Giant Holes In The Ground
Look at these photographs:
Sun 30 Mar 2008
Thu 27 Mar 2008
There Is A Lava-Spewing Volcano Under Ice Sheets Of Antarctica
Volcano Eruption Under Antarctica Ice Sheet Confirmed
Under Ice Volcano Found In Antarctica
Massive Volcano Beneath Antarctic Ice
Ancient Global Dimming Linked To Volcanic Eruption
Scientists Seek Climate Clues On Antarctic Voyage
King Penguins At Risk
Do You Think The Threat Of Global Warming Will Breathe Life Into The Post-Apocalyptic Genre?
536 AD And All That
No ‘Consensus’ On Climate
Climate Meltdown Isn’t Happening…
***Scientists set off on a voyage to Antarctica to see if the icesheets at the edge of the vast continent are melting faster and whether the Southern Ocean is soaking up less climate-warming carbon dioxide. I dont think cold turkey on fossil fuel is even remotely feasible within a 30-50 year span, but Gore wasnt advocating that - rather a whole series of small measures which together bring down CO2. You can use your votes to live in a pretend-world where global warming isnt happening but that wont stop temperatures rising. Can we put your country down for say 2 million refugees? You think anti-CO2 measures will cause instability but that nothing on what climate change will bring. Oh, and every natural cycle is still working bringing ups and downs with it. Will you scream global warming has stopped with cycle or look at the long term trend? Note also the prediction that 2007, 2008 would be steady (and thats without the La Nina). Those in disbelief of mankind caused global warming do NOT want pollution and would love to some day have an alternate means of energy. However, we are not Chicken Little that goes around panicking because a glacier is melting or the climate is naturally changing in certain areas. We hate smog as much as the hippies, but would rather a reasonable and practical solution to problems be given, not something that removes our freedoms or ruins our economy. We also believe until that solution is found, we should make the best efforts to continue scientific research to improve and clean up OIL use, AND for God’s sake drill for oil that sits in abundance right under our feet! We can then be free, and frankly, strong enough, financially, to Did you ever wonder why “Greenland” was named that? It’s a hunk of snow and ice right now. Yet, it used to be a warmer place that was green and fully capable of crop growing and supporting life, hence its name. There are so many aspects of the earths weather that can change situations and climate. The most powerful being the sun itself. The sun goes through periods of higher output and lower output. Water vapor, volcanoes, axis tilt, clouds, Earth’s magnetic field, ocean salinity, etc. etc. all contribute to climate, not just CO2 or methane. Real scientific study has found out that CO2 and methane levels change AFTER climate change and not before. You can’t just pick one or two variables out of a complex equation and plug them into a “Thanks for the reminders on the importance of skepticism. I hope you approach AGW with healthy skepticism, as I do. I did not come to accept AGW lightly. I first became aware of the issue in the late 80s and early 90s. At the time, the best science could do was predict warming with a 50% probability. I remained a skeptic, fence sitter, and data watcher for the next 12 years. It is only in the last 3 or so years that I have come to find the evidence compelling. I do still ask with every piece of data that comes if we are seeing a streak that will end soon or the beginning of a long term trend. I still ask what would I expect the data to look like if AGW is in effect and what would I expect the data to look like if it is not. Observational data seems to indicate warming over the last century. The correlation with with ghg is striking, but insufficient without a mechanism. The mechanism has been known since Arrhenius at the turn of the last century and has been replicated in the lab. The models seem to reasonably reconstruct past climate and so might provide reasonable predictions going forward. Still, I sat on the fence. It was the predictions that began to win me over. The patterns of temperature rise - not so much an increase in daytime highs, but higher nighttime lows. The patterns of precipitation - for our region snowfall starting later in the fall and melting earlier in the spring***
[01]
http://xthsee.multiply.com/journal/item/204/Is_Al_Gore_going_to_blame_this_on_global_warming_or_YOU_
[02]
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1712667_1533032,00.html
[03]
http://homelessonthehighdesert.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/climate-meltdown-isnt-happening-31/
[04]
http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKSP273620080322
[05]
http://hjnews.townnews.com/articles/2008/03/20/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/letter01.txt
[06]
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/37214/In-Other-News
[07]
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080319-global-dimming.html
[08]
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/536-ad-and-all-that/
[09]
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/02/03/under-ice-volcano-found-in-antarctica
[10]
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/There-is-a-lavaspewing-volcano-under-ice-sheets-of-Antarctica/264896/
[11]
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1810
[12]
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90781/90879/6342042.html
Sun 23 Mar 2008
Robots in the Stock Market — Computer Algorithms Automatically Trigger Trades in Response to Market Signals
……But last year, for the first time in the NYSE’s long history, a majority of the market moves may have been dictated by machines, not by human agents. “Program trading” has been around since the 1970s. It’s defined simply as “the simultaneous trading of a portfolio of stocks, as opposed to buying or selling just one stock at a time,” and defined technically by the NYSE as when somebody buys at least 15 stocks at the same time worth a total of more than $1 million. In casual parlance, program trading is when computer algorithms automatically trigger trades in response to market signals, such as price changes in a given stock. A good chunk of program trading is initiated by humans. Every day, there are hundreds of different computer-driven strategies at work, and they frequently work at cross purposes. If IBM breaks through 100, it might simultaneously trigger a sell program at one hedge fund and a buy program at another. The rise of the machines may undermine the journalists’ narratives of the market. But at another level it’s somewhat comforting. Program trading creates a highly unpredictable, occasionally unnerving universe in which sudden reversals can crop up out of nowhere, only to be followed by sudden outbursts of optimism. In other words, a market dominated by computerized program trades is a lot like real human life……
[01]
http://www.slate.com/id/2112392/
[02]
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=amK25dKbMrhQ&refer=news
[03]
http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/02/06/croesus-chronicles-darkpools-oped-cz_rl_0207croesus.html
[04]
http://www.livemint.com/2007/05/04002310/Computerguided-stock-trading.html
[05]
http://www.computerworld.com.my/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=4621&pubid=4&issueid=110
[06]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/business/24trading.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
[07]
http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/11/24/1446219.shtml
[08]
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/23/business/trading.php
[09]
http://www.egothemag.com/archives/2006/01/program_trading.htm
[10]
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_16/b3929113_mz020.htm
[11]
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/07/program_trading.asp
Wed 19 Mar 2008
Do you believe sexual orientation is determined at birth?
Yes
No
Not Sure / Undecided
Tue 18 Mar 2008
The Early Development Of The Warrior Robot — YouTube VIDEO
Who Needs Conscription When You’ve Got Warrior Robots?
[1]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2bExqhhWRI
[2]
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/video/armored-rc-military-robotic-vehicle-defends-soldiers-fires-rockets-kills-baddies-279830.php
[3]
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/92712/robot_soldier/
[4]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/27/scirobots127.xml
Fri 7 Mar 2008
Scientists Unveil Machine That Can Read Minds
Scientists are trying to develop a mind-reading device that can show what a person is thinking. Research could soon enable images in the brain to be shown on a TV screen and it may even be possible to take pictures from dreams. American scientists have taken the first step towards developing such a machine by producing a tool which can identify images from brain activity. It relates brainwaves to “voxels”, 3D versions of camera pixels, and it helped researchers pick out with 92 per cent accuracy images volunteers had been viewing.
[1]
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/2008/03/06/scientists-unveil-machine-that-can-read-minds-86908-20341514/
[2]
http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2003/s910841.htm
[3]
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/non-invasive_sensor_can_detect_brainwaves_remotely
[4]
http://www.mind-gear.com/chmbrln.htm
Thu 6 Mar 2008
Tue 4 Mar 2008
Women In The Stone Age — Did They Look Like Raquel Welch In The Movie “One Million Years B.C.”?
……Is this what women in the Stone Age looked like? Or did they look more like Raquel Welch in the 1960s movie “One Million Years B.C.”? If what the archaeologists tell us is true, that Stone Age societies survived through hunting and gathering, the chances are the women looked more like Ms. Welch than Ms. Willendorf whose obesity would have greatly impaired her ability to move around foraging and gathering. The chances are, a Stone Age woman, much like the women in hunter-gatherer tribes today (such as the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa), would not have had the opportunity to get that fat, unless, of course, she had some special status. She evidently did not need to gather, or hunt, but must have been catered to and had her needs met by others. Significantly, none of the few Paleolithic male figures in sculpture or in engraved images is shown corpulent. If the woman of Willendorf was a special female, who might she have been? The life-like treatment of both the overall form of a fat woman and such details as the figure’s knees and the dimples where the upper arm meets the chest, has caused at least one writer to suggest that a real women served as the sculptor’s model. If this were in fact the case, that the “Venus” of Willendorf is not an idol or a goddess but an actual woman, then she was clearly a woman whose specialness is indicated by her obesity and also by the fact that someone, a man or a woman, went to great pains to produce a likeness of her. But the likeness, if such it is, is noticed only in the torso and perhaps in her hairstyle; otherwise she has no face, unnaturally thin arms, and no feet. The fact that numerous examples of this type of female figure, all generally exhibiting the same essential characteristics - large stomachs and breasts, featureless faces, miniscule or missing feet - have been found over a broad geographical area ranging from France to Siberia, suggests that some system of shared understanding and perception of a particular type of woman existed during the Paleolithic. Images of women, mostly figurines of the same type as the “Venus” of Willendorf, all dating to the Paleolithic period, far outnumber images of men. This has lead to speculation about the place of women in Stone Age society. Some have argued that these female figures denote the existence during this period of a prominent female deity identified usually as the Earth Mother or the Mother Goddess. On the basis of this assumption, it has been suggested that, unlike today, women played a considerably more important, if not dominant, role in Paleolithic society; that possibly a matriarchy existed and women ruled. The “Venus” of Willendorf may be a representation at once of the Mother Goddess and a special living woman; one represented in the form or guise of the other, although which came first is impossible to know. Lacking written documentation, such claims are difficult to support or refute……
Cloud Of Antimatter At The Center Of The Milky Way
……The shape of the mysterious cloud of antimatter in the central regions of the Milky Way has been revealed by ESA’s orbiting gamma-ray observatory Integral. The unexpectedly lopsided shape is a new clue to the origin of the antimatter. The observations have significantly decreased the chances that the antimatter is coming from the annihilation or decay of astronomical dark matter. The new results give astronomers a valuable new clue and point away from dark matter as the origin of the antimatter. Beyond the galactic centre, the cloud is not entirely spherical. Instead it is lopsided with twice as much on one side of the galactic centre as the other. Such a distribution is highly unusual because gas in the inner region of the galaxy is relatively evenly distributed. Equally importantly, Integral found evidence that a population of binary stars is also significantly off-centre, corresponding in extent to the cloud of antimatter. That powerfully suggests these objects, known as hard (because they emit at high energies) low mass X-ray binaries, are responsible for a major amount of antimatter. “Simple estimates suggest that about half and possibly all of the antimatter is coming from the X-ray binaries,” says Weidenspointner. The other half could be coming from a similar process around the galaxy’s central black hole and the various exploding stars there. He points out that the lop-sided distribution of hard LMXBs is unexpected, as stars are distributed more or less evenly around the galaxy. More investigations are needed to determine whether the observed distribution is real. “The link between LMXBs and the antimatter is not yet proven but it is a consistent story,” says Weidenspointner. It has real astrophysical importance because it decreases the need for dark matter at the centre of our galaxy……
The Sola-Rolla-Coasta + Another Rolla-Coasta Completely Unrelated To The The Sola-Rolla-Coaster
We’re at the bottom of the dip. Get ready for the upward climb.
Sat 1 Mar 2008
For The First Time, Gorillas In Congo Have Been Observed And Photographed Copulating Face-To-Face
Imagine you are a gorilla who has just made a momentous discovery: having sex while facing your partner. What is going through your mind? What do you say to your partner? I ask because with the right caption we could have the ultimate Valentine’s Day card (and I’m also trying to elevate a new historic photograph above the level of gorilla porn). Taken in a forest clearing in the Republic of Congo, this photo was released by scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who say it’s the first time that gorillas have been photographed during face-to-face copulation in the wild. It’s also the first that western gorillas like these have been observed mating in such a manner in the wild. Until now, my favorite animal greeting card was the one (given to me for Christmas by wife) with a beautiful photo of two male polars bears on their hind legs facing off against each other on a beach as the sun sets behind them. It has an elegant title, “Strife,” and a caption: “As long as we have each other, we’ll never run out of problems.” But love, of course, is stronger than hate — well, today, anyway — so I think the gorilla card could be even better. But only if some poetic Lab reader can come up with the right caption. So far I haven’t been able to come up with anything better than, “When I gaze into your eyes, I see evolution.” Perhaps a little background about the female in the photograph will help. Her name is Leah, and even before this magic moment she was famous for her innovation. In 2005 she was observed using a stick to test the depth of a pool of water before wading into it, which was said to be the first time a gorilla of her kind was observed using tools. I have no idea what connection there is between tool-making and the missionary position, but Thomas Breuer, the lead author of the study, says researchers are on the case. “Understanding the behavior of our cousins the great apes sheds light on the evolution of behavioral traits in our own species and our ancestors,” said Dr. Breuer, who is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “It is also interesting that this same adult female has been noted for innovative behaviors before.” The Wildlife Conservation Society also notes: Researchers say that few primates mate in a face-to-face position, known technically as ventro-ventral copulation; most primate species copulate in what’s known as the dorso-ventral position, with both animals facing in the same direction. Besides humans, only bonobos have been known to frequently employ ventro-ventral mating positions. On a few occasions, mountain gorillas have been observed in ventro-ventral positions, but never photographed. Western gorillas in captivity have been known to mate face-to-face, but not in the wild, which makes this observation a noteworthy first. “Our current knowledge of wild western gorillas is very limited, and this report provides information on various aspects of their sexual behavior,” added Breuer.
The Shortest Distance Between Two Points Is A Straight Line — So Why Would The Clean-Up Crews Cut Those Columns At An Angle?
YouTube VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J8ojEWlkrs
Point for debate:
Why did the clean-up crews cut at an angle?
Fri 29 Feb 2008
Wed 27 Feb 2008
U.S. Deploy Infantry Robots Equipped With Automatic Weapons In Iraq
The world is sleepwalking into an international robot arms race, a leading expert will warn today. US forces recently deployed remote-controlled robots equipped with automatic weapons in Iraq. The Foster-Miller Armed TALON Robot, used by the US army. Prof Noel Sharkey fears increased research and spending on unmanned military systems by countries including the US, Russia, China and Israel will lead to the use of autonomous battlefield robots that can decide when to kill within a decade. In a keynote speech he will also predict it is only a matter of time before robots become a standard terrorist weapon to replace suicide bombers. Prof Sharkey, of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science, is best known as a judge in the BBC television series Robot Wars. He will outline his fears in a speech at a conference on the ethics of unmanned military systems at the Royal United Services Institute, a respected defence think tank. Prof Sharkey said yesterday: “There’s a massive drive towards developing autonomous robots for more complex missions. “We are rapidly moving towards robots that can make the decision to apply lethal force, when to apply it and who to apply it to. I think maybe we’re taking about a 10-year time frame. “If one country develops autonomous robots, it is clear that other countries will follow suit. What worries me is real soldiers can use common sense in situations such as deciding whether a woman is pregnant or carrying explosives. Robots do not. “Neither can they make decisions about the proportional use of force. Most soldiers would not for example blow up a school full of children if there is a sniper on its roof, but who knows what a robot would do.” The American Department of Defence (DoD) last year published a 25-year plan to spend as £12 billion on robotic air, land and sea systems. US forces recently deployed the first battlefield robots equipped with automatic weapons in Iraq. Talon Sword robots are versions of remote-controlled, track-wheeled bomb disposal devices that can be equipped with various weapons including machine guns and rocket launchers. Four are already in use by the 3rd Infantry Division and 80 more are on order. Currently under international Laws of War humans must be part of any decision to use robots to kill, however the recent DoD programme outlined plans to make them increasingly autonomous. Last year nine soldiers were killed in South Africa when an aircraft gun designed to target other aircraft, helicopters and cruise missiles automatically malfunctioned. A trial at the Old Bailey two years ago heard how a gang of would-be terrorists discussed plans to strap bombs to remote controlled model aeroplanes. Prof Sharkey warned that with the cost of components falling, military developments would inevitably be copied by terrorists. He added it would cost around £250 for terrorists to improvise an unmanned aircraft to deliver explosives using a mobile phone with GPS technology and a model aeroplane. “You could also make thousands of ground-based robots cheaply to replace suicide bombers. I have judged many robot competitions and I know how easy it is. “Once the new weapons are out there, they will be fairly easy to copy. How long is it going to be before the terrorists get in on the act? “There is an urgent need for national governments and the international community to assess the risks of these new weapons now rather than after they have crept their way into common use.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/27/scirobots127.xml
Points to debate:
(a)
Who needs conscription when you’ve got killer robots?
(b)
What if there’s a lightening storm which causes an electrical fault and the robots leave their military base and wreck a nearby American town? (possible script for a future horror movie)
haecus
