in the same regions of the hypothalamus as in females, and also within the testes and perhaps other reproductive tissues. Pulses of oxytocin can be detected during ejaculation. Current evidence suggests that oxytocin is involved in facilitating sperm transport within the male reproductive system and perhaps also in the female, due to its presence in seminal fluid. It may also have effects on some aspects of male sexual behavior."

Also of note:

"The most important stimulus for release of hypothalamic oxytocin is initiated by physical stimulation of the nipples or teats. The act of nursing or suckling is relayed within a few milliseconds to the brain via a spinal reflex arc. These signals impinge on oxytocin-secreting neurons, leading to release of oxytocin. "

So, the next time your girlfriend complains of having "trust issues," you know what to do!

http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/en docrine/hypopit/oxytocin.html

Since the effect seems to be producable by a spray, it is entirely possible that the human body releases low levels of this stuff naturally.

More than you know.

"Males synthesize oxytocin in the same regions of the hypothalamus as in females, and also within the testes and perhaps other reproductive tissues. Pulses of oxytocin can be detected during ejaculation. Current evidence suggests that oxytocin is involved in facilitating sperm transport within the male reproductive system and perhaps also in the female, due to its presence in seminal fluid. It may also have effects on some aspects of male sexual behavior."

It also seems to stimulate maternial behavior in female mammals.

http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/en docrine/hypopit/oxytocin.html

http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/en docrine/hypopit/oxytocin.html

Physiologic Effects of Oxytocin

In years past, oxytocin had the reputation of being an "uncomplicated" hormone, with only a few well-defined activities related to birth and lactation. As has been the case with so many hormones, further research has demonstrated many subtle but profound influences of this little peptide. Nevertheless, it has been best studied in females where it clearly mediates three major effects:

* Stimulation of milk ejection (milk letdown): Milk is initially secreted into small sacs within the mammary gland called alveoli, from which it must be ejected for consumption or harvesting. Mammary alveoli are surrounded by smooth muscle (myoepithelial) cells which are a prominant target cell for oxytocin. Oxytocin stimulates contraction of myoepithelial cells, causing milk to be ejected into the ducts and cisterns.

* Stimulation of uterine smooth muscle contraction at birth: At the end of gestation, the uterus must contract vigorously and for a prolonged period of time in order to deliver the fetus. During the later stages of gestation, there is an increase in abundance of oxytocin receptors on uterine smooth muscle cells, which is associated with increased "irritability" of the uterus (and sometimes the mother as well). Oxytocin is released during labor when the fetus stimulates the cervix and vagina, and it enhances contraction of uterine smooth muscle to facilitate parturition or birth.

In cases where uterine contractions are not sufficient to complete delivery, physicians and veterinarians sometimes administer oxytocin ("pitocin") to further stimulate uterine contractions - great care must be exercised in such situations to assure that the fetus can indeed be delivered and to avoid rupture of the uterus.

* Establishment of maternal behavior: Successful reproduction in mammals demands that mothers become attached to and nourish their offspring immediately after birth. It is also important that non-lactating females do not manifest such nurturing behavior. The same events that affect the uterus and mammary gland at the time of birth also affect the brain. During parturition, there is an increase in concentration of oxytocin in cerebrospinal fluid, and oxytocin acting within the brain plays a major role in establishing maternal behavior.

Thanks. I've already been there and done that - a few times. I'm always having to make a custom kernel to support SMP and this wierd Alteon (IBM Netfinity) gigabit NIC. Portupgrading was always easy, I was always seeming to get tripped up with mergemaster and build world (after tripping up the kernel confing a time or two).

More time tinkering later and I'm sure I'll figure out where I went wrong.

BTW, has the Pango problems with 5.3 been fixed in 5.4RC?

Best install guide for newbies I've yet come across:
http://www.engr.colostate.edu/~reinholz/freebsd/53 _install2.htm

He's talking about lines of blow, and he's wrong, because in fact coke has a long history in Egypt and may have been enjoyed by the Pharoahs.

The proper unit for seconds is lower case s, hence it should be ms.

Correct me if im wrong, but it's the pod broadcasting radio waves? These are slower than the speed of light no? http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/numbers.htm

... but it seems that laws are made to be broken.

The Metric Conversion Act 1975.

which is actually a surprisingly good metaphor for the Disney/Pixar relationship. Hey, AC you're pretty smart!

Termites

Slashdotter's Diets

It's somewhat convenient that one degree Celsius and a Kelvin are the same.

Either way, 8 degrees of anything above absolute zero is pretty darned cold and for most folks it doesn't make a bloody lick of difference what units you use.

Check this page out for more information.

The Materials Engineering Lab at Colorado State is doing some really cool stuff with thin-film PV modules. They are able to get 12.44% efficiences from cells that they make evaporating CdS/CdTe onto a glass backing.

The really cool thing (lots of pictures in the linked site) is that the manufacturing process is very simple (a conveyour belt passes glass into a vaccum-chamber and over several crucibles containing the CdS/CdTe to be evaporated onto the glass) and produces no liquid and virtually no solid waste. As well, if I can remember correctly from my visit to the lab, the raw materials (metals that will be evaporated onto the glass) are readily availible as by-products from other industrial processes.

Hopefully this technology will be out of the lab and in wide-scale use in the near future.

Hurricanes come in 40 year cycles. We are part way into the up swing of the high part of the cycle.

We can seed clouds.

Not that nucleation is the only important factor.

I've wondered if that may be one of the reasons why some couples start looking more and more like each other.

The "two become one flesh" thing might be a bit more literal than some people might think. Using ones sense of smell to help choose a mate might be useful in getting a better genetic match - of course that's assuming you don't have artificial hormones and scents screwing things up. Some women's cycles cause them to flip from one preference (more similar genes) to another (more different) though...

Not sure what happens if a woman has children from many different men. Wonder how her immune system would handle the fetal cells with so many variations of DNA.

On a vaguely related note: human chimeras. Mosaicism and Chimerism.

They can use them in science class, for example to build a CD Spectroscope.

This is a popular misconception. The fact is, the U.S. does use the metric system. See here for a list of laws.