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I've tried to verify your statement, but all I've found so far is that increased CO2 will lead to increased forest fires which will lead back to increased CO2 (how much was not stated), most of the contribution of forest fires to CO2 is due to tropical forests (think slash-and-burn), and that boreal forest fires (as opposed to tropical forest fires, for example), contributed 828-1,103 Tg of CO2 in 1998, compared to 2,214.837 Tg emitted by US fuels (only fuels, mind you) in 1998. According to that same link, the fuels are 40.5% of the total US contribution, so that comes out to about 5,470 Tg of CO2 from the US alone.

So, your facts might be correct, but it's hard for me to verify. Do you have a source?

Observation we cannot explain yet does not mean we don't have a good idea of what's going on:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20050428/ From the Article:
Any debate or discussion about climate change starts from the basic fact that Earth's temperature depends on the balance between how much solar energy the Earth absorbs and how much it radiates back into space.
...
Not only is Earth absorbing about 0.85 Watts of energy per square meter more than it is radiating back to space, but a sizable chunk of that excess energy is "hiding" in Earth's oceans, its full effect on the climate system still unrealized.

Now you explain to me how a change between the energy absorbed and emitted from earth does not mean global warming.

2.Life forms are surprisingly adaptive. You act as if plants are completely helpless in the face of a minor 2% change. I'm not saying there wouldn't be some long-term consequences (more to do with specific species thriving/suffering as opposed to planet-wide climate change) , but a permanent, perfectly linear/proportional drop in oxygen output is unrealistic.

True. While my comment here is anecdotal, this can goes both way, a experiment that was done on an algea shown that while first generation of algea thrived in a more rich CO2 environment, after 30 or so, they start slowing down their growth rate, slowing it lower than before the Increase in Co2. Moral: Nature will adapt, but we can't predict how, so I would not bet on a better outcome than what it is right now.

Increased Carbon Dioxide Levels Decrease Algae Growth

Now Climate Change is a lot more accurate than global warming, because what's happening right now is that the climate pattern on earth are changing. That may mean a lot colder or a lot hotter, a lot rainier, or a lot more chaotic than it is right now where you are living.

The sad thing is that people working on climate, environment will tell you, is that we need to take drastics actions because what's in cause is not only Climate Change, but the drastic drop in biodiversity the planet is undergoing. We are currently literrally killing the planet (sorry it does not explodes like in movies, it dies slowly on a decades or century basis). According to biologists (People who would far better like to study nature than document it's decay), we are currently experiencing a global species extinction at a similar scale that the one who killed the dinosaur. (You can sleep, the cow, from which we make hamburger will not disappear any time soon).

Welcome to the worst case scenario. As a friend of mine who is working on water and ice satelite tele-detection says: Do not buy anything that is near water. (For the record, I'm not kidding here)

You are mistaken. Greatly amplified warming in the Arctic is a pretty unanimous conclusion from decent GCMs (climate models). That the Arctic has seen an increase in average temperatures of around five degrees Celsius in, in fact, uncontroversial. One random story from a quick google: here. RealClimate.org also has very good science, albeit way over the heads of, say, mainstream TV news in terms of complexity and detail.

How is the world do fossils prove evolution? Where are the intermediate forms? What?! What do you mean there aren't any?

Then stop saying the fossil record "proves" evolution because it doesn't. It proves there were dinosaurs. It doesn't prove evolution at all.

The researchers weren't sure about the infectivity of the virus...they weren't sure it would be infective at all. This is a virus that was beaten by evolution and became a pet:

In addition, the researchers showed that Phoenix could form particles capable of infecting mammalian cells in culture. Infectivity was very low, presumably because host cells have evolved mechanisms to resist uncontrolled virus propagation, as has been repeatedly observed for retroviruses from experimental animals. -- ScienceDaily

Now, taking the components of this retrovirus and mixing them with, say a pig retrovirus that is known to infect human cells (this is called superinfection)...that's a bit scarier. Unfortunately, it's called "pig farming." Last I checked, pig farming was not a Biosafety Level 4 activity. It's these porcine retroviruses that are holding up using genetically engineered pig body parts as human replacement parts for transplant. Still, think of all the people who get pig heart valves each year...

Why haven't we all died from some strange porcine-HERV virus combination? Human retroviruses (HTLV1, HTLV2, HIV1, HIV2) are all Biosafety Level 2. The hallmark of these retroviruses is that they aren't very good at propagating. By bumping up to Level 3 the virus that is probably recreated naturally every once in a while, and throwing in the disabling trick to permit it to only reproduce once, they took more than sufficiently reasonable precautions.

Biosafety 4 is reserved for viral hemorrhagic fever viruses (Ebola, Marburg, etc.) and stuff like that. If Phoenix were deserving a Biosafety Level 4, humanity would have been long dead and no one would be alive to conduct the experiments. Think of it as the biologist's version of the Anthropic principle.

Did you know that the Sun's radiation output varies about 7 parts in 10000?

Changes In Solar Brightness Too Weak To Explain Global Warming.

Since I have read this far down and nobody has posted a decent explanation on the difference between a Debeers mined diamond and a made one I thought I would post some five year old info about where they used to be up to. The most advanced people at making artificial diamonds was a lab in Russia.

As far as I can remember the main problem they were encountering was Nitrogen. In a natural diamond which forms over a long period of time the nitrogen atoms would drift together over time and end up clumped together and form a seperate molecule (N4) of pure nitrogen embeded in the carbon lattice. This nitrogen molecule absorbed some light from the carbon but was otherwise undetectable.

In the early attempts at making artificial diamonds they left the nitrogen in but it did not migrate together so ended up actually part of the carbon lattice. This gave the artificial diamonds a slight yellow tint as the nitrogen also emitted light back into the diamond crystal lattice. The Russian solution was to remove all the nitrogen at the start of the process.

This produced perfect, pure carbon diamonds with a perfect crystal lattice. These diamonds however had a the property of trapping light so that when the light falling on them ceased (you switched the light off) they fluoresced, giving off the light they had been trapping with in the crystal lattice due to total internal reflection. Now this may have made them really cool but it did make them different to naturally occuring diamond.

What the Russian team really needed was a way to leave in the Nitrogen impurity but so that it did not ever interupt the carbon crystal lattice.

At this point De Beers was already shitting themselves and started looking at ways of marking there diamonds to prove they were mined diamonds not some knocked up in a lab. They semed to have a number of ideas such as laser etching the DeBeers trademark on each stone and similar but I dont know what the ultimately chose.

If someone has some more info, please post it but don't start it with your dad, grandad, etc used to be jeweler as this just makes it hopelessly outdated. These new lab made diamonds are not like anything De Beers have had to deal with before (Cubic Zirconia, etc) as they are actually made of carbon which is formed into a diamond lattice using super high pressures but in a lab rather than underground.

This information came from some sort of TV documentary I saw a number of years ago.

I did however just throw some stuff at google and this is what came back -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2004/diamondl abstrans.shtml - The program I watched on BBC and have summarised (badly) above.

(Please note - my summary is from memory so the info on the above link will be better.)

http://www.russianbrilliants.net/introduction.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/08/99081 7092046.htm
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.h tml

No camera system is perfect... but I think you might be selling this one short a little too soon.

The idea behind the average consumer camera is to gather photons from a large area in a reasonably short amount of time. Usually we do this with film or with a CCD or CMOS array. However, film is going out of vogue, and CCDs and CMOS arrays can have dead spots. From a scientific standpoint, arrays are problematic for this very reason... plus, who has time to calibrate several thousand detector elements per camera? Using a single element detector helps mitigate this problem.

In this ScienceDaily article, it is revealed that the system works best with higher frequency information that can appear to be white noise. While it may produce images that are unappealing to the human eye, from a scientific standpoint it might be just the thing needed for a given application. I'd be very careful stating that it "essentially directly zeroes out certain frequencies that have low amplitude"... a more appropriate description of what it is doing is recording less information for fields that contain little or no change. Change is often edges, and edges are approximately generated through the summation of many high-frequency sinusoids.

From an imaging standpoint, this is some intriguing stuff. I would have gone to the presentation, but I had class at the time.

Drinking coke is associated with lower bone density in women. So if you don't like the prosprect of brittle bones in old age (osteoporosis), you may want to drink something else.

why go liquid when you can go solid?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/09/05090 7102549.htm

Current climate models indicate that any weakening of the gulf stream is offset by global warming trends.

Also, it may require alot more water than is available from melting ice.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/04121 9152011.htm

"Of course wanting to slaughter your enemies because they have been beating the ever living shit out of you for decades now has nothing to do with it. Nothing at all."

Can you back up your emphatic claim with support from an unbiased source?

2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's).

There are numerous proxies for temperature. Ice core studies use the proportion of deuterium to hydrogen in the ice is a sound local temperature proxy, since the water with deuterium in it requires more heat to evaporate it. This proxy correlates well with temperature measurements.

A mercury thermometer can measure relative temperature to within 0.1C. These have been around since 1714.

3.) The sun's activity has increased by approx. 10% in the last 15 years. In other words, it's getting hotter.

Indeed no. About 0.07%. (Yes that's not 7% and a typo, that's 7 parts in every 10 000.)

Apparently, the Earth magnetic field has decreased by 10% in the last 10 years.

100 years.

5.) Jupitor is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is.

No, the earth is experiencing global warming. Jupiter is experiencing a redistribution of temperature. (from your link: As a result, areas around the equator become warmer, while the poles can start to cool down.)

6.) Mars is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is.

Possibly. I don't think that observed changes on Mars over the past 7 years are a good reason to ignore the measured and predicted effect on increasing greenhouse gasses here on earth over the past 100.

Is it possible that the warmer temperatures that Earth is experiencing are caused by cyclical natural phenomena?

No it's not. CO2 levels are the highest in several million years, and temperatures are hotter than any time in the Holocene, which represents 7 ice-age cycles. This is new, and we know why it's happening, because the physics of greenhouse gasses is well understood.

Try this: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/07/99071 2080500.htm

The cause celebre of global warming being attached to everything from gas prices to alien invaders is not helping anyone come to terms with the realities of the harm pollution is doing to the planet, and gives the opposition the political fodder it needs to maintain the status quo - ie. chicken little bullshit does not help save the planet (IMHO).

Tim

/me reads post

Ok,

Hmmm,

Whoah

Wow! A critic of the 'polarized' environment equating socialism with pro-terrorism and using 'moonbats' as a descriptor.

Potentially well-reasoned, then just whacky. You're not helping here, man.

I wonder what the functional MRIs would say when you are exposed to left or right propaganda?

Good studies there: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/06013 1092225.htm

The best part of science is that you don't even have to believe it for it to be true!

Perhaps you're just a slave to some pro-empire/profiteering biological imperative?

Either way, there will now be a resounding plonk, and it will be good.

Actually, I was recently reading about using man-made volcanoes to deposit specific chemicals in the stratosphere to reflect more UV and counteract the rising temp. It would take alot of effort, but not completly beyond our current level of tech...esp if its that or death.

Okay...

This is not my area of expertise and not my parent post... but since you put serious time into reading.

I'll do a bit more digging.

How about:
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDet ail/assetid/39261;_f5BEi_EFM ... Their main result is expressed in the title of their paper: "Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years." ...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/08/04080 3093903.htm
As the scientists have reported in the renowned scientific journal, Physical Review Letters, since 1940 the mean sunspot number is higher than...

http://www.globalwarming.org/article.php?uid=870
This is a critique of a peer reviewed article that turned out to play fast and loose with the facts to support the global warming argument.
Nature lays (another) egg ...the researchers failed to use the complete temperature record -- a record that actually spanned 1957 through 1995. ...

http://communities.anomalies.net/forum/ubbthreads. php/ubb/showflat/Number/159231/page/1/fpart/23
This is an article *about* an unlinked but peer reviewed article suggesting ice age correlation with stellar clouds. ...new research suggests the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system's passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy. ... ...The latest evidence appears in the June 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal...

What exactly is wrong with observing "natural selection" cases? Aren't these exactly cases of evolution in action?
* peppered moth: selection for wing coloring
* mutations in HIV after it jumped species to humans. Many other mutations are observed in bacteria and other pathogens that make them resistant to drugs. We are currently waiting in fear for the birdflue to undergo such a change.
* Invasive species: many mutations are observed in invasive species that make them more adapted to the environment.
* Recently, direct observation of the evolution of beak size in Darwin's finches was reported (Science 14 July 2006: Vol. 313. no. 5784, pp. 224 - 226)
* Evolution of RNA sequences: many experiments have evolved RNA sequences that perform various functions. One example among many is converting an RNA enzyme to a DNA enzyme (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/0603 27083737.htm)
* Artificial evolution: in many experiment run in computers, evolution is able to create new structures, from bridges to sorting algorithms

Finally, I think it is worthwhile to mention one important piece of evidence that has recently been completed. When Darwin suggested in the 19th century that humans and apes had a common ancestor, he was ridiculed. Till then humans were seen as different from all animals, having been created on a different day of creation. In that time, nothing was known of the DNA. Today, we managed to sequence the human and the chimp genome. We know that humans and chimpanzees differ in 1% of their DNA sequence. In fact, the DNA sequence of a human is closer to that of a chimp than the chimp is to an Orangutan, or than the chimp is to any other living species, with the exception of the bonobo. The human is the chimp and bonobo's closest relative.
I think that is quite an amazing prediction to make more than 100 years in advance. In fact, predictions like this are the strongest corroborations in science: making a prediction that is absolutely unthinkable based on the current belief.

so its our fault if we don't patrol 100% of your border? fair enough. Why don't we discuss the time a year ago when a man murdered his neighbors with a chainsaw, put the bloody chainsaw on the seat beside him, and crossed into America where he was detained for 3 hours and then released? http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/10/border.chainsaw/ index.html

You said something about an armed gunman, but your biggest worry about the guards shutting their post down is traffic problems? WTF mate! Running for cover? I know this isn't the first news article about it, but didn't Canadian CT's foil a group of 17 terrorists' plans? http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopNews&arti cle=UPI-1-20060604-07193700-bc-canada-raids.xml

Finally, please try to link to news if you're going to talk about events like that, it makes it easier on the rest of us :)

I'd rather have tools automate what you would be doing manually with your pencil and printouts.

If you can automate the result of the process of making notes to myself on the printouts, you've not only solved the hard AI program (the natural language output of the notes), you've solved direct input of information to my brain. Wow!

When I was studying anatomy, one very useful tool was The Anatomy Coloring Book. Why not just buy a full-color anatomy book? (Well, I had one of those too, actually.) Because the process of doing the "grunt work" is highly educational.

In Java I would start off with Relo or some other tool to reverse engineer the source into UML.

Ugh. UML: Flow Charts, The Next Generation. No, thanks.

Software is a linguistic entity, a string of words. It needs to be described in words supplemented with graphics, not graphics supplemented with words.

It's a shame and a deep source of our troubles that so many software developers can't put together a decent paragraph, and try to hide their lack of linguistic fluency behind obfuscated diagrams. Dijkstra observed decades ago that mastery of one's native language is one of the most vital tools a programmer has; perhaps there need to be more essay questions in programming classes.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/06082 1133930.htm
is this good enough for you?

Try http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/04102 2104658.htm, or http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/2 4/0024241&tid=191 for the slashdot take on it at the time.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/ The articles are based on press releases, but they reference the original papers if you want to read more.

Slashdot wants more characters per line Sky above 37Â375"N 122Â2222"W at Sat 2005 Jul 2 20:11 Slashdot wants more characters per line ScienceDaily Magazine -- News Summaries Slashdot wants more characters per line BBC NEWS | Science/Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Science News Online Slashdot wants more characters per line Molecule of the Day Slashdot wants more characters per line The Loom Slashdot wants more characters per line Cosmic Variance Slashdot wants more characters per line Scientific American news Slashdot wants more characters per line Sciencegate Slashdot wants more characters per line New Scientist Slashdot wants more characters per line LiveScience Slashdot wants more characters per line Science And Politics Slashdot wants more characters per line Chris C Mooney Slashdot wants more characters per line symmetry Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Discover Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Mathematician OTD Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line ESA - Cassini-Huygens Slashdot wants more characters per line NASA - Cassini-Huygens: Close Encounter with Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line HiRISE Operations Center -- HiROC Slashdot wants more characters per line Cassini Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Slashdot wants more characters per line Saturn Today Slashdot wants more characters per line HubbleSite - NewsCenter Slashdot wants more characters per line MESSENGER Web Site Slashdot wants more characters per line Deep Impact: Your First Look Inside a Comet! Slashdot wants more characters per line Pluto, Charon, and other Kuiper Belt Objects including, Sedna, 2003 UB313, as well as Asteroids and Comets. Slashdot wants more characters per line Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Pharyngula

• EurekAlert
• ScienceDaily

This site is pretty good:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

"Data" is not the plural of "anecdote". Some of the things the submitter was talking about are obviously personal observations, but he was probably referring to stuff like decreasing legroom.

Apparently, the statistics for lost/stolen luggage is about 2%. Doesn't sound like much, but consider that this means that on a flight of a hundred people, two will probably have their luggage lost. Also, this means that you will likely have your luggage lost or stolen once every fifty times you fly... not an issue for me, but my dad travels frequently on business.

Looks like you're right about the prices being lower than in a while, though, according to this. I wouldn't know; I haven't flown in a while.

It's the security thing that's most worrisome to me, though. From what I heard in the other thread, people weren't allowed carry-ons, laptops or other electronics, even books. Considering other changes in aviation security in the past (metal detectors, shoes, explosive sniffers) this may become the norm rather than a temporary measure. I don't know about everyone else here, but to me a six-hour flight (hell, even a two-hour flight) would be intolerable without some of those distractions. I'd rather take the train, but this obviously isn't an option for going to Europe.

Maybe, and remember, just maybe, this spending of money will produce as side effects a lot of new technologies.
And sometimes, again, just sometimes, things such as researches work as a chain of events in a way that we can't see the results until they are already upon us:
take for instance this to this this
And Ta-DA!! We have NASA's technology reducing poverty in the world! Isn't science marvelous!?

Maybe, and remember, just maybe, this spending of money will produce as side effects a lot of new technologies.
And sometimes, again, just sometimes, things such as researches work as a chain of events in a way that we can't see the results until they are already upon us:
take for instance this to this this
And Ta-DA!! We have NASA's technology reducing poverty in the world! Isn't science marvelous!?

A cheap web cam: http://insidecomputer.stores.yahoo.net/usbwebcamwe p.html $7
This book: http://www.nerdbooks.com/item.php?id=1852336668 $45
GCC compiler: http://gcc.gnu.org/ $0
A lot of time: http://www.time.org/ $0
----------------------
$52 + tax, shipping, etc.

And there you go.

Or just go here: http://www.it4tomorrow.de/shop/index.php?lang=ENG& list=KAT14
Or read this: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/06040 4091149.htm
Which will lead you here: http://www.cogain.org/
Which will lead you here: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/developm ent/

Now, from there, I'm stuck. I can't find any more information on the OWL. But it was invented in 1987 and could be mass produced for around $10 (according to the link), so I see potential there.

Layne

One effect is to distract the students with email, instant messaging, games, web surfing, porn, cracking into other computers, anything but pay attention to the material which is, obviously, not conducive to learning.

Right. And right now about the only people with "freedom isn't free" ribbon bumper stickers are people who support Bush. Those things piss me off royally, because this administration has done more to make me less free than any other, and it just keeps getting worse.

However that ~50.5% of the people who voted for Bush are going to read this and think, "oh, that liberal press," or "they'll (? who is they anyway ?) say anything to make little old Bush look bad," or "but he just seems no nice and down to earth." Really, we just don't want to hear anything that doesn't fit with our already held beliefs.

For consumers, switching to ethanol would cost only about $100 per car. Kammen said all it takes are some new hoses and a new gas cap. "This is actually a switch we could make very easily and very quickly," he said.

Kammen is working to get an initiative on California's November ballot requiring that all new cars sold in the state be flex-fuel ready within five years. According to UC Berkeley, in 2004, ethanol-blended gasoline accounted for just 2 percent of all fuel sold in the United States, though nearly 5 million vehicles are already equipped.

"Converting to fuel ethanol will not require a big change in the economy," Kammen said. "We are already ethanol ready. If ethanol were available on the supply side, the demand is there."

An old article from 2002... Bacteria Point The Way To Gold Deposits http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/05/02052 3075914.htm/ Can bacteria help find gold? A pilot survey of 11 soil profiles across gold mining regions in the Peoples Republic of China indicates that elevated spore counts of Bacillus cereus, a common soil bacterium, were detected in areas adjacent to underlying gold deposits.....

The reason to do this is supposedly to help some people... But it does not help anywhere as much as it harms. Communication is the building block of society. To cripple it because some are too lazy to learn it is not the way to solve their problem.

The complexity of modern English is not simply a problem because some people are lazy.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/03/01031 6073551.htm/

There is some statistical evidence that being raised with different primary languages affects the chance that you become dyslexic and the severity of dyslexia. I don't have a problem with English in its current form, and neither do you. But it's possible that simplifying the language will help thousands or millions of people with potential learning disabilities. I don't know if it will help, or if it's worth the colossal work involved. But it is not simply a matter of people that are too lazy to do the necessary work.

......As with all other cultures at the time, the authors of scriptures thought the world was flat and had real ends.....

Exactly wrong, but the opposite is true. In Job 26:7 we read:

"He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing."

(....I asked YOU to prove your claim. Can you do it?.....)

Nobody can "prove" anything, but I can provide some strong evidence. Have you ever heard of continental drift? Continents not only move horizontally, but also vertically. Even right now, there is enough water in the present oceans to cover the entire globe over 5000 feet if the earth were perfectly smooth. There is evidence that three or four oceans of water are locked up in the layer of the earth named the mantle.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/12/97121 7071316.htm
http://www.ldolphin.org/deepwaters.html

What event might have caused the release of some of this water is unknown, but the Biblical record states: "In the six hundredth year of Noah' life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." (Genesis 7:11) Did a sudden stress on the planet release some of this underground water onto the surface? No known laws of science PRECLUDE such a scenario. Like a squeezed sponge releases water and then soaks it up again, so too the deep layers of the mantle spewed forth water onto the surface and then later, when the pressure was released, soaked it up again.

(....no such concepts even existed when the text was written....)

Exactly true, yet the very first verse of the Bible contains the essential elements of our physical universe: "In the beginning (time) God (the cause) created the heavens (space) and the earth (matter-energy)"

(....Unfortunately, the evidence clearly shows that the Earth is billions of years old....)

I was not making any reference to the age of anything. Science can only address what we observe today and how things work now. Somehow we try to explain how things came to be the way they are. You can believe the cosmos created itself, which is absurd, that it has always existed, which modern discoveries showed to be false, or you can hold that a transcendent, eternal Creator is behind the Universe. I happen to believe the latter, but you may believe something else. Anything is indeed possible, but some things are highly improbable. To me, the explanation of an intelligent, powerful creator making a structure such as the human brain is much more probable and believable than any other possibility that does not involve the activity of a mind.

500 BC vs. 73,000 BC? That's a very big difference, and I'm inclined to believe the latter number. The article gives ranges; one is a very wide range of 5000 BC to 1 AD. However, the article is too vague to find out what rates of migration were used and why they were used. It would be interesting to see if actual historical migrations were used. There are a lot of other variables that need to be taken into account.

Also, how well does this match up with the "genetic drift model"? The numbers don't agree, so further refinement is necessary.

Based on another article on this, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/09/04093 0122428.htm, it appears that the point isn't "All of us have one common ancestor in the collective sense, but that any two of us, regardless of distance, have a common ancestor who lived at about that time." That's just the way I interpret it.

I had this procedure done about six weeks ago. The pill sized camera takes hundreds of pix and transmits the images to a unit I wore on a belt. After the time was up, the nurse opened the receiving unit and showed me the flash memory cartridge used to store the images.

Happily, I wasn't required to view the resulting pix, and the camera ended up in the local sewer system.

Painless, and you can do what you want while waiting for the six hours or so pass.

Here is some info about the procedure.

Coral reefs have been around for 225 million years. Now most of them are dead because they can't stand the heat and pollution. How much more proof do you need?" show me proof that "most" of them are dead. Don't get me wrong, I'm concerned about it- I've participated in environmentalist events, I parked my car for good a while back and now just use public transportation, etc.... but I was a marine biology major in college, and coral bleaching is not as big an issue as greenpeace makes it sound. How much more proof do I need? how about some proof to start with.

Give me a set of criteria that, if they are satisfied, you will regard as sufficent evidence for taking action against global warming and I will accept that you may have a pont. Otherwise, all you're doing is saying "Bah! Youse scientist dunt never nothing nowhow" only in an fancy accent.

Amen! The whole bogus "controversy" on the subject is deeply disrespectful to climate scientists: the papers gladly report the opinion of some hack from the American Energy Trade Association basically accusing the entire climate science community of being woolly-headed hippies, and this is followed up a professor of an unrelated subject who is quoted so the editors don't have to endure abuse for fact-based reporting. The following is a bit I wrote up ona crystal-clear example of this.

Here's a 2004 essay that analyzed the scientific literature and quite justifiably concluded that there was scientific consensus. Even if you dispute her study methodology, the fact that all of the import climate science organizations have endorsed this view is in itself nearly enough to claim consensus.

The paper was followed in short measure by this CBS article, in which various right-wing think tanks and a contrarian British anthropologist dismiss the study via comparisons to Stalin.

So if you're a non-climate scientist, or someone who's generally not comfortable with reading science magazines, and you try to read the papers to find out what's going on, you get the wrong story, the one about "controversy" over whether climate change is real, not the one about science concluding people are affecting the Earth's climate. Note also that the two links at the bottom of the story are also from climate change "skeptics". If you read the story from the second of those links, you'll see the same raft of quotes from the same set of players, plus a new contrarian scientist with this recently debunked plum:
"Antarctica has been cooling for the last 50 years. Most of the Arctic has not warmed over long time scales," Baliunas told CNSNews.com. Baliunas also serves as the enviro-science editor for Tech Central Station.

This claim has been debunked by a recent study which concluded that Antartica is in fact losing mass to melting, and in any it was known at the time that the center is cooling and the edges are melting. A reputable scientist would haev distinguished the mean from overall behavior.

And par usuel, the article neglects to mention that Tech Central Station is a basically a lobbyist funded rag, and nor that the people who do these kinds of studies work at the most reputable places in the world. The gravity measurement came from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the first institutions to develop a Global Climate Model, and still one of world's finest climate science institutions.

The bottom line is that the scientific consensus has emerged and strengthened. I was consistently criticized in grad school for holding the view that you can't distinguish between anthropogenic temperature change and natural variability, and though I might well have been behind the times then, I would say I was exercising healthy scientific skepticism until I learned more. That's particularly true with regards to the so-called "hockey stick" in temperature change - several years of debate have done a lot to test the theory. And I continue to think it's fair and constructive for actual climate scientists like Richard Lindzen or even to some extent this VWRC-funded William Gray character at the University of Colorado to challenge the anthropogenic nature of warming, but why does every scientific development require a counter-quote from AEI on the fabricated "controversy"?

I can't fathom how a political movement whose basis was a reaction to disregard fo

But "you can't prove a negative" according to some.

Seriously, though, you are in fact wrong. Plants are limited in their ability to uptake CO2 by soil conditions. Numerous studies have been done on the estimated capacity of plants to sequester both CO2 and methane (actually it's microorganisms in the soil that do that, but they need plant waste to survive.)

"Results of the seven-year study, to be published in the May 24 issue of Nature, show that some forests will not increase the amount of carbon they sequester--at least not enough to compensate for increasing atmospheric CO2. Soil fertility is a key factor in determining the long-term growth response to elevated CO2, according to co-principal investigator David S. Ellsworth, assistant professor of plant physiological ecology in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/01052 4061936.htm

"Climate affects soil carbon sequestration in two ways. First is the production of organic material entering the soil. Warm, moist climates generally have greater plant productivity. Cooler climates limit plant production. Hot climates may limit production because of reduced water availability, making water the limiting factor. Climate also affects the rate of microbial decomposition of plant material and soil organic matter. As temperature increases, microbial activity generally increases."

http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/jan02/feature_carbo n.html

"Although rising atmospheric carbon dioxide boosts photosynthesis and growth in many species, the increases in response to long-term exposure are often much less than predicted from short-term exposure. ARS researchers at Beltsville, Maryland, have noted large differences in the magnitude of yield enhancement in different lines of soybean when the plants are grown in open-top chambers at elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide. The highest yielding varieties at ambient carbon dioxide were not always the ones with the largest response to carbon dioxide. Recent experiments identified the extent of branching at elevated carbon dioxide as a major source of this variation. These results suggest that genetic selection for specific traits may improve crop responses to carbon dioxide in the future."

http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/programs/programs .htm?np_code=204&docid=242 ...those are just a few. This is an extremely well studied area, in that it has ramifications for agri-business.

Promising findings were reported today showing that the combination of thalidomide and dexamethasone (Thal/Dex) when used as initial therapy for multiple myeloma, slowed disease progression almost two-fold compared to dexamethasone alone.

The most recent:

"It is an effect that has been predicted as a likely result of climate change," said David Vaughan, an independent expert on the ice sheets at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England.

In a region known for the lowest temperatures recorded on Earth, it normally is too cold for snow to form across the 2.7 million square miles of the ice sheet. Any additional annual snowfall in East Antarctica, therefore, is almost certainly attributable to warmer temperatures, four experts on Antarctica said.

"As the atmosphere warms, it should hold more moisture," said climatologist Joseph R. McConnell at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, who helped conduct the study. "In East Antarctica, that means there should be more snowfall."

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0520-08.ht m

2004:

"Our studies of cores in New Jersey provide one of the best- dated estimates of how fast and how much sea level changed during the greenhouse world of the Late Cretaceous," said Miller. "The Earth was certainly much warmer at that time, probably due to high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. At the same time, our estimates require that ice sheets grew and decayed on Antarctica during this period of peak warmth, which has been a previously heretical view."

The scientists propose that the ice sheets were restricted in area to Antarctica and were ephemeral. The ice sheets would not have reached the Antarctic coast, explaining the relative warmth in Antarctica, but still could significantly alter global sea level.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/02/04022 9231619.htm

1997 and earlier:

    Having little means to lose mass, East Antarctica would seem to be a
good place to increase accumulation and lower sea level. A nice idea,
but it runs into the problem that precipitation is also highly
inefficient over the East Antarctic plateau (arguably the driest desert
in the world). The best estimates place the rate of increased
accumulation over East Antarctica at right about the same as the
increased ablation on Greenland. That would be a wash for sea level.
Some redistribution of water from north to south, but no net effect.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sea-level-faq/

This has been expected for a long time. West Antartica is just going to melt. East Antartica is going to grow for a while, then melt. Suddenly.

There's nothing you can sing that ain't been sung.

No! No! We must drink both coffee and tea.

Why you say?

So we can drink and smoke

Live long and party!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/05050 9102339.htm

Zero of those traffic deaths have been scientificly proven to be caused by pot. There are very few studies available, but those that have been done (here's one link) seem to show that the paranoia more than offsets the loss of attention and motor coordiantion. The US NHTSA and DOT came to similar conclusions. Of course if it were legal, it would stand to reason that there would be less paranoia of getting pulled over and this effect would reduce. In case you're curious, the DOT figures for drivers in injury accidents testing positive for pot without alchohol was 2%, no control figure was given, but I'd wager the figure for drivers on pot is a little above 2%.

Disclaimer: don't use it, just irked that I'm forced to use inferior drugs like alchohol.

Alternatively, you could look at this long-term study on violent video games (Asheron's Call, FWIW) which found no causal connection between game play and increased aggression.

Make sure to look at all the research, and not just what supports Grossman's thesis.

You are quite right in saying so, and it was entirely my intention to make that point. As I said, the industry has quite some time before growing beyond its infancy. However, the main point to be made is that people are attempting to be forward thinking and, indeed, pragmatic enough to realize that the requisite infrastructure for the elevator must be established. Only then may genuine progress be made towards making what today remains science fiction into reality.

As for current realities: many promising, potentially useful applications are developed every year.

You are quite right in saying so, and it was entirely my intention to make that point. As I said, the industry has quite some time before growing beyond its infancy. However, the main point to be made is that people are attempting to be forward thinking and, indeed, pragmatic enough to realize that the requisite infrastructure for the elevator must be established. Only then may genuine progress be made towards making what today remains science fiction into reality.

As for current realities: many promising, potentially useful applications are developed every year.

You are quite right in saying so, and it was entirely my intention to make that point. As I said, the industry has quite some time before growing beyond its infancy. However, the main point to be made is that people are attempting to be forward thinking and, indeed, pragmatic enough to realize that the requisite infrastructure for the elevator must be established. Only then may genuine progress be made towards making what today remains science fiction into reality.

As for current realities: many promising, potentially useful applications are developed every year.