Slashdot Mirror

You need citations that show that we are cutting down forests? Um, OK:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/eye/deforestation/effect.html

"The statistics paint a grim picture. According to the World Resources Institute, more than 80 percent of the Earthâ(TM)s natural forests already have been destroyed. Up to 90 percent of West Africaâ(TM)s coastal rain forests have disappeared since 1900. Brazil and Indonesia, which contain the worldâ(TM)s two largest surviving regions of rain forest, are being stripped at an alarming rate by logging, fires, and land-clearing for agriculture and cattle-grazing."

http://www.botany.uwc.ac.za/envFacts/facts/deforestation.htm

"Of great concern is the rate at which deforestation is occurring. Currently, 12 million hectares of forests are cleared annually - an area 1,3 times the size of KwaZulu/Natal! Almost all of this deforestation occurs in the moist forests and open woodlands of the tropics. At this rate all moist tropical forest could be lost by the year 2050, except for isolated areas in Amazonia, the Zaire basin, as well as a few protected areas within reserves and parks. Some countries such as Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka are likely to lose all their tropical forests by the year 2010 if no conservation steps are taken."

And I fail to see why I got labeled as "troll"....

I had a student work on this last year. He mounted some CCTV cameras on the roof of his car and stitched the resulting videos together. Not sure if you want to drive around with a PC on your back seat. He tried all sorts of Web and IP cameras, but found that the CCTV cameras worked best because the capture card took the load of the CPU and it was easier to synchronize frames. Unfortunately he could not find a capture card for a laptop, so he had to uses a PC.
The process worked like this:
Extract frames
Correct lens distortions using barrel transformation.
Correct perspective.
Match and stitch frames. He could have used something like Hugin, but chose to write his own stitching software for the sake of the exercise. I seem to recall him using Champher matching.
Create video from frames.
More information about his project can be found at: http://www.cs.uwc.ac.za/~iachmed/index.html.

I had considered that, hence my original "physiological changes" suggestion; however, upon thinking about it there is no actual evidence for that hypothesis, and there are three pieces against it:

1) There was no observable change in my hands, either at the time (although I couldn't see the palms, for obvious reasons), or now (when I can see the palms).

2) There was no lag---the sensor spikes coincided exactly with the "channelling" period. For a blood-heat-based explanation---which was (and still is) one of the stronger hypotheses I've considered---I would expect at the very least a residual effect due to the surrounding tissues absorbing some of that heat and releasing it after the blood rush. There was no such moderating effect observed.

3) The temperature difference between the inside of my cupped hands in a medium-temperature room and that same condition with a rush of blood sounds like it would be a lesser change than the difference between having the sensor exposed to the air or cupped in my hands; however, that was not the observed result. By far the largest change was observed during "channelling", even though the likely temperature difference between my cupped hands (29C or more---since I'm male, they tend to stay pretty warm) and my blood (37C at core, 31C in arms) is likely to be lower than that between my hands and the ambient temperature in the room (~20C), yet the sensor observed a much greater difference during large "channelling".

My bias is to look for a purely-physiological explanation, but so far I haven't found one that satisfactorily explained the data. And, after all, data is king---any hypothesis which fails to match the data is discarded.

You're quite right that human actions play a massive part in all these kinds of problems, but those actions are partly present day and partly historic. The actions of our (westerner's) ancestors cannot be forgotten - I personally believe they mean we owe a debt to those who are now blighted.

And indeed you're right also that GM food has, on the face of it, the possibility of helping. But, the dangers of GM food cannot be underestimated. Both medical (there are simply too many unknowns IMHO) and economic - as you say, these countries will go from living on hand outs from the west to depending on the western corporations for their lives. Hardly a great step forwards. The fact is there is already enough food for all these people, it's just we keep it for ourselves.

Incidently, I've never heard anyone claim the Sahara is shrinking before, I'd always been under the impression it was growing: Link and another and another.

• Marketecture: architecture done by someone named Mark
• Tarchitecture: the design of a roadbed
• Farkitecture: what Drew Curtis does all day
• Sarkitecture: the organization behind the guards in Tron
• Darkitecture: the buildings in Tim Burton's Batman movies, or Blade Runner
• Quarkitecture: how you wind up with five-quarked subatomic particle
• Barkitecture: secondary phloem, periderm, lenticels
• Narcitecture: planning a drug-related sting operation
• Arkitecture: how Noah built his boat
• Parkitecture: the annoying way they lay out parking structures so that there's always some sort of deficiency