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I remember watching NGTV a show all about the Space Shuttle, I think it may have been this show. But, I'm not entirely sure. I remember they did a good portion on how exact they were about analyzing the tiles on the shuttle and in making sure they were all in place.

Right now, the guys that work their butts off to get these birds to fly are feeling pretty depressed, as is NASA in general. Politics aside, I hope that NASA maintains their ambition and continue to show leadership in space.

"His team teleported qubits carried by photons--particles of light--of 0.05 inch (1.3mm) wavelength in one laboratory onto photons of 0.06 inch (1.55mm) wavelength in another laboratory 180 feet (55 meters) away along 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) of fiber optic wire."

So they "teleported" light over fiber optic wire. Uhmmmm right. Check. Now, I may not have a complete mastery of all that phancy physics stuph, but I was pretty sure this was the entire premise of fiber optics. Ya know .. light, distance, little glassish wire things, some lasers..

If you need me, I'll be over in the corner scratching my head.

Here's an article from National Geographic that doesn't require registration. Sorry I couldn't find the Google News link for the NYT article.

(from Anonymous Karma Whores R Us)

National Geographic has some good big pictures / illustrations of it.

A related point: Taxonomy, as a subdiscipline of Biology, is a dying art.

It's all the more important for the All Species project to get off the ground, because if it doesn't soon, there won't be anyone left to train the generation of Taxonomists necessary to do the job.

RC helis and planes over things like area 51, the White House...

It's possible to fly a R/C plane using only the view from the camera (and not being able to see the plane) but it's certainly not easy. People have made autopilots for R/C planes (and even tried to fly them across the Atlantic) but there's still many hurdles to overcome.

At least someone could make a hobby of dogfighting the drones...

People do that now with R/C planes. Either they shoot beams of light at the other plane or they try to cut a ribbon trailing from the other plane, or they'll even deliberately ram your plane and try to make it crash.

I haven't tried it myself (I usually just fly around and poke holes in the sky) but hope to someday. Need to make a nice slope soaring combat wing and try the `full contact' style at the local slope ...

People forget that Tolkien was one of the world's great authorities on all forms of Northen European Lang. and Lit. He had a lot more than Beowulf to draw on. Many linguists have commented on how much Tolkien leaned on Finnish when he created Elvish.

Simple, Map Exchange has it. If you have the TOPO series maps by Wildflower Productions which has been bought by National Geographic, These routes overlay right on your TOPO maps. Upload the route to your GPS and follow the route. I downloaded this last summer and have checked some segmets of it.
Map Exchange

... And how did they conduct this survey? The details are very important in statistics. How many students were involved in the survey? How many schools? How were the schools chosen? How did they conduct the actual survey? If they just handed out papers to teachers for students and then the teachers just told the students to fill them out, many students may have jokingly labled the US as England or some such, or just not filled it out at all.

Another point is that these statistics are only relevant in relation to the other data. As in : Of US students 89% ages 18-24 could find their own country, while 93% of Sweedish students could find their country.(for example: not actual statistics)

Its also intresting when you see a bunch of statistics all claiming different statistics.

I found: 10%, 11%, 15%, and 20% in different places. Here are some links with some of those statistics on them.

http://www.elon.edu/pendulum/Issues/012302/News/ Fo rmerNational.html
http://teacher.scholastic.com/u pfront/issue/articl es/03bdosomething.htm
http://news.mpr.org/collect ions/education/index.ph p?offset=10

The actual National Geographic survey is here.

not really. all the above mentioned methods require the participation of the identified person Not for eye (iris) scans. Here's an anecdote. 17 years ago, National Geographic published an eye-catching (no pun intended) picture of an Aghan girl in a Pakistani refugee camp. This year, after the fall of the Taliban, the original photographer (Steve McCurry) went back to that region to try and locate her. Well, to make a long story short, he found her; but the verification was done using iris scanning technology (story here). Interestingly, the company (Iridian) scanned the negative of the original, 17-year-old photo and used that to do the iris matching with the current photo of the girl (woman now). But the point is: the iris was captured from a 17-year-old photo.

I wonder if they'll plug this as hard as they did with their other products: by writing advertisements-as-articles in Salon and National Geographic.

W e l l , I 'l l l e t y o u d e c i d e f o r y o u r s e l f .

Boy, if that doesn't sound reminiscent of certain events in Salem I'm not sure what does.

They can, though, if they see you on the cover of a magazine, or on the label of your CD, or on Jay Leno late at night, or in your new movie...

Much as we all love to hate MTV (and I do!), I think there's a larger culture-of-celebrity thing going on here. Being, as Zoolander would say, "unbelievably good looking," is just part of the celebrity package these days - playing a role in journalism, fiction and nonfiction writing, and politics.

And once you demand good looks, it's hard to get a really large helping of that "talent" thing in the same package... and so much easier to go to an external songwriting team. So that's what they do.

Not that I disagree with your point about the interchangeable sex-widgets. It's just that that's sort of an added benefit.

-renard

Great site for maps from the present time found here... Includes printable maps, trails, atlas info, etc...

With development costs likely to be astronomical, however, Japanese space officials are hoping to develop the vehicle in conjunction with their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.

Japan previously worked on developing a space shuttle dubbed the Hope, but the project was frozen due to a lack of funds and other difficulties.

Japan has been trying 'government by construction' for years trying to revitalize their economy and have achieved the industrialized world's biggest national debt. So where are they getting the money for a space program?

Seriously, Japan just built an 11 mile long tunnel under Tokyo Bay in '97 that cost almost 11 billion dollars (1.44 trillion yen), yet no one uses it. Why? The toll is about $50. Does Japan really need a space program?

I'm not from Japan and I don't pretend to be infallible - these are my thoughts on the subject. If you live in Japan, what do you think? Also, there was a good article on Tokyo in last month's National Geographic, check it out in print if you can.

Here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/10 10_021010_dinomummy.html

Speaking of politicians ingesting heavy metals, didn't Abraham Lincoln take mercury pills?

*sound of keyboard chattering*

Oh yeah, he did.

'gues that would be http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/05/im ages/021007_quaoar.jpg (without the space in /im ages/)

--
Discover your own (solar) system!

So, if all we have with this new thingie is the second largest Kuiper Belt object after Pluto - so what? Isn't the news play just about trying to get more funding from the fine fellows who've identified it, which is more likely if the headlines scream "Tenth Planet!" What a cynical abuse of the press. Science should stop grubbing, and strive for purity of purpose, lest the results themselves be corrupted. Prostitution just isn't the same as free love.

National Geographic
Nature

but much seems to be lacking yet, apparently not much is known about these insects thus far...

-tid242

nah... nobody *ever* thought humans and chimps shared 99.6%; and it's more like 95% now...;

p.s. human-to-human similarity (DNA-wise) is about 99.9%, so please check your data when posting.

Okay, I've been trying to figure out how they managed to get past the second door. They didn't. The article blurb implies that the third door was behind the second, but it's in a different shaft.

Briefly: There are two shafts. The southern shaft is very straight and has a door blocking it, discovered in 1993. They inserted a fiber-optic camera through a hole in the door and found another door behind it. The northern shaft has twists and turns, and they just now were finally able to get to the end of that with the new robot. That shaft, too, is blocked by a door.

National Geographic explains it a little better...

And there are now hundreds pouring out from the college I work at who think Nikon stinks
[snip]
Funny how that works, isn't it? Out with the old, in with the new.

You know what's even funnier? That you think Nikon, a company with $3.8 billion in sales last year, will be affected by the opinions of a handful of college kids who lose parts to old slide scanners. What a friggin' hoot!

Just out of curiosity, I did a Google search for the phrase Nikon sucks and the word CoolScan. Out of 2.5 billion web pages they've indexed, there were zero occurrences. That's right; not even one. So then I searched for just the phrase "Nikon sucks". That phrase only appeared on three web sites (four now that I've written this). "Nikon stinks turned up only a single web page and the phrase was being used to characterize the stupidity of a discussion, not Nikon as a company. It seems that there are not many people that share your opinion.

Nikon has been the top choice of professional photographers for decades and I'm sure that they will remain so for years to come. Take a look on National Geographic's web site and see what percentage of the pictures were taken with Nikon SLR cameras. Here's a link to get you started. I sure haven't seen any mass exodus away from Nikon. Nor have I had any problems with my Nikon SLRs or lenses. You need to grow up and realize that Nikon is in business to sell products, not to provide you with replacement parts and new drivers for obsolete slide scanners.

It looks to me that Jupiter9 is interested to the second Laura. :)

(Btw, that nationalgeographic.com page has black text on black background - looks like optimized for some "other" browser).

It looks to me that Jupiter9 is interested to the second Laura. :)

(Btw, that nationalgeographic.com page has black text on black background - looks like optimized for some "other" browser).

She's BBC News Commentator Laura Greene.

According to the web site, it's going to be on TV 9/16, 8pm (eastern/pacific) on Fox. Pretty cool...

I saw a report on the global warming flash points within earth. Basically the idea traced the carbon output of rainforests. Geologically global warming was gradual but intensived at certain time periods. These time periods were centered around forest fires in the rain forest areas. The general map is this. Rain forests can only act as a carbon sink for so much carbon before the dead material created by the forest begins to add to carbon output instead of the plants breath cycle decreasing it. In natural historic global warming (without man made intervention) the increase of life on earth slowly moved carbon distribtion until the atmosphere warmed this slow warm hyper excelerated in the last phases. This caused quick changes in temperature followed by a dramatic cold period. The key was the current rain forest model. It appears rain forests hold more carbon than predicted. In tracing this carbon it was found that dead organic material was carried by the rivers and decayed producing methane. But instead of the gas being released in the atmosphere this material was pushed into the sea depths and froze. Methan ice packs have been hit by oil drilling before and than come up a boil. The theory is that this extra carbon sink accounts for the rapid period of global warming in the geological evidence. Slow global warming slowly raises the rates of forest fires releasing more carbon from the forests when temperatures hit a point of affectin sea temperatures the methane in the ocean becomes gas. These large storages are dumped almost instantly creating a dramatic and quick rise in temperature which melts the ice caps and glaciers. This changes the saline levels of the ocean changing the heat distribution of the currents and flipping into a cold period. So it is best to not bring up these carbon sinks but to leave them untouched. Again the drive should be to move away from carbon based fuel. Related links
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/12 18_earthbelch.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/early-earth-01k.htm l
http://www.hydrogen.co.uk/h2_now/journal/articles/ 3_Methane.htm
http://superstringtheory.com/forum/warmboard/messa ges2/116.html

I read about this guy in an article in National Geographic...

"Eber, who fled the 'stifling' style of his native France more than 20 years ago, is wearing a diamond tennis bracelet, a feathered cowboy hat, and a long chestnut ponytail. His first move after arriving here was to borrow the money for a brand-new Rolls-Royce. 'It was the best thing I ever did,' explains Eber. 'In Beverly Hills, if people believe you are doing well, then you are doing well.'"

He's a hairdresser.

Things aren't much different in the real world.

I read about this guy in an article in National Geographic...

"Eber, who fled the 'stifling' style of his native France more than 20 years ago, is wearing a diamond tennis bracelet, a feathered cowboy hat, and a long chestnut ponytail. His first move after arriving here was to borrow the money for a brand-new Rolls-Royce. 'It was the best thing I ever did,' explains Eber. 'In Beverly Hills, if people believe you are doing well, then you are doing well.'"

He's a hairdresser.

Things aren't much different in the real world.

Here is an interesting discussion of the very debate you two are going through.

My general recollection (and my source eludes me at this point) is that Woolly Mammoth parts are frequently found in conjunction with prehistoric settlements/campsites. Carcasses are frequently found with Clovis points embedded in the ribs. There is no question that there was severe hunting pressure on the mammoths. Did this wipe out the mammoth, or was it a combination of factors, including climate change (continuing today) resulting from the end of the ice age? My (amateur) guess is that it was a combination of those two factors.

As the National Geographic article mentions, the hunting pressure on the other types of mega fauna is not as obvious. I tend to think that the "overkill" supporters are generally right on the mammoth, but probably wrong on the other mega fauna extinctions in the New World.

There is also a disease theory on the extinction.

Could early man kill woolly mammonths? The answer is unquestionably yes. (Check out Google for "Atalatl" some time). The fossil record clearly supports this. Did early man cause significant pressure on the mammoth population as a result of his hunting activities? The answer is clearly yes. Did early man alone cause the mammoth to extinction? This answer is less clear.

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/data/2002/ 03/01/html/ft_20020301.1.html

This sums it all up
Article in NG Magazine March 2002.

See a map of the crater accompanying the National Geographic story.

Lewis M. Simmons offered this insight in a recent National Geographic article (teaser): China would no sooner cede Tibet to Tibetans than the U.S. would cede South Dakota to the Sioux.

A previous poster had talked about the "elite" ex-military guards who "know what they're doing" who will guard this Yucca Mountain repository from terrorists and other assorted vermin. Several posters have also made reference to the National Geographic article on the subject.

The dead tree version of the article carries a picture of one of the "elite" guards. Besides looking like a bit of a dork, the M16 rifle he's carrying has a red tab protruding from the ejection port. Ex-military people will recognize this as a chamber plug. Yes, these "elite" guards, supposedly the best and brightest that our military has to offer, are guarding scads of weapons-grade plutonium with unloaded guns.

Sure makes me sleep easier.

There is a summary of the article at their web site.

I have the mag and the article makes for sobering reading. It's written by a former marine who is certainly no tree-hugging hippie, but he admits he was disturbed by much of what he found in his series of interviews and investigations across the country. In short: there's a shitload of bad stuff out there and there's more being produced every day.

Before reading this article I felt like the poster who ranted about activists making mountains out of molehills and ignoring the many advantages of nuclear power. But afterwards I wasn't so sure. Sure, a lot of the crap out there now is due to mismanagement, ignorance and lack of foresight (all alarmingly detailed in the NG article). But even if it was perfectly managed all the time, are the risks still too high? This question reminds me of an earlier discussion on /. about server uptime. Some people were saying that extremely high uptime is not worth it, but others pointed out that the nature of the application matters. One astute reader mentioned a pacemaker as an example - while not really comparable to a computer server, it shows an application where a device must work 100% of the time or someone DIES. Nuclear power is much more complicated than a pacemaker, and I think only a fool would guarantee 100% uptime - or "safety" in this case. So something will eventually go wrong, just as it would with any other complicated power system. It seems to me, however, that a nuclear mistake is likely to cause a lot more trouble than a mistake with any other technology. Even if a coal plant blew up catastrophically, the danger is over when the fire goes out. Even if all the wind turbines fell over on top of people picnicking under them, it wouldn't be the ongoing liability a release of radioactive matter into the atmosphere a Chernobyl-like incident (or worse) would cause.

Perhaps I'm talking out my not-very-scientific arse, and the potential failure consequences aren't that high. However, it's not like we don't have alternatives. Sure, they need money to be developed. But how much money are we really spending on nuclear? We are told Yucca will cost 58 billion to build, but what of the ongoing costs of transportation and security at the reactors and military facilities all over the country that Yucca will continue to get new stuff from? I suspect that would buy a lot of wind/solar/fusion/hydrogen/fart power research.

As for Yucca Mountain itself, the basic principle seems sound. The waste we have is here, we can't get rid of it, so it might as well be stored in one single facility with the best technology and security available. Of course, it must be transported there, but this a risk we'll just have to take to get it safely (whatever that means) stored. Of course, if we keep using nuclear power, this is a risk we must continue to take every day.

Note: I live in Australia, so I use the we pronoun above to mean humanity in general, rather than the American populace :-)

National Geographic runs a story in the july issue, part of the story is online with some useful related links.

National Geographic runs a story in the july issue, part of the story is online with some useful related links.

...possessing a live snakehead is illegal in 13 states. Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia are not among them... (from the article linked above by pamri)

The big question is, with the level of ugly on that guy, who would WANT to keep one? Live or otherwise. It don't look like good eatin' either.

From the article: But it is not quite true that they can walk on land, Schwaab said: "We would sort of characterize their mode of transport more along the lines of wallowing." .The national geographic has more info about similar alien species besides a better report on the same fish.Also, Check out the alien picture gallery, for photos of similar species.

From the article: But it is not quite true that they can walk on land, Schwaab said: "We would sort of characterize their mode of transport more along the lines of wallowing." .The national geographic has more info about similar alien species besides a better report on the same fish.Also, Check out the alien picture gallery, for photos of similar species.

Was watching a National Geographic Explorer show this weekend about how they used a photograph taken twenty years ago to prove whether or not a woman was the same person as the girl in the famous Afghan Girl photograph. The article is here. One of the interesting aspects was how they used iris scans to determine if the women they had found was actually the same person as the original girl.

Some guy at National Geographic has been attaching camcorders he calls CritterCams to the backs of sea turtles, sharks, and other shit that swims around in hard to reach places (no comment).

This guy just proved you can't walk to the North pole solo. Oh sure, perhaps you can do it alone, meaning noone closer than Canada, but quite obviously one needs a rescue crew on standby if they want to live through the attempt.

Um, according to this article in the April issue of the National Geographic magazine, a Norwegian had already reached both Poles by foot and sled. So there.

Raw meat and doggy snacks kept these distant cousins in line over a two-day photo shoot, says photographer Robert Clark. And even that only bought him seconds of time to snap this quirky, yet captivating image featured on the January cover of National Geographic.

"Getting the wolf in the right position with the right expression was the hardest thing," Clark says. "It took me 120 frames to get what I wanted."

What he wanted most was a portrait that captured poise and eyes so attuned to the camera that they followed the viewer right off the page. At the same time, he also needed an image simple enough to clinch the story's headline, "Wolf to Woof," with one glance, while still getting people to wonder how they got the two together.

But more than getting Koda and Simon to stand up, sit down, or look at the 140mm lens on his Mamiya-RZ67 camera, the key ingredient to capturing this photograph was planning.

Three days before the shoot Clark transformed a garage into a studio with a backdrop, a platform, and six strobe lights to highlight the animals' fur. Although Koda has starred in TV commercials and an Imax movie, he needed time to shed his skittishness and warm up to the environment.

"At one point, all the people were talking, and the wolf just let out a beautiful low-level howl... as if he was howling at the moon," Clark says. "It was beautiful, but it reminded us that even though he was trained, we were still with a wild animal."

One of my favorite pictures that I've seen in recent memory was from this past January's National Geographic, in an article about the evolution of dogs from wolves: a wolf, a dog, and an Aibo hanging out. From the page:

Facing the Future
Even with its battery removed, an Aibo robot got the full attention of Koda the wolf and Simon the Maltese during a studio shoot. Koda, a trained captive-born wolf, had worked with Simon but not with the robot. At first he moved away from the motionless Aibo, says photographer Robert Clark. Then, curious, he sniffed it and chewed off a plastic ear. Doug Seus, Koda's owner and trainer, says that while dogs can easily form new relationships after they are about six months old, wolves are genetically programmed not to accept strangers. "It's a built-in survival technique to limit the size of the pack." Confronted with the unknown, wolves are either extremely timid or extremely aggressive, he says. "They may look like a big dog, but they are psychologically different."

Say what you will about his business practices, Bill (with, I'm sure, some conscience prodding from his wife) is doing some good stuff with his money. More than you'd ever see Ellison or McNealy do with their coin (if they had as much as he does, that is).

Hell, Ellison would do something loony like buy Costa Rica and turn it into the Federated Republic of Oracle, complete with its own airforce and navy.

Now that I mention it, that'd be sorta cool.

Why is this all significant? Well, major portions of the world have religious sentiments that date after these cities existed. Islam tends to discourage too much emphasis on history before Islam arose. Similarly, the mindset of Christianity has largely been that nothing important happened until about 6000 years ago.

These findings are very graphic evidence that humanity has a history much older than either Islam or Christianity. Even the academic orthodoxy today tends to be that everything of value came of of the middle east-this now appears to be that everything important came out of the middle east. This appears to be far from true.

Randall Burns

Yeah, and most early culture developed along river valleys where floods would likely be common. As for the similarities between Gilgamesh and Noah, i think they're probably related to the same massive Tigris-Euphrates flood that probably seemed like a world wide flood, but may instead have been only regional. Another more interesting hypothesis deals with the Black Sea. The idea that at the end of the last ice age, the mediterranean began rising and started sloshing up against the natural barrier that today we call the Bosporus. At some point, enough ice melted and the sea came roaring over and spilled into the depressed region that became the Black Sea. Archaeologists have found evidence for small homes underneath the sea there, about 300 feet deep. The survivors of this catastrophe passed on the story to generations that spread around the world.