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If your doctor has been telling you drink 8 glasses a day, get a different doctor. It's a myth. But apparently a lot of people actually follow this extreme regimen.. Just look at how big corp.s can sell bottled tap water.

First, the IPCC itself acknowledged in 2001 that "some" (page 9) recent climate models provide "satisfactory" models without flux adjustments. The implication there being that most don't... The same document (page 13) suggests global warming of 1.4 to 5.8C from 1990 to 2000, so we're talking about 1.3-5.2C per century.

Refer you to the last 20 years of "JGR (Oceans)" and "JGR (Atmospheres)"?

If those models are applied to climate conditions from, say, 500 to 1000 years ago and are let run free, will they reproduce the current climate accurately?

How about the NCAR Climate System Model, which gives good results over 300 years without flux adjustment

Let's see. The NCAR Model projected that "surface temperature is expected to rise nearly 0.2 Kelvin (one-third degree Fahrenheit) per decade over the next four decades". So that's 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade or a projected 2 degrees Celsius change over a century. That's certainly on the low side of the IPCC alarmist figures. It has also been about 5-1/2 years since that model was announced so I would expect to see about 0.1C of warming since then. I am unaware of that having happened...? If it has, can you point to some data?

the Hadley Centre's HCM5, which generates a realistic for 1000 years stable climate (with non-greenhouse CO2) without flux adjustment?

I couldn't find information on HCM5, although I do see HCM2 and HCM3 on the Hadley website and I didn't see any claims to "1000 years stable climate" projections although I did find this page which says: "It is important to be aware that predictions from climate models are always subject to uncertainty because of limitations on our knowledge of how the climate system works and on the computing resources available. Different climate models can give different predictions."

I keep wondering... if some climate models are supposedly so accurate, why do we have so many different models that contradict each other? Further, it seems that at least one of the examples you provided reinforces my point that as the models get supposedly more accurate that the temperature increase they project becomes less--hence the 2C per century prediction of NCAR being on the LOW side of the IPCC estimates from just 3 years ago. I wonder how much lower the estimates will be in 3 years? Of course, in 3 years we'll probably no longer be talking about global warming and instead talking exclusively about salinity in the North Atlantic.

But I have not seen any evidence that taking healthy, BMI 20-25 adults and encouraging them to exercise more results in decreased mortality.

He never said "decreased mortality"- just "more fit". Those phrases are not necessarily correlated. The common conception of a "fit" person is one who is fast, strong, and alert- but the effort get those traits can easily reduce your overall lifespan, especially with an "Atkins" all-meat diet. Whereas there is strong evidence (but not yet longitudinally tested) that calorie restriction will increase lifespan, although its practitioners quickly take on a superficially unfit appearance

(If you use the Darwinian definition of "fitness", then longevity isn't relevant once your grandchildren have reached reproductive age...)

My home machine has 2 gig of ram. Currently Mozilla is taking up only 87 megs of that. My laptop is a different story as it only has 512 megs shared with the video card; damn it all, but I manage.

www.sciencedaily.com

Excerpt :

Evidence Bubbles Over To Support Tabletop Nuclear Fusion Device

Researchers are reporting new evidence supporting their earlier discovery of an inexpensive "tabletop" device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions.

The researchers believe the new evidence shows that "sonofusion" generates nuclear reactions by creating tiny bubbles that implode with tremendous force. Nuclear fusion reactors have historically required large, multibillion-dollar machines, but sonofusion devices might be built for a fraction of that cost.

www.sciencedaily.com

Excerpt :

Evidence Bubbles Over To Support Tabletop Nuclear Fusion Device

Researchers are reporting new evidence supporting their earlier discovery of an inexpensive "tabletop" device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions.

The researchers believe the new evidence shows that "sonofusion" generates nuclear reactions by creating tiny bubbles that implode with tremendous force. Nuclear fusion reactors have historically required large, multibillion-dollar machines, but sonofusion devices might be built for a fraction of that cost.

Your problem with Enoch Root's lifespan is tied up with the fact that that Rowling's book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the United States as 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'. 'Sorcerer's Stone' is, of course, meaningless, but in the world of Quicksilver, the Philosopher's Stone has particular meaning, and particular properties.

It's often a good thing to know some history.

[No, of course I'm not saying that Harry Potter is literature of the same class as Quicksilver]

Was of course The Rt. Hon Sir Richard Seddon, PM of New Zealand 1893..1906. But that's not funny.

Actually, unique varieties of plants have been patentable in the U.S. for over seventy years. Acoording to this site, the Plant Patent Act of 1930 says: "Whoever invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant, including cultivated sports, mutants, hybrids, and newly found seedlings, other than a tuber propagated plant or plant found in an uncultivated state, may obtain a patent therefor..."

The act was but in place in large part because of the works of famous plant hybridizers like Luther Burbank. Burbank was an incredibly prolific producer of new plant varieties, but I had a very hard time making money due to the lack of patents.

Peripheral Interchange Program; or better put, lets smash that Printer / Fax Machine!!!

Naked Rayburn

will dominate this market, because there is a new technique in acoustics that will eclipse the ultrasound method. Using something called time reversal, you can pinpoint the output of sound to a single location in 3 dimensional space, focusing around objects, people whatever; no beam, no drop off.

This focusing can be done with more than just sound waves however, and the first applications are in medicine, however, it does apply to sound as well.

The basic idea is that if you create a sound from some source location, and record all of the noise at another location, then play this noise signal backwards from the recorded location the sound will reappear in the one spot from which it was originally played. An analogy is that if you take a pool ball, put it right in front of a pocket, and then bounce it outwards really hard, letting it bounce against the walls multiple times, but noting the exact location of the last bounce of the ball, then if you reshot the ball at the exact spot where you last saw it bounce, it would go back in the whole.

There is no such thing as $1000 bills today. They've been out of circulation since 1946.

But then again, it's kind of sad that I'm replying to a troll that's responding to a troll. Ah well.

Rigid airships are a lot more complicated to build structurally, since they are carrying a bunch of rigid structure that does nothing to generate lift and can bend and break under stress. Blimps are not just one big ballon, but can and are compartmentalized for disaster containment. Blimps were built in large numbers during WWII as patrol craft, and operated in the US Navy in that role up to sometime in the 1960s. The USN gave up on rigid airships in the 30s, essentially after the Shenandoah went down in a storm.

Balloons are not blimps because they don't have maneuvering engines. A spherical blimp would have engines that move it, making it more than a balloon.

(An untethered Kite or parachute with an engine is called an ultralight, or an airplane)

One of the big issues with these proposals has been power generation and storage. The solar generators that are light enough and flexible to go on a blimp body have tended to be low efficiency compared to heavier crystal cells, according to this, though there are claims here that new products can do nearly as well.

Batteries are notoriously heavy, so it's a tradeoff that hasn't been economically possible yet. Things need to be efficient, light, reliable, and cheap enough. The proposed HAA is still using old lead-acid batteries! I guess this works if there is enough helium, and low enough power demand (related to low wind speed to fight).

here is an article that describes this in more detail.

-dB

For those (like myself) who have little idea about spintronics, Wikipedia has a general article that seemed to explain it to me quite well. Of course, I'm not a physicist so I have no idea whether or not it's accurate although I'm tempted to find out more from the referenced article. PhysicsWeb has more of the same. Apparently this will have far-reaching implications on RAM and cable bandwidth.

Given the fact that we haven't even yet created a single bacterium from scratch...

I'm no bio-engineering expert but we have created a synthetic virus, synthetic blood vessels, synthetic hormones, and even have made some progress towards synthetic organs. Granted, it's not quite creating life, but if you aren't impressed you are either an incurable cynic or doesn't understand the technology. (and probably both) Give it time. Just because we can't do something now doesn't mean we can't enjoy speculating about what might be possible.

They're using a liquid called "deuterated acetone" as the liquid. From the science daily article:

The acetone contains a form of hydrogen called deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, which contains one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. Normal hydrogen contains only one proton in its nucleus.

That's a nice posting and all, except for the fact that a 13 year study by University of Pittsburg found there was no statistical increase in occurrences of cancer around the Three Mile Island plant in Harrisburg PA.

Secondly, the reason you cite for not touching the Challenger fragments was because of (1) the temperature of the metal on re-entry and (2) the hazardous fumes from the aforementioned burning material. Although a local Texas sheriff claimed there was "radioactive material on board" (picked up by reporters with little fact checking), NASA has since said that the only radioactive material on the shuttle at the time were in the smoke detectors.

How do you check for deaths by radiation? By measuring the increase in cancers with respect to a "control group" of those that were not exposed to the radioactive source. For example, population of Seattle vs Chernobyl. If cancer rate is statistically higher, then you're golden.

Oh, and we have a great way to store radioative waste, it's called Yucca Mountain. Find a mountain of volcanic minerals, surrounded by more mountains and deserts, with an non-existent water table in a non-populated area, on government land with a 110 mile radius. Seal the crap underground, and post a guard for the next 6,000 years.

Hell, in another 100 years, we may find methods to "refine" the nuclear waste for more fissionable material, much like we do now in extracting uranium from ore. Just as we aren't going to run out of oil, we're going to run out of cheap oil, then we retool for more extraction. Our children's childeren will be thanking us for taking the time to concentrate all the material into one site for easy processing, just as we build trash-to-steam generating plants (sorry, "reclamation centers") at trash dumps today.

Why therefore do people submit science stories with a link to NYT when they could just link to the source material? This is the frigging internet. You can do just as much research as the press-release-editing typewriter monkey at NYT can.

For instance, the facts in this story were reported six months ago on ScienceDaily , three months ago on Wired and dozens of other places that could be found in 20-30 seconds on googlage.

In summary, if you don't like NYT's registration, don't link to it. You are advertising for them.
</rant>

Why therefore do people submit science stories with a link to NYT when they could just link to the source material? This is the frigging internet. You can do just as much research as the press-release-editing typewriter monkey at NYT can.

For instance, the facts in this story were reported six months ago on ScienceDaily , three months ago on Wired and dozens of other places that could be found in 20-30 seconds on googlage.

In summary, if you don't like NYT's registration, don't link to it. You are advertising for them.
</rant>

... it might be related to the theory outlined in this recent article on earths magnetic fields and polarity changes.

Seems as good a reason as anything else for these "spontaneous" fires I've read so far. Perhaps gross random piezo electric effects might be pre cursors/indicators of building intensity?

Also, we don't know yet if similar phenomenon are ocurring any place else around the planet. Given what is happening in the village, with it's very low population insuring that ANY strange occurrence was well noted by everyone there, similar random appearing events that might be occurring elsewhere in largepopulation areas might be being dismissed as sabotage or vandalism or normal arson, etc, and the stories are just lost in the noise of normal reporting. And if it's ocurring in even more remote areas, well then it wouldn't be reported at all obviously. I don't know, might be though. We DO know that we are seeing other strange magnetic effects around the world, a lot of altered and strange weather, seismic disturbances, etc. Perhaps a unique feature of this villages geology structure beneath might have something to do with the effects being more intense there. I do think we should be paying attention to a variety of indicators relating to the planet's modalities, as there does exist most credible evidence of past.. well.. cataclsyms.

From the earlier Science Daily story to which the earlier Slashdot story referred:

"The sediment within the ice made coring extremely difficult and required frequent bit changes and a complete motor replacement at one stage," said John Priscu of Montana State University.

"It was some very cold drilling," added Doran. "We were there for two weeks at temperatures approaching -40C . . . camping. The drillers had a hard time getting through the sediment layers. They were used to drilling clean ice up on the polar plateau; the dirt in the ice tended to dull the cutting bits."

I can't tell from the article's depth of detail about the specifics whether they "salt" the bore to keep the melt from refreezing, freeing any trailing data cables. Or other salting to raise the ice's melting point for drilling. I don't know where you get your "heated coil" technique from, but even if they used that, these saltings would be appropriate. Especially if they're cautiously approaching the 19m depth within a few meters. Lubricating the bore is standard drilling procedure, regardless of the nature of the bit.

Pardon my ignorance, but how exactly to you calculate the probability of abiogenetic reactions when you don't even know what they are let alone fully understand their reaction rates?! No one knows exactly HOW precursor molecules reacted to form RNA (then DNA) so placing probabilities on their rates of formation in a prebiotic Earth is patently absurd. More likely it is that we simply haven't figured out what make these reactions stable and probable. There is progress here though, on Jan. 9th. of this year researchers at the University of Florida foud that Borate minerals completely stabilize the reaction necessary to form simple sugars like ribose(as in RIBOnucleic acid). There is no logical reason I can think of that will prevent scientists from 'cracking this nut' when it comes to figuring out how abiotic synthesis happened, and when it is figured out it will be one of the most triumphant moments of science in history.

Recognising faces is extremely difficult. It's one of those social functions that humans have evolved to perform with ease, but it also requires a significant portion of the brain to do it.

This assumes that we are using current techniques to farm the corn and ferment and distill it. If the farm machinery can use biodiesel instead of fossil diesel then that part is taken out. If the the still can be heated using solar heating (direct solar heating, not using inefficient solar cells), some use of wind, etc. then it may be possible to make the equation go positive for us.

As long as the input is fossil fuels or ethanol or hydrogen (perpetual motion machine, anyone?), efficiency means we'll come out behind. As plants learned long ago, you need outside input of power for it to be worthwhile which is why some researchers are looking at bacterial catylists among other things to split out the hydrogen from water. Plants left hydrogen behind a long time ago so perhaps we're going down a dead end.

I was searching for some papers on the Keck Observatory, and unfortunately I can't find many free ones online. However, here is an interesting story on how the Keck system outperforms Hubble in the infrared (and a few others are mentioned). An interesting point it makes is that Hubble is actually best in for visible light, which isn't opaque in the atmosphere. There's also this story, but it's a lot less informative.

Kids these days. Just lookin for someplace to store their music files.

http://www.tutorgig.com/encyclopedia/index.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/encyclopedia/
http://explanation-guide.info/

All a bit outdated tho.

Sometimes they do. Here's an article about NASA's handover of SAMPEX ops to the University of Maryland's Aerospace Engineering department.

Who holds the patents on these technologies? The University of Pennsylvania had a direct hydrocarbon burning fuel cell back in 2001. Theirs seems to require non-room-temperature reaction, but with a tank of fuel around, it doesn't seem impractical to burn a little fuel to get up to reaction temperatures.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/09/01090 5072008.htm

Patriot Games...

Canary Trap
Canary Trap

The Science Daily link has more links about Canary Traps and other fingerprinting methods.

The stardust name is also used by:

• Stardust Resort and Casino, Las Vegas
• Stardust, Bollywood magazine
• Ziggy Stardust

B.S. The largest ozone hole on record was in 2000. The second largest was this year. There's too much inter-year variability to make such a claim. Perhaps the Earth's weakening magnetic field will allow in more electrons, which have been shown to destroy ozone.

B.S. The largest ozone hole on record was in 2000. The second largest was this year. There's too much inter-year variability to make such a claim. Perhaps the Earth's weakening magnetic field will allow in more electrons, which have been shown to destroy ozone.

Hmm... I was mislead by the "Molotov -> Russian -> vodka inference. I see that the usual recipe is "usually gasoline (petrol) or alcohol and a rag stuffed in the mouth of the bottle....Sometimes, if available, self-inflammatory materials (such as white phosphorus), could also be used to guarantee the bottle's explosion as it hits the target surface. Tar is often added to the composition in order to make the burning fluid stick to the target. Sometimes acid is added to the mix to increase the damaging potential."

And checking up on vodka reveals that it goes up to about 50% alcohol; being distilled to about 95% and then diluted before bottling. But lacking personal experience, is there any normal drink that would be suitable as an explosive?

This is a myth. Simple counter-example: nuclear reactors powering water electolysis. More complex counter-example: centralizing fossil-derived production simplifies the ability to perform CO2 sequestration (easier than doing it in your car, for example). Even more complex counter-example: use microbes to produce hydrogen.

This is too important an issue to allow this myth to keep perpetuating!

What bothers me every time this comes up is 100's of people saying "the bush administration says to hell with all the alzheimer's patients." The simple fact is that ADULT stem cell research has yeilded MANY beneficial results, like this one piece of recent news. Or this about bone marrow derived stem cells. Or this about turning SKIN cells into BRAIN CELLS for alzheimers patients! Why does the news media at large ignore this huge potential and only focus on how the pro-life movement "want's to end stem cell research altogether" ?

My favorite is when guy catches his girl cheating on him with another guy...and then goes after (or at least gets mad at) the guy, with whom he had no "emotional contract", shall we say.

I don't know if scientists have a name for this most delicious of male irrationalities, but I like to call it the Jerry Springer Phenomenon

This could be the start of something beautiful.

Compare this with that.

But this issue seems to be fraught with misunderstanding.

"Without the ability for the government to arrest citizens in secret and execute them without being held accountable"

We hold this truth to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, with certain, unalienable rights, among these are: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!

I recently ran across two articles about the strong links between creativity and insanity, and thought them relevant to any discussion of PKD -- his methamphetamine abuse left him more or less permanently schizophrenic, but the quality of his work did not suffer: quite the contrary.

I recently ran across two articles about the strong links between creativity and insanity, and thought them relevant to any discussion of PKD -- his methamphetamine abuse left him more or less permanently schizophrenic, but the quality of his work did not suffer: quite the contrary.

Anyone sell an active noise cancelling solution that would work off a PSU power supply?

You'd think with all that power my AMD has, 1% could be used to track and cancel by white noise the offending sounds?

I figure there is more to this than there seems?
Like disturbing my brain with whitenoise.

Has someone figured out how to dump /dev/entropy into a pink/white filter to the sound device?
aka almost like here

Transportation costs are a major factor in recycling glass. This results in a finite radius around glass plants in which it is economical to ship recycled glass back to the manufacturer. Transportation costs are also why you will typically find glass plants located close to sources of glass grade sand such as the Saint Louis area. Given that commodity prices for industrial grade sand is roughly $18/ton, see USGS mineral commodity summary, it doesn't take many miles before transportation costs become prohibitive.

Transportation costs are also environmentally important. It doesn't make sense to recycle something, if the environmental cost of increased fossil fuel usage to transport the material outweighs the recycling benefits

The primary benefit of plastic bottles over glass is consumer safety. Plastic bottles don't fracture into razor sharp shards.

Of course, there are alternative uses of recycled mixed glass cullet. One of which is glasphalt. The advantage being that recycled glass can be used locally without incurring prohibitive transportation costs.

You know, people criticise Slashdot for doing it -- Just copying small pieces of an article, then aiming a link at it. It's not real journalism. Ok, maybe not. But I was a little surprised when, following links for this story, there were two separate articles ( at Innovations Report and at Washington University) which have almost completely identical content, right down to the captions on the pictures... Oh, wait, the Slashdot version doesn't include the pictures. I guess that's what they call editing. Next best thing to journalism.

The article at Washington University is, of course, the original. So, while we're link farming, here is the doctor's homepage.

This speed has already been surpassed as of the 10th of October.

Computer Center Sets Trans-Atlantic Speed Record For Data Transfer

UIC's National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) and Laboratory for Advanced Computing flashed a set of astronomy data from Chicago to Amsterdam at 6.8 gigabits per second

and

The test used Amsterdam's SURFnet and Chicago's Abilene networks. During a 30 minute test, the researchers transmitted approximately 1.4 terabytes of data

So this other related recent accomplishment must just be chopped liver at only 6.8 Gbps, then?

Probably only an option with dedicated lines, though. I don't think they bothered with authentication. But the transfer rates are nice.

You like every other apple zealout refused to understand what you read. The cost of the dells is the total cost of the 5 year project.

And what exactly is a "distinct race"? It sure as hell isn't a genetic difference.