The research, published in today's issue of the journal Science, describes the content of the greenhouse gases within the core and shows that carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years.
So what? There has been a history of natual climate change cycles. Why would a relatively miniscule change in CO2 be the culprit for global change? 27% is not miniscule you say. well lets look at the composition of the atmosphere.
Think of the composition of the atmosphere in relation to the size of a football field. Nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight-yard line. And most of what's left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine-yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what remains is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. That's pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. And how much of that remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That's how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred-yard football field. So, you are told that carbon dioxide has increased in the last fifty years. Do you know how much it has increased, on our football field? It has increased by three-eighths of an inch--less than the thickness of a pencil. It's a lot more carbon dioxide, but it's a minuscule change in our total atmosphere. Yet you are asked to believe that this tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern?
Well we still should take action, you say?
Like the Kyoto accord? Many articles estimate the effect of Kyoto, even with the US signed on, as reducing temperature change by 4 hunthreds of a degree over the next 100 years. Most recently, Nature 22 (October 2003): 395-741, stated, with Russia signed on, temperature affected by Kyoto would be-.02 degrees C by 2050. IPCC models estimate more, but none exceed.15 C. see Lomborg, p. 302. Wigley, 1998: "Global warming reductions are small,.08-.28 C."
Unfortunately it appears that there is nothing we can do in the near future. Tom Wigley and a panel of seventeen scientists and engineers from around the world made a careful study and concluded that there is no known technology capable of reducing carbon emissions, or even holding them to levels many times higher than today. They conclude that wind, solar, and even nuclear power will not be sufficient to solve the problem. They say totally new and undiscovered technology is required. *
[from the article]...levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher, said Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern and senior member of the European team that wrote two papers based on the core.
Ah, good point. Methane is a much worse green house gas than CO2. Is this humanities fault? Well we raise cows and cows burb methane. Sorry, not a fraction of what termites produce.
The total weight of termites exceeds the total weight of all the humans in the world. A thousand times greater, in fact. Do you know how much methane termites produce? Lots.
Man, I am tired of these self rightgious echoterrorists scarying the shit out of my kids at school. What is even worse is that some industries or even governments may be exagerating the dangers just to scare people. Why else would we see almost daily headlines about how pacific islands are being washed over by rising sea levels. While while the average air temperature at the Earth's surface has increased by 0.06 C per decade during the 20th century, and by 0.19 C per decade from 1979 to 1998, the average temperature in Antartica has decreased and the thickness of the ice there is increasing. See article in Nature. This is important since Antartica has 90% of the world's ice. Greenland has 4% and the rest of the world combined has only 6%. So even if the world's temperature rise
Not the best round for man-sized (which strangely enough is approx. deer-sized) "game". The M-16's 5.56x45mm is really just a varmit cartridge (ideally sized for racoons, woodchucks, and prarie dogs), a slightly souped up.223 Remington more or less, not much stopping power out at the fringes of its range like your 500 yards (what is your group size anyway, gotta be huge), there's neat charts showing lethality falling off dramatically at beyond 200 yards.
I aggree that the.223 round is not preferred by snipers but it is actually more capable in some areas. The NATO standard round is the SS109.223. It has a steel core that can penentrate 3mm of steel[an old steel helmet] at 1,000 m while the 7.62mm was brass jacketed with a soft copper/nickel core and while heavyer could only penatrate a steel helmet at 800m. There is an air pocket under the nose of the SS109 bullet which causes the core to tumble once it hits something solid like a body cavity.
Not a sniper round but still deadly at long ranges.
Your post has some incorrect facts...3) Snipers are capable of shooting up to 1500 meters away; the record for the longest kill is held by Carlos Hathcock from 2250 meters away (granted he was one of the best snipers around)
WordPerfect is bundled with many computer systems but if you want a cd without buying a computer try here at MDG computers. They send you the complete suite and you pay just the postage which is about $5 Cdn.
I never stopped using Netscape but I fear this will not bring back many users. The users who care will switch to Firefox or Opera. The rest will use what they use at the office which for most of use is IE. This is like buying a computer that comes with Corel WordPerfect. It is better than Office but if it is free it can't be any good.
CNN now reporting that something went wrong:However, weak signals received by tracking stations in the Pacific Ocean, Russia and the Czech Republic seemed to show it had made it into orbit... "The good news is we have reason to believe it's alive and in orbit," said Murray, a former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The bad news is we don't know where it is."
"We have no evidence that anything is wrong with the spacecraft at all," said Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's director of projects, late on Tuesday.
As some other posters pointed out, it is the donation page that is problematic. Sites will not be allowed to make money from hosting torrents. We will have to wait and see if they can afford to take that page off and continue as a free site.
I used to go to btefnet.net to download the Daily Show but they were taken down when I checked last night. Fourtunately it appears The Pirate Bay appears to be hosting some of the shows. Last night's Daily Show was available this morning. It is not organized by show like btefnet was but the old saying still is true: The internet treats censorship like damage and just routes around it.
I'll ponder why the CO2 levels are at their highest point in 160,000 years. I'll think about the consequences of global climate change.
Think of the composition of the atmosphere in relation to the size of a football field. Nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight-yard line. And most of what's left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine-yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what remains is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. That's pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. And how much of that remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That's how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred-yard football field. So, you are told that carbon dioxide has increased in the last fifty years. Do you know how much it has increased, on our football field? It has increased by three-eighths of an inch--less than the thickness of a pencil. It's a lot more carbon dioxide, but it's a minuscule change in our total atmosphere. Yet you are asked to believe that this tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern?
You sit their and read your novels. And perhaps someone with a bit more foresight will step up and take action.
Like the Kyoto accord? Many articles estimate the effect of Kyoto, even with the US signed on, as reducing temperature change by 4 hunthreds of a degree over the next 100 years. Most recently, Nature 22 (October 2003): 395-741, stated, with Russia signed on, temperature affected by Kyoto would be-.02 degrees C by 2050. IPCC models estimate more, but none exceed.15 C. see Lomborg, p. 302. Wigley, 1998: "Global warming reductions are small,.08-.28 C."
Unfortunately it appears that there is nothing we can do in the near future. Tom Wigley and a panel of seventeen scientists and engineers from around the world made a careful study and concluded that there is no known technology capable of reducing carbon emissions, or even holding them to levels many times higher than today. They conclude that wind, solar, and even nuclear power will not be sufficient to solve the problem. They say totally new and undiscovered technology is required. *
This isn't even taking into acount other natural sources of CO2 and methane (methane is much worse than CO2).
Perhaps we should look at controling the amounts of methane that cows produce or even termites? The total weight of termites exceeds the total weight of all the humans in the world. A thousand times greater, in fact. Do you know how much methane termites produce? Lots.
* Martin Hoffert, et al., "Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet," Science 298 (Nov. 1, 2002): 981-87
For evidence, 90% of the worlds glaciers are in retreat.
There are one hundred sixty thousand glaciers in the world. About sixty-seven thousand have been inventoried, but only a few have been studied with any care. There is mass balance data extending five years or more for only seventy-nine glaciers in the entire world. So, how can you say they're all melting? Nobody knows whether they are or not. *
Look at the pictures of Kilamanjaro in the 70's and compare them to the ones taken now. The effect is far more dramatic in the Andes mountains, where an entire city may have to move as their primary source of water (a glacier) is now down to only 2% of it's original size. That's just in 40 years.
Actually, Kilimanjaro has been rapidly melting since the 1800s--long before global warming. The loss of the glacier has been a topic of scholarly concern for over a hundred years. And it has always been something of a mystery because, as you know, Kilimanjaro is an equatorial volcano, so it exists in a warm region. Satellite measurements of that region show no warming trend at the altitude of the Kilimanjaro glacier. So why is it melting?
Because of deforestation. The rain forest at the base of the mountain has been cut down, so the air blowing upward is no longer moist. Experts think that if the forest is replanted the glacier will grow again. **
* H. Kieffer, et al., 2000, "New eyes in the sky measure glaciers and ice sheets," EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 81: 265, 270-71. See also R. J. Braithwaite and Y. Zhang, "Relationships between inter-annual variability of glacier mass balance and climate," Journal of Glaciology 45 (2000): 456-62.
I am in the middle of reading Michael Crichton's book State of Fear. It is a novel but based on solid science. In the book there is an eco-terrorist group trying to create some disasters to make its point that dramatic climatic change is going to destroy the world. The good guys point out that while while the average air temperature at the Earth's surface has increased by 0.06 C per decade during the 20th century, and by 0.19 C per decade from 1979 to 1998, the average temperature in Antartica has decreased and the thickness of the ice there is increasing. See article in Nature. This is important since Antartica has 90% of the world's ice. Greenland has 4% and the rest of the world combined has only 6%. So even if the world's temperature rises, there appears to be no danger of the sea level rising dramaticly.
Crichton overall message is that the scientific evidence for global warming is thin and that the environmental movement, ignoring science, has gone off track. He thinks we live in a 'State of Fear,' a 'near-hysterical preoccupation with safety that's at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism'.
Personally I think there has to be a balance where we work to protect the enviroment but do not have to tramatize our kids with scary tales of the world ending in their lifetimes.
As far back as 1981, the British Royal Navy tested a top secret weapon system called 'Laser Dazzle Sight,'(LDS). and they used it during the Falklands War where high speed, wave-skipping Argentinean pilots, met a dazzling array of laser beams designed to blind them.
According to this Royal School of Artillery paper 'The most likely choice of lasers for a dazzle weapon would be Argon (458 - 515 nm, blue/green) or Ne YAG freq doubled(532 nm, green).'
According to the Federation of American Scientists In the 1970's it was claimed that Chinese soldiers were blinded by Soviet-built laser systems during the China-Vietnam war. During the Iran-Iraq War, over 4,000 Iranian soldiers sustained injuries due to Iraqi laser systems. Throughout the 1980's, the Soviet Union were long suspected of directing lasers at US spyplanes. Today anti-personnel laser weapons are inexpensive, sold openly by the Third World, have line-of-sight aiming, and are capable of producing catastrophic results if used against aircrews and sensors in flight.
In 1989 a US-USSR bilateral agreement imposed restrictions on the use of low-energy lasers. In 1989 the International Committee of the Red Cross called for multi-lateral controls.
On 13 October 1995 the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons (Protocol IV) was proposed. In 1998 it became international law but Human Rights Watch is concerned that the US is developing Dazzle weapons that do not cause permanent blindness and would circumvent the blinding weapons agreement.
Now while the threat from laser weapons are real, I think the odds are greater that a real terrorist would use a man portable anti-aircraft missle.
Sony Australia apologises for this interruption in service.
Our servers are currently performing a maintenance function(after melting down) and are temporarily unavailable.
This service outage is not anticipated to take long and the site should be available within 30 minutes.
James Bond
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As noted byt the Accordian Guy, There are similar tricks with liquor. In the Ian Flemming novels, such as Moonraker James Bond had the habit of shaking pepper into his vodka shots. He'd picked it up from the Russians, who did it as a matter of safety rather than taste; the pepper dragged fusel oils left over from their crude distilling process down to the bottom of the glass.
A case in Ottawa Canada today illustrates the difference between real life cases and CSI:
"At the trial of an Ottawa pain doctor accused of raping a female patient, court has heard testimony about two sperm found in the woman's vagina after the last alleged rape.
But yesterday, Dr. Martin Gillen's defence lawyer dropped a bomb while cross-examining an RCMP forensic biologist, Steven Pike, who testified intact sperm can last about 18 hours in a woman's vagina.
Before challenging the 18-hour theory, the 52-year-old doctor's lawyer, Brian Green-span, asked if Mr. Pike knew Dr. Gillen had a vasectomy in 1991, and that tests done in 2001 and 2002 showed no sperm in his semen.
"I was not aware of that," Mr. Pike replied.
Mr. Greenspan then showed Mr. Pike a text book on forensic science that said sperm can be found in a vagina up to seven days after intercourse. Mr. Pike said he wasn't familiar with studies showing this.
The woman has testified she had sex with a friend about seven days before the last alleged rape.
$69US is about $85cdn and unfortunately there are no Target stores in Canada yet. The word is that they are about to buy The Hudson Bay chain of department stores. If they do, they will be in every major Canadian market but I could not wait that long.
I was also a little leary of buying a Divx/DVD player as you never know how long the format is good for. Now that I have integrated my computer with my TV and stereo I am kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Whenever I want to watch something on my TV I just have to hit alt F5 and the display switches to the TV. With my wireless keyboard and mouse I can relax on my chesterfield(sofa)while surfing. My wife did not like watching a downloaded movie on the computer monitor so now we watch more movies together.
I had been looking for a way to play Divx files on my TV for awhile. I had considered a Divx capable DVD player but you cannot just go to Best Buy or Future Shop to get one. I thought about a wireless solution but they are still very pricy. I found the easiest and cheapest solution was to buy an ATI video card with TV out. The 9200SE supports the latest games and dual monitors with DIV and has TV out/s video all for about $80cdn Yes my computer has to be close to the TV but I also have it conected to my stereo for home theatre and mp3s. Playing movies from the hard drive also saves having to burn DVDs/CDs. For me, it was the cheapest way to have my home multimedia centre.
'Gorillas in Our Midst,' Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol. 28, Perception, 1999, pages 1059-74.
It was even mentioned on CSI Season 2 Show 32, the one were the three woman rob the casino:
Gil Grissom : A Harvard professor conducted an experiment. Asked a bunch of students to watch a basketball game - count the number of times the ball was passed.
Captain Jim Brass : Yeah? Groundbreaking.
Gil Grissom : During the game a person dressed in a gorilla suit ran across the court. Afterward, the professor asked the students if they noticed the gorilla. Fifty percent responded, "what gorilla?"
Captain Jim Brass : That's wonderful, Gil. If I see a gorilla, I'll arrest it.
I tried plumber for Ottawa and came up with 10 pages of results. I then tried for Pembroke, ON (pop 5,000) and it came up with 6 pages although it expanded the search area to the whole of Renfrew county. I think it is very useful.
Slashdot Mirror
The research, published in today's issue of the journal Science, describes the content of the greenhouse gases within the core and shows that carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years.
.15 C. see Lomborg, p. 302. Wigley, 1998: "Global warming reductions are small, .08-.28 C."
So what? There has been a history of natual climate change cycles. Why would a relatively miniscule change in CO2 be the culprit for global change? 27% is not miniscule you say. well lets look at the composition of the atmosphere.
Think of the composition of the atmosphere in relation to the size of a football field. Nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight-yard line. And most of what's left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine-yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what remains is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. That's pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. And how much of that remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That's how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred-yard football field. So, you are told that carbon dioxide has increased in the last fifty years. Do you know how much it has increased, on our football field? It has increased by three-eighths of an inch--less than the thickness of a pencil. It's a lot more carbon dioxide, but it's a minuscule change in our total atmosphere. Yet you are asked to believe that this tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern?
Well we still should take action, you say?
Like the Kyoto accord? Many articles estimate the effect of Kyoto, even with the US signed on, as reducing temperature change by 4 hunthreds of a degree over the next 100 years. Most recently, Nature 22 (October 2003): 395-741, stated, with Russia signed on, temperature affected by Kyoto would be-.02 degrees C by 2050. IPCC models estimate more, but none exceed
Unfortunately it appears that there is nothing we can do in the near future. Tom Wigley and a panel of seventeen scientists and engineers from around the world made a careful study and concluded that there is no known technology capable of reducing carbon emissions, or even holding them to levels many times higher than today. They conclude that wind, solar, and even nuclear power will not be sufficient to solve the problem. They say totally new and undiscovered technology is required. *
[from the article]...levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher, said Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern and senior member of the European team that wrote two papers based on the core.
Ah, good point. Methane is a much worse green house gas than CO2. Is this humanities fault? Well we raise cows and cows burb methane. Sorry, not a fraction of what termites produce.
The total weight of termites exceeds the total weight of all the humans in the world. A thousand times greater, in fact. Do you know how much methane termites produce? Lots.
Man, I am tired of these self rightgious echoterrorists scarying the shit out of my kids at school. What is even worse is that some industries or even governments may be exagerating the dangers just to scare people. Why else would we see almost daily headlines about how pacific islands are being washed over by rising sea levels. While while the average air temperature at the Earth's surface has increased by 0.06 C per decade during the 20th century, and by 0.19 C per decade from 1979 to 1998, the average temperature in Antartica has decreased and the thickness of the ice there is increasing. See article in Nature. This is important since Antartica has 90% of the world's ice. Greenland has 4% and the rest of the world combined has only 6%. So even if the world's temperature rise
Better latent than never.
Not the best round for man-sized (which strangely enough is approx. deer-sized) "game". The M-16's 5.56x45mm is really just a varmit cartridge (ideally sized for racoons, woodchucks, and prarie dogs), a slightly souped up .223 Remington more or less, not much stopping power out at the fringes of its range like your 500 yards (what is your group size anyway, gotta be huge), there's neat charts showing lethality falling off dramatically at beyond 200 yards.
.223 round is not preferred by snipers but it is actually more capable in some areas. The NATO standard round is the SS109 .223. It has a steel core that can penentrate 3mm of steel[an old steel helmet] at 1,000 m while the 7.62mm was brass jacketed with a soft copper/nickel core and while heavyer could only penatrate a steel helmet at 800m. There is an air pocket under the nose of the SS109 bullet which causes the core to tumble once it hits something solid like a body cavity.
I aggree that the
Not a sniper round but still deadly at long ranges.
Your post has some incorrect facts ...3) Snipers are capable of shooting up to 1500 meters away; the record for the longest kill is held by Carlos Hathcock from 2250 meters away (granted he was one of the best snipers around)
.50 cal Model 82A1
Sorry but the World's record for longest kill is held by a Canadian sniper Killing shot made in Afghanistan at distance of 2,430 metres[1 1/2 miles] using a Barrett Firearms
WordPerfect is bundled with many computer systems but if you want a cd without buying a computer try here at MDG computers. They send you the complete suite and you pay just the postage which is about $5 Cdn.
I never stopped using Netscape but I fear this will not bring back many users. The users who care will switch to Firefox or Opera. The rest will use what they use at the office which for most of use is IE. This is like buying a computer that comes with Corel WordPerfect. It is better than Office but if it is free it can't be any good.
CNN now reporting that something went wrong:However, weak signals received by tracking stations in the Pacific Ocean, Russia and the Czech Republic seemed to show it had made it into orbit... "The good news is we have reason to believe it's alive and in orbit," said Murray, a former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The bad news is we don't know where it is."
"We have no evidence that anything is wrong with the spacecraft at all," said Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's director of projects, late on Tuesday.
As some other posters pointed out, it is the donation page that is problematic. Sites will not be allowed to make money from hosting torrents. We will have to wait and see if they can afford to take that page off and continue as a free site.
I used to go to btefnet.net to download the Daily Show but they were taken down when I checked last night. Fourtunately it appears The Pirate Bay appears to be hosting some of the shows. Last night's Daily Show was available this morning. It is not organized by show like btefnet was but the old saying still is true: The internet treats censorship like damage and just routes around it.
Some years ago there was talk of Netscape and Yahoo merging and moving the head office to Israel. The merged company would be called Net'n'Yahoo.
I'll ponder why the CO2 levels are at their highest point in 160,000 years. I'll think about the consequences of global climate change.
.15 C. see Lomborg, p. 302. Wigley, 1998: "Global warming reductions are small, .08-.28 C."
Think of the composition of the atmosphere in relation to the size of a football field. Nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight-yard line. And most of what's left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine-yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what remains is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. That's pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. And how much of that remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That's how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred-yard football field. So, you are told that carbon dioxide has increased in the last fifty years. Do you know how much it has increased, on our football field? It has increased by three-eighths of an inch--less than the thickness of a pencil. It's a lot more carbon dioxide, but it's a minuscule change in our total atmosphere. Yet you are asked to believe that this tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern?
You sit their and read your novels. And perhaps someone with a bit more foresight will step up and take action.
Like the Kyoto accord? Many articles estimate the effect of Kyoto, even with the US signed on, as reducing temperature change by 4 hunthreds of a degree over the next 100 years. Most recently, Nature 22 (October 2003): 395-741, stated, with Russia signed on, temperature affected by Kyoto would be-.02 degrees C by 2050. IPCC models estimate more, but none exceed
Unfortunately it appears that there is nothing we can do in the near future. Tom Wigley and a panel of seventeen scientists and engineers from around the world made a careful study and concluded that there is no known technology capable of reducing carbon emissions, or even holding them to levels many times higher than today. They conclude that wind, solar, and even nuclear power will not be sufficient to solve the problem. They say totally new and undiscovered technology is required. *
This isn't even taking into acount other natural sources of CO2 and methane (methane is much worse than CO2).
Perhaps we should look at controling the amounts of methane that cows produce or even termites? The total weight of termites exceeds the total weight of all the humans in the world. A thousand times greater, in fact. Do you know how much methane termites produce? Lots.
* Martin Hoffert, et al., "Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet," Science 298 (Nov. 1, 2002): 981-87
For evidence, 90% of the worlds glaciers are in retreat.
There are one hundred sixty thousand glaciers in the world. About sixty-seven thousand have been inventoried, but only a few have been studied with any care. There is mass balance data extending five years or more for only seventy-nine glaciers in the entire world. So, how can you say they're all melting? Nobody knows whether they are or not. *
Look at the pictures of Kilamanjaro in the 70's and compare them to the ones taken now. The effect is far more dramatic in the Andes mountains, where an entire city may have to move as their primary source of water (a glacier) is now down to only 2% of it's original size. That's just in 40 years.
Actually, Kilimanjaro has been rapidly melting since the 1800s--long before global warming. The loss of the glacier has been a topic of scholarly concern for over a hundred years. And it has always been something of a mystery because, as you know, Kilimanjaro is an equatorial volcano, so it exists in a warm region. Satellite measurements of that region show no warming trend at the altitude of the Kilimanjaro glacier. So why is it melting?
Because of deforestation. The rain forest at the base of the mountain has been cut down, so the air blowing upward is no longer moist. Experts think that if the forest is replanted the glacier will grow again. **
* H. Kieffer, et al., 2000, "New eyes in the sky measure glaciers and ice sheets," EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 81: 265, 270-71. See also R. J. Braithwaite and Y. Zhang, "Relationships between inter-annual variability of glacier mass balance and climate," Journal of Glaciology 45 (2000): 456-62.
** Betsy Mason African Ice Under Wraps, Nature, 24, November 2003.
Dolt.
It is a novel but he gives references to the actual science articles he bases his premise on.
I am concerned about pollution but for the health reasons not because I watched 'The Day After Tomorrow'.
I am in the middle of reading Michael Crichton's book State of Fear. It is a novel but based on solid science. In the book there is an eco-terrorist group trying to create some disasters to make its point that dramatic climatic change is going to destroy the world. The good guys point out that while while the average air temperature at the Earth's surface has increased by 0.06 C per decade during the 20th century, and by 0.19 C per decade from 1979 to 1998, the average temperature in Antartica has decreased and the thickness of the ice there is increasing. See article in Nature. This is important since Antartica has 90% of the world's ice. Greenland has 4% and the rest of the world combined has only 6%. So even if the world's temperature rises, there appears to be no danger of the sea level rising dramaticly.
Crichton overall message is that the scientific evidence for global warming is thin and that the environmental movement, ignoring science, has gone off track. He thinks we live in a 'State of Fear,' a 'near-hysterical preoccupation with safety that's at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism'.
Personally I think there has to be a balance where we work to protect the enviroment but do not have to tramatize our kids with scary tales of the world ending in their lifetimes.
I'd like a phone built into my glasses. It could be voice controled with a heads up display projected onto the inside of the lens.
As far back as 1981, the British Royal Navy tested a top secret weapon system called 'Laser Dazzle Sight,'(LDS). and they used it during the Falklands War where high speed, wave-skipping Argentinean pilots, met a dazzling array of laser beams designed to blind them.
According to this Royal School of Artillery paper 'The most likely choice of lasers for a dazzle weapon would be
Argon (458 - 515 nm, blue/green) or Ne YAG freq doubled(532 nm, green).'
According to the Federation of American Scientists In the 1970's it was claimed that Chinese soldiers were blinded by Soviet-built laser systems during the China-Vietnam war. During the Iran-Iraq War, over 4,000 Iranian soldiers sustained injuries due to Iraqi laser systems. Throughout the 1980's, the Soviet Union were long suspected of directing lasers at US spyplanes. Today anti-personnel laser weapons are inexpensive, sold openly by the Third World, have line-of-sight aiming, and are capable of producing catastrophic results if used against aircrews and sensors in flight.
In 1989 a US-USSR bilateral agreement imposed restrictions on the use of low-energy lasers. In 1989 the International Committee of the Red Cross called for multi-lateral controls.
On 13 October 1995 the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons (Protocol IV) was proposed. In 1998 it became international law but Human Rights Watch is concerned that the US is developing Dazzle weapons that do not cause permanent blindness and would circumvent the blinding weapons agreement.
Now while the threat from laser weapons are real, I think the odds are greater that a real terrorist would use a man portable anti-aircraft missle.
Sony Australia apologises for this interruption in service.
Our servers are currently performing a maintenance function(after melting down) and are temporarily unavailable.
This service outage is not anticipated to take long
and the site should be available within 30 minutes.
As noted byt the Accordian Guy, There are similar tricks with liquor. In the Ian Flemming novels, such as Moonraker James Bond had the habit of shaking pepper into his vodka shots. He'd picked it up from the Russians, who did it as a matter of safety rather than taste; the pepper dragged fusel oils left over from their crude distilling process down to the bottom of the glass.
For wine, apparently just decanting the whole bottle into another container improves the taste.
A case in Ottawa Canada today illustrates the difference between real life cases and CSI:
"At the trial of an Ottawa pain doctor accused of raping a female patient, court has heard testimony about two sperm found in the woman's vagina after the last alleged rape.
But yesterday, Dr. Martin Gillen's defence lawyer dropped a bomb while cross-examining an RCMP forensic biologist, Steven Pike, who testified intact sperm can last about 18 hours in a woman's vagina.
Before challenging the 18-hour theory, the 52-year-old doctor's lawyer, Brian Green-span, asked if Mr. Pike knew Dr. Gillen had a vasectomy in 1991, and that tests done in 2001 and 2002 showed no sperm in his semen.
"I was not aware of that," Mr. Pike replied.
Mr. Greenspan then showed Mr. Pike a text book on forensic science that said sperm can be found in a vagina up to seven days after intercourse. Mr. Pike said he wasn't familiar with studies showing this.
The woman has testified she had sex with a friend about seven days before the last alleged rape.
The trial resumes today."
There is a previous MSNBC story with a picture of the lifter here.
/.'ed but can still be viewed via the google cache here, here, here, and a FAQ here,
The Liftport site was
If there are Target stores in Canada I have not seen one and there are none listed on the web. Was it in Goose Bay or Happy Valley?
$69US is about $85cdn and unfortunately there are no Target stores in Canada yet. The word is that they are about to buy The Hudson Bay chain of department stores. If they do, they will be in every major Canadian market but I could not wait that long.
I was also a little leary of buying a Divx/DVD player as you never know how long the format is good for. Now that I have integrated my computer with my TV and stereo I am kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Whenever I want to watch something on my TV I just have to hit alt F5 and the display switches to the TV. With my wireless keyboard and mouse I can relax on my chesterfield(sofa)while surfing. My wife did not like watching a downloaded movie on the computer monitor so now we watch more movies together.
I had been looking for a way to play Divx files on my TV for awhile. I had considered a Divx capable DVD player but you cannot just go to Best Buy or Future Shop to get one. I thought about a wireless solution but they are still very pricy. I found the easiest and cheapest solution was to buy an ATI video card with TV out.
The 9200SE supports the latest games and dual monitors with DIV and has TV out/s video all for about $80cdn Yes my computer has to be close to the TV but I also have it conected to my stereo for home theatre and mp3s. Playing movies from the hard drive also saves having to burn DVDs/CDs. For me, it was the cheapest way to have my home multimedia centre.
'Gorillas in Our Midst,' Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol. 28, Perception, 1999, pages 1059-74.
It was even mentioned on CSI Season 2 Show 32, the one were the three woman rob the casino:
Gil Grissom : A Harvard professor conducted an experiment. Asked a bunch of students to watch a basketball game - count the number of times the ball was passed.
Captain Jim Brass : Yeah? Groundbreaking.
Gil Grissom : During the game a person dressed in a gorilla suit ran across the court. Afterward, the professor asked the students if they noticed the gorilla. Fifty percent responded, "what gorilla?"
Captain Jim Brass : That's wonderful, Gil. If I see a gorilla, I'll arrest it.
I tried plumber for Ottawa and came up with 10 pages of results. I then tried for Pembroke, ON (pop 5,000) and it came up with 6 pages although it expanded the search area to the whole of Renfrew county. I think it is very useful.