That phrasing "So small that it can drop a sugar cube into your cup of coffee." isn't too great either, as it isn't an indicator of being small.
Sikorsky makes helicopters that can also drop a sugar cube into your cup of coffee, or can drop an 18-wheeled truck full of sugar into your cup of coffee.
Include a barcode reader which can tell him what is in a can. Automated method would access a database of codes to find what a code means (and then keep a copy of the info for each code read "recently" for future use).
Manual method would be to type in the meaning of unknown barcodes, with human or other assistance. Someone can look at the can with a webcam, OCR, inference (the barcode reader only knew it was manufactured by Campbell's, and I only bought one soup, so I know what it is).
Somewhat colder. Water vapor provides 70% of the greenhouse effect, so carbon dioxide contributes less than 30%.
Do those paleoclimate studies only detect higher oxygen levels, or also detect lower carbon dioxide levels? The two are not totally interdependent, there is a lot more of both available, and a lot more of both could get removed independently of each other. For example, a volcanic eruption could emit a lot of iron which then absorbs oxygen. Or look at the Himalayas, whose new rocks are sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Hey, great site. Shows nicely how some pieces of the Amazon carbon budget were matched. I like the right-angle radar reflector, too. I hope more pieces are gathered soon.
Look at the code key under the images again. Yellow and red are the most productive. The Amazon is consuming carbon dioxide at a faster rate than Florida.
However, this only shows there are a lot of plants hard at work on the atmosphere there. It does not show what is happening to the carbon in dead trees, soil, mud flowing down the river, carbon entering from the mountains upstream...
Any area which is extracting more carbon than is emitted will build up soil. That's why the prairies of the US midwest had six feet of black dirt.
There are many reports that the layer of topsoil in the Amazon is thin, which indicates it either is in a delicate balance or, more likely, negative balance. Probably a lot of the carbon is being washed away, and the forest is living on the recently produced soil. The Amazon is consuming more carbon than it emits in the air, but is leaking carbon downstream.
As long as the soil replacement is keeping ahead of the erosion this will work. Note that "erosion" can include holes carved by floods, which are then filled in -- a marsh becomes a black dirt plain in a short geologic time. Erosion down toward sea level can continue as long as that thin layer of topsoil slows it down, else a desert or canyon appears. Upstream of the Amazon are mountain ranges which can keep providing minerals for quite a while.
I suppose harvesting forests and locking the carbon in paper and wooden furniture/walls is a form of erosion also...
This is measuring "productivity" -- how much CO2 is being altered to O2 while the plants produce sugars. Only living carbon sinks are shown, so the geologic sinks which remove carbon for a long time (ocean floor) are not shown. The carbon sources also are not shown, so it is not showing when a tree rots in a wet forest and releases methane and soil (there are other satellite images which do show vegetation fire patterns).
Um.. That's relatively more productive. See how much more active the Amazon area is? Now, that blue ring southeast of it is not a desert, it is merely covered with trees and grass similar to what you'd imagine the Iowa farmland to be (yes, the color of Minas Gerais and Iowa are similar). The purple is less active, like the grasslands of Wyoming (indeed, the "northeast Brazil" area is known for its dry land and ranchers, as are the pampas further south).
The forests along the east coast of the USA include those on the minor mountains of the Appalatian range -- a difficult area to farm. Also in there are the Smoky Mountains, named because often there is a haze due to the volatile chemicals (terpenes) released by the forest there.
Yeah, I hate when an artist designs a web site. It sometimes looks pretty on all browsers. Usually it takes forever to download, and things break when they're not running on the fast development machine which the artist used.
All web designers should test at 33kbps modem speed, and on clients with 640x480 screen and a processor that runs at 20% of the speed of the designer's machine. That happens to be a little bit less than the abilities of most laptops in the field.
That's a nice picture of plant activity. Now if the carbon budget could get balanced, so we know how much carbon is going where... and NASA may have a little difficulty measuring how much is landing on the ocean bottom.
Oh, why does it matter? If more carbon is being removed by the carbon cycle than is being released -- we'll run out of carbon dioxide. No plant respiration. No oxygen production.
I was referring to the amount of talking.
I'm sure you did not talk for eight hours today, as you probably were not talking while typing your comment. What if you had to speak for that comment, for each time you wanted the next page, or to follow a link?
Imagine yourself on stage, leading a presentation, having to talk to write code for the audience for eight hours. Try talking to yourself constantly for a day as you use the computer and see if that isn't a lot more talking than usual.
Repetitive stress injuries occur in the vocal cords, and I'm sure also to repeated gestures.
Yes, many people think Earth/Moon should be considered a binary planet. The Moon is much larger than Pluto, and is large enough that the Earth obviously rotates around the center of gravity of the two bodies. Perhaps a definition could require that a planet's center of gravity between it and the next larger object be outside the larger object -- that would require the Moon to be somewhat larger for it to draw the center of gravity above the Earth's surface.
On March 15th will be the first annual Rotation Preservation March on Washington. At noon, 4,000 volunteers will risk arrest as they adjust the height of the Washington Monument with their automobile jacks so as to maintain proper rotation this year. Only jacks from subcompact vehicles will be allowed.
A panel of experts have determined that the proper rotation speed of the Earth occurred during the minute when the panel's chairman was born. All the experts decry the decades of alteration which have occurred since then, except the alterations due to their chairman growing taller. The panel voted to lay prone in the presence of the chairman so as to compensate for his height.
Well, Luna does have an atmosphere. But I'm sure you didn't mean that only objects with life qualify as planets, merely that an object with life on it is probably a planet (with proper definitions to include or exclude colonized asteroids or space habitats) and we long ago would have seen seasonal changes or other things which would have shown ancient astronomers that life existed on our neighbor.
we didn't include asteroids because we couldn't resolve them
I think the problem with asteroids is that we want an "orbit" to contain a single concentration of mass. Mars and Jupiter seem to be planets, but a bunch of rocks wandering approximately in the space between planets doesn't seem like what a planet "should be".
Probably if we had a habitable gas torus around our sun we'd have a different definition of significant astronomical bodies...
Slashdot Mirror
Sikorsky makes helicopters that can also drop a sugar cube into your cup of coffee, or can drop an 18-wheeled truck full of sugar into your cup of coffee.
The craft is reusable.
Is there something in there about the return of civilian passengers?
Manual method would be to type in the meaning of unknown barcodes, with human or other assistance. Someone can look at the can with a webcam, OCR, inference (the barcode reader only knew it was manufactured by Campbell's, and I only bought one soup, so I know what it is).
Do those paleoclimate studies only detect higher oxygen levels, or also detect lower carbon dioxide levels? The two are not totally interdependent, there is a lot more of both available, and a lot more of both could get removed independently of each other. For example, a volcanic eruption could emit a lot of iron which then absorbs oxygen. Or look at the Himalayas, whose new rocks are sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Hurrah for carbon fuels!
You don't hear that every day.
Hey, great site. Shows nicely how some pieces of the Amazon carbon budget were matched. I like the right-angle radar reflector, too. I hope more pieces are gathered soon.
However, this only shows there are a lot of plants hard at work on the atmosphere there. It does not show what is happening to the carbon in dead trees, soil, mud flowing down the river, carbon entering from the mountains upstream...
There are many reports that the layer of topsoil in the Amazon is thin, which indicates it either is in a delicate balance or, more likely, negative balance. Probably a lot of the carbon is being washed away, and the forest is living on the recently produced soil. The Amazon is consuming more carbon than it emits in the air, but is leaking carbon downstream.
As long as the soil replacement is keeping ahead of the erosion this will work. Note that "erosion" can include holes carved by floods, which are then filled in -- a marsh becomes a black dirt plain in a short geologic time. Erosion down toward sea level can continue as long as that thin layer of topsoil slows it down, else a desert or canyon appears. Upstream of the Amazon are mountain ranges which can keep providing minerals for quite a while.
I suppose harvesting forests and locking the carbon in paper and wooden furniture/walls is a form of erosion also...
This is measuring "productivity" -- how much CO2 is being altered to O2 while the plants produce sugars. Only living carbon sinks are shown, so the geologic sinks which remove carbon for a long time (ocean floor) are not shown. The carbon sources also are not shown, so it is not showing when a tree rots in a wet forest and releases methane and soil (there are other satellite images which do show vegetation fire patterns).
The forests along the east coast of the USA include those on the minor mountains of the Appalatian range -- a difficult area to farm. Also in there are the Smoky Mountains, named because often there is a haze due to the volatile chemicals (terpenes) released by the forest there.
All web designers should test at 33kbps modem speed, and on clients with 640x480 screen and a processor that runs at 20% of the speed of the designer's machine. That happens to be a little bit less than the abilities of most laptops in the field.
Oh, why does it matter? If more carbon is being removed by the carbon cycle than is being released -- we'll run out of carbon dioxide. No plant respiration. No oxygen production.
But as the reaction which uses sunlight to remove carbon from carbon dioxide is generating sugar...this image only shows us carbohydrates.
Har. The joke has many variations, as shown in Google for '"Corinthian Leather" kahn'.
I'm sure you did not talk for eight hours today, as you probably were not talking while typing your comment. What if you had to speak for that comment, for each time you wanted the next page, or to follow a link?
Imagine yourself on stage, leading a presentation, having to talk to write code for the audience for eight hours. Try talking to yourself constantly for a day as you use the computer and see if that isn't a lot more talking than usual.
Repetitive stress injuries occur in the vocal cords, and I'm sure also to repeated gestures.
I'm afraid only we old wizards recognize that joke. We have to be old enough to have watched the original Star Trek when first shown.
I rotated my screen in every direction but couldn't find the map description.
So are you already accustomed to talking and gesturing for eight hours a day, every work day?
We were worried that the Germans might jam the signals our submarines used to control their radio-controlled torpedoes.
Yes, it was very helpful when our submarines controlled the German torpedoes.
Yes, many people think Earth/Moon should be considered a binary planet. The Moon is much larger than Pluto, and is large enough that the Earth obviously rotates around the center of gravity of the two bodies. Perhaps a definition could require that a planet's center of gravity between it and the next larger object be outside the larger object -- that would require the Moon to be somewhat larger for it to draw the center of gravity above the Earth's surface.
A panel of experts have determined that the proper rotation speed of the Earth occurred during the minute when the panel's chairman was born. All the experts decry the decades of alteration which have occurred since then, except the alterations due to their chairman growing taller. The panel voted to lay prone in the presence of the chairman so as to compensate for his height.
The lunar atmosphere is also only 1/100,000,000,000,000 that of Earth, and in fact is often called the exosphere. For planets, the exosphere is the tenuous part of the atmosphere beyond the ionosphere that blends into space, says Galvin. "The Earth's exosphere starts at 480 kilometers up. For the moon, you have the surface of the moon and -- bang! -- the exosphere right next to it."
We'll need a definition more precise than "outside Pluto's orbit" unless we are satisfied with having Neptune sometimes not be a planet.
I think the problem with asteroids is that we want an "orbit" to contain a single concentration of mass. Mars and Jupiter seem to be planets, but a bunch of rocks wandering approximately in the space between planets doesn't seem like what a planet "should be".
Probably if we had a habitable gas torus around our sun we'd have a different definition of significant astronomical bodies...
Look down.
Look up at the Sun.
See? Earth is definitely much larger than the Sun.