At the end of every week Michael Hanley leaves his job in Kansas and starts his 530 mile trip back to his home in Wisconsin. After the local GM plant closed down, his family couldn't afford to go without his $28 an hour job or his health insurance. Now Hanley drives over 1,000 miles round-trip weekly with his brother and two brothers-in-law who find themselves in the same situation. "I like to say I gave up an eight-minute commute for an eight-hour commute," he says
Most people think that a commute is a daily thing (not me BTW ; my commute is variable, monthly or several-monthly), so let's put it on a daily basis : 530miles each way, once per week is 1060miles/week. Between 3 people, that's 353.3 miles per person per week. Assuming 5 working days per week (hah!), that's 71 miles per day. Equivalent to a 35.5 mile round trip each day. For the average Brit, that would mean someone getting into Leeds from Huddersfield, or Rochdale, or Sheffield.
Lower prices to 10c / song and I'll immediately spend $200.
I never did understand the logic of that. What is it that would encourage you to spend $200 for 2000 somethings that you don't need, when you wouldn't spend the $200 for one of those things that you don't need.
Using an SMS with a confirmation message could avoid this, though.
IFF ("if and only if") there is mobile phone service at the location you're talking about. Which is not something I have for months at a time when I'm at work, but I still need to do banking things. Your solution is not general.
The IOC asserts that it owns all the rights to all images taken at the games,
Yeah, sure. So, if I went to the Olympics and took photos of my family there, the IOC would assert copyright over them. Riiight.
Well one good thing can be said for this (alleged) policy : it hasn't changed one whit, jot, or iota the probability of me attending an Olympic event, or indeed of spending a penny on merchandise for the Olympics, or indeed of deliberately spending any money supporting sport at all. The probabilities have changed from zero to zero.
Roll on 2012 and the planned terrorist massacres in London. Let's hope some good urban regeneration can happen in the bomb-scoured wreckage.
They actually have the [struggles for words] honesty to call it that?
Why shouldn't they? Most people completely fail to see the implications of this statement anyway. They don't realize (or don't want to realize) that it simply means that profit takes precedence over the health of the insured.
But... I thought that the wonderful Merkin For-Profit healthcare system included lots of out-of the way country retreats with well-guarded borders, where such accidents of birth, masturbators and other retards can be kept under safe guard. Oh, I see : 49th parallel, etc. So that's your little secret. Oh well, it's safe here. No-one reads this junk anyway.
You'd trust anyone of any age with a knife in the same room ^h^h^h^h^h building ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h town ^h^h^h^h county ^h^h^hry as a child. You sickening prevert! Umm, will no one think of the children?
Any drugs, even asprin must be administered by a school nurse. Always.
If there had been a nurse at my school (in itself, that says something about the insanity of the Merkin healthcare paranoia), then I'm sure that I'd have enjoyed having her rub the thrush cream into my knob-end three times a day. What an excellent excuse to get off from History : "Sorry Teach, but I've got to go and get a hand job from Nursy. I'm sure that you can lecture on the Hapsburg lip with that image in your mind. And the 30-other sweaty boys in the classroom."
For profit health insurance is just that. For profit.
They actually have the [struggles for words] honesty to call it that? Wow, do those guys need some Public Relations advice. Or a good litigation lawyer. (I use the word "good" in an ironic sense.)
Which means that you live in an area where the public utility water is sufficiently clean that you have confidence drinking it, or that you only drink water which you've recently boiled yourself. Two hints : YOU pay for your public utility water supply through your tax system (or your neighbours pay for your water, if you're a thief who avoids paying due taxes) ; OR you pay for the power to boil your water (similar caveat about theft of power, or fuel).
OK, possibly you don't live in an area with good public water, and you don't drink water that you've sterilised yourself. That's a limiting case, but not an important one : eventually your game of Russian roulette will catch up with you, and either kill yourself, your children (rendering your existence moot), or both.
Seriously about the paying for air : in some countries pollution is getting bad enough that you are getting people paying for (ineffective) pollution masks. Look at the next cycle path that you see. It won't be long before landlords of commercial sites start installing filters on their air inlets, and charging their lessors appropriately for the service. At which point, you'll start paying for other people's (slightly cleaner) air when you shop in that mall and pay those shops (slightly inflated) prices.
Isn't it hell, trying to live up to dramatic claims in an interconnected world?
Agreed. However if the sea level dropped by 100m, You can get to Crete from Greece via the island chain to the northwest, with only two boat trips: one of 6 miles, and the other of 15 miles. This is easily doable even in a primitive boat or raft.
And the climate on the Balkan peninsula at 100000 years ago was... an awful lot worse than on the north coast of Africa. Which is why (I presume) the article's authors considered the possibilities of immigration from Africa as well as from the north. Given that the first Homo sapiens to leave Africa very likely had to cross the Bab al Mandab, the technology of crossing (approx) 30km of water has been available to almost all humans, almost all of the time that they've been recognisably humans. The largest plausible exception to this is the arrival of humans in Europe, which could have happened via Gibralter (12km voyage), or through the Levant (nothing more than river crossings, though some of them can be pretty hairy).
The big question is not "could humans have made these crossings?", it's "why would they have made these crossings?" If you've got a settlement anywhere with a hunter-gatherer society, then by definition, people are going to be exploring to the limit of their short term transport - say, several day's walk. So, any time that a group feels the need to branch out (because they don't like the Boss, for example) then there is likely to be some place which they already know (from that 4-day trip last year, when they Ugggh-the-Rebellious went further than Boss told him he could) which is at least acceptable... and another 2 days beyond that... we'll find out when we've set up camp there. When such people meet the coast, they're practically certain to have some existing fishing and watercraft skill (retained through use on lakes and rivers as their tribe has migrated, at a pace of around two kilometres a year) which can be adapted over a few decades to marine fishing use. Then, if you can see land over the horizon... that's the "couple of days" travel in the previous discussion. You don't go much further than you've gone already, and you scout before you attempt to settle ; you don't burn your bridges (adolescent males are easily replaced, so send them ; their contemporaneous sisters are probably pregnant already and are not so expendable). If you find that there's not enough land, or game, or the climate is too bad, then you don't go there at the next 4-day migration, instead you go along the coast. When there are neighbours on all sides... welcome to population pressure and the cloud you see in the future is either agriculture or conquest by your agricultural neighbours. Given that scenario, then I'd expect on first principles that the settlement of Crete and the other Mediterranean islands would have been settled from the north, as you say. But (and it's a big "but"), if the coasts and interior of Europe were uninhabitable, or so marginally habitable as to kill off settling groups within a generation (while there were still people who knew where "back" was, so they could go "back" before things got too bad), then you could have settlement on habitable islands from the south. But I'd still expect Sicily to have been settled (and crossed) before Crete, and Gibralter to have been crossed into Iberia before either Sicily or Crete.
(Actually, I have a suspicion that coastal migrating communities might well move substantially faster than inland communities ; they've got fewer travel options ; they've a more consistent environment to move into, and they've got their founder population to avoid in one direction, and so really only one direction to explore in. Which gels with the rapid spread of AMHs (Anatomically Modern Humans) from Africa to Australia (taking around 50ka) and to the Americas after another 30ka. But hey, I'm just a geologist - WTF would I know?)
Even if proper hulls were beyond them they could build a sailing raft. There was more wood around in those days.
Was there? 100000 to 200000 years ago (the authors do put pretty broad limits on their dating) had temperatures around 4 to 8 centigrade colder than present, which would make for a greatly different climate, and probably rather less wood. OTOH, previous climatic postdictions I've seen for the Sahara in the same time period has it considerably more clement and wood-rich.
Perhaps they swam or rafted over from the North instead? Crete is only about 74 miles from mainland Greece, and there are island chains between them. During an Ice Age sea levels would be lower so there would probably be even more and larger islands between them. Crete is nearly as close to Asia Minor (Turkey), also w/ island chains in between.
However, at the time at which the style of stone tools were in use on the African mainland, the climate on mainland Europe was pretty harsh. Think in terms of north Siberian tundra of the present day, or Baffin Island. While humans were able to make it into central Europe on occasions, I don't recall them being reported from this particular time period (which could simply mean that they came in during relatively good millennia and died out in the next millennia. WGAF.)
I really don't understand the author's decision to quote the distance to the African coast. The only reason I can think of is appalling geographic ignorance.
Humans (possibly AMHs, Anatomically Modern Humans) were present in Africa at about this time, producing comparable tools ; the conditions in Europe at the time were considerably worse ; the conditions in the Balkan mountains were probably even worse than the average in Europe ; things probably weren't particularly sunny and marvellous in Anatolia either, because they're pretty mountainous too ; meanwhile, the Sahara... wasn't (well, it wasn't a major desert ; plenty of woodland, minor lake basins, much less of a challenge to cross than it has been in recorded history). So I think that the suggestion of an approach from the south is not irrational. And considering that the authors also consider the prospect of there being transits across the Mediterranean at Gibralter too, then it's unjustifiable to say that they're ignorant of the other plausible alternatives. They don't mention the prospect of crossing the Mediterranean across the Tunis/ Sicily/ Italy route. that'd be considerably narrower under 100m lower sea levels. It'd still require boats of some sort, but probably only a day at sea.
So potentially people could have either walked to Crete around that time frame, or it would have been a much easier boat trip so the boats need not have been very sophisticated, maybe no more than rafts.
Just putting forward an alternate explanation, I'm no expert in this area.
I've just spent another whole minute with Google Earth (not because it's the only appropriate tool, but because it's readily available), running the cursor around the north side of the island, its easy to trace an isobath (line of constant depth) at 1km water depth. So, in the event that the Mediterranean suffered a 1km shallowing (which has happened, but a lot more than 100000 years ago), then Crete would still be an island, and by a substantial amount.
Do some calculations. If the islands had moved through this distance over 130000 years, then over the 130 years of instrumental surveying, they'd have moved several hundred metres. Yeah, right. Land bridge? Where did the volume of rocks go? All approximately 2000 cubic kilometres of it? Sea lower in the Med? See previous comments about the areas bathymetry. Islands in between - see 'land bridge'.
A lot can happen on a human scale over 130,000 years ; like the emergence of a new species, and the development of virtually all of our culture, science and technology. But to the Earth, it's barely anything.
Currently the north shore of Africa is about 200 miles from crete, but what they seem to have failed to take into account (or at least mention in the article) is that in ancient times sea levels were much much lower.
True.
This is estimated to be due to deglacification around 7k years ago.
That's the number-one reason on that time-scale.
The National Institute of Oceanography states that in studies the sea level of India's coast were about 100m lower about 14k years ago,
Seems reasonable, and you're using the Indian coast as a proxy for "global sea-level" because you think that have been no significant vertical movements of that part of the coast over that time-scale. Which is OK - we know that the Pakistan and Myanmar coasts are relatively active (Rann-of-Kutch earthquake of a couple of years ago ; the 2006 tsunami) ; it's less well-known that the east coast of Africa is rather wobbly - until you look at the movements further inland on the rift valleys ; looking for coastal stability in the Mediterranean is pretty much a WOMBAT. So yeah, I'd take 100m relative drop in sea level as a first approximation.
so extrapolating (a dangerous game I know =) we could say it may be possible that at some point the voyage to Crete was either walkable, or a very short sea voyage.
As you know, extrapolation is a dangerous game. 100m of sealevel decrease means completely different things depending on the steepness of the coastal regions and seabed. On the west coast of Scotland, you might acquire 50 to 200m of horizontal distance on your coastline ; on the east coast here, you'd acquire tens of kilometers for the same sea level fall. In the southern North Sea you'd change it from being sea to being low, rolling land. (I grew up over 100km from the coast in southern Englandshire, and at an altitude of barely 100m.) What effect you get from a particular fall in sea level depends entirely on how steeply the seabed decreases in your area under study. So you need a bathymetry map. (Greek : bathos = depth ; -metry = measurement) Google Earth has the data you need : explore the coasts of Egypt/ Lybia and the south coast of Crete. You'll find that the 100m depth contour is indistinguishable from the coast along the southern shore of Crete (at least, at the resolutions that I used), but lies around 10km off the coast on the Lybia/ Egypt side. So, by dropping sealevel by 100m (if that's what happened in the Mediterranean ; funny things have happened in the past at Gibraltar), you turn a 360km-odd journey into... 350km. Big deal. You may be remembering hearing about the Mediterranean drying up completely. That was (several times) around 5 to 7 million years ago in the Miocene, and the Med dried out several times. A lot of the seabed of the Med has up to a kilometre of salt deposited from that event, below 1.5 to 2 km of water. But the prospect of protohumans crossing the Med during the "Messinian Salinity Crisis"... not plausible, I think.
If you are thinking anything beyond that there seems to be evidence for active selection for intelligence around the time of the discovery of agriculture, 10-30K years ago.
It depends a little who you ask, but the consensus about the origin of agricultural technologies is that it took place from about 10000 years ago until the last few hundred years (where do you draw an end - at the 18th century experimental farms of the squirarchy, or at the statistical sciences developed at Rothampstead in the 1920s and 1930s?) So if your dates are accurate (and I'd like to see the citations for the evidence to back those dates), then development of agriculture is associated with a decrease in selection for intelligence. Which rather blows a hole in your thesis.
Yes, our ancestors were intelligent, probably just as intelligent as us, possibly more intelligent on average. But that intelligence probably predates the change over from hunt-and-gather lifestyles to more sedentary ones including significant livestock and eventually crop-raising. As the Kzinti say, "How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?"
Not only will it take twice as long and cost 3 times as much,
[nitpick]6 times as much.[/nitpick] Twice as long at three times the rate equals six times. What do you think you are? An accountant, or a software engineer?
I wondered what prompted Larry Niven to mention special "handmeals" for the busy pilot in freefall. I guess I know now. Google can only find 278 references for a "handmeal" ; obviously not one of the better taken Nivenisms.
in a different way, as School Boards denying Evolution.
Is it? Are they denying that the logic of nuclear science works, or that the facts of radioactive decay are not actually true? Or are they just being implausibly bull-shitty? I know almost nothing about the power systems in use in California (is that the right state?) except that they're under quite serious strain because Californians can't stand the heat and are unwilling to get out of the kitchen. But I'd be interested (possibly amused) to know how Berkeley monitors the state's power grid to know which cycles of the AC are being provided by nuclear stations, and which are provided by coal stations, so that they can switch some out and some into their local grid. Do they do full-wave or half-wave rectification of their supply?
(That reminds me - I've got to build a portable 350V DC power supply for Tom's Geiger counter. Yummy!)
Slashdot Mirror
Contradiction in terms.
Further contradiction in terms.
I think that you're starting to get the idea now.
Well?
OK, maybe my hangover has turned off my funny bone.
(Oh, and a first post BTW?)
More bragging rights, amongst a certain range of retards?
More to the point, the engine is running, at car-engine pathetic efficiency, for almost all that time.
Homeopathic argumentation? The less substance there is to their arguments, the stronger they get?
Most people think that a commute is a daily thing (not me BTW ; my commute is variable, monthly or several-monthly), so let's put it on a daily basis :
530miles each way, once per week is 1060miles/week. Between 3 people, that's 353.3 miles per person per week.
Assuming 5 working days per week (hah!), that's 71 miles per day. Equivalent to a 35.5 mile round trip each day.
For the average Brit, that would mean someone getting into Leeds from Huddersfield, or Rochdale, or Sheffield.
Brings a (w)hole new meaning to "grab-a-granny night".
I never did understand the logic of that. What is it that would encourage you to spend $200 for 2000 somethings that you don't need, when you wouldn't spend the $200 for one of those things that you don't need.
IFF ("if and only if") there is mobile phone service at the location you're talking about. Which is not something I have for months at a time when I'm at work, but I still need to do banking things. Your solution is not general.
Yeah, sure.
So, if I went to the Olympics and took photos of my family there, the IOC would assert copyright over them.
Riiight.
Well one good thing can be said for this (alleged) policy : it hasn't changed one whit, jot, or iota the probability of me attending an Olympic event, or indeed of spending a penny on merchandise for the Olympics, or indeed of deliberately spending any money supporting sport at all. The probabilities have changed from zero to zero.
Roll on 2012 and the planned terrorist massacres in London. Let's hope some good urban regeneration can happen in the bomb-scoured wreckage.
But ... I thought that the wonderful Merkin For-Profit healthcare system included lots of out-of the way country retreats with well-guarded borders, where such accidents of birth, masturbators and other retards can be kept under safe guard.
Oh, I see : 49th parallel, etc. So that's your little secret. Oh well, it's safe here. No-one reads this junk anyway.
You'd trust anyone of any age with a knife in the same room ^h^h^h^h^h building ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h town ^h^h^h^h county ^h^h^hry as a child. You sickening prevert!
Umm, will no one think of the children?
If there had been a nurse at my school (in itself, that says something about the insanity of the Merkin healthcare paranoia), then I'm sure that I'd have enjoyed having her rub the thrush cream into my knob-end three times a day. What an excellent excuse to get off from History : "Sorry Teach, but I've got to go and get a hand job from Nursy. I'm sure that you can lecture on the Hapsburg lip with that image in your mind. And the 30-other sweaty boys in the classroom."
They actually have the [struggles for words] honesty to call it that? Wow, do those guys need some Public Relations advice. Or a good litigation lawyer. (I use the word "good" in an ironic sense.)
http://www.arvixe.com/
Yet.
Which means that you live in an area where the public utility water is sufficiently clean that you have confidence drinking it, or that you only drink water which you've recently boiled yourself.
Two hints : YOU pay for your public utility water supply through your tax system (or your neighbours pay for your water, if you're a thief who avoids paying due taxes) ; OR you pay for the power to boil your water (similar caveat about theft of power, or fuel).
OK, possibly you don't live in an area with good public water, and you don't drink water that you've sterilised yourself. That's a limiting case, but not an important one : eventually your game of Russian roulette will catch up with you, and either kill yourself, your children (rendering your existence moot), or both.
Seriously about the paying for air : in some countries pollution is getting bad enough that you are getting people paying for (ineffective) pollution masks. Look at the next cycle path that you see. It won't be long before landlords of commercial sites start installing filters on their air inlets, and charging their lessors appropriately for the service. At which point, you'll start paying for other people's (slightly cleaner) air when you shop in that mall and pay those shops (slightly inflated) prices.
Isn't it hell, trying to live up to dramatic claims in an interconnected world?
And the climate on the Balkan peninsula at 100000 years ago was ... an awful lot worse than on the north coast of Africa. Which is why (I presume) the article's authors considered the possibilities of immigration from Africa as well as from the north.
Given that the first Homo sapiens to leave Africa very likely had to cross the Bab al Mandab, the technology of crossing (approx) 30km of water has been available to almost all humans, almost all of the time that they've been recognisably humans. The largest plausible exception to this is the arrival of humans in Europe, which could have happened via Gibralter (12km voyage), or through the Levant (nothing more than river crossings, though some of them can be pretty hairy).
The big question is not "could humans have made these crossings?", it's "why would they have made these crossings?" ... and another 2 days beyond that ... we'll find out when we've set up camp there. ... that's the "couple of days" travel in the previous discussion. You don't go much further than you've gone already, and you scout before you attempt to settle ; you don't burn your bridges (adolescent males are easily replaced, so send them ; their contemporaneous sisters are probably pregnant already and are not so expendable). If you find that there's not enough land, or game, or the climate is too bad, then you don't go there at the next 4-day migration, instead you go along the coast. When there are neighbours on all sides ... welcome to population pressure and the cloud you see in the future is either agriculture or conquest by your agricultural neighbours.
If you've got a settlement anywhere with a hunter-gatherer society, then by definition, people are going to be exploring to the limit of their short term transport - say, several day's walk. So, any time that a group feels the need to branch out (because they don't like the Boss, for example) then there is likely to be some place which they already know (from that 4-day trip last year, when they Ugggh-the-Rebellious went further than Boss told him he could) which is at least acceptable
When such people meet the coast, they're practically certain to have some existing fishing and watercraft skill (retained through use on lakes and rivers as their tribe has migrated, at a pace of around two kilometres a year) which can be adapted over a few decades to marine fishing use. Then, if you can see land over the horizon
Given that scenario, then I'd expect on first principles that the settlement of Crete and the other Mediterranean islands would have been settled from the north, as you say. But (and it's a big "but"), if the coasts and interior of Europe were uninhabitable, or so marginally habitable as to kill off settling groups within a generation (while there were still people who knew where "back" was, so they could go "back" before things got too bad), then you could have settlement on habitable islands from the south. But I'd still expect Sicily to have been settled (and crossed) before Crete, and Gibralter to have been crossed into Iberia before either Sicily or Crete.
(Actually, I have a suspicion that coastal migrating communities might well move substantially faster than inland communities ; they've got fewer travel options ; they've a more consistent environment to move into, and they've got their founder population to avoid in one direction, and so really only one direction to explore in. Which gels with the rapid spread of AMHs (Anatomically Modern Humans) from Africa to Australia (taking around 50ka) and to the Americas after another 30ka.
But hey, I'm just a geologist - WTF would I know?)
Was there? 100000 to 200000 years ago (the authors do put pretty broad limits on their dating) had temperatures around 4 to 8 centigrade colder than present, which would make for a greatly different climate, and probably rather less wood.
OTOH, previous climatic postdictions I've seen for the Sahara in the same time period has it considerably more clement and wood-rich.
However, at the time at which the style of stone tools were in use on the African mainland, the climate on mainland Europe was pretty harsh. Think in terms of north Siberian tundra of the present day, or Baffin Island. While humans were able to make it into central Europe on occasions, I don't recall them being reported from this particular time period (which could simply mean that they came in during relatively good millennia and died out in the next millennia. WGAF.)
Humans (possibly AMHs, Anatomically Modern Humans) were present in Africa at about this time, producing comparable tools ; the conditions in Europe at the time were considerably worse ; the conditions in the Balkan mountains were probably even worse than the average in Europe ; things probably weren't particularly sunny and marvellous in Anatolia either, because they're pretty mountainous too ; meanwhile, the Sahara ... wasn't (well, it wasn't a major desert ; plenty of woodland, minor lake basins, much less of a challenge to cross than it has been in recorded history). So I think that the suggestion of an approach from the south is not irrational. And considering that the authors also consider the prospect of there being transits across the Mediterranean at Gibralter too, then it's unjustifiable to say that they're ignorant of the other plausible alternatives.
They don't mention the prospect of crossing the Mediterranean across the Tunis/ Sicily/ Italy route. that'd be considerably narrower under 100m lower sea levels. It'd still require boats of some sort, but probably only a day at sea.
I've just spent another whole minute with Google Earth (not because it's the only appropriate tool, but because it's readily available), running the cursor around the north side of the island, its easy to trace an isobath (line of constant depth) at 1km water depth. So, in the event that the Mediterranean suffered a 1km shallowing (which has happened, but a lot more than 100000 years ago), then Crete would still be an island, and by a substantial amount.
Do some calculations. If the islands had moved through this distance over 130000 years, then over the 130 years of instrumental surveying, they'd have moved several hundred metres. Yeah, right.
Land bridge? Where did the volume of rocks go? All approximately 2000 cubic kilometres of it?
Sea lower in the Med? See previous comments about the areas bathymetry.
Islands in between - see 'land bridge'.
A lot can happen on a human scale over 130,000 years ; like the emergence of a new species, and the development of virtually all of our culture, science and technology. But to the Earth, it's barely anything.
True.
That's the number-one reason on that time-scale.
Seems reasonable, and you're using the Indian coast as a proxy for "global sea-level" because you think that have been no significant vertical movements of that part of the coast over that time-scale. Which is OK - we know that the Pakistan and Myanmar coasts are relatively active (Rann-of-Kutch earthquake of a couple of years ago ; the 2006 tsunami) ; it's less well-known that the east coast of Africa is rather wobbly - until you look at the movements further inland on the rift valleys ; looking for coastal stability in the Mediterranean is pretty much a WOMBAT. So yeah, I'd take 100m relative drop in sea level as a first approximation.
As you know, extrapolation is a dangerous game. 100m of sealevel decrease means completely different things depending on the steepness of the coastal regions and seabed. On the west coast of Scotland, you might acquire 50 to 200m of horizontal distance on your coastline ; on the east coast here, you'd acquire tens of kilometers for the same sea level fall. In the southern North Sea you'd change it from being sea to being low, rolling land. (I grew up over 100km from the coast in southern Englandshire, and at an altitude of barely 100m.) What effect you get from a particular fall in sea level depends entirely on how steeply the seabed decreases in your area under study. So you need a bathymetry map. (Greek : bathos = depth ; -metry = measurement) Google Earth has the data you need : explore the coasts of Egypt/ Lybia and the south coast of Crete. You'll find that the 100m depth contour is indistinguishable from the coast along the southern shore of Crete (at least, at the resolutions that I used), but lies around 10km off the coast on the Lybia/ Egypt side. So, by dropping sealevel by 100m (if that's what happened in the Mediterranean ; funny things have happened in the past at Gibraltar), you turn a 360km-odd journey into ... 350km. Big deal. ... not plausible, I think.
You may be remembering hearing about the Mediterranean drying up completely. That was (several times) around 5 to 7 million years ago in the Miocene, and the Med dried out several times. A lot of the seabed of the Med has up to a kilometre of salt deposited from that event, below 1.5 to 2 km of water. But the prospect of protohumans crossing the Med during the "Messinian Salinity Crisis"
[nitpick]6 times as much.[/nitpick]
Twice as long at three times the rate equals six times.
What do you think you are? An accountant, or a software engineer?
I wondered what prompted Larry Niven to mention special "handmeals" for the busy pilot in freefall. I guess I know now.
Google can only find 278 references for a "handmeal" ; obviously not one of the better taken Nivenisms.
Is it? Are they denying that the logic of nuclear science works, or that the facts of radioactive decay are not actually true? Or are they just being implausibly bull-shitty? I know almost nothing about the power systems in use in California (is that the right state?) except that they're under quite serious strain because Californians can't stand the heat and are unwilling to get out of the kitchen. But I'd be interested (possibly amused) to know how Berkeley monitors the state's power grid to know which cycles of the AC are being provided by nuclear stations, and which are provided by coal stations, so that they can switch some out and some into their local grid.
Do they do full-wave or half-wave rectification of their supply?
(That reminds me - I've got to build a portable 350V DC power supply for Tom's Geiger counter. Yummy!)