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The only information that I know about is here...

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/08sep_radioactivemoon/

Out in deep space, radiation comes from all directions. On the Moon, you might expect the ground, at least, to provide some relief, with the solid body of the Moon blocking radiation from below. Not so.

When galactic cosmic rays collide with particles in the lunar surface, they trigger little nuclear reactions that release yet more radiation in the form of neutrons. The lunar surface itself is radioactive!

So which is worse for astronauts: cosmic rays from above or neutrons from below? Igor Mitrofanov, a scientist at the Institute for Space Research and the Russian Federal Space Agency, Moscow, offers a grim answer: "Both are worse."

They are attempting to quantify this effect with CRaTER or Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation. Basically, the CRaTER instrument is aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (which is currently orbiting the Moon). However, I haven't seen any specific reports on their findings on their official website http://crater.sr.unh.edu/, press reports indicate that initial finding aren't good...

In a surprising discovery, scientists have found that the moon itself is a source of potentially deadly radiation.

Measurements taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the number of high energy particles streaming in from space did not tail off closer to the moon's surface, as would be expected with the body of the moon blocking half the sky.

Rather, the cosmic rays created a secondary — and potentially more dangerous -- shower by blasting particles in the lunar soil which then become radioactive.

"The moon is a source of radiation," said Boston University researcher Harlan Spence, the lead scientist for LRO's cosmic ray telescope. "This was a bit unexpected."

While the moon blocks galactic cosmic rays to some extent, the hazards posed by the secondary radiation showers counter the shielding effects, Spence said at a press conference at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week.

Why do you need negligible Coriolis effects?

The general rule of thumb is that human factors restrict you to an rpm of 2 or so (although I cannot find a good primary source for this). This paper suggests that people can get used to 23 rpm (!), which would mean you could do a Mars gravity in a single, decent sized, spacecraft. I must admit that I have some doubts about this. A 2 rpm Mars gravity would require a 85 meter tether. A 8 meter tether (or spacecraft) would suffice at 6 rpms, and I suspect that that would be more along the lines of what would be chosen. Astronauts would just have to get used to it in their training (or not go).

Let me translate: "If you disagree with me, you should be prohibited from serving in public office. Further, you should be put under house arrest, so you won't be able to influence anyone else against my views."

Now for some truth: Communism, rooted deep in athiesm, resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people in the 20th century--but to those communists, nothing was lost, since without God, humans are nothing but bags of random organic goo, resources to be exploited, since they amount to nothing in the end. On the other hand, it's because of the intrinsic value of human life that is central to Christianity that resulted in the formation of the USA and all its associated values of individual liberty, which have had a strong positive impact on the rest of the world--which you would so grossly trample.

You're nothing but a hypocrite. But of course, "+5 Insightful" on Slashdot.

Some of the greatest intellectual leaders of all time had strong religious faith. It's only in the cult of scientism--in which science itself is practically worshipped as a religion--that religion and reason are said to be incompatible.

FYI, that's not normally how this works. For instance, the Harvard School of Education has a masters program aimed specifically at people who have been professionals in mathematics and science fields who want to switch to teaching.

Don't forget to tell them that atheists, including the fundamentalist sort, killed 100,000,000 people in the last century.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html

If Microsoft made cars.
(a href="http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm")If Microsoft made cars.(/a)
Replace the ( ) with < >

The believers are bullies, and we need to stop allowing them to shove everyone around.

Atheists in power also have a history of bullying. The documented results are tragedy on an epic scale.

The believers are bullies, and we need to stop allowing them to shove everyone around.

Atheists in power also have a history of bullying. The documented results are tragedy on an epic scale.

Actually religion is THE problem. As Richard Dawkins so elegantly has pointed out: Religion is a delusion, but as so many suffer from it, it is not recognized as the mental illness it really is.

The alternatives appear worse.

"What is we ran the exhaust alongside some materials like this"

you mean like this:
http://www.gentherm.com/page/automotive-0
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=107768&p=irol-newsArticle_print&ID=1326140&highlight=
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/08/bmwthermal-20110830.html

or this:
http://www.serdp.org/Program-Areas/Energy-and-Water/Energy/Conservation-and-Efficiency/EW-1651
http://www.navysbir.com/10_3/8.htm
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012SPIE.8377E..15S

The problem is usually in actually getting that level of total conversion efficiency. By the time you take all of the efficiency chain fractions into account, you're far below the theoretical 15% (which only occurs at peak, steady conditions).

1) Your information is owned by the publisher, you can't reprint or send copies to friends.

This is a sweeping generalization at best and wrong in most cases. It is perfectly possible to publish in a 'gold' open acess journal like the ones owned by PLoS, in which case your information is published under, for instance, some CC license. Even most 'traditional' journals nowadays allow self-archiving preprint and/or postprints in an institutional repository like Harvard's or in ArXiv ('green' open access).

3) The work gets restricted to a small audience - the ones who can afford the access fees

Not necessarily true, for the reasons outlined above.

4) It's rife with politics and petty, spiteful people

The same goes for Slashdot, Wikipedia, the local philately club and most communities I can think of. More seriously, it also happens that a paper is vastly improved thanks to constructive and insightful comments by genuinely concerned reviewers.

5) The standard format is cripplingly small, confining, and constrained.

I can sort of see what you mean by this, although most journals allow authors to post supplementary information (or just add a link to one's web page). Is this really such a problem in practice?

6) The standard format requires jargonized cant to promote exclusion.

There is a reason why jargon exists: it helps specialists communicate. The reason is not to exclude non-specialists, which may be an unfortunate side-effect from time to time. There are other media for that purpose (communicating the results of important research to a wider audience).

As PZ Myers asks, if the remaining 40% is all functional... why do onions need ten times as much as humans need,

When you question them, this is all the "Junk DNA" proponents' arguments ever boil down to: "I don't understand it, therefore it's junk."

We DO understand what 60% of the genome is doing. 45% of it is parasitic. Do you really think that LINEs, parasitic DNA strands that make copies of themselves over and over again, are NOT junk?

and why can the fugu pufferfish thrive without any of it?

Thrive....under what conditions? And what is your definition of "thrive"? Have you subjected the animal to every possible condition it could ever experience in life, to completely ensure that the DNA in question can never be triggered under any circumstances?

Of course you haven't--because you haven't the foggiest clue how it all even works. "Junk DNA", like many other idiocies in the long history of science, is the legacy of morons.

Fugu "thrive" in the sense that they're alive and reproducing. Fugu are not dying off. Fugu are not endangered. Fugu are not at an evolutionary dead end suffering under a genetic legacy that's handicapping them, like pandas or the various all-female species of parthenogenic whiptail lizard are. Like I said, thriving. The only thing that threatens them at all: their tasty lip-numbing tetrodotoxin convinces humans to turn them into sushi.

Why do fugu (390 megabases) get by with 3.5 times less DNA than zebrafish (1.4 gigabases)? Why do fruit flies eliminate non-coding "junk" DNA from their genome 40 times faster than crickets do? (And, for that matter, why do both fruit flies AND crickets AND most eukaryotes excise DNA from their genome at all?) Why does the common onion, Allium cepa (15876 megabases), need 2.3 times more DNA than its close relative the Blue Spear chive, Allium altyncolicum (6860 megabases)? Does bear's garlic, Allium ursinum (30870 megabases), have extra DNA stashed away in preparation for a future alien invasion that will sap the precious bodily fluids from lesser garlics? No. If two closely related Allium species both live in the same area, and look similar, and taste similar, and their cells have a similar appearance under a microscope, and they are equally prolific in their environment... but one has twice as much DNA as the other... then by definition at least half of the larger wad of DNA must be redundant. Maybe not inert, but "junk" in the sense of duplicate or obsolete functionality that doesn't need to be there to grow a successful, sexually mature plant that can compete in the real world.

In short, "junk DNA" is basically a shorthand for "DNA that could be deleted from all individuals in a species without harming the reproductive fitness of those individuals". By this standard, LOTS of DNA is junk -- at least the part that's known to be parasitic (45% of the human genome), and probably a lot more.

Are there regions of non-coding DNA, in the 40% of the human genome as yet not understood by humanity, that confer a benefit to their hosts? Almost certainly. But as a percentage of the genome, the 80% claim in the ENCODE press release is f***ing ridiculous. As best as I can tell, the ENCODE papers are using a shotgun approach that would categorize known parasites like LINEs, ERVs, and transposons as "functional". In one sense, such DNA is not passively sitting there, so it's not "junk" in the sense of being "inert". But for all the spinning of its little wheels, it's doing nothing to help you survive. Sure sounds like junk to me.

Beyond that... fine, call me a moron if you like, but PZ Myers is a Ph.D. professor of biology who studies genetics. This is his area of expertise, and his day job is to teach this stuff to people. If you don't have a Ph.D. i

https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2008/07/10/custom-textbooks/ http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-585832.html http://lubbockonline.com/stories/021700/loc_021700103.shtml http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/former-college-it-director-sentenced-in-kickback-scheme/27153

According to this, most stars (2/3rds in the Milky Way) are actually single. Assuming other galaxies are similar in that respect to ours (which is safe, logical, and pretty much required given the difficulty involved in observing stars in other galaxies), most are probably single everywhere.

The high end of the tether is only 135000km from Earth. Is that far enough into the ionosphere to use for power generation?

The upper part of the ionosphere, the plasmasphere, extends up to 10,000-20,000 km (the plasmapause), where it cuts off abruptly. The actual altitude depends strongly on the magnetic latitude - it's much lower nearer the poles - and on the time of day. Source: Gallagher et al. (1988).

A few caveats, though. First, is there any reason why you can't extend the cable to lower altitude? It'll increase the tension a bit, but it's not going to fall as long as it's attached to the moon. Second, do you actually need to interact with the ionosphere to generate power? Don't you just need a conductive cable moving through the earth's magnetic field?

I certainly won't compare this type of antenna-based lens to a zone plate as far as applications go because I don't want to speculate too much. I should say though that while you need to be in the "far field zone" to see the desired beam from a diffraction optics element such as a zone plate (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_diffraction), our design forms the desired wave-front almost immediately after the layer of antennas. I'm not sure if it's useful to have a curved wave-front that a lens imparts immediately after the flat wave surface or it's just a curiosity, but it's at the very least interesting. For other applications (for example we've demonstrated vortex plates here with the same technique: http://www.seas.harvard.edu/capasso/wp-content/uploads/publications/Genevet_APL_100_013101_2012.pdf) this may more relevant.

Easy there, comrade, you are becoming overheated! Just wander over to the samovar and enjoy. If you want to be a defender of Moscow, that is fine. But, if you wish to fight a sacred war, make sure you do it for a good cause.

During Brezhnev's time a Soviet officer teaching cadets made the point that all of the organs of control and oppression under Stalin still existed, but that no one had the strength of will to grasp and use them as Stalin did. If enough people fight the wrong battles, they may find their new Stalin with the will to once more grasp the reigns. And that would be an enormous tragedy, given past experience. Enjoy your freedoms, while you have them, for it may not always be so. If you want to fight for the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, you should understand that revolutions eat their own, and you will not be safe no matter which party faction you are in.

Do not confuse the label of propaganda as necessarily being the same as untrue.

The Christian community then does not include the Convservative/Fundamentalist sects that do the exact opposite?

Your approach makes sense. Characterize a billion Christians by the oddest, isolated, strangest church of a dozen you can find. Yes, that is fair.

Tell me, what are your thoughts on the socialists know as Communists? They were good atheists, as I'm sure you know. Obviously they couldn't be backward. And you don't have to look for a dozen people in the foot hills of West Virginia to characterize them: trustworthy, peaceful goose steppers, lovers of the law, stewards of the environment. Are they not the flower of humanity?

People who don't believe in god are not angry, they're confused and worried about the repercussions from people that do.

Until they get into power. Oddly enough, some of the greatest incidents of all hell breaking loose was under governments run by atheistic socialists.

One minor difference between us Atheists and the Fundies: We don't want to behead you for not sharing our dogma.

Minor quibble, really, Other than that, yeah, we're just like the Fundies.

It wouldn't be rational to behead people as an atheist. The rational atheist puts people in labor camps and works them to death. What more proof could you need of the superiority of atheistic philosophy in organizing society?

When was "God told me so" an excuse the last time?

Circumcision has been an accepted practice for thousands of years, including in Europe. There have been two prominent times it has been an issue recently - Germany in the 1940s when they murdered 6,000,000 Jews, and in Germany now in the last year or so. It is unclear if they are trying to recapture the magic of German civilization of the 1930s and 1940s, or that of the atheistic internationalist socialists (as opposed to socialists of the nationalist variety - see Germany, 1930s - 1940s).

No, it is clearly religious persecution - in particular of Jews. Old habits die hard.

Religion seems to bother you. If you had an ounce of sense you would be terrified of atheists, especially the socialist variety, gaining power, given the track record in the last 100 years.

First we're currently in a "warm period" (interglacial) that began around 11,500-13,300 years ago (the last ice age began around 26,000 years ago). From the Wikipedia article on Global Cooling:

As for the prospects of the end of the current interglacial (again, valid only in the absence of human perturbations), it isn't true that interglacials have previously only lasted about 10,000 years; and Milankovitch-type calculations indicate that the present interglacial would probably continue for tens of thousands of years naturally. Other estimates (Loutre and Berger, based on orbital calculations) put the unperturbed length of the present interglacial at 50,000 years.

Additional references:
Eight glacial cycles from an Antarctic ice core
An Exceptionally Long Interglacial Ahead?

(For the slow: the user is the bird or bee, the flower is the content provider, the nectar is the content, and the pollen is the advertisement.)

I dont get it. Which one is the car?

The car is the the advertising content distribution network. It brings the advertiser who feeds you, the bee, the imidacloprid-laced high fructose corn syrup that you crave, Brawndo style.

Hope that clarifies the analogy.

The quest for universal health coverage: achieving social protection for all in Mexico

Only a socialist planned economy on a global scale can deal with the environmental pollution crisis. Workers to power! Expropriate the bourgeoisie! Dogfart!

It won't work, based on the record of previous "Dictatorships of the Proletariat".

EUROPE'S ENVIRONMENTAL NIGHTMARE: HARD ROAD TO RECOVERY

Dogfart!

A fair characterization of Communist governance.

Something as trivial as a frequency isn't copyrightable.

I think you mean that only trivial frequency isn't copyrightable. There are many reasons why frequency would be copyrightable. For example, frequency that changes based on specified events.

Nor are simple structs (plenty of case law showing that .h files containing structs aren't copyrightable). Complex data structures may be copyrightable, but there's also no requirement to provide the data in this form, it could just be exported into a simple form.

Correct, but complex data structures are copyrightable. See i4i. See 17 U.S.C. I03(a)(1994). Here's a link for you to harvard law on data structure copyrightability: http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v10/10HarvJLTech239.pdf

Assume that the data structures are not "simple" and are either copyrightable, patented, or a trade secret. True, the data MAY be able to be exported, but could such data be exported in such a way as to fully represent all data collected, and if not, then who would be legally liable if "errors" were introduced, and by "errors" I am referring to an non-exact representation of the data collected? And even if so, who would be responsible for converting the data from that format to one that did not contain said copyrightable/patented/trade secret information? Why would any manufacturer in their right mind agree to such a thing when it would open them up to possible lawsuits and expenses?

GRACE also measured the 2005 Amazon drought, regarded as the worst in over a century. Just five years later, the 2010 Amazon drought might have been even more severe.

GRACE also measured the 2010-2011 floods in Australian and Columbia, which dumped so much water on land that sea level temporarily dropped by ~6mm.

This "earthworm" device uses Nitinol shape-memory alloy as an actuator. That's been tried many times before, going back to the 1980s.

As an actuator, Nitinol can produce significant power in small package, but it's a very inefficient device. The metal will change crystal structure when heated, and return to the original shape when cooled. Heating is usually accomplished by running electricity through the Nitinol wire. Most of the energy goes into waste heat; only a small fraction comes out of the actuator as useful work.

So a battery-powered earthworm isn't likely. As a cabled device, it has potential. A great application would be short run cable-laying for fibre optics. A machine that could get a fibre optic cable underground from street to house without digging up sidewalks and lawns would be very useful.

I've seen news of reports on studies lately that show coffee is good for you. Is the green tea thing simply Asian folklore, or have there been scientific studies? The video you linked is suspect; it's a VIDEO. Do you have a link for those of us who can actually read, preferably from an .edu domain rather than a .org?

See here and here. With respect to the Lense-Thirring effect, the first abstract suggests you need both GRACE and LAGEOS, but I don't know if they analyzed GRACE by itself.

Thanks!

See here and here. With respect to the Lense-Thirring effect, the first abstract suggests you need both GRACE and LAGEOS, but I don't know if they analyzed GRACE by itself.

You are required to pick a password of 16 characters or less - why? I blogged about maximum password length restrictions before, and I would like to hear a compelling reason why this is needed. Otherwise, I can only assume they are storing them in plaintext.

That is odd, considering Libertarians are some of the most emotionally-driven, unreasonable people around :)

Can you site a study, published report or otherwise verifiable data to support your claim?

Implicitly, by asking for proof.

You guys are like a cargo-cult. Libertarians know what science and reason sound like, and try to emulate it so people will think their whacko beliefs are somehow supported by science.

Claiming the title 'reason' for your ideological rantings demonstrates you are unwilling to debate. You've made your mind up, convinced yourselves (in this case, that contrary to all the evidence, mass gun ownership is great) and then declared everyone who dares point out the gaping flaws in your argument as irrational.

You could teach Bell & Howell a thing or two about projection.

I just have a curious mind. I'd honestly like to know if your basing your position on empirical data, if it's just a stereotype that you've created, or if there are some other underpinnings. Though at this point, I think that I have my answer.

Here's a review that may interest you. May the cargo dropping gods bless you with their bounty:
Would banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide
A review of International and Some Domestic Evidence
Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf
It's quite a surprise.

They won't be duped into buying a book, but they may be misled into thinking that the book originated from the Jack Daniels company.

As a parallel example, no one would would confuse a poster inviting people to "Enjoy Cocaine" for an ice cold bottle of Coke. Yet the "Enjoy Cocaine" poster was found by the courts to infringe upon Coca-Cola's trademark.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tmcases/coca.htm

The actual paper is worth a read. This has nothing to do with drones. It's about taking out leaders, and what effect that has.

Assassination of political leaders by an external power has historically been a losing strategy. A new political leader soon takes power, and is generally more hostile to the external power. (When the new leader set up the assassination of the old one, that's a coup d'etat, which is a different situation.) The point of the paper is that terrorist groups tend to be held together by a charismatic leader, and killing that leader, more often than not, kills the group.

The older the group, the less likely this is to work. For a group that's only a few years old, it usually works; for one more than 20 years old, it rarely does. The half-life of terrorist groups is 15 years; half of them collapse in that time, and the survival rate of such groups follows a classic decay curve.

It doesn't work for drug and crime lords, because drug cartels are economic organizations. The organization and profit motive remain. Eliminating a leader just leaves a power vacuum at the top, which is quickly filled.

Interestingly, assassination of religious leaders is highly effective. "Although religious groups appear to be 80 percent less likely to end than nationalist groups based on ideology alone, they were almost five times as likely to end than nationalist groups after experiencing leadership decapitation." The conventional wisdom is that it is very difficult to take down a religion, short of outright extermination of all followers.. That may not be the case.

Well said. To which I will add this reference:

The Black Book of Communism - translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer - available at Barnes & Nobel and Amazon.

Review by Daniel J. Mahoney, American Enterprise, of: The Black Book of Communism

The six contributors to this book are all French, and all hail from the Left. The book's original publication in France created a sensation, because its cumulative effect is to establish that Communism is the twentieth century's fiercest practitioner of state violence and "crimes against humanity." It forthrightly challenges the claim that Nazism has a monopoly on "absolute political evil" in our time.

The chapters on the Soviet Union and China are as powerful as they are in large part because their authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, avoid excessive polemics and allow the evidence to simply speak for itself. If anything, Werth is excessively conservative in his estimates, drawing almost exclusively from not always reliable "official" party and state archival materials to verify politically--inspired deaths and incarcerations in the Soviet Union. Despite the limits of this method, Werth concludes that the Bolshevik regime was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of 20 million people between 1918 and 1956, and for the imprisonment in camps of millions more. He demolishes the notion of a good Lenin and a bad Stalin by showing that terror defined the Soviet regime from its inception. And he concludes that there is no basis for the claim that the terror of the 1930s was driven by overzealous Party and police officials acting independently of orders.

Likewise, Margolin's chapter on China shows that the crimes of Maoism are rooted in ideological hubris and a denial of the humanity of political or class "enemies." Margolin demonstrates that Mao committed crimes unprecedented in Chinese history, and damaged the nation in everything from economics to ethics. The devastating consequences of Mao's rule: 65 million lost lives. Perhaps the deepest reason The Black Book has sparked controversy is that it argues Communism is as intrinsically perverse as Nazism. Editor Stephane Courtois argues that Communist crimes, like Nazi ones, partake of the desire to eliminate groups of people on the basis of their origins, not because of any individual culpability or responsibility. He denies that Communism's crimes have any right to be excused or qualified because they were committed in the name of egalitarian principles. Courtois shows that Communism is an exterminationist ideology which selects its enemies on the basis of class. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suggested in The Gulag Archipelago that the USSR's war against the independent peasantry--the so-called "de-kulakization" campaign --was the first systematic effort to eliminate an entire class of people for ideological reasons. In this sense, Hitler was Lenin's and Stalin's faithful pupil.

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

Well said. To which I will add this reference:

The Black Book of Communism - translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer - available at Barnes & Nobel and Amazon.

Review by Daniel J. Mahoney, American Enterprise, of: The Black Book of Communism

The six contributors to this book are all French, and all hail from the Left. The book's original publication in France created a sensation, because its cumulative effect is to establish that Communism is the twentieth century's fiercest practitioner of state violence and "crimes against humanity." It forthrightly challenges the claim that Nazism has a monopoly on "absolute political evil" in our time.

The chapters on the Soviet Union and China are as powerful as they are in large part because their authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, avoid excessive polemics and allow the evidence to simply speak for itself. If anything, Werth is excessively conservative in his estimates, drawing almost exclusively from not always reliable "official" party and state archival materials to verify politically--inspired deaths and incarcerations in the Soviet Union. Despite the limits of this method, Werth concludes that the Bolshevik regime was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of 20 million people between 1918 and 1956, and for the imprisonment in camps of millions more. He demolishes the notion of a good Lenin and a bad Stalin by showing that terror defined the Soviet regime from its inception. And he concludes that there is no basis for the claim that the terror of the 1930s was driven by overzealous Party and police officials acting independently of orders.

Likewise, Margolin's chapter on China shows that the crimes of Maoism are rooted in ideological hubris and a denial of the humanity of political or class "enemies." Margolin demonstrates that Mao committed crimes unprecedented in Chinese history, and damaged the nation in everything from economics to ethics. The devastating consequences of Mao's rule: 65 million lost lives. Perhaps the deepest reason The Black Book has sparked controversy is that it argues Communism is as intrinsically perverse as Nazism. Editor Stephane Courtois argues that Communist crimes, like Nazi ones, partake of the desire to eliminate groups of people on the basis of their origins, not because of any individual culpability or responsibility. He denies that Communism's crimes have any right to be excused or qualified because they were committed in the name of egalitarian principles. Courtois shows that Communism is an exterminationist ideology which selects its enemies on the basis of class. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suggested in The Gulag Archipelago that the USSR's war against the independent peasantry--the so-called "de-kulakization" campaign --was the first systematic effort to eliminate an entire class of people for ideological reasons. In this sense, Hitler was Lenin's and Stalin's faithful pupil.

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

Weeks, yes, months, no.

A study at Harvard found no significant effects on memory, etc. after quitting for 28 days.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/10.11/marijuana.html

**NEWSFLASH**

Countries run by anti-religious bigots commit all manner of evil acts and promote despicable hatred.

More news at 11 !!

And now for news INSIDE the USA . . .

Who gives to charity?

This may help:

The estimates of the deaths caused by communism are staggering indeed: 65 million in China, 20 million in the former Soviet Union, two million each in Cambodia and North Korea, 1.7 in Africa, one million each in Vietnam and Eastern Europe and 150,000 in Latin America. -- Human Events review of The Black Book of Communism
 

This may help:

The estimates of the deaths caused by communism are staggering indeed: 65 million in China, 20 million in the former Soviet Union, two million each in Cambodia and North Korea, 1.7 in Africa, one million each in Vietnam and Eastern Europe and 150,000 in Latin America. -- Human Events review of The Black Book of Communism
 

The Bible isn't the only thing that requires faith. There are more pieces that science doesn't know, than those it does know. Most origins science is not testable, which is why assumptions are made. The assumption that all radioactive decay rates have always been constant, is not testable. Many fields of science are based on that assumption. [dudpixel]

... how could you know what the decay rates of radioactive isotopes were 4 billion years ago? The fact is, no one knows, and so we just assume that because our measurements over the past couple hundred years show very little variation, it must have never varied. [dudpixel]

That's incorrect. Scientists don't just assume that nuclear decay rates have been constant over billions of years. Just to be clear, we can't be sure that nuclear decay rates are exactly constant. But experiments have placed constraints on the size of any variation in decay rates:

1. Supernovae produce many radioactive elements which slowly decay after the explosion. At first they shine brightly in a spectroscopically unique manner, but over the course of several weeks they fade to half their previous brightness. The amount of time it takes the brightness to fade is a direct measurement of the nuclear decay rate. The best example is supernova 1987A, which lies ~169,000 LY away. That means that when scientists looked at that light in 1987, they were measuring the nuclear decay rate as it was around 169,000 years ago. The results were experimentally indistinguishable from current decay rates, and have been confirmed by similar experiments on SN1991T, which is 60,000,000 light years away.
2. The Oklo natural nuclear reactor left evidence that can be used to determine the fine structure constant and neutron capture rates, both intimately entwined with quantum mechanics' predictions of nuclear decay rates. This experiment is more ambiguous and as a result the error bars are much larger than the SN1987A constraint, but it's also consistent with a constant nuclear decay rate. Since the Oklo reactor was active 1.8 billion years ago, the Oklo evidence only supports a change in the fine structure constant of one part in 10 million over that timespan.
3. The increase in nuclear decay rates necessary to increase the "apparent age" of rocks from thousands to billions of years is enormous. This decay rate would make all the mildly radioactive elements in the Earth decay faster, releasing enough heat to melt the crust. It would still be molten to this day unless God made a cosmically sized refrigerator to cool it down fast enough to fit into the creationist timeline.
4. Any change in nuclear decay rates would have to affect all types of nuclear decay identically, otherwise isotopes that decay by different mechanisms (alpha, beta, neutron emission, etc) would've decayed at different rates. If these rates changed differently, it would cause isochron dates of the same object but using different isotopes to disagree. To the best of my knowledge, that's never happened.
5. If nuclear decay rates have changed, then why do ice cores like the one taken at Vostok, Antarctica show agreement between annual layer counts and isochron age? A change in nuclear decay rates wouldn't affect the annual temperature fluctuations that form the basis of the annual layer counts, so the two different methods of dating the same (~400,000 year old) ice core should be different. They aren't.

More proof as if we needed any . . . "Religious" governments are ALWAYS a bad idea.

Of course the anti-religious governments tend to be as bad or worse.

Wish I could have given you a nudge with this... thank for posting.

You might be interested to in the results of rule by atheist governments.

CALEA applies to Internet communication.

Pen/Trace - asking for email headers and IP headers but not content.
Full detail - asking for actual dump of bidirectional communication from a specific IP address or address-range.

See ISPs can be requested to forward all traffic...
or a company that helps ISPs comply...
or this has been a law since 2007...

To find these things check out this link.

Fact: I appreciate your copying my style. However, when doing so, please ensure that after the word "Fact:" comes a fact.

Ehud

The Clean Energy Project.

Bigotry is a choice. We are not born racist, but many people are conditioned to be so from birth.

Actually, we ARE born racist. A trait which favors people more similar to you is self propagating. Please note that I'm not justifying racism - just pointing out that it's an evolutionary hangover, like many other aspects of our behavior. You might want to take a look at this: implicit.harvard.edu and maybe read this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18761-stranger-danger-at-heart-of-racial-bias.html

You must mean this one ; http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000DPS....32.1008I

Do you have links to anything that documents Jupiter and Venus being out of chemical equilibria? I searched for a while, but couldn't find much more than a few lines, and I'd be very interested to know more.

For Venus, you have to look at the Soviet literature, as they did most of the exploration, and much of that is not on-line. See, e.g., Volkov, 1991. There is an interesting "tri-modal" distribution of cloud droplet diameters, and Iron, Phosphorus, Sulphur and Chorline have all been detected at altitude.

For Jupiter, look at any of the color images returned by spacecraft. All those different colors are different materials, probably polysufides, although AFAIK there is no consensus as to exactly which material makes each color. Whatever makes the colors, it must be operational on a grand scale, as the colors are consistent over at least a century, and the residence times in the visible layers of the atmosphere are much shorter than that. Perhaps the best evidence is the change in the color of Oval BA, where in less than a year a storm complex the size of the Earth significantly reddened with nothing else apparently changing. The authors of the above paper postulate an unobservable change in global temperature but, who knows, maybe there is a biosystem that thrives in and colonizes the large storms, and the reddening is byproduct of that. That at least has the advantage of being testable (by seeing if the reddening is a general, but delayed, feature of new mega storm systems).

Now, none of this is proof of anything biological on Jupiter, but if you want to take the opposite viewpoint, the Jupiter biosphere could be immense (comparable to or larger than the mass of the Earth), and still be consistent with our available data. For Venus, a biosphere could be a remnant from the age before the run-away Greenhouse, and could easily be comparable in mass to the maximum biosphere that currently could be active on Mars. Neither has gotten much spacecraft attention; I guess bugs in the air aren't as sexy as bugs in the permafrost.