>First, with or without the oceans or their currents, the only thing keeping my home from falling to -300 at night is greenhouse gasses. Take a look at any planet without them.
I know that we rely on greenhouse gasses to keep us comfortably warm. The problem is a matter of excess, of human output on top of natural, which is what causes global temperature increase.
> Oceans have an effect, but much less then the atmoshpere.
Warm & cold ocean currents do have a large effect on atmospheric temperatures at or near sea level, especially in coastal regions. Ask any meteorologist.
> 3 to 5 K since the begining of human records? Was that the late 19th century, when we finally had good, standardized temperature measurement.
OK, so 'human records' was a bit misleading. The data in question was taken from a New Scientist article which I read sometime in the last few months, but I'm pretty sure it was all 20th century records.
> Some evidence actually CONNECTING the two events you described would be good two. Simultanious occurance does not indicate a relationship.
Not definitively no, but as you yourself said, it takes a lot of energy to warm up a large mass of water at sea level - and the Indian Ocean is a huge mass of water.
> The simple fact is that we are not willing, and probably not able to make significant changes in the way that we use energy, at least not as a society. Until we are convinced on a large scale that this is an imediate problem, and a problem worthy of the sacrifices of the solution, no one is going to do anything meaningful. You are taking the wrong road to win people over to your cause.
Who, precisely, is the 'we' that you are speaking for here? Evidently you are from the USA, so I should assure you that the 'we' I am speaking for, which is the scientific community's consensus (incidentally backed up by the EU, both in its central government and in the vast majority of its component nations), are convinced about the reality of climate change. All I am trying to do here is to convince you, and anyone else that may be reading this, that there is a problem. And the sacrifices involved in dealing with this problem are not great - here in Europe we have a good standard of living and release much less pollution per capita than in the states. Plus we (in Britain at least - I haven't viewed Europe-wide statistics recently) are still succeeding in decreasing them further.
If your government has failed to achieve the targets which it promised to meet at Kyoto, where so many others have achieved and more, then that is your governments' failure. You are aware, of course, that the US releases 25% of human greenhouse gas output? The tide is changing. Even Bush has (albeit in vague terms, as is his way) admitted that climate change is a problem. It is time to admit scientific reality and do something about it.
> If the oceans and atmosphere were on a SHARP warming trend, wouldn't it be cyclic changes in the earth climate?
No, it would not. When we compare the rate of climate change currently to that at any time in the geological record, we find a steeper increase than any we have evidence for in the past.
> I will concede to the fact that man has had a powerful influence on both the atmosphere and oceans but then again measurable changes over time have been very minute in comparison to things such as, say, Mt. Saint Helens.
Volcanoes do not have much of a net heating effect on the globe. This is because, in addition to greenhouse gasses like CO2 they also send particulate smoke high into the atmosphere and reflect heat back into space.
> Also, do you realize how much energy it takes to heat 1 cubic foot of water at sea level?
Average temperatures in the Indian Ocean have risen by 3 to 5 degrees Kelvin since human records began. In the same space of time, more than 95% of the coral in the Indian Ocean has died.
> I like my nights here in Wisconsin being -5 degrees Fahrenheit rather than -300 degrees Fahrenheit.
As the previous poster said, if warm currents in the oceans are disrupted as some theoreticians predict, weather in temperate and northern climes will get colder, not warmer.
> I could go off on this for years [taken out of sequence]
Yes, but all your points have either been false or have been taken out of proportion. If I were you, I'd quit now.
One cold winter in a very limited area of the Earth's surface doesn't contradict a trend of global warming. Your description of it as "getting colder _everywhere_" is totally innacurate - both the geographical area and the timescale in your description are extremely limited.
Further to this, colder winters in the northern hemisphere are no surprise under global warming. One consequence predicted of an increase in oceanic temperature (which as a previous poster said, comprise the greater part of the Earth's surface area) and of retreating ice mass (which is irrefutably occuring at an accelerating rate) is to destabilise global weather patterns. So colder winters, hotter summers. Oh yes, and we all get more hurricanes.
To sum up, get the facts straight and in proportion to one another before shooting your mouth off next time. It may be difficult to make definite and accurate predictions based on 70 years of worldwide data, but it does add up to a lot more than what has happened in your own back yard for the last couple of months.
They cut Tom Bombadil. I also have certain reservations about some of the casting, but I do have to applaud the choice of director. Plus Christopher Lee should be in 7th heaven playing Saruman (let's hope he doesn't overdo it).
In a moment of boredom, I checked out their web-site, and found that they're making 3 films, each based on one novel (although there is a slight element of event shuffling so that Boromir for example dies at the end of Part 1 and not at the beginning of Part 2. The worst thing they've done to the plot that I know of is that they've cut Tom Bombadil out of the story.
What's even more worrying is the casting. Some decisions I can agree with, such as Christopher Lee as Saruman. But Cate Blanchett as Galadriel? And some bloke whose previous roles stop at a character in Xena is playing Aragorn, which as he'll almost certainly foul it up horribly is a shame indeed.
Salmonella can quite often kill without treatment. However, it is typically a debilitating disorder, rather than a lethal one, with modern medicine involved. Plus I would hope that they would select a non-pathogenic "wild strain", although why they didn't choose to make a customised mutant one is beyond me.
The truth comes nowhere close to being as black and white to how either of you are putting it. I think that the Guardian (a British newspaper) put it best in an article entitled 'two just causes at odds with one another'. In this latest intifada, I would say that the Israelis are the more guilty party, as they have often been before, but that the Palestinians have not all been innocent victims either (although for many of the casualties, that is undeniably the case).
The recent origins of the current conflict can be traced back in particular to two events: the failure of the Palestinian authorities to ensure that Jewish holy sites under their care were treated with respect, and Arafat's continued brinksmanship in response to the most generous offers yet made by an Israeli premier, made at considerable risk to his own political position. In his uncompromising rejection of these terms, Arafat forced the end of that round of peace talks and pushed Israel's government to a more hardline stance.
But neither action can in any wise be used to justify the high level of Palestinian civilian casualties or the outright declaration of martial law with regard to Arab-Israeli citizens, which has extended to the house arrest of tens of thousands of civilians because of their ethnic status and the use of air strikes against the political opposition.
> Debunking #1: Since smokers tend to die prematurely, they save the government billions of
> dollars on reduced medical costs.
This is almost certainly a troll. Still, it had better be answered since it raises some fundamental misconceptions. Smokers do not only die early, they also suffer declining health from an earlier age that can cause serious depreciations in productivity and quality of life. They will probably spend just as much time or more in hospital as a non-smoker who lives 5 years longer. Also cancer therapy is particularly expensive, and cancer treatment can last for years (trust me, it killed my father, a non-smoker).
> Debunking #2:... second-hand smoke... has not been conclusively proven to cause cancer or any other disease. (Provide a link with information from an objective and credible source that proves a positive causal relationship, and I will withdraw this debunking.)
Fair enough - although I'm surprised that you seriously doubt the reality of passive smoking. You'll find several documents on the following page that will give you the US EPA's position:
http://www.epa.gov/iaq/pubs/
It tallies quite closely with my own.
But then, I'm not completely happy with the way things are going regarding rights in the UK either. Especially if the current Tories were ever to get in, in which case capital punishment could well be back on the cards here as well. And that would be a fucking mess. Plus there's the whole Anne Widdecombe drugs stance...
In particular I got spooked by an article that suggested that a Republican govt in the US would strengthen the Tory hand here. I don't like Labour much, but they're a damn sight better than anything further right would be.
Come off it - often the omissions from a political statement can be just as telling as the spoken part. If he had said that he would support law-abiding citizens' right to practice religion as they saw fit, then that would have covered the issue completely. He has not and will not say that because that's not the ticket he's running on and it could lose him support from the right-wing extremists that his father lost to Perot.
> Those religions also represent 99+% of religious people in the United States.
I'd expect that atheists would count for more than 1%, as atheist/agnostic is a big (? the biggest) demographic here in the UK. I'd also question how many atheists would view themselves as being represented by any religion.
Actually it does. It hurts the taxpayer by costing the government who pay for many smokers' additional medical costs. And then there's a little thing called passive smoking...
I don't object to your right to smoke, but I do think that you should to some degree repay others what it costs them when you chose to do so.
I have a love-hate thing with daylight saving(s?)time in the autumn. Basically, it's like this. For the first night, when the clocks go back, it's great - you can either spend an extra hour out having a good time, an extra hour in bed, or a mix of the two. Every night afterwards, however, it's that little bit colder when you go out and come back, and in a scottish winter that's not great. It's also getting dark & cold in the mid-afternoon when I'm coming back from lectures etc, and when I might well have things I need to do around the town.
To be fair, though, it does make it marginally easier to get up in the morning.
Re:Banks is Wonderful but Awful
on
Look to Windward
·
· Score: 1
I disagree, both about the treatment of the characters and about the twist. The character-treatment is a challenge to the conventional 'hero swanns through carnage blissfully untouched' kind of crap that gets fostered by writers in so many genres. Plus, if you think his treatment is bad, you should read Stephen Donaldson's 'Gap' series, which I would rate as being in the same league as Banks in terms of quality as well.
And about the twist? It was totally necessary. In fact, it was given away before it happened - the character of the real Zakalwe was v. different from that of the main protagonist, there was all the emphasis upon the fact that Zakalwe had not been as good with weapons or tactics but v. good at hand to hand, whereas the protagonist is the reverse, there was that extract about the 'piece' of the sister/foster sister being carried close the the protagonists heart - and you get told who the bone fragment lands in! It doesn't take a genius, the really interesting part was waiting to see how Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw would react when they found out, and I still feel kind of frustrated that Banks left that to us. It would have been a further insight into the ethics of the culture, and the kind of person that they were willing to employ.
I read in the Economist that Florida (which also carries quite a lot of votes with it) had the potential to go either way, but that was a few weeks ago so maybe it's shifted now.
> divided evenly among the 50 states (not realistic, but not wholly unso)
What exactly do you mean by 'not wholly unso'? The suggestion itself is v. misleading - although I'm sure that/. contains representatives from all over, I'd be very surprised if some marked trends didn't show up (were it to be looked into) with regards to place of origin, and that could very well reveal a fair bit of voting power within a swing state.
Plus the direct readership of/. is not the sum total of those whom articles and messages on it can reach so that what comes up here tends to float around into other discussion groups, mailing lists and even the regular media from time to time. So save the fuzzy stuff for arguments with 5-year olds and credit us with a little intelligence.
Although I agree that you should vote, you're wrong to say that it's the only say you have. Use any forum you have to air your views - that's your fundamental right, (one which I would stand beside Voltaire in defending to the death) and you might make a bit more of a difference, particularly if you arm yourself with facts, rather than the made-up statistics etc which many people on/. are currently using. According to standard deductive logic it often only takes one fact to scupper a whole theory, and in a discussion it is often all that's needed to break a huge and convoluted emotional rant.
I'd assume that a fair proportion of people reading and commenting on this article have at least some interest in politics, seeing as they chose this article to read and comment on. Now, if you're interested, you've probably gone to some lengths to become informed, and are probably the last person who shouldn't bother voting. It's like if I'm asked to vote for 'Candidate A' or 'Candidate B' belonging to party '1' or '2', I wouldn't bother. However, where I've been presented with an enormous and partly indigestible barrage of information, which I've filtered for the parts relevant to my own interests and beliefs, I think that I have a little something to contribute. Admittedly the voting might not make as much difference as protest marching, organised canvassing, etc. but the point remains that it might tilt the balance to be a little more representative of you yourself. And if more people do it, there's less of a culture of apathy for all the sheep to follow. Particularly this applies to minor candidates - voting for a minor party who won't get in in the short term but whose share of the votes you thus increase gives them more credibility and legitimacy, thus giving them more opportunities to get their views across. Positive feedback.
But despite advocating small parties, if I was an American living in a swing state I'd still vote Gore just to hope it might stop Bush.
I agree with you - I found this one a v. hard one to answer, particularly as I am fundamentally opposed to a great many actions taken by the Israeli government. In the end, however - and this may surprise you - I went for 'strongly support' because this was the one that was described in the 'more info' section as meaning that the US should give out more aid and give it out based on need and not based on the interests of the US government.
Overall, my top three candidates were Bradley, Nader, and Liebermann in that order, but if I was American I'd vote for Gore anyway (4th overall, 1st on economic issues) just to stop Bush.
I was given the same two 1st choices, in reverse order - Bradley then Nader. Nader was my highest on the personal front, Gore (who came 4th overall) on the economic. I forget who came last, except that I had 0% agreement with Bush on personal issues.
All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon
As we poison the pigeons in the park!
Sorry - it seemed appropriate. And I really dislike pigeons, as you'd expect after living in London for a year. It's hard to understand why some people feed the bloody things. I fed them when I was 8, but most of the people whom I've seen doing it don't have that excuse - they're just irresponsible.
> The inherent absurdity of using an aircraft to pop down to your local newsagent. But then, we
> probably once thought this of cars.
It is absurd to drive to the local newsagent - at least it is for people like me, who've never lived more than a 5-minute stroll away. I can understand that if you're living somewhere a little more remote it would be necessary, but I'd expect most of/. don't.
This further evidence of bacterial spore durability significantly increases the chance that we have been exporting mono-cellular critters on board the Pioneer and Voyager probes etc. 'If' these probes were ever to come into contact with alien life, the bacteria would give the aliens a much greater insight into Earth-based life than any plaque.
Which leads onto another idea - why not stick bacterial spores in a suitably protected part of the next probe with a message stuck into a nonsense part of their genetic code. It might not be the most efficient way to say 'hi' but it would have panache.
Slashdot Mirror
>First, with or without the oceans or their currents, the only thing keeping my home from falling to -300 at night is greenhouse gasses. Take a look at any planet without them.
I know that we rely on greenhouse gasses to keep us comfortably warm. The problem is a matter of excess, of human output on top of natural, which is what causes global temperature increase.
> Oceans have an effect, but much less then the atmoshpere.
Warm & cold ocean currents do have a large effect on atmospheric temperatures at or near sea level, especially in coastal regions. Ask any meteorologist.
> 3 to 5 K since the begining of human records? Was that the late 19th century, when we finally had good, standardized temperature measurement.
OK, so 'human records' was a bit misleading. The data in question was taken from a New Scientist article which I read sometime in the last few months, but I'm pretty sure it was all 20th century records.
> Some evidence actually CONNECTING the two events you described would be good two. Simultanious occurance does not indicate a relationship.
Not definitively no, but as you yourself said, it takes a lot of energy to warm up a large mass of water at sea level - and the Indian Ocean is a huge mass of water.
> The simple fact is that we are not willing, and probably not able to make significant changes in the way that we use energy, at least not as a society. Until we are convinced on a large scale that this is an imediate problem, and a problem worthy of the sacrifices of the solution, no one is going to do anything meaningful. You are taking the wrong road to win people over to your cause.
Who, precisely, is the 'we' that you are speaking for here? Evidently you are from the USA, so I should assure you that the 'we' I am speaking for, which is the scientific community's consensus (incidentally backed up by the EU, both in its central government and in the vast majority of its component nations), are convinced about the reality of climate change. All I am trying to do here is to convince you, and anyone else that may be reading this, that there is a problem. And the sacrifices involved in dealing with this problem are not great - here in Europe we have a good standard of living and release much less pollution per capita than in the states. Plus we (in Britain at least - I haven't viewed Europe-wide statistics recently) are still succeeding in decreasing them further.
If your government has failed to achieve the targets which it promised to meet at Kyoto, where so many others have achieved and more, then that is your governments' failure. You are aware, of course, that the US releases 25% of human greenhouse gas output? The tide is changing. Even Bush has (albeit in vague terms, as is his way) admitted that climate change is a problem. It is time to admit scientific reality and do something about it.
> Maybe the oil companies are just too damn powerful.
Even if they weren't before, they are now, as there can be no doubt that Bush jnr is well and truly in their pockets.
> If the oceans and atmosphere were on a SHARP warming trend, wouldn't it be cyclic changes in the earth climate?
No, it would not. When we compare the rate of climate change currently to that at any time in the geological record, we find a steeper increase than any we have evidence for in the past.
> I will concede to the fact that man has had a powerful influence on both the atmosphere and oceans but then again measurable changes over time have been very minute in comparison to things such as, say, Mt. Saint Helens.
Volcanoes do not have much of a net heating effect on the globe. This is because, in addition to greenhouse gasses like CO2 they also send particulate smoke high into the atmosphere and reflect heat back into space.
> Also, do you realize how much energy it takes to heat 1 cubic foot of water at sea level?
Average temperatures in the Indian Ocean have risen by 3 to 5 degrees Kelvin since human records began. In the same space of time, more than 95% of the coral in the Indian Ocean has died.
> I like my nights here in Wisconsin being -5 degrees Fahrenheit rather than -300 degrees Fahrenheit.
As the previous poster said, if warm currents in the oceans are disrupted as some theoreticians predict, weather in temperate and northern climes will get colder, not warmer.
> I could go off on this for years [taken out of sequence]
Yes, but all your points have either been false or have been taken out of proportion. If I were you, I'd quit now.
One cold winter in a very limited area of the Earth's surface doesn't contradict a trend of global warming. Your description of it as "getting colder _everywhere_" is totally innacurate - both the geographical area and the timescale in your description are extremely limited.
Further to this, colder winters in the northern hemisphere are no surprise under global warming. One consequence predicted of an increase in oceanic temperature (which as a previous poster said, comprise the greater part of the Earth's surface area) and of retreating ice mass (which is irrefutably occuring at an accelerating rate) is to destabilise global weather patterns. So colder winters, hotter summers. Oh yes, and we all get more hurricanes.
To sum up, get the facts straight and in proportion to one another before shooting your mouth off next time. It may be difficult to make definite and accurate predictions based on 70 years of worldwide data, but it does add up to a lot more than what has happened in your own back yard for the last couple of months.
They cut Tom Bombadil. I also have certain reservations about some of the casting, but I do have to applaud the choice of director. Plus Christopher Lee should be in 7th heaven playing Saruman (let's hope he doesn't overdo it).
In a moment of boredom, I checked out their web-site, and found that they're making 3 films, each based on one novel (although there is a slight element of event shuffling so that Boromir for example dies at the end of Part 1 and not at the beginning of Part 2. The worst thing they've done to the plot that I know of is that they've cut Tom Bombadil out of the story.
What's even more worrying is the casting. Some decisions I can agree with, such as Christopher Lee as Saruman. But Cate Blanchett as Galadriel? And some bloke whose previous roles stop at a character in Xena is playing Aragorn, which as he'll almost certainly foul it up horribly is a shame indeed.
Salmonella can quite often kill without treatment. However, it is typically a debilitating disorder, rather than a lethal one, with modern medicine involved. Plus I would hope that they would select a non-pathogenic "wild strain", although why they didn't choose to make a customised mutant one is beyond me.
The truth comes nowhere close to being as black and white to how either of you are putting it. I think that the Guardian (a British newspaper) put it best in an article entitled 'two just causes at odds with one another'. In this latest intifada, I would say that the Israelis are the more guilty party, as they have often been before, but that the Palestinians have not all been innocent victims either (although for many of the casualties, that is undeniably the case).
The recent origins of the current conflict can be traced back in particular to two events: the failure of the Palestinian authorities to ensure that Jewish holy sites under their care were treated with respect, and Arafat's continued brinksmanship in response to the most generous offers yet made by an Israeli premier, made at considerable risk to his own political position. In his uncompromising rejection of these terms, Arafat forced the end of that round of peace talks and pushed Israel's government to a more hardline stance.
But neither action can in any wise be used to justify the high level of Palestinian civilian casualties or the outright declaration of martial law with regard to Arab-Israeli citizens, which has extended to the house arrest of tens of thousands of civilians because of their ethnic status and the use of air strikes against the political opposition.
> Debunking #1: Since smokers tend to die prematurely, they save the government billions of
... second-hand smoke ... has not been conclusively proven to cause cancer or any other disease. (Provide a link with information from an objective and credible source that proves a positive causal relationship, and I will withdraw this debunking.)
> dollars on reduced medical costs.
This is almost certainly a troll. Still, it had better be answered since it raises some fundamental misconceptions. Smokers do not only die early, they also suffer declining health from an earlier age that can cause serious depreciations in productivity and quality of life. They will probably spend just as much time or more in hospital as a non-smoker who lives 5 years longer. Also cancer therapy is particularly expensive, and cancer treatment can last for years (trust me, it killed my father, a non-smoker).
> Debunking #2:
Fair enough - although I'm surprised that you seriously doubt the reality of passive smoking. You'll find several documents on the following page that will give you the US EPA's position:
http://www.epa.gov/iaq/pubs/
It tallies quite closely with my own.
But then, I'm not completely happy with the way things are going regarding rights in the UK either. Especially if the current Tories were ever to get in, in which case capital punishment could well be back on the cards here as well. And that would be a fucking mess. Plus there's the whole Anne Widdecombe drugs stance...
In particular I got spooked by an article that suggested that a Republican govt in the US would strengthen the Tory hand here. I don't like Labour much, but they're a damn sight better than anything further right would be.
Come off it - often the omissions from a political statement can be just as telling as the spoken part. If he had said that he would support law-abiding citizens' right to practice religion as they saw fit, then that would have covered the issue completely. He has not and will not say that because that's not the ticket he's running on and it could lose him support from the right-wing extremists that his father lost to Perot.
> Those religions also represent 99+% of religious people in the United States.
I'd expect that atheists would count for more than 1%, as atheist/agnostic is a big (? the biggest) demographic here in the UK. I'd also question how many atheists would view themselves as being represented by any religion.
> it [smoking] hurts no one else
Actually it does. It hurts the taxpayer by costing the government who pay for many smokers' additional medical costs. And then there's a little thing called passive smoking...
I don't object to your right to smoke, but I do think that you should to some degree repay others what it costs them when you chose to do so.
I have a love-hate thing with daylight saving(s?)time in the autumn. Basically, it's like this. For the first night, when the clocks go back, it's great - you can either spend an extra hour out having a good time, an extra hour in bed, or a mix of the two. Every night afterwards, however, it's that little bit colder when you go out and come back, and in a scottish winter that's not great. It's also getting dark & cold in the mid-afternoon when I'm coming back from lectures etc, and when I might well have things I need to do around the town.
To be fair, though, it does make it marginally easier to get up in the morning.
I disagree, both about the treatment of the characters and about the twist. The character-treatment is a challenge to the conventional 'hero swanns through carnage blissfully untouched' kind of crap that gets fostered by writers in so many genres. Plus, if you think his treatment is bad, you should read Stephen Donaldson's 'Gap' series, which I would rate as being in the same league as Banks in terms of quality as well.
And about the twist? It was totally necessary. In fact, it was given away before it happened - the character of the real Zakalwe was v. different from that of the main protagonist, there was all the emphasis upon the fact that Zakalwe had not been as good with weapons or tactics but v. good at hand to hand, whereas the protagonist is the reverse, there was that extract about the 'piece' of the sister/foster sister being carried close the the protagonists heart - and you get told who the bone fragment lands in! It doesn't take a genius, the really interesting part was waiting to see how Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw would react when they found out, and I still feel kind of frustrated that Banks left that to us. It would have been a further insight into the ethics of the culture, and the kind of person that they were willing to employ.
OK, that's my rant finished for now.
I read in the Economist that Florida (which also carries quite a lot of votes with it) had the potential to go either way, but that was a few weeks ago so maybe it's shifted now.
> divided evenly among the 50 states (not realistic, but not wholly unso)
/. contains representatives from all over, I'd be very surprised if some marked trends didn't show up (were it to be looked into) with regards to place of origin, and that could very well reveal a fair bit of voting power within a swing state.
/. is not the sum total of those whom articles and messages on it can reach so that what comes up here tends to float around into other discussion groups, mailing lists and even the regular media from time to time. So save the fuzzy stuff for arguments with 5-year olds and credit us with a little intelligence.
What exactly do you mean by 'not wholly unso'? The suggestion itself is v. misleading - although I'm sure that
Plus the direct readership of
Although I agree that you should vote, you're wrong to say that it's the only say you have. Use any forum you have to air your views - that's your fundamental right, (one which I would stand beside Voltaire in defending to the death) and you might make a bit more of a difference, particularly if you arm yourself with facts, rather than the made-up statistics etc which many people on /. are currently using. According to standard deductive logic it often only takes one fact to scupper a whole theory, and in a discussion it is often all that's needed to break a huge and convoluted emotional rant.
I'd assume that a fair proportion of people reading and commenting on this article have at least some interest in politics, seeing as they chose this article to read and comment on. Now, if you're interested, you've probably gone to some lengths to become informed, and are probably the last person who shouldn't bother voting. It's like if I'm asked to vote for 'Candidate A' or 'Candidate B' belonging to party '1' or '2', I wouldn't bother. However, where I've been presented with an enormous and partly indigestible barrage of information, which I've filtered for the parts relevant to my own interests and beliefs, I think that I have a little something to contribute. Admittedly the voting might not make as much difference as protest marching, organised canvassing, etc. but the point remains that it might tilt the balance to be a little more representative of you yourself. And if more people do it, there's less of a culture of apathy for all the sheep to follow. Particularly this applies to minor candidates - voting for a minor party who won't get in in the short term but whose share of the votes you thus increase gives them more credibility and legitimacy, thus giving them more opportunities to get their views across. Positive feedback.
But despite advocating small parties, if I was an American living in a swing state I'd still vote Gore just to hope it might stop Bush.
I agree with you - I found this one a v. hard one to answer, particularly as I am fundamentally opposed to a great many actions taken by the Israeli government. In the end, however - and this may surprise you - I went for 'strongly support' because this was the one that was described in the 'more info' section as meaning that the US should give out more aid and give it out based on need and not based on the interests of the US government.
Overall, my top three candidates were Bradley, Nader, and Liebermann in that order, but if I was American I'd vote for Gore anyway (4th overall, 1st on economic issues) just to stop Bush.
I was given the same two 1st choices, in reverse order - Bradley then Nader. Nader was my highest on the personal front, Gore (who came 4th overall) on the economic. I forget who came last, except that I had 0% agreement with Bush on personal issues.
All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon
As we poison the pigeons in the park!
Sorry - it seemed appropriate. And I really dislike pigeons, as you'd expect after living in London for a year. It's hard to understand why some people feed the bloody things. I fed them when I was 8, but most of the people whom I've seen doing it don't have that excuse - they're just irresponsible.
> The inherent absurdity of using an aircraft to pop down to your local newsagent. But then, we
/. don't.
> probably once thought this of cars.
It is absurd to drive to the local newsagent - at least it is for people like me, who've never lived more than a 5-minute stroll away. I can understand that if you're living somewhere a little more remote it would be necessary, but I'd expect most of
This further evidence of bacterial spore durability significantly increases the chance that we have been exporting mono-cellular critters on board the Pioneer and Voyager probes etc. 'If' these probes were ever to come into contact with alien life, the bacteria would give the aliens a much greater insight into Earth-based life than any plaque.
Which leads onto another idea - why not stick bacterial spores in a suitably protected part of the next probe with a message stuck into a nonsense part of their genetic code. It might not be the most efficient way to say 'hi' but it would have panache.
I read it once, and it was really pretty poor as sci-fi goes. The sequels were worse.