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Here's the basic plans to make your own nuclear bomb, and it is legal to disseminate those. Just like it is legal to disseminate plans on how to make a firearm.

My solution is nuclear energy which is the safest form of power.

False on its face, given that the number of deaths from solar or wind technology is zero, as opposed to Chernobyl or Fukushima. If someone falls off a wind tower and dies that's an industrial accident, same as if Homer Simpson accidentally runs over Lenny with a forklift at the local nuclear power plant. When a wind farm starts a deadly tornado, or a solar farm accidentally forms an Archimedes mirror, then we can talk about which form is safest.

But not before then. And putting the issue of safety aside completely, nuclear power is completely unjustifiable based on cost alone.

Just require that all of the wiring be made of conductive thermite. Then, if a wire gets too hot, WHOOSH!! Perfectly adequate fireball, with the added bonus of being impossible to extinguish. Magnesium wiring would do, but it's possible to put a magnesium fire out. One might also make the body out of rocket fuel.

Statement 1: "Thomas Edison invented the light bulb."
Statement 2: "Thomas Edison took the initiative in creating the light bulb."

Statement 2 is very weasel-worded. What exactly does it mean to "take the initiative in creating the [product X]"?

Actually, statement 2 is a much more accurate description. As various historians have pointed out, claiming that Thomas Edison "invented the light bulb" is factually incorrect. If you use any reasonable definition, light bulbs were built and demonstrated by several people before Edison got into developing it. The practical problem that he worked on was making one that was practical for home and office use. His contribution was primarily managerial: he put together a team of engineers that did massive materials testing to find materials that would continue to glow sufficiently long to be a practical product. Yes, he was a trained engineer himself, but giving him total credit for the work that was mostly done by his employees is highly misleading. Some of his engineers did a lot of work, and refusing to give them credit is a typical failure mode of our development system. And in this case, saying that he "invented" the product is simply wrong. It was the classical story of the results of the work of many people, not all of them working for Edison.

A much better description of Edison's contribution would be something like "... took the initiative in the development research project that led to the first really practical light bulb". This gives him credit for the overall task, while making it clear that his job was as the leader of a research team, not as a sole genius inventor.

Of course, when talking to the media, it's hard to get across nuanced statements like this. They're likely to go "Huh?", and finally accept it when you shrug, sigh, and say "He invented it.". This was probably the main explanation for Gore's clumsy statement.

OTOH, Al Gore was a politician running for office. By then, he fully understood the bumper-sticker mentality of the media, and his statement was probably about as brief as he thought he could get across on the spur of the moment. But it was clearly still a bit too wordy, and he was probably not surprised when his opponents willfully misquoted him so egregiously.

Finally, whales can't talk, so asking them what they think probably won't result in any useful answers.

Yet. What they say 100 years from now will burn your ears off. Their epic ballads used to make the elves cry, but ever since the rise of the throbbing container ship, they dish more scat than Mozart.

"Mommy, I'm going to get a tattoo!"

"You stay away from licorice pasta (*). You hear me! Have you never heard old Missus Sturm (**) sing that horrible coda? She crooned and crooned for half an hour. It was the worst thing ever (***). "

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every suck you take I'll be watching you

"How did it come to this? Calves these days all want to emulate Marimba Moby. Let me tell you, they didn't call your pop the Big Maraka for nothing. Anything to stand apart. Honestly." (****)

(*) From Giant squid

Giant squid and some other large squid species maintain neutral buoyancy in seawater through an ammonium chloride solution which flows throughout their body and is lighter than seawater. This differs from the method of flotation used by fish, which involves a gas-filled swim bladder. The solution tastes somewhat like salmiakki and makes giant squid unattractive for general human consumption.

(**) Sperm Whales May Have Names

(***) From The Giant Squid:

For an hour and a half the monster clung to the whale trying to drown it as the whale's mother watched helplessly. "The little whale could stay down for 10 to 12 minutes, then come up. It would just have enough time to spout - only two or three seconds - and then down again." The squid finally won and the baby whale was never seen again.

(****) From Sperm Whales Dominica

Thirty thousand beaks have been found in a sperm whale stomach indicating they had eaten 15,000 squid as squid have upper and lower mandibles.

Hey, they do it with trees.

Oh wait, it's actually happening already.

The Dogon already knew of the existance of life in Orion centuries ago... http://www.unmuseum.org/siriusb.htm

Today, scientist's vision of the habits and habitat of the Apatosaurus are quite different than what Marsh and other early paleontologists had thought. Early analysis suggested that the animals must have been weak because their small heads could only chew the minimum amount of food necessary to fuel such a big body. So weak, in fact, that large sauropods were thought to be slow, unable to lift their bulky tails off the ground and only able to support their massive weight by living in shallow lakes and swamps where water floated their bulk.

Paleontologists like Bakker showed that this image was wrong. No Apatosaurus skeleton has been found in an ancient body of water and its feet were not at all suited for walking through marshy and muddy ground. In fact, Bakker notes in his book Dinosaur Heresies, an analysis of changes in geology over time suggest that large sauropods moved out of areas as they became wet: they didn't like swamps at all.

They just do it like they always have. They guess.

That's the damn point: it isn't a cataclysm. It's been turned into one by a bunch of pseudoscientists to sell alarmist books and idiotic, overdramatized programs to the Discovery Channel. At most it might give us some spectacular aurora at low latitudes, increase cosmic rays at the surface by a measurable but biologically insignificant amount, mess up compasses and maybe a few satellites, and cause some geese and pigeons to fly in the wrong direction for a while.

The only true cataclysm here is that people can make a decent living selling this kind of crap, but I suppose that's nothing new. In the 1910s some people thought Halley's comet was going to poison the Earth because deadly gases were found spectroscopically in its tail, and the Earth was going to pass through it. Imaginative business people sold gas masks and "anti-comet pills". Same idea, only this time it's "geomagnetic reversals".

The Nazca Lines were first, and much bigger. The picture at bottom left is even a baby chicken. Or a moose upside down.

The lecture was conducted in a very informal fashion; there were no hand outs or slide shows to download but I did manage to find this for you: http://www.unmuseum.org/dnadino.htm

I read the above article at unmuseum and it represents the meat of the lecture...

In response to some requests: the lecture was "How to Make a Dinosaur"

I happen to look it up and found this: http://www.unmuseum.org/dnadino.htm

Here is yet another interesting link: http://www.cem.msu.edu/~cem181h/projects/97/clonin g/index.htm

---
I wonder what dyno-burgers taste like :)

What else could be done to get to space with minimal harm to the planet?

The story of the lightbulb also incorporates a tale of success for the patent system.

Edison used existing patents to avoid dead end research.

He pre-announced the vaporware lightbulb before he had even got anywhere near completing his research.

He also sued Swan for patent infringment, despite Swan's patent being granted 1 year prior to Edisons. The two of them decided to join forces instead of continued litigation and became the world's leading suppliers of lightbulbs.

So, the world benefitted from the patent system and it's litigating participants because eventually common sense prevailed.

http://www.unmuseum.org/lightbulb.htm

http://www.unmuseum.org/spaceelevator.htm

The center of mass for the elevator has to be at this altitude, as the elevator basically works like a geostationary satellite.

From :
This spurred Edwards to come up with a plan for a space elevator he called "The Wright Brother's version." In Edward's simplified plan, a robotic platform is boosted into space to the right height (22,300 miles) needed for the geosynchronous orbit. The platform would carry two spools of a CNT in the form of a ribbon 5 to 10 inches wide. The spools would then unwind, one going down to Earth 22,300 miles below, and the other one going upward to a height of around 62,000 miles. The extra ribbon above would ensure that the center-of-mass always stayed at 22,300 miles and eliminate the need for an asteroid counter-weight.

22,300/200 = 111.5 hours

how many times do i have to listen to Kraftwerk?

That is, if you can keep yourself awake for over four days...

Yes, I did make a mistake in my post with the the spelling of Brontosaurus but my point was the Brontosaurus did not exist. It was a mistake / hoax, call it what you will. So the species did not exist. Google for Brontosaurus Here and here explain thing rather well.

If Mars had water 5 million years ago on the surface then it may had a atmosphere then also

It has an atmosphere now!
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/facts/

We've seen microbes on ancient mars rocks

They saw structures inside the rocks that resembled bacteria, but they haven't found "microbes." They don't know for sure what they are.
http://www.unmuseum.org/marsrock.htm

Not everybody gets that right: http://www.unmuseum.org/hindenburg.htm/

um, hello - I think you are forgetting about a little something called THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY!

There are "a lot of supposed sites for Atlantis. I would have to say this is one of the least faith inspiring "finding" I've seen.

Mythology being quite entertaining to me, I've read of most of the supposed sites. There is an island called Thera, located off the coast of Crete. It seems to me that if anything found so far is the fabled Atlantis, this is it. Archological digs show that they had both hot and cold running water, as well as a very advanced trade. Prior to the erruption, there was a circular cove around the island. There are significant enough similarities between Plato's Atlantis and Thera for there to be a very convincing arguement for this site. The disaster of the volcanic erruption would fit the timeframe of the other legends surrounding the survivors of Atlantis - for instance, the Spanish conquistadors that slayed the white-skinned men on the northwestern coast of Africa that claimed to be from such a society (I think? my memory is sketchy.)

I suspect people aren't making conclusive claims about Thera being Atlantis yet because there simply aren't enough interesting historical mysteries to get funding for. Atlantis is a pearl in almost everyone's eyes, thus people keep searching - finding various other interesting things - in the name of searching for Atlantis.

After all, once you've found all the easter eggs that they said there were, you're not going to want to keep looking, as it's not likely you'll find anything - or so you think.

There was a television special recently about this. What I found even more interesting was a different security compromise.

A private investigator was hired to watch the airport in Las Vegas and he observed which cars came and went on a frequent basis. He was eventually able to deduce which cars' owner were spending the day at Area 51.

At that point, it became a simple matter of just following the cars to a plush neighborhood. When he went to knock on the door and asked about Area 51, they said "no comment" and shut the door in his face. One would think that just mentioning Area 51 would be enough to inspire curosity from the non-involved.

An once-insider agreed to secretly meet with them doing the whole inside-a-hotel with blured-face and altered-voice routine. He examined maps and photos and said they were accurate. He also said that there were no UFOs at Area 51, and that the big secret was the abusive politics and unsafe worker conditions.

Guess Area 51 scooby gang missed the television special on S4, where the anti-gravity from borrowed UFOs go on.

As I was writing this I found a good general overview site for Alantis which is a lot more readable than the wikipedia link. Atlantis Info Apparently the website was listed as one of the 50 best science sites by pop sci magazine, so despite it's conspiracy theory-esque look, it seems to be a credible source.

This is interesting... I have heard other explanations for Atlantis... but the best one I've heard was on a Discovery channel (I think) special a few weeks ago. Apparently there is an island in the Meditterranean that was highly volcanic at one point, and kind of imploded on itself and caused massive tidal waves and such in the area... I think there's evidence in the surrounding area, but at the time of the documentary they hadn't managed to explore the crater yet. There was news of a rather advanced civilzation there for the time; running water, indoor plumbing, the kind of thing that would be rare in the ancient world -- not spaceships or anything. I tried to find an article on it online, but didn't come up with anything. I wonder if these news items are related (it seemed a very recently made documentary). The articles are rather light on info. Anyone else see this thing or know what I'm talking about? It could've been on one of the History channels too, because I watch those about 90% of the time.

The thing you seem to be thinking of is the unseen antichthon or counter-Earth; this dates from classical Greece where it was an element of Pythagorean cosmology. It was however not on the other side of the Sun but permanently hidden by the "central fire" which the Pythagoreans also believed in. To my knowledge it has never been taken seriously by scientists since that time - certainly not by a majority of them, anyway.

And finally, there was no universal law of gravitation to fit the Earth's orbit into prior to Kepler, or even for a few decades after his death. That had to await Isaac Newton. Sounds like you are thinking of Kepler's famous attempt to fit the planetary orbits into a nested series of perfect solids (pyramid, cube, etc).

We all know the truth. NASA has done this stuff to us before and one day they'll learn.

Meanwhile, it's clear that these pictures were made with certain software that the government doesn't want you to know about.


Note: Joke.

Sounds a bit like the Beale Papers.

Dan East

I once saw a show where they picked a random part of the ocean near Europe which had the same traffic patterns as the Bermuda area. They then looked at all the past maritime records they could find and found the same percentage of unsolved accidents. The myth began from all the books written about the famous Flight 19 incident and just grew from there.

tower of babel?

When will it be thawed? I really need to get down into the center of the Earth where Hitler has been hiding since WW2.

Then the problem becomes those "basic underground markings". The reports point out that solid barriers can mean "this barrier is protecting treasure". If there are no barriers, future archeologists or curious miners might remove the fill, thinking that the shaft was abandoned for other reasons. (Yes, I know the facility will be much larger than a single 7-foot shaft, and that makes it even more interesting to study)

Remember, Oak Island, with a barricaded and boobytrapped shaft still attracts attention from treasure hunters after repeated failures over two hundred years.

Construction workers routinely cut through reinforced concrete. Tunnels are cut through granite. Barriers will only stop someone with wooden tools, and will only slow down hundreds of slaves eroding it with stone tools. Solid metal can be worn away by building an iron-age smelter against it and melting the surface. Modern welding or water/plasma/laser cutters are even faster.

Deception: We could try placing treasure in a barricated chamber with little disguise, and hide the further shaft. But the ancient Egyptians tried that, and both old tomb thieves and modern archeologists went on to find the real tombs. And any treasure is an invitation to find more.

I think there should be a solid barrier behind camouflage, then a backfilled vertical shaft. The real horizontal shaft can be carefully hidden behind the top of the vertical shaft (by "carefully" I mean modern tech used to drop a solid block across shaft and the seams melted and aged to make the wall seem to be virgin mountain rock -- again, old tricks: behind this barrier we can put as many modern physical barriers as we want, as anyone going past the deceptions will always think there is more). The vertical shaft is a time waster which will make many explorers give up before reaching the bottom. At the bottom of the shaft leave broken mining tools, indications of some routine exploration, and a crushed body or two. Success will only prove to be a waste of time, delaying further exploration for perhaps a generation or two while the story of failure lasts.

Large scale: We could use an underground nuclear explosion to make a large cavern (or maybe grotto is the right word, as it is man-made) across the shaft. Then there's both a large pit as a trap, and there is no shaft to follow until climbers explore the far side. But in additional to possible damage to the storage area, a cavern with characteristics different than other caves would attract attention.

We could try talking to miners by leaving broken mining tools in front of the barrier, but youngsters think they can do better than their ancestors.

There is one more thing: A few hundred feet in from the entrances, behind all the deceptions and barriers, put two chambers. Cover the walls with graphic warnings, modern scientific warnings, gold-leaf ionization detector. This is the last chance room -- we already know we can't stop them physically so we hope they're archeologists and figure out the warnings. The word of this is supposed to get out, so if they encounter its twin in the other shaft on the other side of the mountain they'll keep people away for a few generations. The chamber beyond the last warning chamber has a nuclear bomb with a simple mechanical trigger -- it explodes when grabbed. This will either show advanced people exactly what type of problem exists (they defuse it and find it has radioactive material or read the warnings), or detonates and reseals the shafts, or if it is no longer functional but not enough time has passed then its radioactivity poisons the team and warns others of the effects of going further.

I realize they're pretty hard to come by, but does anyone have any really 'good' or 'typical' ones? I've never seen ball lightning, and I'm not sure I've seen any good pics of it (having nothing to judge against).

BL #1 BL #2 BL #3 BL #4

• A Soviet tanker in 1965 came across a battle between a giant squid and a sperm whale

Referenced in several places, along with claims that Architeuthis will aggressively attack whales and ships. Bear in mind though, that the beak of an Architeuthis only opens a few inches, and is ill suited to eating anything as large as a human, let alone a 40 ton whale or a 15,000 ton ship!

This new species is certainly unusual (compared to the surface beasties that we're used to), but bear in mind that it's part of a subclass that varies in length from 6mm to 16,000mm (and nearly half a ton, that we know of).

Then the rich guy plundered the site he discovered, smuggling priceless architectural treasures out of Turkey, then selling them to the highest bidder.

That's not quite how it went. Leaving aside the fact that archeological treasures are much simpler to smuggle than architectural ones, Heinrich Schliemann (the rich guy in question) actually donated the stuff to museums, and also later repaid the government of Turkey.

But he was also rather a bad archeologist and may in fact have brought the "treasures of Troy" into the country with him. With 160 people working the Troy site, it's a tad strange that Schliemann was the only one to locate anything valuable. See this link for details.

After some digging, I found this reference to the "Surgeon's Photograph", the most famous picture of the monster: http://www.unmuseum.org/nesshoax.htm