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There are F-16s that have crashed in the lake. The military decided it was too expensive to recover them since they were destroyed anyway. So they let them sink in the mud (presumably they did). I imagine that there is other airplane junk in the lake too, being the flyover for a military base.

There are some interesting artifacts around the lake. Being a desert region seems to attract a number of artists that sees it as their canvas. It's where you see all the car commercials with the car zooming along in a vast desert expanse on white ground (the salt flats).

It's unfortunate, but we do not have an enviromentally conscious citzenry. All sorts of trash and junk. have been dumped out at the lake, just so they wouldn't have to pay a landfill fee or bother with it.

It's true that the lake does have an ecosystem, but not much of one, as it is very salty.

Also, the Salt Lake is not the swimmer's aquatic paradise. At one time it was considered to be. There was a large resort on the shore. Unfortunately it burned to the ground when some vagrants built a campfire on the wooden floor (smart, huh?).

The lake was so salty that you would indeed float like a cork. But because of a railway causeway across the lake, the south end (where everybody goes swimming) does not have enough salinity as the lake is fed by freshwater sources there.

The lake does not have any natural beaches, but rather mud flats for shoreline. Not like what you find at the ocean. There are some man made ones, and this is where you can go spend the day if you want.

But even if you do find a spot of sand to toss the blanket on, there are "brine flies", the other half of the lake's ecosystem. Imagine a hord of gnats that want to make you their business.

There is bacteria that thrive in this anaeoribic enviroment around the shoreline. The resulting byproduct of their efforts is hydrogen sulfide, or as we like to call it "lake stink". If the wind is just right, there is not a place in the valley that you can go to escape it. But that only happens occasionally, like before a rainstorm. I think the natives like myself have a fondness for it (since it only happens a couple times a year) as it reminds us that we live in a unique place. However, if you are down on the shore, there are days it is very bad.

After years of drought, the lake is at a low point right now. However in the mid-eighties, it was at the highest point ever. An interesting engineering feat (or more likely boondoggle) was the installation of massive pumps that are capable of pumping the lake in order to lower the level.

There are a number of mineral companies that remove salt, rare metals (magnesium), and other minerals from the lake.

However, until recently (last 15-20 years), there was not that much concern for the lake ecology. The thing that people did/do not realize is that like other resources, it is finite.

There was a time that nobody harvested brine shrimp eggs. Now there are a number of companies that have to be regulated so they do not remove the entire next generation of brine shrimp from the lake. Indications are that decades of removing minerals from the lake have depleted the salt flats. So much so, that the world famous Bonneville Speedway does not have enough rock hard salt to break speed records on anymore.

My favorite thing about the lake? Without a doubt it is Pink Floyd, an escapee from a local aviary. He's more predictable than the swallows at Capistrano. Every year he makes

You mean, of course, that the US never starts anything, and has never started anything. I agree fully; our country does us proud.

They're almost certainly refering to the Wen Ho Lee case, which is still very controversial. Apparently, Chinese intelligence had penetrated the Los Alamos lab an obtained secrets pertaining to our nuclear weapons program (the Chinese had made a quantum leap in only ten years or so, and much of the work in this period appeared to be very similar to ours in some respects). The investigation focused on Lee, who is ethnic Chinese, a logtime employee at the Los Alamos labs, and who had made at least one trip to mainland China previously. His arrest and treatment seemed to be bungled, and the FBI got a black eye over it. Some people adamantly maintain that Lee was indeed a spy, but there was insuffcient evidence, and detractors held this as an example of incompetence and racism in the FBI.

Details can be found here.

more than thirteen thousand hectares of fertile soils were flooded by the Toktogul Reservoir. In addition to constricting the downstream water supply to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and eventually to the Aral, the dam destroyed the fragile ecological balance within the region and the once beautiful area surrounding the reservoir was transformed into a desert

If it's in the air, it's out. There's no way you can honestly enforce this, at least not in Canada. Why? It's illegal for them to broadcast in Canada (for whatever reason); Canadian judges have ruled that it's not illegal to decode these signals since they don't offer them.

If your phone is hardwired and you make the effort to ensure it's fine, then police need a warrant to tap it. If you are using a cell phone, they don't. If you leave your curtains open, it's not illegal for the police to look in. It is illegal for them to use alternate imaging equipment which views wavelengths that'll pass through most visible-light opaque material, as was ruled.

Once again: if you are broadcasting a signal of some kind, or emiting reflected waves that you are not taking the effort to not transmit via curtains or using wires, you have no legal equivalnce of wired security, and are doing so at your own risk. Due dilligence is important.

Please read "Once shunned, Chinese in Korea courted again". Even to this day, the Koreans have a racist attitude against non-Koreans. Most damning is the discriminatory laws that the Koreans have used against non-Koreans. The government of Korea gives preferential treatment to ethnic Koreans seeking Korean citizenship, and if you cannot prove that you are ethnically Korean, then you must obtain a personal guarantee from a high-ranking government official. Even more shocking, for more than 50 years, non-Koreans were prohibited from owning businesses. The Koreans "successfully" drove out most of the Chinese, reducing their number from 150,000 to 20,000.

A discussion of question begging from the Christian Science Monitor.

This study was really one of those government-funded studies that's always in progress. They just send some guys out to buy the same exact products from several stores in local communities. The big news in the last couple of years is that prices at stores (in my area) like FoodMax and Publix are, on the whole, about 30% cheaper than prices at Kroger or Food Lion. Even the discount savings using the card only knocks off about 10% of the average total bill.

(I do not have the data to back this up; these numbers are recalled to the best of my memory. This means that the best this post can do is get you to think about it and investigate it. I've already done so for myself, and I've made my decision about it. I only use my store cards to purchase alcohol and condoms.)

anyone else wonder what the super collider project was?

google search came up with this quick summary:
http://csmweb2.emcweb.com/durable/1999/10/21/p19s3 .htm

actually french fries weren't made by the french in france, but rather Belgium (source).

even then though, the evidence is sketchy. In reality the reason they are called French fries is because the way of cutting the potatoes is called "to french". Cutting a potatoe in long, slender slices is to french the potatoe. (Not to be confused with a different more modern "to french").

Just some interesting facts.

Proven oil reserves in "thousand million barrels":

Canada:
1981: 8.5
1991: 8.0
2000: 6.4

Total Middle East:
1981: 362.6
1991: 661.6
2000: 683.5

Source: BP statistical review of world energy - Oil and Gas Journal posts very similar numbers, and World Oil posted numbers varying by somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.05%, by my quick off-the-cuff glance. It's true that Canada may potentially have much more oil, but statistics about unproven reserves are even less reliable for comparison's sake.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Canada has 4.7 billion barrels of reserves, and is the No. 3 supplier of crude oil to the US, behind Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

The US gets somewhere between 25% and 45% of its oil from the Middle East, depending on where you look. Not that the statistics are the end-all and be-all, anyway... the real question is, is there a compelling strategic need to maintain a reasonable amount of control over current oil production (even "less than 20%" as you claim is a very substantial amount of oil), is there a staggeringly humongous amount of money to be made by the oil industry in the Middle East and Central Asia, and do George Bush, Dick Cheney, the S.S. Condoleeza Rice, Hamid Karzai, and others have substantial investments, holdings, and interests in the oil industry? Will these people likely continue with or go back to the oil industy after their term is up? Are most of their backers, family, family friends, and business associates from the oil/energy industries?

The US already uses its political leverage to increase oil production in Canada. You may notice they don't need to send the 101st Airborne to do so, as they may in more unruly parts of the world. If you do even the slightest bit of research, you might find that some Canadians feel that NAFTA and other agreements has already basically ceded their oil to US interests. And the US managed to do that without having support a coup, as they did, whaddaya know, just recently in Venezuela.

Your facts are wrong and your reasoning is faulty. If you truly want to be better informed, take a look at The Economist or the BBC, for starters.

Indeed.

http://csmweb2.emcweb.com/durable/2000/08/01/p18s1 .htm has more information on various techniques filmmakers use for making various storms.

This new development seems more evolutionary than revolutionary.