Culture of Life Science News

NEW BLOG LOCATION!

2006-03-19T21:33:00.001-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

We now reside at Culture of Life Science News

Culture of Life Space News

Culture of Life Evolution News

See you there!

Elaine
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Walking On All Four: Genetic Glitch Causes Human Children In Turkey To Do This

2006-03-08T12:19:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Due to a missing gene on the 17th chromosome, a family in Turkey has children who walk like our lemurian ancestors. This is a very interesting case and proves, yet again, how genes control our bodies and how few genes seperate us from our distant relatives.

From the BBC:

Five siblings from Turkey who can only walk on all fours could provide science with an insight into human evolution, researchers have said.
The three sisters and two brothers could yield clues to why our ancestors made the transition from four-legged to two-legged animals, says a UK expert.

This is most interesting. I have posited in the past that not only was bipedalism a part of humanity's past, it is for a number of the Great Ape families, all of them, I would dare say. Namely, for the last 8 million years, bipedalism is what seperated the orangatang, gorilla, chimpanzee and human family from the get-go. The knuckle-walking of the other families is a recent innovation, I bet, in less than the last 3 million years!

Whenever our ancestors went on all four, they did it the same way these children are walking: flat palmed. The knuckle walking innovation had a very bad downside: it made the fingers inept and unable to make tools or groom well. In other words, it is a net loss. To increase preambulation, the gorilla and chimpanzee lost the ability to use their fingers for delicate tasks, dooming them into an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

Our most distant ancestors were insect eaters who ate some fruits when available abut anyone living in the wild knows, there are always insects whereas fruits are a very iffy thing. To catch bugs, our ancestors needed clever, fast hands that can pluck things swiftly, ever try to catch flies? Heh. Must be where the urge to pull off bug wings comes from, a deep genetic trait.

From Agence France Press:

All five are mentally retarded and have problems with language as a result of a form of underdevelopment of the brain known as cerebellar ataxia.

This is the most exciting part of this case! Are the genes for developing the part of the brain for speech this connected with bipedalism? So many interesting doors beacon to be opened. From a private web page created by a husband who lost his wife to degeneration of this part of the brain.

By definition, "ataxia" is a state of incoordination. The cerebellum is the "microprocessor" which controls and regulates motor-control neuron messages. So when upon consultation the Practitioner has intensively quizzed the patient and ruled out all the routine triggers for incoordination - such as inebriation, inner-ear conditions and countless others, the term "cerebellar" gets added to the "ataxia" label. But this is still not a "diagnosis".

The first move by a Neurologist when confronting an ataxia which defies explanation is to commission an MRI Scan of the cerebellum. He is looking for many things but in particular for a shrinkage / degeneration of the cerebellum which unlike "cerebellar ataxia" (which you will remember is just an incoordination symptoms label) is defined as "cerebellar atrophy". And this "is" a diagnosis .

It is odd to me that the abbreviation "CA" is often wrongly used interchangeably to represent both "Cerebellar Ataxia" and "Cerebellar Atrophy". They are really quite different "animals". One is a symptoms label and the other a diagnosable physiological disorder.

There are many incarnations and degrees of severity and progressivity of cerebellar atrophy. At the present state of medical science there is no reversal path for atrophy of any organ and no panacea medicinal treatment or cure. But it will not always be so - because recent developments in stem-cell regrowth of atrophied cells hold enormous promise for the future.

Apparently, when stricken later in life, one simply becomes increasingly disoriented and can't walk at all whereas these children seem quite mobile and able to do various tasks, they just can't stand up easily nor do they have any inner urge to do so.
From Web MD:

Aniridia-Cerebellar Ataxia-Mental Deficiency, also known as Gillespie Syndrome, is an extremely rare inherited disorder that is characterized by partial absence (aplasia) of the colored portion (iris) of the eye (Partial Aniridia), impaired coordination of voluntary movements due to underdevelopment (hypoplasia) of the brain's cerebellum (cerebellar ataxia), and mental retardation. Many affected individuals also exhibit a delay in the acquisition of skills requiring coordination of muscular and mental activity (psychomotor retardation). Aniridia-Cerebellar Ataxia-Mental Deficiency is believed to be inherited as an autosomal recessive genetic trait.

It seems, the family in Turkey, instead of trying to impose a bipedal regime on their children, let them follow nature's course. The good health and seeming happiness of the children in this case seems to make this a wise choice. I, for example, used to imitate animals such as using the much better otter system of swimming which is both safer and conserves energy in the most amazing way, one can swim effortlessly literally for miles by slithering through the water with small moves of the hands and feet to give more propulsion. It still baffles me why people want to swim the hard way, thrashing violently through the water instead of literally gliding along the surface, rolling over periodically.

I wonder if children suffering from this genetic problem are really being helped by shoving them into the bipedal straight jacket? After all, it isn't the most efficient way of getting around! Ask any four legged creature. They will look at you funny.

I grew up in high mountains with very thin air and I learned at about three years of age, four legs good, two legs, bad. I scrambled about the rocks and thorns on all four, moving along with absolute assurance. You can bet, I never fell down. By the time I was about nine, I could switch from bi to quad effortlessly which is why I could go all over the place as if it were flat ground. Like swimming, the less one thinks as a human, the easier it is.

In ancient chronicles like the Sagas of Iceland, there are tales of people like the children in Turkey. One family in a saga put their two retarded sons out with the sheep each spring and the boys contentedly hung out with them while the normal brothers ran around the oceans, burning people's homes, raping women and stealing stuff. Um. Evolution at work.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Scientists Predict Sun Will Be More Active Next Cycle

2006-03-07T15:11:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

We know not that much about our local star, the Sun. We have many assumptions which often are little more than wishful thinking. Ditto for our galaxy. Anyway, there is great dispute about what is going on with our local star and here is a recent report claiming the sun will spit even more x-rays at us this coming Solar Cycle which is bad news on several fronts.

From Associated Press:

A new computer model suggests that the next solar cycle will be more active than the previous one, potentially spawning magnetic storms that will be more severe and disruptive to communication systems.

The next sunspot cycle will be between 30 percent to 50 percent more intense than the last one, scientists said Monday.

Global warming has several elements three of which are key: relative distance from the sun, composition of the atmosphere and how much energy the sun is producing.

For example, if the sun shuts down sunspot activity, it gets mighty cold here. The more active the sun, the hotter it gets. Add a lot of fresh CO2 to the atmosphere and you get really serious global warming. The summer of tremendous solar activity we had several years ago knocked out electricity across the planet. It also disrupted communications and it withered the trees, I know my oaks didn't like it one bit.

The causes of the great ice ages are still very sketchy. The more we learn the less we can pin down the exact causes. Since this planet and the sun are both very dynamic systems, this means there are so many variables, it is hard to know what the trigger is, exactly. All we know is, there is a definite rhythm and this pulse is probably triggered by the interaction of the sun and the seas.

The new prediction is at odds with previous forecasts, which suggested that the intensity of the next solar cycle would be measurably smaller.

I don't know about anyone else but my hair was standing on end, the last cycle. Especially the x-ray episodes.

Exploding stars spit out x-rays. Stars turning into black holes spit out x-rays. X-ray events are quite noticable and not "normal" at least, if the object is a "regular" star still. According to my father, examination of recent Greenland core samples suggest the sun spat out some really nasty x-rays back 44,000 years ago, a significant time zone. If you google that number, you get some interesting biological hits. One thing, Homosapiens came pouring out of Africa. One wonders if the extended session dried out that continent to the point, humans had to forage much further and eat many more relatives who had been chased out earlier? We still know so little.

Maybe this session of superheating started the deep melting of the glacial icepacks? This would explain all the icedam lakes that ruptured so violently over the next 10,000 years.

If the sun does become seriously active, this means global warming will shoot up much faster. This will have a host of geological effects that puny dams and buildings won't stand a chance against. Like the sea suddenly rising a dozen feet or so?

We just don't know. Well, it will be very interesting, won't it?

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Humans Ate Neanderthals And Are Eating Bonobos Today

2006-03-06T10:32:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bonobos are about to go extinct. Humans are eating them just like we ate all our nearest relatives who weren't hiding in deep jungles. Humans love cannibalism.

From AP:

Scientists are struggling to save the fast-disappearing bonobo, the gentle "hippie chimp" known for resolving squabbles through sex rather than violence.

Unfortunately, bonobos are prized by Congolese for their tasty meat, and many villagers who are illegally hunting the wiry, wizen-faced apes don't realize how close their prey is to extinction.

"Bonobos are an icon for peace and love, the world's 'hippie chimps,"' said Sally Coxe of the Washington-based Bonobo Conservation Initiative. "To let them die off would be a catastrophe."

The average American was taught to hate hippies. I remember because I was a hippie, though a rather violent hippie, thus the name, "The Violent Hippie Chick". Anyway, humans, hardly the paragon of virtues beloved by gods, are actually vicious cannibals that have eaten vast swaths of the planet's lifeforms into extinction. In Darwin's famous book about Evolution, he illustrates a successful bird strategy, the Passenger Pigeon, that adapted to modern farming techniques only by the time his book was published, the last Passenger Pigeon flocks were being decimated and work on annihilating the vast herds of buffalo had begun.

Humans killing bonobos claim the meat tastes yummy. Indeed, even with chimpanzees, it is the same, they go nuts over the delicacy of eating other monkey species and even eating each other's babies is a tasty treat. Humans were successful because we set up various complicated rules governing who to eat. For example, eating one's mate is a no-no and eating mother and sister and brother was bad, too. Indeed, as the ring of "do not eat" grew, the brains figuring this out grew, too. Being able to remember all the many rules, none of which are natural or inherited, meant having a large brain that is large enough to figure out how to teach complex social "do not eat/OK to eat" rules. Part of this system was "how to have sex, have children and not kill each other" rules.

These rules are breaking down rapidly across the board, across the planet. Due to overpopulation, the value of one's siblings, ones clan, ones own children is dropping. In some hard-pressed areas, selling the children into slavery and retaining only one is growing common.

Within "civilized" communities, the value of large families clinging together in the face of outsiders is in steep decline, too. Each generation, it grows less and less, each is sent out on their own and no one gives a hoot what happens next.

Back in the old times when the only way to survive was to protect the children collectively and have as large a clan as possible, humans did keep the genes for cooperation and love intact along with the mental gymnastics for avoiding T-rexing family members. From the BBC:

Scientists have long debated what leads people to "act out of the goodness of their hearts" by helping non-relatives regardless of any benefits for themselves.

Human society depends on people being able to collaborate with others - donating to charity, paying taxes and so on - and many scientists have argued that altruism is a uniquely human function, hard-wired into our brains.

The latest study suggests it is a strong human trait, perhaps present more than six million years ago in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.

"This is the first experiment showing altruistic helping towards goals in any non-human primate," said Felix Warneken, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

"It's been claimed chimpanzees act mainly for their own ends; but in our experiment, there was no reward and they still helped."

Humans and even apes will selflessly help strangers because deep inside us resides this "if you help this person, they might be carrying your genes" which is operational in a small community. As humans killed off all rivals and relatives, the need to recognize "this person has our genes" grew. I suspect one reason why we, unlike any ape or monkey, show a great deal of the white of our eyes is for identifying humans when all our other features looked similar to our nearer relatives. Animals show the white of the eyes only when very angry or very scared. We look like that all the time. We think of this state of being as natural but if any human stares at any animal, it flips them out. This is probably why zoo animals are very stressed at first before they figure the scary white eyed creatures are harmless.

"Altuism" in small children is problematic. They love to "help" but they also are in a continuous power struggle with mother in particular, father, if he is around and interacting. The tiniest baby will wail for attention. They will refuse to cooperate for the sheer joy of flexing their tiny wills. Then, at about 2 years of age, the storm breaks and it becomes a battle of wits and blunt strength to reel in the increasingly imperious tots. This is true of all animals dependent upon a parent. And they will compete ruthlessly with siblings until they learn the value of siblings.

The reason why total strangers will die for Bush, for example, is due to people exploiting this hard wiring which assumes human-like creatures must be related, therefore, one benefits if one dies for them. I will note that the Bush clan doesn't practice this at all which means the old Darwinian reciprical grooming genetics steps in. Namely, creatures able to tell if they are being "cheated" in reciprocation retaliate.

Another way of saying, the s**t is going to hit the fan, here.

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Bring On the Spear Carriers
Orangatangs Use Tools Too
Study Finds Chimps Act Like Bush
Schoedinger's Box
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Comet Pojmanski Skims Past Earth, Seen At Sunrise

2006-03-06T10:03:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Another celestial visitor. Comet Pojmanski swung around the sun and turned a stunning bright blue including the tail. Astronomers used to think all comets were the same, mostly water. Turns out they are as individual as different planets. This shouldn't surprise us at all.

From NASA:

Right now, however, a new comet has brightened unexpectedly and is visible as a faint streak to the unaided northern observer in the eastern morning sky just before sunrise. Binoculars may help. Comet Pojmanski, officially designated C/2006 A1 and discovered only in January, now sports a turquoise tail several times longer than the full moon. Comet Pojmanski's ion tail is due to gas particles expelled by the comet being pushed away from the Sun by the solar wind, the same wind that ionizes gas in the tail causing its blue tint. Pictured above as it appeared only last week, Comet Pojmanski has now begun to fade as its orbit around the Sun takes it further from the Earth.

Strictly for early birds. All comets are lovely to look at, they are delicate veils streaming in the cosmic wind. Unlike shooting stars which are items falling into our planetary well. The best place to view these comets remains mountain tops which is why observatories are set up there (except for Yerkes and campus-based observatories, of course!)

The view from my deck is blocked by the Taconic mountains to the east, alas. And my headcold prevents climbing the mountain to see higher up. But the photos are lovely. It is like a saphire ring, a clear, brilliant, sharp blue, the blue one sees in a stained glass window at Chartes sort of blue.

Like so many items whizzing past us, this comet is the first time we noticed it, probably won't be back for a while. It is a sharp reminder that we are very vulerable to being hit by such items and the window of knowledge of their passage is not much longer than half a year.

Not that anyone seems to care? Heck, NASA and our military are too busy spying on us to care, it seems.

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

NYC Planetarium Doing Collision Show That Explains Nothing

2006-03-06T07:53:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

This illustration shows classic cosmic theory, the Big Bang happened and everything flew outwards, evenly. Everything is flowing away and will fly apart faster and faster until it all burns up and dissappears into nothingness or rips apart suddenly because it is flying away faster and faster thanks to mysterious "dark matter." This is just plain silly.

From the NYT:

The show is a $3 million production by NASA and the American Museum of Natural History, where Mr. Emmart is the director of astrovisualization at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Narrated by Robert Redford, the show provides a bold and colorful look at the universe — with colliding stars, planets and even galaxies — based on theories and data collected from 30 scientists around the world.

"There can't be anything wrong, factually or visually, with anything about this presentation," said Michael Shara, curator of astrophysics at the museum. "It has to be consistent with what is being written in the science journals."

This show includes the future Andromeda/Milky Way (that's us!) merger. Again and again, I wonder how astronomers can swallow the BS about the universe expanding faster and faster. This is pure lunacy. Funny, how the word for crazy uses the image of the moon.

While most of the presentation focuses on the past, the show includes a preview of what scientists predict will happen in two billion years: a collision between Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way, and its nearest neighbor, Andromeda, that will create one vast new galaxy.

"The two galaxies," Mr. Braun said, "are drifting toward each other right now."

According to my diagram, this is impossible. If everything is flying apart, it can't be crashing together. There is no way we can cross paths. Mapping the universe has shown clearly "strings" of matter. Instead of a uniform field, the pesky stellar stuff likes to lump itself along long lines leading to big globular clusters. The question is, are these globular clusters sliding into each other, too?

Any logical system should take a line of reasoning and run it to the logical conclusion and if data doesn't match then the line of reasoning is flawed.

Astronomy is in crisis mode right now. To maintain older theories, reality has to be tormented increasingly to the point of creating stuff out of whole cloth which is fun and stupid. If there is an easy explanation for something then most likely, that is the explanation!

So, if galaxies are falling INTO each other's gravity wells and all smaller galaxies are falling into bigger galactic gravity wells then this means the universe isn't shooting outwards at all, it is FALLING INWARDS. The curve of space-time gives us the illusion of falling outwards just like when one is in freefall going into a planet, one thinks one is weightless even though one is very definitely falling relentlessly. Space if full of such contrary-wise perceptions which is why Einstein's understanding of relativity was such a brilliant revelation.

I am no astronomer, I was born at an observatory and grew up in them, quite literally, my bedroom was in an observatory for a while, even. Not having to ever have to take an exam, I never had to cough up and drill into my head, standard theoretic stuff so I have nothing to loose to examine the facts coming in and the facts are, ALL GALAXIES ARE IN FREE FALL!

And what is attracting all of them, the ultimate planet, so to speak, the thing causing this?

Gravity. Simple gravity. The energy of the Big Bang has been expended and now consolidation is going on as all the Big Bang stellar debrie is being suctioned up by giant black holes. Look at our galaxy, looks like an Electrolux vacuum cleaner, the dirty debrie circling down into the center. Smaller galaxies being ripped apart as they slither down like string or ribbon being devoured by the vacuum cleaner.

I happen to like this diagram. :)

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Dust Bowl/Firestorm Drought Grips Midwest

2006-03-05T19:58:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Americans don't want to fix the global warming stuff so we get to suffer. The latest news doesn't surprise me. Terrible heat/drought is going to devastate the Midwest this year and for several years to come. This does affect me here on my own mountain. It is way too dry. And it is March. Hurricane Rita couldn't even penetrate Houston but was driven up the Mississippi due to the long term high over the Colorado Rockies.

From the Morris Daily Herald:

Accu-Weather.com meteorologists have warned oceanic conditions similar to those that triggered the ruinous "Dust Bowl" drought again appear to be in place.

The exceptionally warm Atlantic waters that played a major role in the record-breaking 2005 hurricane season, coupled with cooler-than-normal Pacific waters, are weakening and changing the course of a low-level jet stream that normally channels moisture into the Great Plains.

Effects are starting to be felt in "America's breadbasket," as the southern Great Plains region is already suffering from higher temperatures and a prolonged lack of precipitation.

Never in my life did I see firestorms sweeping the plains in the middle of winter. Absolutely never.

The fantasy that we can grow stuff like switchgrass and continue to tool around in big SUVs forever is plainly silly. The reason the dust bowl happened was because the harvest failed. Cows were turned loose to graze on the stubs of the wheat fields because there was no more grass to graze, the land was plowed up and dust storms started.

Today, there isn't dust storms. There are firestorms! Is this an improvement? When the fire sweeps through, usually in nature, this happens ONLY during thunderstorms, it rains and the grass regenerates only these fires are manmade and happen when it is bone dry and no rain on the horizon.

Already, shipping on the tributaries of the Mississippi valley system are drying up so badly, farmers are being told they can't irrigate using these waters. Even so, boats are grounding. The Mississippi itself is still going strong thanks to the snow and rain that has pulled us out of the summer drought last year, barely. Thanks to some pretty big hurricanes. We got over 7" of rain in one day, here, an amazing amount, so the stats look OK for the year but it was definitely a bone dry/soaking wet year, not a good thing, not at all.

The ideal is rain or snow at least once a week!

The Dust Bowl, which lasted from 1931-1939, was a severe drought that struck a wide swath of the Great Plains.

It was a catastrophic blow to the U.S. economy, which was already staggering under the weight of the Great Depression.

The Dust Bowl was the worst drought in U.S. history, eventually covering more than 75 percent of the country.

And some of the worst hurricanes, thanks to the warm water! And many people forget, our country's problems began when the Mississippi had the Great Flood. That and hurricanes flattening Florida hammered the economy of "the little people" and despite the housing/stock bubbles, regular people couldn't pay their mortgages and loans in the Midwest and the drought finished off the survivors who weren't hit by the floods and voila, total bank failures compounded, coast to coast.

Already, the Midwest reels from the blows from Mother Nature. The coast isn't nearly so bad off thanks to huge infusions of futile government funds but this isn't working since Mother Nature's belly already swells with the embryoes of a whole lot of hurricanes. Eventually the government program of encouraging and lavishing funds on futile pleasure housing in places Nature intends to put under water will fail, after bankrupting the government, of course.

"The agricultural practices at the time, combined with a long period of drought, caused severe damage to farmland in the region. Eventually the topsoil dried up to the point where it was swept away as great clouds of choking dust that stretched for miles."

Continued Mohler, "Today's agricultural practices, such as crop rotation and improved irrigation, as well as drought-resistant hybrid crops, would likely prevent the landscape from being as ruined as it was during the 1930s.

For example, Illinois endured a terrible drought in 2005, but the state's corn yield was close to normal. However, a multiyear drought in the Great Plains would still be devastating for the nation."

The first two years of a drought, the soil still has moisture. It is when year three and four come into play that the drying out means reduction of harvests. And crop rotation? What is that? I see little of that, most simply use fertilizer to keep the money flowing, if you let fields go fallow, the money drops off and no one wants that, it used to be, the government paid farmers to rotate crops thanks to the Dust Bowl lessons but hark, what happened?

OH! The GOP ended this program and said, "Freedom to farm as you wish!" and so of course, there is no crop rotation anymore.

Meanwhile, New Orleans has an obvious problem, termites. From Reuters:

An emptied New Orleans is seeing the return of one long-time resident it could do without: the termite.

Scientists had predicted the dirty salt water that flooded New Orleans in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina would spell the demise of the voracious Formosan subterranean termites that have plagued the city for more than 50 years.

But Formosans, unlike native termites, can establish colonies in trees or buildings and probably fled to higher ground when Katrina's rains started, insect experts said.

I was told by the Tohono O'odham at Kitt Peak that if you suddenly notice all the ants running around frantically, this means the Thunder Gods are near. Ants and termites can sense barometric changes with esquisite ease. And they act, frantically, on the information. They are very vulnerable to flooding.

Anyone who thinks floods will eliminate them is nuts. They are the Elder Ones, been around since...land was colonized and they survived the disaster of the Permian extinction, too! Something that killed of 90% of all living things couldn't kill them, nor cockroaches. If we nuke the world these three insect families will do just fine, thank you!

Termites love wet wood that dries out. They don't like wet wood that is wet, makes for a nasty home, the best is wood that is weak which they can chew up and digest easily and tunnel inside. This is why you only see them when they fly off to mate. I see them when people ask why a beam is weak and I poke a hole in it and see the buggers crawling around, inside.

New Orleans' flooded houses are doomed. Even if one strips the walls, the wood has been wet for some time and is now sauteed to the delight of these little bugs. Poisoning the wood might keep them temporarily at bay but they evolve rapidly, remember, they survived the Permian extinction! All the trees were poisoned by the salt water and the oil pollution. The salt didn't penetrate the deep wood of the trees, just the roots. So these trees are now totally yummy for the bugs and they will turn the entire ecosystem into pulp. Sort of human in their industry, no?

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Peculiar Story Of Dolphins Fleeing Florida Coastal Waters

2006-03-05T07:56:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I look for odd stories like this one. Last year we witnessed a number of strange water events when all the sea creatures would suddenly migrate out of deadly water territory. This is always a bad sign. Just this winter, we see bottom feeding fish in North Carolina rush to the shore because the water was unihabitable lower down.

From Ecoenquirer:

Marine researchers who have been observing the same pod of dolphins off Florida's eastern coast for three years have now, for the first time, photographed the dolphins swimming directly northward.

"These bottlenose dolphins, possibly the smartest creatures on Earth, were observed swimming directly northward", said Prof. Bonita Krillman. "Given the recently observed warming of the tropical oceans, we theorize that this pod is heading poleward in search of cooler waters".

Underwater listening devices, used to pick up the normal playful squeals of the fun-loving dolphins, recorded squeals with a noticably different timbre, the researchers reported. "They sounded more terrified than playful", claimed Crystal Dearing, a graduate student working toward a degree in Anthropogenic Environmental Disasters at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. "They sounded distressed and fearful".

The article goes on to suggest hyper warm waters caused the flight. Thre are no water temperature measurements within the article. But what struck me was the story is similar to quite a few other stories this last year all of which features sea animals very suddenly stopping normal foraging behavior and just taking off as fast as possible.

The "dead zones" were a serious problem last August, the Gulf in particular. That body of water rapidly becomes a hot tub and resembles more and more the way the ocean was at the beginning of the great Permian extinction.

It's not clear why the various kinds of sea turtles are washing ashore.

"It may or may not be associated with red tide," said Cianciolo. "They tend to show symptoms of what's called a red tide intoxication, but you have to take a lot of samples and they must go through testing to actually determine that."

Dive instructor Michael Miller took underwater video to try to figure out the mystery.

"Right now, anywhere we go from shore to 20 miles offshore, from Sarasota to Tarpon Springs, we can't find a single creature alive on the bottom right now," said Miller.

Miller says he's never seen such death and devastation under water in his 20 years of diving.

Here is yet another, earlier posting about die-offs.

The marine and land and air worlds seem embroiled in changes due to global warming. So many odd things in just a few days!

Just the other day, I wrote about the dead sea on the coast of Florida. Nothing, absolutely nothing above the single cell creatures, is alive there. Now there is more news from that area. From the Sun Herald:
A bizarre freeway of fish swimming by the thousands along the shore of Englewood Beach Thursday morning left crowds of beach-goers agog and marine biologists bewildered.

"I've lived her for 10 years, and I've never seen anything like this. It's incredible," said Bob Ricci of Englewood.

Beach-goers reported that a wide variety of sea creatures came swimming south in a narrow band close to the beach at mid-morning.

It is a lot scarier than mere warm water. These mass diasporas are a warning sign. Humans can avoid thinking about or doing things about the messes we are making because we live in energy bubbles.

Each summer, the ozone alert areas have grown. I remember in my youth, one had to do to the LA valleys to find unbreathable air or visit Pittsburgh when it was an industrial giant. The pollution was mostly local. Over my lifetime, the number of powerplants and cars have multiplied hugely and it is quite noticable. Each summer, now, we get ozone alerts that cover the entire eastern half of the continent!

I stagger around my forest, watching the trees literally struggle to filter the carbon dioxide. Most humans here simply shut themselves off from the bad air they are creating. Their cool, pleasant environments let them laugh at the hazy brown muck outside. As this process accelerates global warming the need to use more energy to create bigger bubbles makes things worse and worse.

I have noticed the sea life alarms are starting at a ridiculously early time this year, it isn't even springtime yet! I expect many stories of suffering wildlife fleeing this summer.

Then there are the arctic lifeforms. From Reuters:

The Antarctic ice sheet shrank significantly during the past three years, according to the findings of a NASA study released on Thursday.

Using data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), scientists concluded that Antarctica's ice sheet decreased by about 152 cubic kilometers annually from April 2002 to August 2005.

The estimated loss was enough to raise global sea level about 1.2 millimeters (0.04724 inch) during the study period or about 13 percent of the overall observed sea level rise for the same period, according to the study conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

That is about how much water the United States consumes in three months and represents a change of about 0.4 millimeter (0.01575 inch) per year to global sea level rise, the study concluded.

Like watching the water flow into the hull of the Titanic. The meltoff of the Antarctic and Greenland land masses won't be slow and steady but rather, as it reaches a tipping state, sudden.

We already know the glacial melt that started our latest interglacial was extremely swift. The coastlines changed very rapidly and rainfall patterns shifted swiftly, too, human ability to migrate mitigated the difficulties of dealing with these rapid changes but this is certainly not true today.

We are as vulnerable as the polar bears, in this regard, for the greater mass of humanity has chosen to live on the edge of the sea or on flat places easily flooded by rising oceans.

We know that vast floods relandscaped the Pacific Northwest when the glaciers melted rapidly forming huge lakes that suddenly gave way. If we think this won't happen in Antarctica we are nuts. Already we know there are lakes of ancient water under the glaciers there. This could rapidly become a problem if they grow and grow.

Meanwhile, Africa is going dry. From the BBC:

Africa could be faced with 25% less water by the end of the century because of global warming, scientists have warned in a new report.

The research, published in the journal Science, shows geographical factors will amplify changes in rainfall patterns resulting from climate change.

Semi-arid areas such as southern Africa would be the most vulnerable.

Africa has no body of water like the Great Lakes. And even here, we have increasing problems in the desert communities where many people are moving in. The Colorado river is a mere stream by the time it reaches Mexico. As the Rockies heat up, there is less and less year round snow to feed the streams feeding into the Colorado River, for example.

In Africa, it is even worse. The larger, none-rift zone lakes are rapidly drying up like Lake Chad, for example. The Indian Ocean on the east side of Africa is becoming nearly as hot as the Gulf of Mexico. Between overfishing and die-offs, life forms are suffering more and more.

Many years ago when the UN decided to drill lots of wells in Africa, I was against this because it would cause overgrazing. I knew what would happen next because this was happening back then, in America. The government made water available and then cattle ranchers would then beef up their herds to infinity and destroy the land causing desertfication. The spread of cholla cacti is a vicious reminder of what happens next. Namely, inedible, thorny, harsh plants colonize the former grasslands.

In Africa, all the tribes wanted as many livestock as possible because this represents wealth and power so they overwhelmed all the wells which went dry, anyway. Around the wellheads, deserts bloomed as animals stripped the landscape of all plant life.

The desire to preserve elephants in parks had the same effect. Elephants are like my ox team; they can uproot or pull down fairly big trees, they can strip the bark or tear off the tree's branches to eat the leaves. Elephants are very destructive if they are confined. Like us humans.

The balance of nature means no species should be allowed to dominate.

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Earthquake and Volcanic Activity in the Caribbean

2006-03-04T20:45:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As the earth flexes and shivers after the Great Boxing Day Quake, various parts are now responding to the rapid changes over in Asia and the Pacific Plate.

I got this email the other day from Marty Salo:

HUH? What's going on here? Seems like alot of activity recently, and at different depths.

MAG UTC DATE-TIMy/m/d h:m:s LAT
deg LON
deg DEPTH
km LOCATION
MAP 3.6 2006/03/03 14:36:36 19.113 -63.991 5.0 55 km ( 34 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 4.4 2006/03/03 13:09:31 19.060 -63.681 39.3 77 km ( 48 mi) ENE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.8 2006/03/03 10:07:34 19.160 -63.900 15.5 65 km ( 40 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.8 2006/03/03 09:53:32 19.257 -63.597 21.7 96 km ( 60 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.4 2006/03/03 09:02:06 19.007 -64.184 3.5 34 km ( 21 mi) NNE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 2.2 2006/03/03 08:37:00 18.352 -64.966 41.1 4 km ( 2 mi) W of CHARLOTTE AMALIE, US Virgin Islands
MAP 3.2 2006/03/03 08:30:41 19.032 -63.947 6.6 52 km ( 32 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 2.8 2006/03/03 08:16:58 19.127 -65.602 24.6 82 km ( 51 mi) NNE of Vieques, PR
MAP 3.2 2006/03/03 07:18:38 19.242 -63.813 24.8 78 km ( 48 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.3 2006/03/03 07:05:13 18.985 -63.826 7.8 59 km ( 37 mi) ENE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.5 2006/03/03 03:53:41 19.177 -63.549 6.0 95 km ( 59 mi) ENE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.3 2006/03/03 03:51:43 19.357 -63.644 20.3 100 km ( 62 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.7 2006/03/03 03:39:31 19.122 -63.931 8.3 60 km ( 37 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.6 2006/03/03 02:32:15 19.182 -63.828 20.0 72 km ( 45 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.4 2006/03/03 02:23:45 18.740 -63.560 11.1 75 km ( 47 mi) ENE of West End, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.6 2006/03/03 02:21:29 19.452 -63.946 60.1 89 km ( 56 mi) NNE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.7 2006/03/03 02:13:46 19.011 -63.823 10.0 61 km ( 38 mi) ENE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.5 2006/03/03 01:32:46 19.090 -63.724 23.9 74 km ( 46 mi) ENE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.8 2006/03/03 01:20:45 19.137 -63.883 5.0 65 km ( 40 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.3 2006/03/03 01:18:52 19.125 -63.795 13.4 71 km ( 44 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 2.2 2006/03/03 00:50:44 18.163 -67.322 30.0 17 km ( 11 mi) WNW of Puerto Real, PR
MAP 3.2 2006/03/03 00:50:13 19.087 -63.539 24.8 91 km ( 57 mi) ENE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.4 2006/03/03 00:42:28 18.970 -63.752 31.5 65 km ( 41 mi) ENE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.7 2006/03/03 00:25:37 19.137 -63.971 5.0 58 km ( 36 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 2.3 2006/03/03 00:22:31 19.089 -64.076 16.8 47 km ( 29 mi) NNE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.2 2006/03/03 00:21:17 19.053 -64.044 2.9 46 km ( 29 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.3 2006/03/03 00:19:55 19.056 -63.892 15.0 58 km ( 36 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.2 2006/03/03 00:19:53 19.073 -63.774 20.2 69 km ( 43 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.5 2006/03/03 00:18:12 19.104 -63.916 8.1 59 km ( 37 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.1 2006/03/03 00:16:27 19.115 -63.797 15.0 70 km ( 43 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.4 2006/03/03 00:04:44 18.757 -63.617 30.1 71 km ( 44 mi) NE of West End, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.7 2006/03/02 23:59:12 19.282 -63.582 50.5 99 km ( 61 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 2.3 2006/03/02 23:58:46 18.441 -63.639 29.3 57 km ( 36 mi) E of West End, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.5 2006/03/02 23:57:11 19.291 -63.687 30.1 91 km ( 57 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 2.8 2006/03/02 23:56:34 19.069 -63.963 42.8 53 km ( 33 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.6 2006/03/02 23:53:57 19.061 -63.907 31.3 57 km ( 35 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.8 2006/03/02 23:51:35 19.147 -63.803 5.0 71 km ( 44 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.7 2006/03/02 23:45:36 19.139 -63.791 15.1 72 km ( 45 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 5.3 2006/03/02 23:35:44 19.358 -63.787 24.8 89 km ( 56 mi) NE of Settlement, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.1 2006/03/02 21:25:08 18.610 -67.584 5.0 46 km ( 29 mi) NW of Rincón, PR
MAP 3.3 2006/03/02 08:25:53 19.427 -68.082 43.7 111 km ( 69 mi) NE of Higüey, Dominican Republic
MAP 3.4 2006/03/01 12:38:24 18.855 -68.701 58.2 26 km ( 16 mi) N of Higüey, Dominican Republic
MAP 3.2 2006/03/01 06:44:57 18.084 -67.878 101.2 72 km ( 45 mi) WSW of Stella, PR
MAP 3.2 2006/03/01 01:35:28 18.135 -64.249 5.0 30 km ( 19 mi) SSW of West End, British Virgin Islands
MAP 3.4 2006/02/28 15:14:00 18.040 -67.915 72.6 77 km ( 48 mi) W of Puerto Real, PR
MAP 2.6 2006/02/28 14:12:39 18.507 -66.266 119.8 5 km ( 3 mi) N of Dorado, PR
MAP 2.8 2006/02/28 12:25:27 19.113 -67.121 10.0 69 km ( 43 mi) N of Isabela, PR
MAP 3.2 2006/02/28 11:12:13 19.084 -67.144 10.0 66 km ( 41 mi) N of Isabela, PR
MAP 2.8 2006/02/28 06:11:18 18.466 -66.082 108.8 6 km ( 4 mi) NNW of San Juan, PR
MAP 3.2 2006/02/28 01:32:34 18.754 -67.401 16.0 44 km ( 27 mi) NW of Aguadilla, PR
MAP 3.5 2006/02/27 23:06:41 17.452 -68.299 118.2 130 km ( 81 mi) SSE of La Romana, Dominican Republic
MAP 2.8 2006/02/27 10:15:07 18.221 -67.197 87.1 6 km ( 4 mi) WNW of Mayagüez, PR
MAP 3.0 2006/02/27 04:09:11 18.231 -67.194 123.8 6 km ( 4 mi) S of La Playa, PR
MAP 3.6 2006/02/27 02:08:45 19.471 -68.882 47.1 55 km ( 34 mi) ENE of Samaná, Dominican Republic
MAP 2.7 2006/02/26 19:12:44 18.172 -67.390 49.9 23 km ( 14 mi) SW of Stella, PR
MAP 2.5 2006/02/26 10:26:00 18.114 -66.075 23.5 3 km ( 2 mi) ESE of G. L. García, PR
MAP 2.3 2006/02/26 09:54:51 18.170 -66.701 20.4 3 km ( 2 mi) ENE of Adjuntas, PR
MAP 2.5 2006/02/26 07:41:01 18.699 -66.457 58.2 27 km ( 17 mi) N of Tierras Nuevas Poniente, PR
MAP 3.1 2006/02/26 00:32:59 19.438 -65.469 4.3 119 km ( 74 mi) NNE of Vieques, PR
MAP 2.9 2006/02/25 09:21:43 18.979 -65.038 20.9 70 km ( 44 mi) NNW of Little Harbour, British Virgin Islands
MAP 4.4 2006/02/25 06:43:34 18.264 -68.433 160.4 49 km ( 31 mi) SE of Higüey, Dominican Republic

I have been looking at the greater quakes in this area. The recent quake in the Gulf of Mexico startled me a bit.

I have noticed over the last year or so, many earthquakes like to happen at 10.0 km. Whether under water or on land. It is like the earth's crust has this blanket on top that operates independent of the lower layers. Some of our nastiest quakes occur at this depth, the earth's blanket being shaken and tugged like Mother Nature is straightening out the bed.

The geology where this happened is interesting because it isn't all that prone to earthquakes. Just last week, I noted there was a much gentler earthquake right in New Orleans just when tornadoes were hitting that poor city! The New Madrid Fault has been shaking a bit, lately. As if it were trembling, waiting for something.

Indeed, many things will happen now. About 100 years ago, there was a rash of activity in the Caribbean. One volcano belched poison fumes

On 8th May 1902, Mt Pelée, in Martinique erupted. A glowing avalanche (pyroclastic flow) from the eruption destroyed the town of St Pierre and its 28,000 inhabitants. Only one person, a prisoner, survived.

In 1902, the Soufriere volcano in St Vincent erupted. The eruption began on 6th May, 1902 and continued until 30th March, 1903. 1,565 people were killed and extensive damage was done to agriculture in the areas around the volcano. The Soufriere volcano erupted again in 1979.Between 2001,Kick'em Jenny also showed signs of activity which placed the suronding islands on yellow alert.

The poor prisoner was rescued. He made his living thereafter, appearing at theaters and carnivals.

I was once cleaning out a theater's back rooms, back when I used to go on stage, and I found a huge banner which was tattered and very old. "The ONLY surivor of Mt. Pele! See him reenact historic event!" I used to dance the works of the trio of famous American modern dancers, the three women who created modern dance, Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller and Ruth St. Denis. St. Denis did this wonderful dance with 100 yds of silk, called "Mt. Pele Erupts" which I drew above based on a very old photo of this dance.

Since the volcanoes haven't killed thousands in recent memory, we tend to forget this daisy chain along the Caribbean/Atlantic subjunction zone.

In the last three days, the earthquakes have been not only greater in intensity but the ones along Central America have been very active, too. This leads into the San Andreas rift zone quakes. This rift has been onimously quiet the last year, a bad sign.

Obviously, the Pacific Plate is shoving against Central America which is, in turn, pinching the Caribbean Plate since the Atlanic, moving slower but just as relentlessly, has been having quite a few 5+ earthquake events this last six months. One can almost feel the earth bulging.

The Super Volcano is in the news today, too. This is the mega monster that heaves and sighs barely under the surface of the earth in Yellowstone. It has been slithering around just under the surface a lot lately. From National Geographic:

Molten rock flowing beneath Yellowstone has been causing the national park to rise and fall, scientists say.

Periodic uplifting and settling has occurred here over the last 15,000 years.

A new model helps explain the latest episode of rapid surface rise and increased geyser activity—from 1997 to 2003—in the volcanically active region in the western United States.

A number of gysers have either returned into action or new ones have appeared. The fact that the lava just under the surface has sighed back down except the caldera walls are still heaving upwards, only means it is alive, not safe at all. We can only guess at what is going on downstairs. The latest images show the caldera's many rings quite clearly and one can sense how the entire region breathes up and down with the lava's movement, it is stunningly huge. Perhaps one can say, it is directly affected by the California rift zone's own activities?

Geology is not only a very exciting field, there is so little we know and of course, understanding how the entire eco-interplanetary/interstellar systems coexist and interact is life and death for us humans! Which takes me back to all the cut backs in science that the GOP is increasingly imposing upon us. This is beyond stupid, it can be fatal!

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Homo Sapiens Killed Off Neanderthalers Very Quickly According To New Information

2006-02-25T17:25:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Homo Sapiens, rather than being the pinnacle of greatness probably should be renamed "Homocidaliens". Evidently, no sooner than our ancestors flooded into Europe, we killed all the Neanderthalers very quickly. This is probably due to better weapons and a ruthless disregard for other species.

From Associated Press:

Neanderthals in Europe were killed off by the advance of modern humans thousands of years earlier than previously believed, losing a competition for food and shelter, according to a scientific study published Wednesday.

The research uses advances in radiocarbon dating to revise understanding of early humans, suggesting they colonized Europe more rapidly and coexisted for a much shorter period with genetic ancestors.

Paul Mellars, professor of prehistory and human evolution at the University of Cambridge and author of the study, said Neanderthals — the species of the Homo genus that lived in Europe and western Asia from around 230,000 years ago to around 29,000 years ago — succumbed much more readily to competition.

Since even today, we kill with only slight cause or no cause at all like Cheney nailing his hunting buddy, what killed off every single Neanderthal wasn't "competition" but "murder." Our invasion of Europe should read like an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

Homo sapiens used their cleverness to outwit the Neanderthalers and we systematically butchered them, man, woman and child. This happened during the Ice Ages when life was difficult for everyone but humans who haven't evolved much except in a regressive way because we figured out how to exploit the Ice Age for ourselves, especially the "skin those you hunt and wear it as an extra covering" part.

Thanks to research in places like Russia, we know our ancestors lived often in tents, they even used mastadon tusks for the arches of these skin tents as well as using reeds to build shelters. The idea that we were cave dwellers is probably due to summer hunting grounds when a cave was OK. In winter, a cave is very cold and unpleasant but in summer, the real difficulty is the various biting insects which anyone hunting in Alaska knows all too well, ha, here in New York, the "no-see-um" season is so annoying, those tiny biting bugs like to fly into eyeballs and noses which is why, when they are spawning which they do three times in summer starting with June, I wear a veil.

Mosquitos and gnats don't go into caves so retreating to them during the summer is probably a survival tactic.

The ability to make structures that were pretty durable for winter shelter meant more babies of the homo sapiens survived the long, dark night of winter back then. Heating a tent is pretty easy, the more the merrier, the bodies warm it up and throw a few mastadon pelts on the sandy floor and it can be quite luxurious for the toddlers to climb around on.

Most likely winter quarters were along the Mediterranean Sea which was much lower so looking for evidence of this is difficult, it being under water, but I suppose the French Riviera was a popular hang out back then, in winter, it gets much balmier the closer to the Med one gets.

"The two sides were competing for the same territories, the same animals and fuel supplies and occupying the same cave spaces. With that kind of competition, the Neanderthals were always going to come out as the losers," said Mellars, whose paper was published in the journal Nature.

Since time immemorial, homo sapiens likes to hunt other humans starting in spring time. It just isn't a winter activity. When humans invaded Europe, they probably brought their buddies, the early dogs, with them. The dogs helped hunt down the remaining Neanderthalers and since they had no dogs, they didn't know when hunting parties were sneaking up on them but when they sought to retaliate, I suppose the dogs did what they do now: bark like crazy and then attack.

The timeline for eradicating the Neanderthalers coincides with one of several possible timelines for the dog/human bond forming. Since the people who reached Australia had dingo dogs already, I am assuming the much later invaders of Europe had them, too. Europe was very dangerous with huge lions hunting in packs, cave bears, giant elephantine trunked and tusked animals, it was a very dangerous environment. I suspect homo sapiens saved it for the last colonization effort because of this and because of the extremes in weather between summer and winter. Developing an ice culture took a lot longer than say, developing social systems to cope with the balmy climate of Australia or India much less, Africa.

Unlike those places, the humans became herd followers and traveled huge distances between summer and winter. Also, due to the lack of fruits and nuts in the summer zone, they were like many far norther tribes were up until this century like the Inuit, for example, total meat/fat/fish eaters.

It looks like homo sapiens didn't co-exist with Neanderthalers from much longer than it took to hunt them down and eradicate them, this took less than 1,000 years. Here is an interesting article about the genetics of human migrations during the last Ice Age. From DNA Heritage Class:

The Neanderthals would have died out around 14,000 years ago leaving the nomadic hunter-gatherer Cro-Magnon (modern man) to pursue the animals of the time. Due to the cold and the need for food, the populations of the day waited the ice age out in the three locations shown on the map. These were the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans and the Ukraine.

These people were skilled in flint-knapping techniques and various tools such as end-scrapers for animal skins and burins for working wood and engraving were common. Cave painting using charcoal had been around for a couple of thousand years although at this time they were now more subtle than mere outline drawings. These artistic expressions are significant as it shows that people are able to obtain some leisure time. Whether this is ‘art for art’s sake’ or objects of ritual is not known.
*snip*
The three groups of humans had taken refuge for so long that their DNA had naturally picked up mutations, and consequently can be defined into different haplogroups. As they spread from these refuges, Haplogroups R1b, I and R1a propagated across Europe.

- Haplogroup R1b is common on the western Atlantic coast as far as Scotland.
- Haplogroup I is common across central Europe and up into Scandinavia.
- Haplogroup R1a is common in eastern Europe and has also spread across into central Asia and as far as India and Pakistan.

These three major haplogroups account for approx 80% of Europe's present-day population.

Despite many later invasions, it seems that the origional ice age colonizers have multiplied and occupy all of Europe. The Laplanders being the most unchanged from their Ice Age culture, following the reindeer and ice to the far north.

It is really amazing, how little populations have changed after we killed off all competitors.
And these are my ancestors.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Wave or Particle? Here or There? Up or Down? The Outer Darkness

2006-02-24T13:20:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

When I was struck by lightning the first time, I fell into a paradoxical universe which I call "the Outer Darkness" but it did have something, a juncture of where all opposites exist simultaneously in the same place at the same time. I couldn't figure out where I fit in this so I fled and started breathing again. I know how Schroedinger's cat feels in that box. It isn't pretty.

From the Register:

A quantum computer at a US University has solved a computational problem without running a program. Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gleaned the answer to an algorithm by combining quantum computation and quantum interrogation (a technique that makes use of wave-particle duality to search a region of space without actually entering that region) in an optical-based quantum computer through a process called "counterfactual computation".

Tremendous power exists where the two worlds intersect, where matter and antimatter cross, where, well, this is what lightning is all about, too. Having been unified with the positive and negative polarity of a strike, I assure you, there is another place that isn't this place at all nor is it the reverse, it is a unifying oneness which results in a pretty powerful explosion.

As scientists used computers to track and figure out the streams of information, the faster the computational abilities, the closer we get to "seeing" this sort of event horizon which incidentally is very much what the surface of a black hole is also about. Common sense logic argues against a paradoxical universe but Mother Nature loves paradoxes, you might as well name Schroedinger's Box "Pandora".

Light itself, the most fleet of foot item in the universe, is a paradox. It is a wave that exists in several time realities while at the same time, it is a particle that has its own existence but doesn't reveal itself except in death, when it betrays itself by striking something and even then, it retains itself in various ways including being incorporated inside of another entity only to be reexpressesd in the form of new energy such as the photons that hit the plants and animals and was "eaten" only to be released again, half a billion years later in the form of energy that powers a lightbulb which produces photon units yet again! It is part of what the unity of nature is all about.

Utilising two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat's team succeeded in counterfactually searching a four-element database using Grover's quantum search algorithm. "By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm," said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper. "We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a 'chained Zeno' effect."

Through clever use of beam splitters and both constructive and destructive interference, the researchers can put each photon in a superposition of taking two paths. Although a photon can occupy multiple places simultaneously, it can only make an actual appearance at one location. Its presence defines its path, and that can, in a very strange way, negate the need for the search algorithm to run.

I bet this is the way bee or ant brains work. They have no brains yet they "think" individually and collectively. They barely have anything approaching a nervous system yet they think as exquisitely as a computer doing alogrithims in the fashion described here.

Ants and bees constantly have to make "choices" like, whether or not to sting me when I walk by the bee hive. I know they are "thinking" because the bees will fly around me, move up and down and signal with their wings, their intentions. When they are happy with me, they make a very faint buzz but if something angers them, the buzz is much louder. And they fly in front of my face instead of next to me.

Computer electronics get more and more hive-like rather than human as we speed up processing. The earlier forms used clumsy direct paths but even so, with the 1-0 paradigm was already not quite human (er, I guess! heh). I brains are, I fear, mostly for processing either our dreams or our waking emotions. We have to train them to do other things like hunt without shooting lobbyists in the face, for example. But even with hunting, the more one does the actual killing in "automode" the more successful one is. This is why we target shoot. I can tell by the sound of the release of the string of a bow if the arrow will hit the target.

Anyway, back to the astonishing news today that paradoxical non-one/non-zero computing can occur under some conditions means very small electronics can be used if this state is stable enough, to do much more than present systems that rely on a cascade of 1s and 0s alternating rather than co-existing. Actually, I hope this sounds even slightly reasonable. Trying to make sense of all this is difficult and actually, I have more questions than answers, myself.

One of the things mentioned by the scientists is the old paradox of Zeno, the race between Achilles and the tortoise.

This paradox turns on much the same considerations as the last. Imagine Achilles chasing a tortoise, and suppose that Achilles is running at 1 m/s, that the tortoise is crawling at 0.1 m/s and that the tortoise starts out 0.9 m ahead of Achilles. On the face of it Achilles should catch the tortoise after 1s, at a distance of 1m from where he starts (and so 0.1m from where the Tortoise starts). We could break Achilles' motion up as we did Atalanta's, into halves, or we could do it as follows: before Achilles can catch the tortoise he must reach the point where the tortoise started. But in the time he takes to do this the tortoise crawls a little further forward. So next Achilles must reach this new point. But in the time it takes Achilles to achieve this the tortoise crawls forward a tiny bit further. And so on to infinity: every time that Achilles reaches the place where the tortoise was the tortoise has had enough time to get a little bit further, and so Achilles has another run to make, and so Achilles has in infinite number of finite catch-ups to do before he can catch the tortoise, and so, Zeno concludes, he never catches the tortoise.

The closer Achillies gets to the pesky turtle, the slower time flows until he crosses the event horizon and ends up with no time or space because both he and the pesky reptile are on a black hole.

Kind of like Iraq for us. You go in, can't get out again. And everything is frozen in time except when bombs go off and then one gets to live in all eternity.

Heh. See? I brought everything back to Bush and Cheney, the Black Hole Twins! Hooray.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Earth's Bell Gives Another Peal--After A Day Of Silence, Big Quake Hits

2006-02-22T22:27:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

At around 11am today, I looked in on the IRIS world earthquake map and noted not a single earthquake was happening in the previous 24 hrs. "Ah, there will be a big earthquake by the end of the day!" I said, being a cheery Cassandra. I figured it would be at the opposite side of the planet's rift valley of the Gulf of California and sure enough, it was at the other huge rift, the one in Africa.

From Associated Press;

A powerful earthquake struck Mozambique early Thursday morning, shaking buildings and forcing people from hundreds of miles around to dash into the streets for safety. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

The magnitude-7.5 quake struck at 12:19 a.m. in southern Mozambique, 140 miles southwest of the coastal city of Beira, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The temblor was felt in neighboring Zimbawe and as far south as Durban, South Africa, 800 miles away.

Elias Daudi, Mozambique's national director of energy, said on state radio that authorities still do not have any information on casualties or the extent of the damage. He also urged people not to return to their buildings because of possible aftershocks.

Already, as I was doing the artwork, a 5.4 aftershock has hit. It is with tremendous interest I see this one, like nearly all the great quakes this last year or so, since the big blow-out next to Indonesia, are at the 10 km level. There is something important separating the 10 km of the crust from what lies below. Some earthquakes are very deep indeed, more than 400 kms. But the really bigs ones this series happen to be at the 10 km level.

Once again, the earth will shake and writhe everywhere and then they will get very light and small, then rhythmic, like the series of near identical depth and intensity daisy chain of quakes that trembled up South and Central America and down the Kamchatka Islands, Japan and the Philippines. It looks like all the great rift valleys are going to readjust themselves for the next five years or so.

Which is why I worry about the huge rift system which is much of California.

Looking at our planet, I wonder if Antarctica isn't moving towards Africa? There is so much we need to know about this planet which is why Bush and his gang are so lacksidasical about it all for they have, at their fingertips, all the tools, all the data.

Scarey, isn't it?

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

RIT Professor Releases New Study About How Black Holes Can Kick Each Other Out Of Merging Galaxies

2006-02-20T22:47:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Yet another study of what is now known to be a very common event: galaxies colliding with each other. This latest paper by Prof. Merritt is tries to explain why smaller galaxies sometimes don't have a black hole core anymore. At the same time this work has been done, astronomers in Britain claim they have located a major galactic black hole split event at HE0450-2958. There is some dispute about this.

From Eurekalert.org:

Virtually all galaxies are believed to contain supermassive black holes at their centers. According to current theory, galaxies grow through mergers with other galaxies. When two galaxies merge, their central black holes form a binary system and revolve around each other, eventually coalescing into a single black hole. The coalescence is driven by the emission of gravitational radiation, as predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity.

Merritt and his colleagues determined how fast a black hole has to move to completely escape a galaxy's gravitational field. They found that larger and brighter galaxies have stronger gravitational fields and would require a bigger kick to eject a black hole than the smaller systems. Likewise, less forceful impacts could jar the black hole out of its home at the center of a galaxy, only to later rebound back into position.

The kicks also call into question theories that would grow supermassive black holes from hierarchical mergers of smaller black holes, starting in the early universe. "The reason is that galaxies were smaller long ago, and the kicks would easily have removed the black holes from them," Merritt says.

According to Merritt and his co-authors, it's more likely that supermassive black holes attained most of their mass through the accretion of gas and that mergers with other black holes only took place after the galaxies had reached roughly their current sizes.

Right on the heels of this paper being published came this news out of Europe. From World Science:

A collision between two galaxies may have led them to spit out a colossal black hole that’s still soaring through space, some astronomers have calculated.

If correct, the proposal would be the first evidence of a possibility astrophysicists have theorized for years: a black hole’s expulsion from a galaxy.

Indirectly, it could also shed light on how some black holes became as big as they are—a longstanding puzzle that’s also entangled with the question of how galaxies formed.

A team of researchers describe the results in a paper to appear in an upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a research journal.

They claim an enigmatic object known as HE0450-2958, estimated to weigh as much as 400 million suns or more, may be the expelled black hole.

I have noticed some people have mocked Europe for "weakening" and becoming a "backwater" for science. This comes mostly from Americans who like to preen themselves for our past accomplishments all of which have been in rising jeopardy thanks to the insane Bush/GOP program to dumb down America.

Prof. Merritt disputes the contention of the Europeans saying, the black hole is still inside the hot gas envelope of the host galaxy so it really hasn't "escaped". I contend, it can't escape. Indeed, no galaxy will ever escape any other, bigger, galaxy's gravitational pool because contrary to present dogma, the universe isn't expanding straight outwards, time/space isn't straight at all, it is increasingly warped as we move further away from the initial impetus of the Big Bang's outward force.

Here is the picture of one black hole spiralling away from its host.

When I was a child, Walt Disney used to produce "science" films and cartoons. One of them was about the space program and tried to explain gravity and how rockets don't fly straight away from the earth but have to spiral away. My parents were asked to view the film before it appeared in public to critique it. Since our family had seven children, we were asked to watch, too. I remember vividly the parts where they illustrated physics by using billiard balls and a cue stick. After the showing, we demanded our father get us a pool table and we played it so much, I used to amuse myself as an adult, knocking those ivories about in bars, astonishing men who thought women couldn't play well.

The main thing was, using the billiard table model gives a totally false mental picture of the cosmos. For it isn't flat. Carl Sagan gave a much better presentation explaining gravity on his famous TV series for PBS. He understood, the critical nature of time/space around any physical body is warped and the only way most items operate in this medium is to spiral in or out. Indeed, comets and rockets skim down into gravitational pools in order to pick up speed as they skim back out again. It seems as if they then fly off, forever, except they don't, for the most part. Most of the rocks that fall down the sun's gravitational pool shoot back into deep space only to return. This was first noted about Halley's comet, a recent spectacular visitor who comes back like clockwork, it being trapped in the inner la Grange orbits of the sun.

Rocks trapped on the sun's galatic plane seldom degrade in orbit. But those which fall down the pool from other angles do degrade and they are a tremendous danger to us since they can hit the planets that orbit the sun. One should suppose, the angle of movement determines whether or not a body "merges" (crashes).

Back to billiards and black holes: it seems pretty certain, the universal rule of thumb in the universe is, all black holes will fall into the gravitational pull of all bigger black holes and since they sometimes crowd in, more than one at a time, it is like 3 D billiards, the new incoming galaxy will act like the cue ball and striking two galaxies that are near to merging, can "kick" one of them outwards. Only this doesn't mean the escaping galaxy is dissappearing into the wild blue yonder.

Here is my schematic drawing of a non-flat billiard game.
If the cue ball hits very hard on only one of the two balls, one of them can be sent spinning away while the cue ball and the remaining ball stay "stationary" vis a vis each other, in other words, the cue ball displaces the second ball. But absolutely nothing in the universe is "stationary" except in relation to only one body at a time. The multi-level complex movements of various bodies makes the fabric of space a very complex entity. If we could see this visually, the ripples, waves and whirlpools would make an ocean in spring flux off the shores of New Foundland look placid.

It is amusing and scary to me, watching scientists riddle out this business of gravity because of course, Einstein first theorized that all things move relative to each other and this relativity warps light and fools the eye of the beholder. This caution has been overcome by using the magic of numbers to express the relative movements. But as always, one has to have a visual image to dump this data into and mine happens to be spiral/circle/round rather than open space that stretches to infinity.

Just like if we shoot a cannonball, it goes x number of meters but eventually falls back to earth. If we shoot a rocket, it goes x numbers of miles and then goes where? We haven't done any studies of this, yet. We have some probes that are eventually going to clear our solar system, they being exceedingly light and thus, able to escape the gravitational pool of the sun which isn't that great, cosmically speaking. Of course, Bush and the political tools running NASA have cut funding for tracking Voyager, for example, which is, to my mind, really stupid.

One thing is certain, in my mind, there is no way Voyager or anything we send out, will escape our galaxy any more than our galaxy can escape all the others going towards the Great Attractor. Which takes us back to the whole business of visuallizing the universe. I would posit that many astronomers are like "flat earth" people, unable to understand emotionally, that the earth isn't the center of the universe. Thinking about space as essentially flat is wrong.

And thinking there is some "dark attractor" that isn't the Great Attractor which is "tearing apart the universe" and all that ripping of the cosmos talk is desperation, trying to think of things as if there is no gravity at work here, on a mega/mega scale.

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Earthquakes Along The Pacific Coast Creeping Closer To California

2006-02-20T11:36:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Ever mill crooked wood? You can saw along the grain, removing one slice after another and then suddenly, the tree tears apart with a loud bang? Earthquakes are like that. The San Andreas fault is particularily dangerous because it is long, complex and is part of a developing rift valley zone. And it is preparing to give a big shove northwards.

Here is the official earthquake map.

DATE &spades &spades &spades &spades &spades LAT &spades LON &spades MAG &spades DEPTH &spades REGION
2/20/06 10:54:28 &spades 18.52 &spades -100.44 &spades 5.1&spades 96.7 GUERRERO, MEXICO
2/20/06 06:56:07 &spades 13.09 &spades -87.65 &spades 5.5 &spades 1.3 HONDURAS

Several days ago, I noticed the planet had no earthquakes bigger than a 4.0 and knew there would be a new series of increasingly violent quakes. This seems to be the cycle ever since the Boxing Day event. As this blog noted just two days ago, there were mirror earthquakes on both sides of the Pacific that were amazingly uniform is size and near the same in depth. I also notes that North America's Pacific regions have had only very slight tremors for the last year unlike 90% of the Pacific and this was not a good sign, such as "dodging the bullet" but a very bad sign for it means the readjustment will be much more severe, sudden and violent.

I have been watching the earth shake for rather a long while. Many quakes are at either 10 km or more than 100 km. The Boxing Day quakes were all at the 10 km depth, for example. Today's quake in Honduras was an oddity: 1.3 km deep which is very odd. Might presauge a volcanic event, for example. I don't know. I just find the tactic of ignoring all of this odd since we, of all people, should be hyper aware of earthquake activity and just like we had a 5+ mag event right outside New Orleans and there wasn't so much as a peep about it in the news.

Indeed, I emailed my article about that quake to a magazine that I quoted in the article and the editor said he was unaware there was even an earthquake!

Why we should imagine that running around, blind as bats, is going to protect us baffles me. Just like the asteroid business: when the event comes, when we must move fast to save our necks, we won't be ready because we don't want to bother ourselves over obvious threats to our lives and limbs.

Meanwhile, we threaten nuclear wars because we are scared and want to be safe?

Well, no terrorist and no nation can do what an aroused and angry Mother Nature can do!

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Salton Sea Sign of California Rifting/ Rising Seas Deadly For State

2006-02-19T12:49:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I used to swim in the Salton Sea. It is a classic rift zone lake. When looking at Africa, for example, we can easily call it "the Great Rift Zone" but when looking at California, we call the same rift, "the Central Valley" which sounds very comforting, right? Well, it is a Great Rift Zone, too, with the earthquakes and volcanoes associated will all such places!

From Associated Press:

Intensified development in flood-prone parts of Missouri and California significantly raise the risk of New Orleans-style flooding in urban areas on the Mississippi and Sacramento rivers, researchers said Saturday.

Hell, how about earthquakes? The reason these places are prone to flooding is due to rifting of the continent. Missouri is interesting because it is in the middle of the country which kind of sags down, doesn't it? Even as it is being pushed by the slowly expanding Atlantic Plate, it isn't mountain forming anywhere along the eastern half of the country, the mountain building is mostly to the west! Where the Pacific Plate is shoving hard.

California's woes are far more dangerous than the Midwest's due to global warming and the fact the earth has decided to undergo some very severe furniture rearrangements which Mother Nature has taken a hankering to do. Here is today's earthquake map:

Interesting how nearly all these are deep in the earth as well as similar in size except for one which is one magnitude higher. If this were a diagram of a bell ringing, it would look like this. Evenly mirroring each other! Except one place: North America!

Why the silence? The earth has been contorting itself pretty violently this last 14 months. The plate taking the most blows has been the opposite side of the planet from California. Thinking that this tremendous activity is not translating to our end of the planet is insanity.

It is building up relentlessly.

Here is a map of California after the seas rise just another 2' which is less than if or when Greenland melts, and god help us, Antarctica, if they both go, the seas will rise many feet and kiss most of civilization goodbye, at least their ports and homes.

But just two feet rise eliminates most habitable parts of California. Unlike, say, Holland, we can't dike in the entire West Coast. Aside from the frequent earthquakes, the ocean is a very powerful energetic beast. Huge waves beating relentlessly upon the shores. This is why people can "surf" there! The Gulf of Mexico is a bathtub, California level waves occuring only during hurricanes.

Even so, we can't fend New Orleans from storms! The rift valley of California is already preparing itself for joining the ocean. My favorite example is the Salton Sea. Supposedly, it formed when dikes along the Colorado broke back in the floods of the early 1920s. But since then, now that no water is coming in directly from any source of river, it should have dried up totally, long ago, it being an extremely dry desert there.

But it has grown. So the explanation has been "water seeping in from farming." Well, I know the desert. Irrigate like hell, it won't form no lakes, dudes. Otherwise, Phoenix would have been underwater eons ago. Instead, it is drier and drier!

The Salton Sea, seen from space, looks like all rift zone salt water lakes: a finger of the ocean. Namely, it happens when rifts are nearly ready to join up with the nearest ocean. Baja is one long segement of land that used to be attached to Mexico and as the rifting process proceeds, it tears open like a zipper, zzzp. The rift zone will go all the way up to Long Valley which runs alongside Death Valley. This is a very geologically active area, earthquakes as well as volcanic. Eventually, it will erupt long fissures of lava.

The Central Valley which should be called the Central Rift Zone, is cut off from the Baja ocean extention by a group of mountains running alongside the San Andreas fault. This fault's mountains run all the way to San Francisco where it plunges into the sea right where there is a big fat gap letting the ocean flow into the Central Rift Zone. Right now, it isn't flooding that area but it will.

What if we dam it when the world's oceans rise so high, flooding the Central Rift Zone is a problem? Will we farm there?

The answer is no. For the Central Rift Zone will become like the one in Africa or the Holy Land where the Dead Sea lies: uninhabitable and unfarmable. When you irrigate a rift zone, the water rapidly salts the land. This shouldn't surprize us. It seems pretty universal. Just like the Salton Sea.

When I was young, I delighted in swimming there, it is so salty, you are bouyed up and laying upon the water is easy. I loved dangling in the brine, luring fish and wild birds to come and poke at me or sit on me. Maybe they thought I was a corpse. Heh.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

All Of NASA Was Throttled By Right Wing Political Appointees Working For Griffin

2006-02-17T09:35:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As alarming news pours in, the facts of global warming and exterrestrial events pound the earth, NASA wasn't muzzled only by far right wing religious college drop-outs, the vicious campaign to stifle all talk of what is happening to the primary planet in the solar system if not the universe, the earth, was coordinated by Griffin working with his buddy, Bush. Griffin should resign.

From the New York Times:

Top political appointees in the NASA press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences, public affairs officers at the agency say.

OK, the whole point of a director is to defend his underlings from political hacks. Always, Presidents and political powers that be want to meddle with NASA. They do it all the time. But some things are not to be meddled with. One is, launching the shuttle under dangerous conditions due to political pressure.

When Reagan had this done for himself, there was tremendous pressure to whitewash the entire affair. It was remarkably like the Cheney near murder of a fellow "hunter". That was swiftly swept under the table by everyone who has an interest in propping up the present maladministration. For an interesting read about the Cheney circus, read this: from Inforwars:

Below is a ten minute "see-for-yourself" report that conclusively shows that Vice President Dick Cheney's claims to Kennedy County Sheriff's Deputies in south Texas is a total fabrication.

A massive cover-up has been conducted concerning the shooting. We know that most of the facts that have been told to the public are manufactured frauds.

Nearly everything Cheney told the cops was a lie. And his buddies covered up. They do this with everything and they tried doing this with the NASA mess.

Luckily for us, once again, people are leaking out the truth and the truth is, NASA has been destroyed by Bush and those dumb "Let's go to Mars" lunatics (literally, in this case, since they want to go back to the moon, too!) while scrapping systems that are designed to study the premier planet in the entire galaxy: the Earth!

Some examples have been reported to senior scientists and administrators who are assembling complaints as part of a review of communications policies demanded by Dr. Griffin, who became administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in April. Others have been described or provided to The New York Times.

Griffin is desperately trying to distance himself from this mess he enabled. Was he so out of touch, he couldn't see what his own front office was doing? How did he manage to be so aloof and distant from the scientists in Planetary Sciences who are interested in this planet more than Mars?

Eh? What? I sincerely wish we could ship all those Mars lovers to their home planet and let us run this one, thank you, ourselves! Bush and Cheney in particular. Both men profess to be much more interested in Mars than Earth. All the abiotic oil loons can go there, too, and prospect for oil.

Press officers, who were granted anonymity because they said they were still concerned for their jobs despite Dr. Griffin's call for openness, said much of the pressure in late 2004 was placed on Gretchen Cook-Anderson. At the time, Ms. Cook-Anderson was in charge of managing the flow of earth science news at NASA headquarters.

How could "pressure" be placed on this lady if her boss who is only one step over her head, didn't collude? Of course, he not only allowed this, he actively assisted in this, his meetings with Cheney (sans guns) and Bush show he had their ears and they had his ears. How can he pull a "Ken Lay" and claim he is innocent, out of the loop, unaware?

All it takes is one phone call. Instead, like Chertoff, another monster who should be shipped to Mars where there are no hurricanes, he pretends no one bothered to tell him and suddenly, he reads it in the news! My oh my. The uninquiring minds of the Bush administration!

So, people working for NASA are still terrified of being punished for talking about this planet! After Griffin begged them to talk! Hah.

Mr. Mahone has since left NASA. He did not return several calls seeking comment yesterday. Dean Acosta, a political appointee who was then Mr. Mahone's deputy and is now Dr. Griffin's press secretary, said he had never pressed Ms. Cook-Anderson to cut back on news releases. "I was not part of any meeting that would have been party to that," Mr. Acosta said.

But archives of news releases on the NASA headquarters Web site show a sharp change in the number of such releases, to 12 in 2005 from about four dozen in 2004, a figure that had helped lead to the pressure to cut back.

Note how the lady who was pressured to conceal a crime (destroying our planet is the ultimate crime!) is out of her position and the political operative who is responsible rose in the ranks and works intimately with Griffin. Hmmm. And some people say I am nuts to talk about these things so harshly...heh.

Mr. Acosta likes to lie. Cheney lies about nearly everything and Bush hasn't seen a lie he couldn't embrace happily since he was a tot. The media lies, too. But even the NYT is tiring of all these lies since we bloggers harrass them mercilessly when they lie, and now, we see a flood of truth finally pouring out, sort of.

In a more recent example of possible political pressure at the agency, press officers and scientists cited an e-mail message sent last July from NASA's headquarters to its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. It said a Web presentation describing the uncontroversial finding that Earth was a "warming planet" could not use the phrase "global warming." It is "standard practice," the message went on, to use the phrase "climate change."

Note the "headquarters" element here! Griffin's office is the center of "the headquarters" and if he is too dumb to know what the hell is going on in his Commissat office, he should resign.

Just go, Griffin. Your goofy plan to go to Mars is a failure, your refusal to protect the earth is a crime. Your inability to focus our resources on important matters stinks. There is now a huge clamor in America demanding we go to Mars but there is a lot of people who are very alarmed and very interested in what is happening to our earth.

Just for starters, Houston and the Florida as well as the Alabama facilities will be under water if this news about Greenland melting very rapidly is true!

The amount of ice flowing into the sea from large glaciers in southern Greenland has almost doubled in the last 10 years, possibly requiring scientists to increase estimates of how much seas could rise under the influence of global warming, according to a study to be published Friday in the journal Science.

The authors said there is evidence that the rise in flows will soon spread to glaciers farther north on the vast island of Greenland, which is covered with an ancient ice sheet nearly two miles high in places that holds enough water to raise global sea levels 20 feet or more should it all flow into the ocean.

No place in Florida, south of Tallahasee, is higher than 20' above sea level in Florida! Geeze, you morons.

Mars has no water. It is cold. A perfect dwelling place for all the planet earth haters who are destroying NASA. I say, let's build them all a Noah's Ark and ship them there. Now. As quickly as humanly possible.

A side story of interest: From Space.com:

A huge explosion halfway across the galaxy packed so much power it briefly altered Earth's upper atmosphere in December, astronomers said Friday.

No known eruption beyond our solar system has ever appeared as bright upon arrival.

But you could not have seen it, unless you can top the X-ray vision of Superman: In gamma rays, the event equaled the brightness of the full Moon's reflected visible light.

You know, we got sprayed with more than the usual amount of x-rays this last year when the sun spat out some very nasty stuff, too. This business affects the polar regions thanks to the ozone holes and it is no wonder, the ice is melting much faster than we expected.

The Permian extinction was like this, I fear.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Happy Darwin Day!

2006-02-12T07:25:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I read "Silent Spring" before exploring "On The Origin Of The Species" by Darwin. Both books have been a big influence on my life. It is interesting that the Key to the Kingdom of Nature was a particularily drab subset of species of bird, the Galapagos Island finches. The bird kingdom has some of the flashiest, most beautiful of all living creatures but it was the least of these that revealed to a great mind the greatest insight into Nature Herself. So let us celebrate Darwin Day by filling the birdfeeder.
UPDATE: From Playfuls.com:

Charles Darwin has been the father of the theory of evolution, for a long time the worst enemy of the religious belief in creationism. However, things seem to have changed over the years, as nearly 450 Christian churches around the US plan to celebrate the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin on Sunday with programs and sermons intended to emphasize that his theory of biological evolution is compatible with faith and that Christians have no need to choose between religion and science.

"It's to demonstrate, by Christian leaders and members of the clergy, that you don't have to make that choice. You can have both," said Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, who organized the event, according to The Chicago Tribune.

"Evolution Sunday" has drawn participation from a variety of denominational and non-denominational churches, including Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Congregationalist, United Church of Christ, Baptist and a host of community churches, including at least 16 congregations in Illinois.

Finally tracked down this story and boy, was it in an obscure corner of the net.

Darwin Day Headquarters:

Darwin's 200th Birthday will occur on February 12, 2009; it will also be the 150th Anniversary of the publication of his famous book On The Origin of Species. So, together we have time to evolve a truly International Celebration to show our appreciation for the enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, has contributed to the advancement of humanity.

Wouldn't it be nice to throw a party here? I would go.

At this juncture in history, the world has become so small and interdependent that we need a Global Celebration to promote a common bond among all people. The Darwin Day Celebration was founded on the premise that science, like music, is an international language that speaks to all people in very similar ways. While music is both intellectual and entertaining, science is our most reliable knowledge system, and it has been and continues to be acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity. Moreover, evolution via genetic variation and natural selection, introduced by Darwin, has become the central organizing principle in biology. In addition, evolution also plays a central role in astronomy and cosmology, where it refers to the way that stars, galaxies and the entire universe 'change over time.' To study biology while neglecting evolution would be like studying physics without Newton's laws that govern the universe or chemistry without the periodic table. Clearly, Darwin himself has become an internationally acclaimed figure, whose influence on progressive modern thought continues to be both profound and pervasive (Ernst Mayr, Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought, Scientific American, July 2000).

Incidentally, this is Lincoln's birthday, too, and you can imagine the speed at which he is spinning in his grave. I will note that the GOP, far from celebrating their founder's birthday, are strangely silent about this.

Republican Party Headquarters.No mention of Lincoln. Lots of stuff about how Reid is corrupt because he refused to vote for something Jack Abramoff wanted. Heh. Talk about twisted. How did these idiots evolve, anyway? Devolution is what describes them.

Poor Lincoln, his party home to the KKK.

Darwin Day isn't big news in America. The craven media owners don't want to alienate people who haven't evolved their thinking since the last Ice Age. There is no mention of Darwin Day in the New York Times. They do slog on with many articles about the science of biology and evolutionary issues but they don't have anything about this. And Lincoln! I remember when we had this holiday called "Lincoln's Birthday" as well as "George Washington's Birthday" and both were turned into "President's Day" rendering both meaningless and no one, absolutely no one, pays attention to this holiday at all anymore except for used car dealers.

Indeed, I found no mention of today in any news source online that was American. Plenty of English sites.

This is most depressing. Next to Newton and Einstein and Aristotle, Darwin ranks as one of the greatest scientists and like many scientist who break the truth out into the open, always under siege by religious fanatics. Even as Americans pretend to be angry about religious fanatics in the Muslim world, we are hardly a shining light of liberal thought. Indeed, the dark night of vicious anti-intellectualism is cloaking our nation and it is a severe problem, on nearly every level, popular culture to political agitation, the forces against intelligent thought are growing stronger, not weaker, here at home.

The ability to rationally think ebbs and flows throughout history. We have seen great flowerings of intellectual thought get crushed under the military boot heel. Sometimes, cultures collapse so totally, the documents and philosophy of the previous times nearly totally disappear so all that was created becomes obscure even as it still stands guard like Stonehenge, once a great observatory for tracking the sun, the moon and the stars, devolving into a magic rite site and then a stone quarry.

Great cultures are by definition, fragile. And this is why we have to pay attention as interest in scientific thought, reading out of curiousity and difficult to acquire and use cultures like classical music or dance, are abandoned as "too difficult" or worse, "boring". I will note how, just the other day, I took great joy in seeing a geologist's predictions about a riddlesome place, the Gulf of Mexico's connection with the New Madrid Fault, was ignored. I saw not a single news story about this matter. Indeed, the weird happenstance of a largish earthquake at a previously thought "stable" earth zone should have made headlines.

It wasn't even noted!

Isn't that bizarre. The earthquake caused by Darwin was noted right away back then. I own some very old children's books that were printed once a year, called "Annuals" which were handed out at Christmas. Here is a typical page from the 1881 edition of "Nicholas":

This page is the "Agassiz Association" which the publishers launched in 1880. Each month, readers do various projects and then write back about the results.

This book has a thousand pages of stories, history, biographies, legends, nature information, riddles, discussions of science, a smorsgeborg of subjects showing inquiring minds at work. Compare this Victorian mainstream literature with modern born again Christian claptrap they are trying to pass off as "learning" and one is amazed at the mental deterioration going on today. As the facts in the case build for scientific thought, the ability to think even slightly is imploding rapidly. This doesn't bode well for our nation. This book from my great grandmother's generation is very dense, the print is fine, the book is for multi-family children from tot to adult since the family often sat around a table together to read it in lamplight. The young scholars wrote letters the previous year which get published each Christmas and these letters are well written and show questing minds seeking more information and asking about nature, how to run an aquarium, for example, or how to classify beetles and put the collection on display properly.

The letters come from surprizing places. Like homesteads out in the Dakotas! Sending letters from the frontier back then was expensive and difficult, yet the young scholars, eager to learn, tried to communicate. My grandpa was born on the frontier, in Nebraska, out in the middle of nowhere, in a town founded by his father and a handful of others, and thanks to books like this, he grew up hungering for more science and it helped launch his career as a well known astronomer, famous enough to have a crater on the moon named after him. There are even stories in this book explaining how circuses work, namely, how they are put together and managed and how the financing works. Amusing stories about school boys trying to help local firemen but end up tossing out a big mirror from a house that wasn't on fire because they wanted to save the beautiful 16 year old girl who lived there and how they were puzzled when she flipped out. Amusing.

Anyway, the verve and intelligence displayed is a shock. Far from being grim, this book is, as I show in the paragraph above, a joy to read, full of curiousity and desire to understand foreign cultures, other religions, everything. Little children back then didn't hardly have any books for themselves, they were content to sit nearby the elder children and listen in. The pandering to small minds which seems to obsess our culture today is producing...small minds. I am probably lucky to have grown up around a stern, science big-shot who was a dyed in the wool Victorian all the way down to his fob watch in his vest pocket. So he wouldn't sit around reading, "Goodnight, Moon." He would pull out a book about lunar topology and lecture me (and I LOVED it!).

When writing about science, I can hear his stern voice in my inner ear.

And to stop being way off topic here, I want every one to join me in blowing out the candles on both Darwin and Lincoln's birthday cakes. May their writings and deeds live forever.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Now NOAA Is Accused Of Censoring Scientists And THEY CENSORED ME!

2006-02-11T20:25:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Last Sept. my friend in England, Richard of "This Old Brit" warned me as he looked at my stats that NOAA was watching my blog and sure enough, that very day, my blog was censored! Now we learn that Deutsch of NASA fame wasn't the only political operative set over our scientists, NOAA is infested with these creatures who, like cockroaches, lurk in the dark, yanking any info about global warming that they have power to prevent anyone from reading.

From the Daily Kos:

The main instrument of suppression seems to be noaa's policy on contact with the press. Since June 2004, noaa, which is part of the Department of Commerce, has had a policy that its employees have to notify a public affairs officer if a member of the press contacts them for an interview. But the policy was often ignored. Then, on September 29, in the midst of growing public debate over hurricanes and global warming, public affairs official Jim Teet issued a memo requiring that "any request for an interview with a national media outlet/reporter must now receive prior approval by DOC [Department of Commerce].

Now, anyone perusing my blog knows, I talk about global warming, Bush and the planet earth a lot. And I connect dots, pull up documents to prove a point and I mull outloud, what is going on here and try to find answers.

No problemo. Here is an example pre Sept. 28th: The Unstable Sun:

The sun has long been recognized as a variable star because of the roughly 20-year sun spot cycle but recently, thanks to the many space telescopes and monitors we have launched and the old NASA has monitored, we now know exactly how unstable the sun really is. Namely, it is periodically spitting out x-ray events.

One such event-epidsode is happening right now. For a week, the giant sunspot storm has been facing away from the earth so only space monitors have been able to see what was going on as major coronal events occured but now it has rotated into sight so we can see directly what is going on with all our array of space/earth monitoring systems. The same systems Bush and the new NASA head want to cut back, are cutting back, our bankruptcy is cutting back.

This article, from Sept. 11, 2005, is a classic Culture of Life rant. Here is an amusing paragraph from it:

Panic can set in at NORAD which is filled with incompentent people. Note how relentlessly Bush and the neo-cons drove into early retirement so many capable people including Powell! They also can't understand that when the earth is being bombarded at its most critical stage, here in the Northern Hemisphere, by x-rays and cosmic rays and all sorts of products from massive eruptions, this disorganizes our brains which are, I assure you, very electrical in nature, namely, impulses are transmitted from one set of nerves to others and cosmic things like lightning bolts and sun spot emnations can disrupt the internal thinking apparatus.

The blockheads ruining our country hate scientists, hate people who ask questions, connect dots or have scientific minds. They reward incompetents and corrupts (deliberate sic!).

On Sept. 24th, I posted an interesting article concerning Hurricane Rita.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

WHAT HAPPENED TO RITA?
By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I was going to write about this earlier. It is now every five years or so, we have a drought out here in NY. This is bad. This isn't normal. Of course, guess what? Like Alaska, which is having a drought, too, this year, we are now cycling into a drought/flood pattern that is very very hard on the forests up here which is mostly oaks and maples and beeches and cherry and other hard woods.

TO READ MORE CLICK HERE
posted by Elaine Supkis at 9/24/2005 10:00:00 PM links to this post

It was on line for about three hours when Richard of This Old Brit came by my blog to warn me he detected someone snooping around from the government, and he specified it might be NOAA. I said, "No way! Thanks." And then went to this page to double check and the "Forbidden" page popped up! I was flabbergasted. Usually, this is merely a blogger glitch so I reposted it and it sat there for an hour until another reader, dear Facti, emailed me to tell me the page was missing. I then altered my text to delete all NOAA references but it stayed down anyway and since hurricane Rita was trashing the joint, I didn't go and "fix" the page because events were moving too fast.

So lo and behold, there it is, by that week, Bush had finished installing little Young Republican Chickenhawk Cowards at NOAA so they could hide out and play Soviet Kommisar at taxpayer expense and I was probably one of the very first people to be nailed by this stupid gang.

Since then, I use no NOAA data or text or illustrations. Patterns of Droughts and Flood Zones was a continuation of the Rita article the NOAA censors ripped up. Namely, persistent droughts are so severe, even when a huge, gigantic hurricane blows in, the side of the hurricane facing the outer edges of the drought zone shrivelled up and not until Rita passed Texas, did it get moisture again and drop more rain for in the circumstance, it should have deluged Texas and it didn't.

And this is one of the side effects of global warming and because I used those words in the Rita article, I was censored.

From my blog: Weather Develops Long Range Patterns of Drought and Flood:

As global warming continues to change the ocean currents and air flows of our planet, we see vast changes on the ground. One of the most noticable changes are in the Temperate Zones which are much more active and has been having flood/drought cycles that are not seasonal but due to shifts in persistent highs as they travel from west to east across the upper latitudes.

The great thing is, I no longer use any NOAA pictures so I had to figure out a methodology for making quickie schematic drawings and it worked wonderfully for now I do a lot of this as readers can plainly see, maps, graphs, models, all the same method and I really enjoy doing this and am learning a lot from doing it. Thank you, stinky censors!

The downside is knowing that government agents are attacking free speech. I don't make a thin dime off of this blog, not one penny, I don't even rattle a cup here, begging for money like many sites do, so there was zero reason for NOAA to attack this little blog, it wasn't like I was ripping them off, nay, I asked everyone to visit the various NOAA sites---they used to be very informative but now they ain't, a lot of the important information is...er...MISSING!

Arrest the NOAA censors. Gads. At least fire them. Let them go back to school and learn something for crying out loud.

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Moon Nearly Split In Two 4 Billion Years Ago

2006-02-11T11:33:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The great lava flows that discolor the surface of the moon that faces the earth was the super lava flow from a single impact that tore nearly through the moon, permanently deforming both the back by depressing it and the front with a big bulge.

From Spacedaily.com

Planetary scientists have found the remains of ancient lunar impacts that may have helped create the surface feature commonly known as the "Man in the Moon."

Findings by a team at Ohio State University suggest that a large object actually hit the far side of the moon about 4 billion years ago, and it sent a shock wave through the Moon's core and all the way to the Earth-facing side. When the crust recoiled, the Moon's surface displayed the markings of the encounter.

Many mysteries of the moon are being probed by unmanned missions. One of the more interesting probes mapped the gravity fields on the moon and came up with some surprises.

Click here for the NASA data which I used for my schematic drawing.
Unfortunately, the article I cited here from Space Daily.com isn't all that informative so I decided to hazard some guesses here. The gravity hole that is roundest and biggest and I presume, deepest, is Mare Orientale. It also has quite a lava flow from it that is directional, namely, it poured out towards the South Pole.

On the other side of the moon lie the huge lava flows that make up the Mare complex there. If you look at the moon, there are no huge craters there, instead, all the earliest impact points are covered by a massive lava flow punctuated by a few random craters of much later origin. This lava flowed into some of the older craters made by large objects which is why they seem fragmented but it is probable that all the lava flow on the Near Side of the Moon comes from this singular impact.

Evidently, the mantle of the moon on the far side was shoved in so deep, a part of it penetrated deep into the core. If this object hitting the Moon was any larger, it possibly could have shattered the Moon. The Moon is much smaller than the earth so the ratio of objects hitting vs planetary surface makes the Moon much more vulnerable to damage. I wonder if Venus had a moon, too, but it was annihilated in the earliest years as tons of debrie fell back into the sun when the sun pulsed out a lot of the hard matter that it was born in, for we now know, all stars are born in the dark realms where all the dirt and dust and fairly large objects congregate. Once a star begins goes "nuclear" all the dirt surrounding it is shoved away.

Since a lot of this dirt was falling towards the sun when it hit us, I would suppose the closer to the sun an object was, the more it was hit by incoming debrie? We have pictures of Mercury and it is wall to all impact zones. It is amazing it remained intact, considering everything. Since the Moon orbits the earth, has it played the role of mine sweeper for us? Taking the brunt of the debrie coming in? One wonders.

Another oddity of our planet which might make it pretty hard to replicate! We are "lucky" on so many levels.

And I am glad we have a moon or we wouldn't have tides and it might have made life on earth harder to evolve since tides are a changable environment which means more solutions, more niches. Also, how else can women have menstral periods if we had no moon?

On the other hand, I hated those. Ick. Oh well, at least it looks pretty up there.

*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

5.2 Earthquake Dead Center In Gulf Of Mexico

2006-02-10T17:30:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

A mid-sized earthquake shook the Gulf of Mexico today. This is where it is geologically pretty stable. It is also right next to the huge salt domes where much of the oil and gas is being extracted. A retired geologist, Mr. Jack M. Reed, theorized there has to be a hidden tectonic plate segment in this spot and it is not only geologically active but is responsible for triggering the New Madrid Quakes.

I found this after writing my article! It is just too cool. This geologist predicted correctly! From the American Association of Petroleum Geologists:

The New Madrid seismic zone in Missouri has long intrigued scientists because, according to conventional geologic theory, large earthquakes clustered in a tectonically quiet region are difficult to understand.

But at least one AAPG member is challenging the crowd.

New Orleans independent geologist Jack M. Reed believes the origin of the earthquakes lies beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

That's not all.

Reed, a retired Texaco geologist-geophysicist who has been studying the region's geology for over 40 years, says the accepted theory of a quiet geologic evolution of the Gulf of Mexico Basin is fundamentally flawed and needs to be revised.

According to him, the Gulf was and is tectonically active -- and it is the likely origin for not only the New Madrid seismic activity, but also for the Middleton Place-Summerville seismic zone near Charleston, S.C.

I grew up around geologists working with my dad on siting observatories. One puzzle they all liked to chew over at leisure is the riddle of the New Madrid Fault. It made no sense.

Today's earthquake, no small one, was an eye-opener which is why, the minute I saw it in today's data, I jumped on it.
From the good geologist:

"This northeast trending earthquake zone appears to connect with the northeast trending Monroe Uplift, the LaSalle Arch and, possibly, to an active seismic zone located in and around Sabine Lake on the Texas-Louisiana border," he said.

This complex of doming and seismic centers is similar to another Cretaceous age triple juncture located in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico Basin. Doming of the DeSoto Canyon High during the Jurassic to Cretaceous created this triple juncture, which includes the Cretaceous Shelf Edge, the Suwannee Strait and the West Florida Escarpment.

If the New Madrid seismic zone is indeed part of a triple juncture, he continued, there should be an expression of this limb trending along a line in a northeast direction.

So Reed conducted a study using data from the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center and the USGS map "Earthquakes in the Conterminous United States." He only studied earthquakes measuring at least magnitude 5, and found that while most of the earthquake centers are random with no alignment, there is a well-defined earthquake trend extending northeastward from the New Madrid seismic zone across the United States to Canada, where it joins with the St. Lawrence River seismic zone.

Within the boundaries of this earthquake alignment there are:

Sixty-one seismic points that have a magnitude of 5 and greater.
Several large earthquakes dating to the early 1800s, all measuring over magnitude 8, all occurring within a couple of months of each other, all centered in a northeast trending line.
The two 5+ earthquakes that occurred earlier this year in northern New York state and southern Indiana.
"There is definitely some form of movement occurring along this trend," Reed said, "and it appears to be active today."

Well, it really was active today! I bet he is happy as a lark, seeing more evidence his personal theory is correct. I hope this gets good coverage for it is a major geological "find"! Indeed. Congratulations, Mr. Reed! Take a bow.

Click here for raw data. Click here for the earthquake world map. I have noticed over the last year or so, many earthquakes like to happen at 10.0 km. Whether under water or on land. It is like the earth's crust has this blanket on top that operates independent of the lower layers. Some of our nastiest quakes occur at this depth, the earth's blanket being shaken and tugged like Mother Nature is straightening out the bed.

The geology where this happened is interesting because it isn't all that prone to earthquakes. Just last week, I noted there was a much gentler earthquake right in New Orleans just when tornadoes were hitting that poor city! The New Madrid Fault has been shaking a bit, lately. As if it were trembling, waiting for something.

The continental shelf falls rapidly where today's quake happened and maybe the entire Mississippi valley is ready for some serious alterations. The Mid-Atlantic ridge had a 4.6 mag earthquake right next to Iceland which is the volcanic island erupting out of the northern end of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. It, too, was at the interesting depth of 10.0km. Santiago, Chile, had a 4.2 quake at pretty much the same time. I noted this morning that the earth was very quiet for the previous 24 hrs and said to myself, "There are going to be some interesting shakes today," for these quakes are tending to swarm across great distances, like the earth is shuddering still from the side effects of the big blow out last winter.

The geological stability of this part of the Gulf is very important for us since we have deep drilling going on there and if the earth shifts, the various layers shift at different rates so a pipe going straight down can get displaces and cease working as a well.OCSBBS:

There have been significant new discoveries (such as Great White, Trident, Chinook, St. Malo, and Cascade) in the ultra-deep waters of Walker Ridge and Alaminos Canyon. These discoveries open up a whole new geologic play with exciting potential.

Industry has made great technological achievements in recent years. Examples include polyester mooring, composite risers, cell spars, and 15,000-psi subsea trees.

There was a 51 percent increase in the number of producing deepwater projects over the past 2 years.

Deepwater production has risen more than 100,000 barrels of oil per day (BOPD) and over 400 million cubic feet per day (MMCFPD) each year since 1997. (Production volumes were only available through 2002 at the time of writing due to the production data lag.)

Subsea gas production has increased 90 percent since December 2000.

Since the start of 2000, new deepwater drilling has added over 4.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE).

We aren't awash in gas or oil, much of this deep water drilling simply replaces well heads that are beginning to fail.

From Priweb.org:

Just onshore, in south eastern Texas and southern Louisiana, the flowage of salt domes has been the predominant mechanism for creating traps for oil. Salt of Jurassic age occurs here. When it is put under immense pressure by overlying rocks, this salt, which is less dense than the rocks surrounding it, will begin to flow upward. As it does so, it displaces, folds, and faults the rocks around it. In this way, traps can be created.

The Louann Salt is more than 200 million years old, and is located at great depths along the Gulf of Mexico's shoreline. In some places, however, this salt has moved due to the enormous pressure being put on it from the rocks above.

This all takes us back to the beginning, namely, the great Permian age when living things began to rapidly evolve and creatures crawled out of the teeming seas and plants colonized the earth and the atmosphere filled with oxygen and it all came crashing down, as we talked about, this week.

The great salt flats covered over all the rich plant and animal life, the hot seas evaporated in the various shallow seas, tons of salt built up over millions of years as the planet slowly readjusted and life forms began to slowly recolonize the previously dead regions. All that stuff is what we are pumping out today and you might say, the ghosts of these once living creatures are now looming over us all.

UPDATE: I just found another paper by Mr. Reed on this same topic: From Oil & Gas Journal.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

USA Wants USA Weapons In Space--Against Wishes Russia, China and India

2006-02-10T08:48:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Again and again, the Pentagon tries to militarize space. The latest gambit is to put up weapon systems that can destroy satellites in order to "protect" our satellites. What? If no one else has weapons in space, why do this?

From Reuters:

The military's role in deterring attacks on commercial satellites is set to be strengthened in the first broad overhaul of U.S. space policy in a decade, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.

The policy would remove any ambiguity about official responsibility for figuring out who was behind any attack on U.S.-owned commercial satellites, said Air Force Col. Anthony Russo, head of the U.S. Strategic Command's space division.

Russo said recent drafts of the policy, which he said could be announced within months, did not rule out weapons in space.

Instead, they speak of taking "all appropriate measures to defend our space assets," he told a reporters at a forum organized by the private Center for Media and Security.

"All appropriate measures is a pretty broad statement," Russo said. "It doesn't rule out weapons in space. It doesn't say go build them either."

Boy, aren't they coy? So clever. "Maybe yes, maybe no," from the world's most overarmed, over extended military? They all have this horror vaccuui. They see an empty space, they have to fill it.

In the Game of Go, if you fill all the empty spaces, you lose, you know. The importance of making rational choices means the winner of that game is the one who has the most territory with the least number of stones.

In this case, no one, so far, is threatening any satellites.

Currently, no known weapons specifically designed to apply force are stationed in space -- an absence that Russia, China and many others strongly support.

Way back, years ago, I lobbied for the USA to sign the "Peaceful Uses of Space Treaty" but just like the Kyoto Accords, our rulers wanted the option to be nasty and took it. We won't sign the landmine treaty for the same reason. We want to use them. We pretty much signed off of the Geneva Conventions, too.

Well, our rulers don't obey American laws or honor the Constitution, so probably this is all moot, anyway.

Russo described President George W. Bush's emerging national space policy as an "evolution" from the current one, issued in 1996 by then-President Bill Clinton.

"The new bit clarifies that (the military's responsibility) extends to commercial assets that are not necessarily providing U.S. government services," he said.

Since corporate America owns our government, why not make it seamless? After all, our foreign policy towards Central America was run for years and years by banana importers!

Tens of thousands of incidents involving possible attacks on satellites are reported each year, he said. But only a handful of these turn out to be deliberate efforts to pirate services or interfere for political reasons.

OK. Clue me in. What exactly are these "thousands of incidents"? Stealing bandwidth? Like college kids tapping Roadrunner lines? Huh? Good grief. It would be like Time Warner blowing up fraternities for stealing bandwidth.

Exaggerating dangers so we can have an excuse to create very serious dangers is modus operandi for this regime. Just like 9/11 could have been prevented by simple police work that is already possible under pre-Patriot Act laws, so, any future problems with our satellites can be taken care of via diplomatic UN type means. Blowing up stuff in space is an insane solution.

The real plan is to shoot down any European, Indian, Russian or especially Chinese satellites before we launch attacks on one or several of these countries when our demented ruler launches WWIII. Just to prevent the temptation to start WWIII, we must prevent the militarization of space.

Cue Darth Vader's marching song.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Deutsch, The Censoring Brat at NASA, Strikes Out At Dr. Hansen and the NYT

2006-02-09T20:55:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The 24 year old dropout, Deutsch, finally speaks out and shows himself to be an arrogant, ill informed political operative whose sole function at NASA was to enforce right wing GOP mandates that are anti-scientific. Now is time for Griffin, his boss, to resign.

From the NYT:

In the interview, Mr. Deutsch said that Dr. Hansen had partisan ties "all the way up to the top of the Democratic Party," and that he was "using those ties and using his media connections to push an agenda, a worst-case-scenario agenda of global warming." He said that anyone who disagrees with Dr. Hansen "is labeled a censor and is demonized and vilified in the media — and the media of course is a willing accomplice here."

Mr. Deutsch contended that although Dr. Hansen was a scientist, he wanted to talk about policy as well as science. "He wants to demean the president, he wants to demean the administration and create a false perception that the administration is watering down science and lying to the public," Mr. Deutsch said. "And that is patently false."

Are we all blind to the obvious vicious damage Deutsch and his fellow battalion of the Know Nothings are inflicting on what once were great scientific enterprises the entire world looked up to? Mr. Deutsch's job classification was "water boy in charge of watering down science"!

"When at NASA, I was asked to let my managers speak on behalf of the issues," he said. "Now that I am no longer bound by that, I would really like to clear the air and defend my integrity and my good name."

Mr. Deutsch said he resigned of his own volition because he was unhappy with the negative publicity he and NASA were receiving in the news media. "I was just sick of it," he said. "I was being smeared. My integrity and credibility was being questioned. And as a human being, as a human being, I just could not take it anymore."

A creep who deliberately lies on his resume has no good name to defend. Or rather, his name should be "defendANT" in a court of law where he can learn the fine art of what is the difference between fraud, lying and decieving people in order to make money, illegally.

There is no way he would have been hired in his position if it depended upon credentials and he knew this so he simply lied. And is still lying, he hasn't explained how he got his position in the first place and why he wasn't fired the minute he tried to upend the very real research of the top Goddard Institute's Earth Sciences!

And since when is informing us about the very serious dangers of global warming, "demeaning the President"? Is it because Bush is a demon and wants a very hot earth so it will replicate his home base, hell? One really begins to wonder about all this.

As for Dr. Hansen going to the press to talk about our planet earth and what he knows....great gods. This is the Dr.'s job! I feel as if Dr. Hansen is Dr. Who and this Republican baby is a Dalek. "Exterminate, exterminate." And he talks about his humanity! Well.

Move to Mars if you hate this planet. I will personally escort you to the rocket launch pad.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Deutsch, Religious Fanatic, Resigns From NASA
NASA Is Really Run By Right Wing 24 Year Old
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Perfectly Preserved Early Tyrannosaurus Rex Fossil Shows Feathers

2006-02-09T11:13:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Astonishing beautiful mud casts of the earliest T-rex fossils have been uncovered in China. It clearly shows the pattern and imprint of feathers on the 3.6' long critter. This is probably why Chickadees are so vain: they know their pedigree.

From the National Geographic:

The primitive tyrannosaurs were discovered together. They appeared to have become fatally trapped in a prehistoric mud pit, according to Xing Xu, professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China. The carnivores were possibly lured to their deaths by other mud-stricken animals, which also left behind fossil remains.

"This is an unbelievable discovery with tremendous new information on the evolution of the tyrannosaurs," Xu said.

Xu and fellow dino experts describe the new species, named Guanlong wucaii, in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature.

The evolution of feathering goes further and further back in time. Let's review what happened on this planet, 250+ million years ago.

The Great Permian Extinction Happened

For terrestrial vertebrates during the Late Permian, the combination of a drop in atmospheric oxygen plus climate warming would have induced hypoxic stress and consequently compressed altitudinal ranges to near sea level. Our simulations suggest that the magnitude of altitudinal compression would have forced extinctions by reducing habitat diversity, fragmenting and isolating populations, and inducing a species-area effect. It also might have delayed ecosystem recovery after the mass extinction.

So, whatever small area the proto-T-Rex lived in, the situation was such, they quickly evolved from their pre-Permian collapse scales became lacy and fine in order to hold in heat. This is because thin oxygen altitudes are very cold. This thinner the oxygen, the colder it gets, faster, in the shade and the hotter the sun when it is out.

A fine example is the moon, you freeze totally in the dark and roast totally in the sun, there being no atmosphere at all! So probably all proto-dinosaurs had some degree of feathering and probably slept in groups at night, to keep warm. This meant, unlike many reptiles, they tend more to social life, most likely, mother sleeping with babies. Even modern crocodiles coddle their babies so I would bet, the Permian extinction killed off any carelessly cared for, land dwelling babies.

Mammals did rather well compared to many other creatures in this tragedy except the survivors were trapped, probably far inland, in deep valleys where they couldn't leave until much later than the dinosaurs who were much smaller and hunted by hairy mammals during the wet Permian, they now, freed of their tormentors and equipped with brand new, shiny feathers, when the two met again, millions of years later when the very small mammals, reduced in size due to the slim pickings of limited environment, ventured forth only to be greeted by hunters four times their size, the feathers helped the dinosaurs to not only hunt faster but now, being warm blooded, they were able to put more energy into the hunt.

I have raised turkeys who are great models for T-rexes. They have long necks that are mostly fine skin that change color according to mood. Mostly, it is chalk blue and pink. But when the male gets angry, it flushes red due to the rush of blood. The head goes higher and higher and the chest puffs up so he can thrum it like a drum, whoom, whoom! Then, sucking in a lungful, he lets loose with an angry gobble. They literally snort with rage and we used to annoy our turkeys, when young, by whapping on their breasts to make the drum roll.

When they annoyed me, I would put my hand on their head and shove them down. As soon as the head is forced down, the turkey surrenders and goes "whimp, whimp, whimp".

I am certain early T-Rexes did all this, too. Even little Chickadees sit very erect and raise their tiny feather cap and scold much bigger animals, a dim memory of who was boss still running in their genes. Turkeys are hunter/stalkers. They stride across the field, head up, looking around, looking down, seeking prey. If they spot a mouse, they will rush it and stab at it with their beaks and if they corner a mouse, use the powerful feet to pin it down to kill it. They will seize snakes and play tug rope with it until it is skinned and dead. If the snake is big, the turkey toms will surround it and take turns jumping on it, a circle stomp that is amazing to watch.

Once, my turkey tribe caught a huge toad and ran up and down our mountain for an hour, fighting over it. Finally, the biggest turkey started to jam it down the throat and it got stuck so he ran up to me guggling and I had to pull out the poor, dead toad.

This is why toads and other animals puff up. To thwart the T-Rexes of the Avian Kingdom.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

More Data On Asteroid: Path Still Not Totally Clear But We Are In Possible Impact Zone

2006-02-09T07:23:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

My personal sliding scale of dangers:
&spades Sun going nova. This pretty much ends everything.
&spades Asteroid strike. Depending on the size, all are bad, the bigger, the badder.
&spades Nuclear war. This is under our control This is why the stupid things we do are really dumb.
&spades Bankruptcy. This is 100% under our control. Arrest Bush. Arrest Greenspan.
&spades Sickness. I had two flues this winter. Really annoying and difficult. Will survive.
Evidently, more data has been processed and this looks like the possible path. Whew. Hope this is correct and passing through the planetary system doesn't warp the trajectory!

From Space.com forums:

And it's (Asteroid BQ6) been updated again. This image shows what Silylene was saying about Earth being within the error bar. The newest update has the asteroid passing the other side of Earth.
Orbit Simulator.com
*next poster*
The thing about this one that's impressing me is that each day it is seeming to get closer and closer (now I'm sure the error bar is getting smaller each time too) and there still hasn't been any media attention.

Considering how just a few years ago they would have had doomsday headlines all over the place I think either we have done a good job of teaching the media how little a chance of impact it actually is or else they just havn't seen it yet.

Either way, I'm glad they havn't said anything yet.

We all know, with the battle over dummy Deutsch, NASA has muzzled its scientists. A right wing tool, Griffin, runs the joint and he is in cahoots with Bush. He has this really dumb idee fixee that we must go to Mars. So he has defunded, defused and confounded all other programs as much as possible. The fact that a nasty asteroid might slam into earth in a mere six months (!) seems to be invisible to him. The fact that we bloggers, all three of us (!!!) are publishing news and updates about this amazes me.

On Google, the Space.com website and mine are the top citations. This is bizarre.

Why do Americans get all hysterical about a couple of Saudis being allowed to attack us with impunity, why are we endorsing spiralling warfare with the entire Muslim world, why are our rulers, our hateful despots, going around the planet like whirling dervish devils, trying to start more wars, why do our media trot after them, faithfully publishing all their fear mongering over nonexistent WMD when Mother Nature is gearing up to showing us exactly how big her arsenal is and how easy it is to wipe all humans out, pffft.

This folly is the ultimate folly. There are at least three essential reasons to have a space program:
&hearts To colonize other planetary systems so if the sun goes nova, we don't go bye-bye.
&hearts To utilize the various La Grange orbits for satellites of various sorts.
&hearts To spot and eliminate all hazards like asteroids and comets that look like they will hit us.

A great side effect to all this is simple wonder. Our space program allows us to access and record tons of data so we can see the universe better and understand the tremendous wonder of it all. If we don't kill ourselves, being nasty to each other here on the planet earth!

The silence of the press in this matter is very disturbing. I would like to know if this rectitude is self-imposed or from simple stupidity (which is a strong possibility. This asteroid isn't a floozy pop singer doing dumb things) or fiat from anti-science moron-in-chief, Arbusto Busho.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
New Asteroid 2006BQ6 Might Pass Close To Earth
Panther Mountain, NY, Created By Meteor Strike
Bush Plans To Cut NASA Funds
More Scientists Tell About Bush Political Appointees Strangling Science Maliciously
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Deutsch, The Religious Fanatic Censor At NASA Headquarters Lied About Graduating From College

2006-02-07T20:33:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

LATEST NEWS: Deutsch was finally forced to resign thanks to the information uncovered by the blogger, NIck Anthis, a Rhodes Scholar. Congratulations, good research! One thing we bloggers have done is force right wingers to obey the law, we are still trying to force Congress to force Bush to stop breaking the law but that project is much harder.

A scientist has uncovered the crime George Deutsch committd when he lied on his Federal resume. He never bothered graduating from Texas A&M. I am shocked the adminstrators of T A&M haven't called for the dismissal of this brat and of course, Griffin, being only a right wing tool set up to destroy NASA, keeps him in a position of authority. Fire him, too. Arrest Deutsch, arrest Bush. Lying about serving in the Texas National Guard when one really went AWOL is also illegal.

From the Scientific Activist:

Deutsch’s former coworker informed me that in the summer of 2004, when Deutsch was the Opinion Editor for The Battalion, he was offered a position in George W. Bush’s presidential reelection campaign. The position was apparently too good to turn down, so Deutsch not only left his editorial post, but he also left A&M completely. Deutsch's coworker was not aware of him returning to A&M to complete his education. I investigating this further, and through the Association of Former Students, I learned that George Deutsch never graduated from Texas A&M, and the last record of him was from June 9, 2004, when he withdrew.

I tried to figure out which Deutsch family this guy sprang out of, there are several higher uppers in the GOP with that name.

It wouldn't surprise me even slightly to learn his family is well connected for the government just crawls with nepotism at virtually every level. This is directly connected with the ragin ineptitude we now see. I have detailed other nepotists elsewhere on this blog, it should be outlawed. The slender resume is bad enough, in Deutsch's case, the pathetic lies he had to use to pad it further are not only grounds for dismissal, he must refund all his pay for he got it illegally!

So why didn't that raging idiot, Griffin, conduct a severe investigation, suspending this archaic, Neanderthaller employee? Is Griffin this feeble? He has fired reams of real scientists, many from the Jet Propulsion Lab, just for example. He is cancelling one vital project after another like the Deep Space Earth Climate Observatory. Where was this Griffie dude during that mess? All I heard from him was a loud fart.

He is wrecking NASA, he is enabling anti-science idiots into NASA making it the laughing stock of the world. Not that it is noticeable against the stellar heavens of such administrative wonders as Brownie or his boss, still in power and utterly invisible, Skelator, aka, Chertoff, not to mention Bubble Boy himself.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Think of Solomon in a space suit.
That sums up the role of NASA head Michael Griffin as he tries to balance President Bush's vision for manned spaceflight with the hard realities of a $16.8 billion budget next year.

It's more money than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration received this year. But the agency must find $3 billion to $5 billion for the shuttle flights to finish the International Space Station and it must field a replacement for the space shuttles to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020.

They don't have the faintest idea what to do on the moon except to compete with that jumping cow up there. Last time there, we sort of twaddled about. This inability to fight off the goon in the White House means doom for NASA. Who cares about the money they get if it is all flushed down the toilet?

They are cancelling the probe we were sending out to see if there are other habitable planets, for example. Funds for exploring the moons of Jupiter. Everything is being tossed overboard without so much as a peep from Griffin. And yet, they have tons of money to waste on useless, right wing, born again boobs whose sole job is to deny any information about the Big Bang or the environment!

Big Bang meets Bigger Bozo.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
More Scientists Tell About Bush Political Appointees Strangling Scientists
NASA Is Really Run By Right Wing GOP 24 Year Old (Dropout)
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

More Scientists Tell About Bush Political Appointees Strangling Science Maliciously

2006-02-06T08:10:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

More scientists come forward with accusations that the Republicans are strangling science and interfering heavily with running scientific organizations that need government support. Meanwhile, Bush pretends he wants more scientists, I presume, so he can kick them around and abuse them.

From Time Magazine:

The 3 1/2-hr. conference call brought together nearly two dozen of the nation's best minds on the subject of air quality--and many of them were steamed. As the scientists of the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, they are rarely overruled on their recommendations about how the government should react to the latest and best research on the dangers of dirty air. Seven months ago, they warned the EPA in a letter that unless it made at least modest reductions in the amount of airborne soot, thousands of Americans would die prematurely each year. But last December, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, citing "the best available science," ignored their counsel. On the phone call last week, an exasperated Dr. James Crapo, professor of medicine at Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research Center, told his fellow scientists, "We need to write another letter and this time take a stronger stand."

Starting when he was a presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush has often assured voters that his policymaking would be guided by "sound science." Last week, in his State of the Union address, the President pointed to scientific research as the way to "lead the world in opportunity and innovation for decades to come." Yet growing numbers of researchers, both in and out of government, say their findings--on pollution, climate change, reproductive health, stem-cell research and other areas in which science often finds itself at odds with religious, ideological or corporate interests--are being discounted, distorted or quashed by Bush Administration appointees.

More and more we see direct parallels with the Soviet Union. Ideology trumping science. I know, first hand, how the government periodically tries to silence scientists. Most Americans don't know that within the scientific community during the 1950s over the rank lies put out by the Pentagon and the President concerning nuclear tests.

I watched this rage right over my head, sitting discreetly nearby, the adults unaware I could put 2+2 together already. They knew perfectly well, the pollution was deadly, the tests were dangerous, the few studies they were allowed to conduct were kept secret and anyone spilling the beans would see their career end, this was the McCarthy era and they all saw what happened to Oppenheimer, for example.

So fear kept mouths shut and as the undeclared nuclear war raged with all countries dropping bombs as "tests" and screwing up the entire planet, guess why we are seeing a cancer plague today, especially in parts of the body that process food! And breasts that produce milk...nearly every female can now expect to have breast cancer if she lives to be 100 years old? This vast war that saw hundreds of nuclear bombs dropped have degraded the ecosystem radically. And the scientists figured out why this was very bad and very dangerous yet were unable to do anything until prodded and poked when they finally went to Kennedy and explained to him what was going wrong.

I know, I was one of the pokers.

Even after the tests were stopped, the data was classified until many years later. It turned out that many tests on civilians were either illegal or cruel or badly done. Many people suffered from cancer or were killed outright in the government program to prove nuclear bombs weren't bad for us (except when it blows up a city!). These studies, when they showed, all of them, that nukes are terrible with hideous side effects, this was kept out of the public debate, not published, hidden from view.

This process of hiding the truth has been revived by Bush. You can't have a vibrant scientific community with idiots censoring data! Period. And censoring and intimidating scientists is now at an all time high, running at the same levels as under good old friendly Eisenhower who muzzled nuclear scientists with terrible brutality. Gads, I hate Eisenhower.

Some who have experienced it from the inside, however, disagree. Dr. Gerald Keusch, former director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), says he saw a marked change in its operations as the government moved from the Clinton to the Bush administrations. Under Clinton, Keusch says, he never encountered resistance in appointing experts to the advisory board that conducted peer reviews of grant proposals to the center, which focuses on international health issues, particularly in developing countries. He made seven nominations, and all were approved by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) within three weeks. Under Bush, his first four nominations were quickly endorsed by NIH but then, says Keusch, "it's 10 months before I hear from HHS, rejecting three of the four, including a Nobel laureate, with no reasons given." In return, HHS sent him the résumés of other people, many of whom had no expertise in infectious diseases or developing countries. Over the next three years, Keusch recalls, he had to nominate 26 people to fill seven vacancies and "came close to having a very dysfunctional advisory committee. I couldn't get a quorum anymore."

Bush and his minions push for incompetent, ill-trained, anti-science lunatics. Like Hitler and Stalin, magical thinking ideologues are put in positions of authority over real scientists.

Meanwhile, the neo-Nazi, neo-Stalinist "pundits" are on the attack, as usual. From the Washington Post:

Five years ago China recruited Gavriel Salvendy, an American scientist from Purdue University, to set up a department of industrial engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Salvendy didn't speak Chinese -- "not a word, apologies" -- but that didn't matter. In the department he created, 75 percent of the lectures and 100 percent of the textbooks are in English.

This is a paean to American intellectualism. The books and lectures in China are in English! Hahaha. My dad, when he studied rocket technology and physics had to learn...GERMAN! Did Einstein write in English? Even if one read a translation, this wasn't good enough, one had to learn German to study philosophy or science. Anyone arguing about Hegel in English was laughed at, you had to know him in German, first, I can attest to this. Greek was required, too, for the same reason.

Science and math advocates have been harrumphing about national competitiveness for at least a quarter-century. In the early 1980s the National Science Foundation predicted "looming shortfalls" of scientists and engineers, and the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." But the American economy went from strength to strength over the next decades, while supposedly more technical countries such as Japan and Germany foundered.

What a moron. Both Germany and Japan are beating the brains out of us, technologically speaking. And who has a trade surplus with whom? Both ship high tech stuff to America! They all learn English and then go home and use our information but there is no return flow since Americans refuse to learn any foreign language and Bush refuses to learn even English.

We have had a "shortfall" for a long time, here. The only reason why it doesn't show up, yet, is because we can still attract scientists from abroad. Go to any technological school and ask how many people are foreign students. 30%? 50%? 80%? They come here because the pay is still high but this won't last too much longer, thanks to the GOP who are bankrupting America.

This is embarrassingly flimsy. When economists say that technological change drives living standards, they don't mean that scientific ingenuity achieves this by itself. What matters is the way science is diffused through an economy: the availability of venture capital, the flexibility of workers, the quality of corporate leadership, the competence of government policy, the reliability of public infrastructure -- all help to determine how science is absorbed. The United States scores well in nearly all these areas, which is why it's defied alarmist predictions for a quarter of a century and will continue to do so.

Corporate leadership is very destructive now. How many factories are being built to produce any sort of new technology? Hello? Do I hear echos?

This is absurd. This pundit gloats about how cheap scientists are in China and then talks about how superior we are, guess what? Microsoft isn't hiring programmers in America anymore to do any research or design, they moved it all to India and China! And this is true of nearly all corporate America which have hijacked this nation and opened the borders to reduce their inflationary overhead and now they are wrecking the last of our great scientific community which was really tiny until two great, shattering political events drove hundreds of thousands of philosophers and scientists to America: Bolshevism and Naziism.

Sieg Heil.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Missing Link To Crocodile/Avian/Mammalian Past Rediscovered At Museum of Natural History

2006-02-05T20:33:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Researchers noticed what looked like a crocodile ankle poking out of a very old cast stored in the Museum's back rooms. Upon opening it, the fossil, which hasn't been seen in many years, turned out to be an important missing link from right after the great Permian extinction.

From National Geographic News:

Ankle aside, Effigia had large eyes, a long tail, and a toothless beak—not unlike the ostrich dinosaurs.

Effigia also walked on two feet, unlike modern crocs.

These physical similarities suggest that Effigia and the ornithomimid dinosaurs evolved similarly during two different eras, the scientists say.

The fossil record shows that many different features have been reinvented time and again in different species. But the Effigia example is a bit surprising.

Untangling the tree of life is a challenge. When we apply genetic tools, it is always surprising and filling out the record by classifying fossils enables us to understand all the many odd things that happened in the past for evolution is all about things happening.

Modern crocodiles are but one remnant of what was once a far more diverse croc family.

"Today we think of crocodiles as looking basically the same," said Nesbitt, of the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "But in their history they took on a wide variety of different body plans."

"Some looked like reptilian armadillos or cats, and others looked like little dinosaurs," Nesbitt said.

The crocodilian family may have been at its peak during the Triassic period.

"Toward the end of the Triassic period you have this crazy diversification of these crocodile relatives, including this animal," Nesbitt said.

"It was really the heyday of the crocodile-like animals, but the only lineage to really make it out of the Triassic was the lineage that led to modern crocodiles."

Recent research now shows that birds, turtles and crocodiles all split off from the main trunk of the dinosaur family pretty quickly and each struck out upon its own path which increasingly diverged. This splitting happened when many species were cut off from each other by the tremendous disaster of the end of the Permian when not only did the planet become very hot, the oxygen supply nearly disappeared again, it being an artifact of plants releasing oxygen when processing CO2. Each species the survived, and very few individuals survived this disaster, lived in small, restricted, protected areas. This allowed them to change rapidly without being interfered with.

Prior to the disaster, proto-mammalian Theraspids hunted proto-dinosarus. It looked like the earth would be inherited by the mammals who could keep their young warm. The bulk of all our fossil fuels comes from this balmy, wet, fertile period. For 100 million years, thick forests of fern-type plants covered the landscape. This mass of greenery and the milling insects and animals thrived happily. From Berkeley University:

In addition to having the ideal conditions for the beginnings ofcoal, several major biological, geological, and climatic events occurred during this time. One of the greatest evolutionary innovations of the Carboniferous was the amniote egg, which allowed for the further exploitation of the land by certain tetrapods. The amniote egg allowed the ancestors of birds, mammals, and reptiles to reproduce on land by preventing the desiccation of the embryo inside. There was also a trend towards mild temperatures during theCarboniferous, as evidenced by the decrease in lycopods and large insects and an increase in the number of tree ferns.

All this got buried suddenly and totally, under rock, no less. This doesn't happen inevitably. The only way to build up rock to seal in great masses of organic matter that couldn't rot easily is by suddenly turning the climate inside/out.

So hot winds, blowing sand, rains falling on bare rocks high up, causing mud flows to pour into deep valleys that were deep graves of former tremendous forests, compressing it all over the eons to turn it all into rock called "coal" or a liquid called "oil".

Here is more on the debate about warming vs asteroid impact: From GSA:

Rapid end-Permian extinctions probably intensified conditions that were already developing on Earth including: 1) extreme warmth, 2) deep-sea stratification and anoxia facilitated by warm, saline bottom water, 3) limitation of nutrient availability, and 4) reduction in atmospheric oxygen levels. All of these factors could have delayed Early Triassic biotic recovery. Decay of unburied biomass would release considerable carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Destruction of most photosynthetic organisms (land plants and phytoplankton) would sustain warmth by sharply reducing Earth’s capability for CO2 drawdown. Water lost during forest destruction would facilitate desertification that would foster erosion resulting in depletion of soil nutrients and release of CO2. Additional greenhouse gas probably entered Earth’s atmosphere from the Siberian Traps eruptions, gas hydrate release, and ocean overturn. Absence of active, low-latitude Late Permian orogenic belts had already reduced long-term silicate weathering and CO2 drawdown.

Like any terrible disaster, multiple forces coiciding with each other amplify each other's effects and thanks to this being a fairly complex system, once out of whack, everything falls rapidly apart since the entire ecosystem is built one part interacting with all neighboring parts which is why we are seeing so many extinctions today, for example.

It so happens, when all animals struggled to survive the great Permian extinction, when things got better over several million desperate years, the niche occupied by the dinosaurs happened to be bigger and more fertile than the one mammalians occupied and when the two lineages met each other again as oxygen levels rose, mammals were much tinier than before and little dinosaurs were much bigger than the poor mammals. So dominating the former dominators was easy and mammals spent the following 100 million years, dodging the thundering footsteps of the dinosaurs.

Until, again, the ecology collapsed, the climate changed and the dinosaurs lost their grip on the planet and became helpess fossils.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Scientists Now Think Global Warming Caused Greatest Extinction During At End of Permian

2006-02-05T17:34:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

This is a schematic map of Pangea at the end of the Permian Era, 250 million years ago. The land masses were, except for at the poles, very hot, the averages at over 100 F. Scientists now think the ocean's north/south circulation shut down and the seas became too tepid and stagnant so 90% of all sea life perished while on the land, 70% of the fauna died and oxygen levels were so depressed, the air was breathable only slightly above sea level.

From Science Magazine:

Hypoxia, Global Warming, and Terrestrial Late Permian Extinctions
Raymond B. Huey* and Peter D. Ward
A catastrophic extinction occurred at the end of the Permian Period. However, baseline extinction rates appear to have been elevated even before the final catastrophe, suggesting sustained environmental degradation. For terrestrial vertebrates during the Late Permian, the combination of a drop in atmospheric oxygen plus climate warming would have induced hypoxic stress and consequently compressed altitudinal ranges to near sea level. Our simulations suggest that the magnitude of altitudinal compression would have forced extinctions by reducing habitat diversity, fragmenting and isolating populations, and inducing a species-area effect. It also might have delayed ecosystem recovery after the mass extinction.

Here is a view from above showing how oxygen was cut off by mountains so populations were isolated from each other.

This shows how low the oxygen level was relative to mountains, seen from the side.

There are many reasons for us to try to understand all the extinctions because we are bioforms here and we know we can go extinct. Of course, with lunatics whipping up wars all the time, many we will beat Mother Nature to the punch. Right?

But if sanity prevails, it does behoove us to figure out the planetary past and what dangers to keep a wary eye on. To me, this is simple when it comes to things like asteroids and comets. They are, without any doubt, grave dangers to us. Another is volcanic eruptions of mega volcanoes. Then there are more subtle but insidiously dangerous threats like destroying our air and water! And the data about global warming grows more and more dire, not less and less dangerous.

This latest information is terrifying! Not only did the planet hyper-heat, this killed off a host of sealife that produces masses of oxygen and the loss of these tiny creatures nearly killed off the luxuriant flora and fauna on land. Life existed in only a few scattered "bio-islands" and there was reduced communication between these outposts, all creatures were locked into isolation chambers until the earth cooled off again and then evolution resumed with great force and we all descended from the survivors of this ancient Noah's ark.

National Center of Atmospheric Research:

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have created a computer simulation showing Earth's climate in unprecedented detail at the time of the greatest mass extinction in the planet's history. The work gives support to a theory that an abrupt and dramatic rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide triggered the massive die-off 251 million years ago. The research appears in the September issue of Geology.

"The results demonstrate how rapidly rising temperatures in the atmosphere can affect ocean circulation, cutting off oxygen to lower depths and extinguishing most life," says NCAR scientist Jeffrey Kiehl, the lead author.

Thanks to increasingly powerful computers, scientists can now run detailed climatological programs that take in many more variables than ever before in order to flash forward probabliities to some sort of conclusion. So, running variables on a 50 million year scale, feeding in a small rise in CO2 each year and this was the shocking result.

18 to 54 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 30 degrees Celsius) higher than today, and extensive volcanic activity had released large amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere over a 700,000-year period.

To solve the puzzle of how those conditions may have affected climate and life around the globe, the researchers turned to the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). One of the world's premier climate research tools, the model can integrate changes in atmospheric temperatures with ocean temperatures and currents. Research teams had previously studied the Permian extinction with more limited computer models that focused on a single component of Earth's climate system, such as the ocean.

Well, we now know the upper limit! Severe desertfication happened back then. The reason why we have so much oil to pump is because of all that lush biomass rotted and was quickly covered by sand and gravel and then compressed by mud from rising seas. We are literally repeating the mess of the Permian extinction by burning the rotted carcasses of the living creatures who dwelled on this earth so long ago.

The CCSM's simulations showed that ocean circulation was even more stagnant than previously thought. In addition, the research demonstrated the extent to which computer models can successfully simulate past climate events. The CCSM appeared to correctly capture key details of the late Permian, including increased ocean salinity and sea surface temperatures in the high latitudes that paleontologists believe were 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) higher than present.

Understanding the dynamics of the ocean currents is important and scientists already fear the mighty Gulf Stream is weakening due to nonsalty water draining off of Greenland.

From this blog:

The most recent study of the Atlantic currents show weakening of the rate of flow. Some scientists have speculated that a slower current could trigger a sudden ice age if all other meteorlogical and solar actions coincide to produce a plunge in the northern jet stream. The debate about this oscillation possibility rages on. Understanding this process is vital for our survival.

Back when I wrote this, I didn't know the new information. This is far more alarming.

The great Siberian eruptions occured at the end of the Permian and this was like Mother Nature running a huge SUV non stop. She does what She does but we can't be that fatalistic, we have to do the right thing, not the wrong thing, since it pays off handsomely, namely, we get to live on as organisms.

As usual, we take tiny steps forwards, here is an example, the British are getting kind of worried since they are on the front lines of so many bad things here (forget Florida or any Gulf state, they are doomed). From the BBC:

Governments are wrestling with problems of rising energy demands, rising costs and the spectre of climate change. In this week's Green Room, Dr Matt Prescott argues there is an easy first step to dealing with all three issues - banning the traditional light bulb.

Ever since I began to use solar energy, I used only fluorecent bulbs. I never use the cheap bulbs. I agree they should be outlawed but bet this will never happen any more than people will respond by doing the right thing rather than the destructive, cheap thing. This is why people are going to be caught in a trap of their own devising.

Simple things like building houses facing the optimal direction for solar heating or keeping cool depending on the climate, is a no-no nearly universally in this country. I must be living on one of all of 1% of houses deliberately sited and designed to maximize natural forces to my benefit. This is woeful and suicidal, our building for no future. Even if we build vast bubbles to protect us, the planet will die around us and end up with less oxygen than Mars.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
NASA Kills Deep Space Climate Observatory
Largest Antarctic Ice Sheets Near Collapse
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

4.5 Mag Earthquake At Dangerous Yellowstone Faultline at Hebgen Lake, Montana

2006-02-05T09:16:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

A small but important earthquake just happened at Hebgen Lake, Montana, today. It was only 5 km down which is extremely shallow. This is also the exact same site of the famous 7.9 Yellowstone earthquake. Here is a review of what happened back then.

Here are pictures of the quake zone.

This landslide killed many campers. The Hebgen Lake dam, for the lake is artificial, nearly collapsed. Luckily, the fault line upheaval occured just above the north side of the dam.

The fault lines in Yellowstone are fairly complex. I simplified them, they are actually all extremely short and very close together, I just tried to give a general idea of their directional orientations. The Hebgen region is part of the Yellowstone complex. The earthquakes at this point echo easily further south.

According to scientists, even very distant earthquakes on the same American plate cause echos at Yellowstone.

During the last week, we had yet another 6+ earthquake at both the Adaman Islands, site of one of the great quakes last year, and the boundry between the Australian and Pacific Plates. In other words, the reverberations from the Boxing Day Quake are still happening. Far from the earth being at rest, it is still working out the dynamics of that great change in the crust.

Californians think, since all the quakes are happening elsewhere, maybe it won't happen here. This is a ridiculous idea. But then, people are madly rebuilding bigger and more expensive structures in the heart of hurricane alley. And we know for a fact, next year's hurricanes just might dwarf the ones that happened last year.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

NASA Is Really Run By Right Wing GOP 24 Year Old Boy

2006-02-05T06:54:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Ever since Super Brat, Bush, hijacked America, he has installed fellow frat style creeps in positions of responsibility all over the place. He had them run Iraq's economy which is now a disaster area, he had them run FEMA which turned disaster areas into super disasters. And he has them running NASA and of course, NASA is collapsing. A heck of a job, army of Brownies.

From the NYT:

A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.

"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff."

Griffin is a far right winger nut case. I warned NASA employees in the beginning, he was going to allow Bush and his fellow lunatics run the show into the ground and I was right, as usual.

For Griffin to pretend he had no idea that the far rightwing Texas tot he himself installed in a position of authority in NASA is just too silly for words. How dare he. He was touted as the hands-on super smart guy who would fix NASA and all I see is wall to wall destruction and misdirection. The know-nothings that fill every possible government position were placed there by the heads of departments so I am demanding that Griffin resign.

For example, this news is straight out of the Stalin "political officer" playbook:

Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr. Hansen's case, there were several other instances in which political appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from the agency.

They called or e-mailed The Times and sent documents showing that news releases were delayed or altered to mesh with Bush administration policies.

In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.

How could Mr. Super Smart, Hands On Griffin not know what his own office was doing? Is he spaced out? Is he NASA's Ken Lay, Mr. "I'm out of the loop" NASA?

No wonder the agency is dying. I can see it all over the place. Now that Bush is totally unpopular, the poor scientists at NASA are no longer being censored by the press. They now dare to strike back against these idiots running the show. Mr. Deutsch, by the way, is only 24 years old, a very connected Texas brat brought in to muzzle NASA scientists and his ability to do this was gained with the tacit approval of Griffin.

This monumentally stupid political operative was peddling the dumb "intelligent design" crap that seems to be the ultimate sign of brain rot afflicting America. As we fight a war to the death with Muslim funamentalists, we let our own minds collapse into cottage cheese.

Griffin has been leading a fool's errand since day one. His entire plan is to misdirect NASA until it is totally nonfunctional so that the GOP can crow that the government can't run things and then sell NASA off to private investors. In other words, this is yet another right wing conspiracy to steal public resources and sell them at a huge loss to rich people who will then use it for their own purposes just like they want to sell the weather satellite feed to private investors who then keep it all secret unless you pay them off!

Gads. This pisses me off.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Printing Out Living Brain Cells...And Human/Animal Clones: Brave New World Order

2006-02-03T11:01:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Scientists have rigged up a device that works just like my office printer only it prints out living brain cells. So now, even a piece of paper will be smarter than Bush? What if we print up "My Pet Goat" using this system? Will that raise Bush's IQ if he is holding the book? And of course, the idea that a printed page can think, too, well, the pen just might be mightier than the brain!

From Raw Story:

A printer that spits out ultra-fine droplets of cells instead of ink has been used to print live brain cells without causing them any apparent harm. The technique could open up the possibility of building replacement tissue cell by cell, giving doctors complete control over the tissue they graft.

The device is a variant of a conventional ink-jet printer. Instead of forcing individual droplets of ink through a needle-shaped nozzle and onto the page, the cell printer uses a powerful electric field to produce droplets just a few micrometres in diameter, far smaller than is achievable by other means.

Couple this with the other stories about chimeras and we see some of the genetic Brave New World Order.

Of course, they will use this science for nefarious purposes since the people ruling us are nefers.

From National Geographic:

Weissman has already created mice with brains that are about one percent human.

Later this year he may conduct another experiment where the mice have 100 percent human brains. This would be done, he said, by injecting human neurons into the brains of embryonic mice.

Before being born, the mice would be killed and dissected to see if the architecture of a human brain had formed. If it did, he'd look for traces of human cognitive behavior.

Oh, great, I blogged about this earlier, how we are going to give mice human brains. The mind boggles. Of course, the Frankensteins doing this tell us not to worry, they plan to murder the mice quickly so we can rip out their tiny human brains and toy with them! Oh, that is a relief. Can't have thinking mice writing books or blogging, can we?

Some scientists are queasy about this, too.

"This is unexplored biologic territory," he said. "Whatever moral threshold of human neural development we might choose to set as the limit for such an experiment, there would be a considerable risk of exceeding that limit before it could be recognized."

Cheshire supports research that combines human and animal cells to study cellular function. As an undergraduate he participated in research that fused human and mouse cells.

But where he draws the ethical line is on research that would destroy a human embryo to obtain cells, or research that would create an organism that is partly human and partly animal.

How about human/animal mixes being disease agents? Namely, viruses, those quickly evolving, ever seeking single celled former rulers of the planet, view us as virgin territory, all this biomass just screaming to host Viral Armies. When we mix our genetics tremendously with our domestic animals, this opens many doors to viruses who can then use them to jump from species to species.

Like the Avian Bird flues, for example.

Already, our close association with animals exposes us to transitory diseases. Since our benefits from living with them overrules the deficits of them getting us sick periodically, we put up with it. But as humans overwhelm the world's planetary system, our attempts at keeping ourselves alive are clashing increasingly with Mother Nature's attempts at bringing things into balance. This is why birth control is so important and why attempts to prevent it are so annoying. Vast parts of the planet have no birth control and it shows, population explosions are tipping the scales everywhere and even cultures that are not reproducing rapidly are still stripping the environment because the remaining population is insisting on living in bigger and bigger anti-nature bubbles that is literally eliminating the ecosystem across great parts of the earth.

And then there is that asteroid no one is talking about....
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

The Largest Antarctic Ice Sheets Near Collapse

2006-02-01T22:38:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Ever since the entire Larsen Ice Shelf broke off and fell into the sea, scientists have been warily eyeing the remaining ice shelves. Now they think they can detect signs all of them are about to shatter and fall into the ocean. No surprise to me, look at how very active the fault lines on the Antarctic plate are acting! Meanwhile, the volcano in Alaska rumbles along while the mysterious asteroid hurtles towards our planet.

From the New Scientist:

The massive west Antarctic ice sheet, previously assumed to be stable, is starting to collapse, scientists warned on Tuesday.

Antarctica contains more than 90% of the world's ice, and the loss of any significant part of it would cause a substantial sea level rise. Scientists used to view Antarctica as a "slumbering giant", said Chris Rapley, from the British Antarctic Survey, but now he sees it as an "awakened giant".

Um, I would say, Mother Nature is rearranging the furniture and we are but ants and cockroaches to Her Majesty. I don't care how much one prays to Allah or Jesus or Buddha or whoever, not one of these guys can order Mother Nature around, they have zero influence over her.

We, on the other hand, do have some small influence, some large influence, indeed, the global warming stuff is 50% us and 50% the very active sun and of course, the ozone holes that let in lethal rays, directly onto the exposed snow packs.

Changes on the peninsula, where 75% of the 400 mountain glaciers are in retreat, have provided new insights into the ways that ice sheets may disintegrate.

In March 2002, a huge floating ice shelf known as Larsen B shattered into icebergs. This turned out to have an effect akin to pulling a cork from a bottle. With Larsen B no longer impeding movement, the ice floes that fed the shelf began moving faster towards the sea and started to thin. The finding took scientists by surprise when revealed in September 2004 and now modellers are now working to include such mechanisms in their predictions.

Look, let's be reasonable: America's refusal for years and years to curb our abuse of fossil fuels, our refusal to not only change but to actively make things much, much worse, our blasted collective stupidity is going to end civilization. If the seas suddenly rise by only 10', this ends most cities. All of Florida south of Tallehassee, will be habitat for manatees.

And the hurricanes. Don't even think of living within 100 miles of the ocean unless it is in very secure bunkers set high above flood stage!

London, Venice, all of Holland, Manhattan and of course, Washington, DC, will be 100% underwater. Few people know that lower Manhattan has a seawall and ditto, Brooklyn along half the shoreline. Coney Island will be for mermaids, only, it is already watching the shores get eaten by the sea, year after year.

When the ice blows, the rise will be quite rapid. Most small island nations will disappear like Atlantis. Bangladesh's 75 million+ people totally without homes, half of Pakistan, gone, much of the Tigris/Euphrates valley, up the Nile, too. Denmark. Probably California will end up with the Salton Sea filling much of the Central Valley, for the rift there in the earth is already preventing the irrigation water from flowing out and it won't be long before the slight elevation at the Colorado River's exit into the Gulf of California will be too low to stop the ocean from flowing northwards.

All our petty problems are dwarfed by this mess.

Then there is the asteroid. Something truly we should concentrate on only we won't.

This just came in: From the Washington Post:

The National Association of Evangelicals said yesterday that it has been unable to reach a consensus on global climate change and will not take a stand on the issue, disappointing environmentalists who had hoped that evangelical Christians would prod the Bush administration to soften its position on global warming.

Over the past four years a growing number of evangelical groups have embraced environmental causes, urging Christians to engage in "Creation care" and campaigning against gas-guzzling SUVs with advertisements asking, "What would Jesus drive?"

Of course, this campaign had a flat tire and is out of steam and the Jesus-loves-only-greedy-people churches decided they have nothing to do with causing catastrophe and despite all the Bible Stories of God killing people who annoy him, they decided they would rather have God launch the Apocalypse rather than stop devouring the planet, themselves.

This is, I fear, a wish of theirs that will come true. I don't want it to since I live here, too. Perhaps we can ship them all off to Mars.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Blizzards In Hawaii While Rain Falls In New York

2006-01-29T14:07:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Today, yet another rainstorm is heading up to New York. This is January! Meanwhile, huge parts of the planet are getting hammered by blizzards including Hawaii! Instabilty is one of the effects of global warming.

From Unknown Country:

A vast arctic cold front has driven temperatures to record lows from Norway to Siberia and Japan, and has now brought snow to the slopes of Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. Tourists from California who were climbing the volcano were almost stranded when the latest blizzard began. The park rangers who work there all say they have never seen snow this intense in Hawaii before. While snow is fairly common on Mauna Kea, blizzard conditions are rare.

Temperatures in Moscow have plunged to -35 last week, and the US northeast has been experienced heavy snowfall in recent days. Bitter cold has gripped northern India, and New Delhi has seen record lows, as has Greece, where the Acropolis is covered with snow. Hundreds have died worldwide, at least 53 in Ukraine alone.

Truly, the weather is extremely bizarre this year. I was out sawing firewood they other day in a light jacket and was soon covered with sweat because of the hot sun! This, on a mountain in upstate New York! Unbelievable.

Americans are rejoicing in this weather because our fuel costs are down but there are some devils in these details and if any of them take form, we just might end up with no port cities on the Gulf or Florida.

Also, I just wanted to do a cartoon about snow in Hawaii. Have to have some mordant fun. Haha.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Deadly Coldwave Grips Europe
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Bush Plans to Cut NASA Funds--Just Like I Predicted

2006-01-29T13:24:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Back when Bush claimed he wanted to go to Mars--he actually meant, be Mars---he got the usual supporters of NASA to back him in the last election. I noted over and over, he never ever mentions space exploration or Mars in any meaningful way and besides, the planet we should be studying is called "Earth" and he just killed the Earth orbiting Deep Space Climate Observatory! So now, he sticks a knife into NASA just in time for a possible asteroid strike (which isn't in the news, is it?).

From the Washington Post:

President Bush has finally won endorsement of his "Vision for Space Exploration" from a once-skeptical Congress, but supporters now fear the administration is backing away from its own initiative to send humans back to the moon and then on to Mars.

For at least three months, the White House Office of Management and Budget and NASA have struggled to find a way to make up a budget shortfall of between $3 billion and $5 billion and perhaps more, in the troubled space shuttle program -- and to do so without inflating overall space spending well beyond the $16.5 billion that NASA has this year.

The born again baboons on the right hate NASA. They want it dead. They want all scientists to be as moronic as they and this is what kills all empires: religious nuts strangling science. Even happened to China!

Of course, Bush intends to kill NASA. Why the world's billionaires think they will have a big party if we are all snuffed in an asteroid strike baffles me. They won't even be able to flee to the moon or Mars! They will die! Like us! Is this smart of what?

I knew this was going to happen. As usual, it happens. Why can't I be wrong? This would be a happy thing, all the Cassandra stuff, false! No one would be happier than I!

Living on our living earth means we have some small responsibility for taking care of it. We watched, idle, while huge hurricanes tore apart our nation and we still refuse to impliment any of the Kyoto Accord's suggetions. And now this. NASA has proven over the years to be one of the "good" government programs, one that benefits all humanity as well as the planet and Gaia.

Well, that is why Bush must kill it. His plan is to have no government systems work, period. Except the military and even that, nope. Look at 9/11. Our military, out to lunch, goofing off, ditto during hurricane Katrina. Gah.

Can they hand NASA over to me? And the Presidency? For one week? Pretty please.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
NASA Kills The Deep Space Observatory
America Celebrates the Death of the Kyoto Accords
Lost in Space
NASA Flounders
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Panther Mountain, NY, Created by Asteroid Strike, Big Meteor Strikes Hit Antarctica

2006-01-28T21:20:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Long ago, an asteroid hit just 70 miles away from where I now live, Panther Mountain in the Catskills. My husband worked with the geologist who discovered this impact site. Also, geologists find major meteor strikes in Antarctica.

From the NY State Museum:

ISACHSEN, Yngvar W., NYS Geological Survey, Albany, NY 12230; Panther Mountain Circular Feature

A study is underway of cuttings of the Herdman Well, which is located near the northern periphery of the Panther Mountain Circular feature. The goal is to test the possibility that Panther Mountain circular drainage and negative gravity anomaly are caused by a buried impact crater (an intact impact). The cuttings are being searched for shock induced features such as shatter cone markings, breccias, fused glass, planar features in quartz, and displaced, repeated, or disrupted stratigraphic units that would test the impact hypothesis.

Ingvar was lots of fun to work with and my husband enjoyed it a lot. Studying satellite photos, Ingvar noticed the perfectly round circle in one of the state parks. Even the streams ran in a circle. So he decided to study it.

I once got lost a night in that area and ended up, with my daughter, driving in the huge circle. We were told to look for a red barn and turn left. Well, there are zillions of red barns there! So we kept going left, counterclockwise until I saw the same red barns marching past, yet again! Spent over two hours at this amusing enterprise. So I got to know the area pretty well. When you stand on any of the outer ridges, the bowl shape is quite noticable.

This medium-sized crater is only 70 miles from my farm. If it were to hit now, I would be going on a one way trip to the cosmos. Just the wind and flash would do me in, forget the flying rocks!

Here is a list of all the major known strikes. Panther Mountain isn't in this list only because it was confirmed just in the last 15 years. This is most likely what it came from:

End of the Triassic Period

About 214 million years ago, 5 large fragments of a comet impacted the Northern Hemisphere. The impacts caused widespread destruction and lead to 3rd largest mass extinction resulting in the loss of approximately 80% of the species on the face of the planet. The fragments impacted in Quebec, Canada; Saint Martin, Canada; Red Wing, North Dakota; France; and the Ukraine. The largest fragment produced the Manicouagan crater, 62 miles in diameter, in Quebec, Canada.

Over the eons, it filled in as the Catskill mountains eroded away.

In 2004, scientists discovered a major meteor strike on Antarctica. The effects from it were very different than if it landed on water or land. From the Guardian:

Professor Frans van der Hoeven, from Delft University in the Netherlands, told the conference that the evidence showed that an asteroid measuring between three and seven miles across had broken up in the atmosphere and five large pieces had hit the Earth, creating multiple craters over an area measuring 1,300 by 2,400 miles.

The effect would have been to melt all the ice in the path of the pieces, as well as the crust underneath. The biggest single strike caused a hole in the ice sheet roughly 200 by 200 miles, which would have melted about 1% of the ice sheet, raising water levels worldwide by 60cm (2ft).

That would cause Florida to go for a pretty big swim. This happened 780,000 years ago when the Great Ice Ages already began.

Prof Van der Hoeven said: "The extraordinary thing about this meteor strike is that it appeared to do so little damage. Unlike the dinosaur strike there is no telltale layer of dust that demonstrates the history of the event. It may have damaged things and wiped out species but there is no sign of it."

Well, no matter where a strike occurs, it would be problematic for the earth as we humans have arranged ourselves.

One thing that did happen at exactly the same time was the reversing of the Earth's magnetic field. There is no other explanation as to why this took place and Prof Van der Hoeven believes it was caused by the impact.

You know, our north pole has taken to wandering lately. Looks like we might be in for a reversal. A real coincidence.

Meanwhile, Bush, head in the sand, as usual, with NASA set firmly on the path of useless space exploration while studiously ignoring this planet (oh, how like 9/11 this all is!) spends all his feeble resources trying to shut up pesky NASA scientists. From NY Times:

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

I wonder if the paper pushers at NASA will show him instruments of torture. I wonder if signing papers denying the earth orbits the sun denying the earth is over 6.000 years old are next.

One thing for certain, if Gore were President, I know we could appeal to him to save the planet.

Here is some legislation information concerning protecting the planet from hazards of outerspace: From Congress:

H.R. 1022, also introduced by Rep. Rohrabacher, would establish a program within NASA to detect, track, catalogue, and characterize the physical properties of near-Earth asteroids and comets equal to or greater than 100 meters in diameter in order to assess the threat of Earth being struck by such near-Earth objects. The bill would authorize appropriations for the program of $20 million for each of fiscal years 2006 through 2007.

Rep. Rohrabacher said, “The potential catastrophe of an asteroid hitting Earth should no longer be ignored. We need to know what is out there. Accounts of asteroids passing close to Earth with almost no prior warning should be enough to get our attention. The first step is to assess the threat. Given the vast number of asteroids and comets that inhabit the Earth's neighborhood, greater efforts for tracking and monitoring these objects are critical. This bill would direct NASA to expand their current program to track and detect potential threats and would provide a funding authorization. Any threat that would wreak havoc on or world should be studied and prevented if possible. We have the technology, we need the direction – this bill provides that.”

This was passed out of committee back last May. It isn't a big, fat pork bill for junk like the bridge to nowhere in Alaska so I doubt any money was budgeted for it.

I don't see any mention elsewhere conerning this. Time for a rethink, right?
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

New Asteroid, 2006 BQ6, Might Pass Close to Earth (and I do mean CLOSE)

2006-01-28T18:56:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Astronomers at Mt. Lemmon which is the mountain I lived next to when not on Kitt Peak when I was a child, spotted an asteroid which they calculate will pass very close to the earth. Really close.

From a science forum:

Asteroid 2006 BQ6 has a very tiny chance to hit Earth on Aug 1. Judging from the Palermo Scale of -2.8, the odds are about 1 in 20,000. The asteroid's trajectory is only known from 1.5 days of arc, and subsequent observations are likely to give better estimates and (what usually occurs) eliminate any possibility of a collison.

Just something interesting to watch at this stage...

Quote:
2006 BQ6

Notes: 2006 BQ6 was discovered by the Mt. Lemmon Survey on the morning of 22 Jan. 2006 and was announced two days later, when it was posted by NEODyS as an impact risk.

NOTE: This object, estimated to be on the order of 425 meters in diameter, has a highly-preliminary impact solution for Aug. 1st this year. This solution is rated at the normal Torino Scale 0 ("likelihood of collision is zero, or so low as to be effectively zero") and has a relatively low Palermo Scale (PS) rating for a solution so soon for an object of this size, but still the non-zero possibility needs to be completely ruled out. Fortunately, 2006 BQ6 will remain in view and early risk assessments always change with further observation.

Packed designation: K06B06Q
NEODyS Clomon Assessment
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Years VI PS Cum PS Max T S Arc Days
2006-2072 7 -2.76 -2.78 0 1.545

Click here to see the path of the asteroid.

Here is the University of Arizona's meteor strike calculator.

Here is the Meteor Crater page. My grandfather, Edison Pettit, was one of the astronomers who decided this was a meteor strike rather than a volcano. My parents have a fairly large meteor which my grandfather tried to saw in half, using old equipment that broke down before sawing it in two, it weighs over 100lbs. I used to play with it when I was a child, running toys across the surface.

There was fierce debate about the moon's craters. Grandpa sided with the theory, they were from meteors and my father believed the dust on the moon might be pretty deep and maybe loose due to the low gravity. He worried the space capsule might sink in too deeply to extract again. When we sent men to the moon, there was no way of knowing, it was a big risk.

My grandfather made a blow-up photo of the moon at half dark/half light. It was over 8' tall and 4' wide, one of the biggest pictures of the moon outside of museums. I used to stand there and trace out the various impacts with my finger when very young. I grew up knowing the topography of the moon as well as the surrounding mountains we lived in or on.

I used to wonder about meteor impacts.

I have seen quite a few meteor passes thanks to living on places like Kitt Peak with no light interference and a very thin atmosphere. To this day, I have powerful lungs thanks to running around as a child on high mountains. Your voice is pitched higher there, too, so by the time I was 13, my voice accomodated this by dropping very low. I have a deep voice today, thanks to this.

As a teen, if I dressed appropriately, I could pass myself off as an adult due to my low voice abilities, something I exploited in the usual way (no need to ask! Pass the beer stein!). Anyway, we also studied volcanoes and my parents loved visiting volcanoes and nothing pleased them more than to figure out if a volcano, in the pre-satellite days, blew up and we noted it on the mountain tops by the passage of a sudden line of super high cirrus clouds.

I caught the clouds from one eruption as I walked out of my bedroom one afternoon, back in 1964. It was fun, spotting it.

If a celestial object does hit, it is very similar to a volcanic eruption: the further one is from it, the louder the boom. At over a thousand miles, one can hear it quite distinctly. When Krakatoa blew up, the sound traveled around the world three times, it was so loud! Next comes the high cirrus clouds and right behind the long, white broiling line of clouds comes the wind. The closer one is, the fiercer the wind. Winds of over 500 mph can happen. The debrie from the impact is very fine of one is far away but closer, things can get bitterly bad, fast. If it hits an ocean which is more likely, then we get tidalwaves that would dwarf the ones that hit us back last year. And of course, there would be many earthquakes, too.

Our ancestors saw all this. Meteor crater happened only 50,000 years ago. It wasn't that big an object, hitting us.

All my life, since I was so small, I was in a crib, my family has talked about this matter, namely, we fret about stellar objects hitting our planet. We know that in the middle ages, a meteor hit the moon and it turned red from the mantle of dust that covered the entire surface within minutes. The moon is still trembling from that impact, like a rung bell.

Carl Sagan loved to talk about this and like me, supported the space program for two reasons: to locate other lifeforms and star/planetary systems and to spot asteroids or meteors and deal with them before they deal with us! Back in the eighties, I frantically tried to redirect the funding for Star Wars over to space observatories and developing a better L-orbital flight system that is easy to launch so we can intercept these asteroids quickly.

Now we sit here like sitting ducks who can't duck. I hope this is a near miss, I hope it is a wake-up call. I really don't want to witness a meteor impact, thank you. Space, as my grandfather loved to say, isn't empty at all. And it has a lot of stuff that is dark and can't be seen unless it approaches the sun. And look at the Milky Way some night. The dark patches are vast, gigantic sheets of hard space dirt like asteroids, masses and masses of this stuff, huge, unimaginable amounts, so great, no starlight from the galactic core penetrates it. Our sun has bored a hole in this sort of dirt and much of it resides on the outer Kuiper belt in an unstable situation which is why pieces fall back into the planetary plane.

The ice and dust ones become comets. The hard iron ones are called asteroids. Both are exceedingly dangerous. When the comet that hit Jupiter during OJ mania summer, it didn't penetrate American's consciousness because we were distracted by dumb stuff. But I will assure you, the astronomers and scientists at all the observatories and JPL were amazed, flabbergasted and horrified as it bore into Jupiter's cloud cover, leaving massive holes that churned and burned for quite a long while. No one, absolutely no one expected this.

The holes were bigger than the planet earth and yet, it was all much smaller fragments of the original giant. My father calculated that if it hit us, there wouldn't be much left to talk about it unless one s a single celled creature.

By the way, growing up with astronomers, I had to deal with the emotional difficulties of thinking about the beginning and end of time, etc. This is why I have a cheerful disposition. Namely, if Lady Luck, the real ruler of the Universe, the one who rolls those dice and blindly blunders about, if She rolls snake-eyes, there isn't much to do. But if humans are very clever, they can tip the dice and foil her.

Only we are more destructive than She is! So all I can say is, roll them bones and give me good luck.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

MSNBC Issues Boilerplate Lies About Space Shuttle Disaster

2006-01-28T05:09:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Calling the accusation that the White House applied political pressure on NASA to hurry up and launch the Challenger "a myth", MSNBC carries GOP water, as always, when anyone blows a whistle, they are called liars or insane. I was very involved in the debate about the launch when it was happening. The very strong concerns of the technicians on the ground were overridden by the top administrators of NASA and then, to cover up, they had to make up ridiculous stories which are easily debunked.

From MSNBC:

Myth #6: Political pressure forced the launch

There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin. Launch officials clearly felt pressure to get the mission off after repeated delays, and they were embarrassed by repeated mockery on the television news of previous scrubs, but the driving factor in their minds seems to have been two shuttle-launched planetary probes. The first ever probes of this kind, they had an unmovable launch window just four months in the future. The persistent rumor that the White House had ordered the flight to proceed in order to spice up President Reagan’s scheduled State of the Union address seems based on political motivations, not any direct testimony or other first-hand evidence. Feynman personally checked out the rumor and never found any substantiation. If Challenger's flight had gone according to plan, the crew would have been asleep at the time of Reagan's speech, and no communications links had been set up.

We had FOUR MONTHS "window of opportunity." So why the rush? Why worry about a six hour delay which was all the engineers were asking for? A 24 hour delay?

Why was the media howling at NASA? They don't howl at NASA unless there is some political pressure to howl at NASA and that comes from the political side of the street. I didn't know of a single scientist at JPL, for example, yelling for a quick as possible launch! Indeed, they were the ones calling for it to not be launched and the probes were their babies!

Next: the idea that the astronauts would all be "asleep" at the wheel by 8pm is totally stupid. What? Huh? Were they all Bush clones? I can easily wake up at 4am and run things until midnight, this is my normal schedule! And the excitement of a great trip into space? Running around for 24 hours is a cinch. Indeed, no one is sent into space to snooze. The missions are fairly short in duration, a tiny handful of days. So sleep is kept to a minimum, not a maximum! Occassional cat naps. And not everyone sleeping at once, either. Jeeze. This is why anyone going into space has to be fit and not only that, very strong, endurance-wise. No Bushes go into space!

This sort of infantile stuff posted by MSNBC really steams me. Of course, top NASA authorities will never suggest they were pressured by the White House. Biting the hand that feeds you and all that. Reporters are not supposed to be paid by the White House even though they are, of course, under the table. So supposedly, they are to be immune to this sort of thing and should be able to seek out the truth. It is interesting that the cat is out of the bag since no reporter talked to me back then, about this matter, and you can bet, they won't talk to me today, even after googling my story.

And Google is being very nice to me lately, my postings are often on page one there and so this means, people can access it easily.

The news media back then, ran stories about Reagan looking forward to talking to the teacher in space. Big, big PR stuff. I remember it quite clearly. I also remember talking about that with my father that morning. I also remember how the press worked hard to erase that information afterwards, assuring the Americans watching the news that Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with the disaster and then that trained seal actor went to the podium and shed crocodile tears all over his monitor, weeping for them and making a big to-do about how they were now angels and all that. Boo hoo. We were then ordered, collectively, to not think about the morning's plans for the teacher to talk with Reagan.

Myth #7: An unavoidable price for progress

Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management — the disaster should have been avoidable. NASA managers made a bad call for the launch decision, and engineers who had qualms about the O-rings were bullied or bamboozled into acquiescence. The skeptics’ argument that launching with record cold temperatures is valid, but it probably was not argued as persuasively as it might have been, in hindsight. If launched on a warmer day, with gentler high-altitude winds, there’s every reason to suppose the flight would have been successful and the troublesome seal design (which already had the attention of designers) would have been modified at a pace that turned out to have been far too leisurely. The disaster need never have happened if managers and workers had clung to known principles of safely operating on the edge of extreme hazards — nothing was learned by the disaster that hadn’t already been learned, and then forgotten.

HAHAHAHA.

Gads. The previous myth #6 claimed there was no pressure then this paragraph admits there was pressure! This is why the stooge reporter had to say, the pressure was from JPL to launch because they only had four (!!!!) more months to go? What?

Engineers didn't have qualms about the O rings, they didn't even have qualms about the cold even though there was ice on the shuttle which concerned them somewhat. It was 100% the air turbulence, especially at 20,000 feet. Period. This lying reporter then claims NASA learned nothing from the disaster.

Hogwash. Unlike reporters or politicians, scientists don't have sudden Alzheimer's symptoms whenever they have to think about disasters! I know from first hand experience, how difficult politicians can be and how difficult it was, trying to raise funds for NASA when America was being bullied by the military/industrial complex and right wingers like Safire, who I debated in public back then, over the Star Wars program with suddenly sucked up most of NASA's potential funding, so Congress brutally penny pinched NASA to death thanks to the huge budget overruns caused by Reagan's wild tax cutting, back then, the Chinese were too poor to soak up all our red ink for us.

This is why the teacher in space publicity was launched. To revive public interest in the shuttle missions which were quite boring up until then.

NASA officials have huge reasons to lie about this disaster. They, like Reagan and his operatives, were complicit in this mess and so, to save themselves and save their paymasters, they covered it all up with a ton of bull. And so here we are, after a second, eerily similar disaster, on the anniversary of the other shuttle blow up, when Bush happily announced we are going to Mars (and killing any research about this home planet of ours that might show global warming!).

There are lies about that mess we won't ever see debunked by the scribes pretending to be reporters. And MSNBC: you know my name, you know where I am. Gads. Feel free to call me. I get not one thin dime from NASA or anyone so I have no reason to shut up. On the other hand, if anyone working for JPL is called to confirm my information, they will be forced to lie. Ah well.

The truth is obvious. Even within the parameters of this "myth debunking" article.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

We Tried To Stop The Launch of the Challenger Shuttle

2006-01-27T08:26:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

On the anniversary of the failure of the Challenger mission when it blew up, one cold winter morning, I remember it well, for I was involved in trying to stop the launch that day.

Here is a review of what happened.

Everyone was so excited about the "teacher in space" program. It was a brilliant publicity move for NASA and it was used to curry favor with the public. Many public schools were planning to tune in to live broadcasts from space with the lovely teacher, Sharon McAuliffe, who won the contest to go into space. Since the moon landing, attention to space matters was flagging and NASA was eager to revive it for they needed public support to get funding out of Congress.

The various space exploration/colonization communities were totally ruined by Reagan's Star Wars mess. The desire to rule the earth via space was very powerful. Fear of Russia who was bogged down in a futile war in Afghanistan and bleeding red ink trying to keep its empire intact via military force (sounds awfully familiar!) was falsely viewed as scary and dangerous so much of the public funds flowed ever faster into the maw of the military space program, a situation that didn't even pause when the Soviet state collapsed into bankruptcy and they came, hat in hand, to us for financial help (this will sound horribly familiar as we go off, today, to beg for money from China!).

Ronald Reagan decided he wanted to do a nifty publicity stunt and speak to the teacher in space during his State of the Union speech. So there was tremendous urgency to launch Challenger on this latest schedule for they were running out of time.

As usual, I was watching the weather like a hawk, a lifetime passion of mine. Due to being hit by lightning, I have a very good reason to keep a wary eye on the sky. The night before launch, a terrific cold wave with a lot of unusual turbulence came roaring down from the Arctic. Temperatures in NYC plummeted. The wind was screaming. News reports about possible crop damage in Florida caused orange futures in Chicago to shoot up as weather watchers made purchases, expecting and then getting great price hikes in the following months.

I studied the graphs showing the isobars at about 6am that morning. I knew my father was going to be at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena at 6am, PST. So I waited until 9am EST to call him. When he answered his office phone, I yelled, "Stop the launch! Please! The upper level crosswinds in Florida are really bad! I have a very bad feeling about this!" We talked back and forth for an hour as he looked at the isobar charts and made calls to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They then had a meeting at the JPL headquarters and then voted to delay the launch yet again.

The launch had been repeatedly delayed due to weather and small odds and ends. So when the JPL people urged caution on the Houston people, this caused some political concerns. Houston then decided to stay the launch based on my father's say-so.

My father was the one who brought back all those German rockets in 1945, he is one of the fathers of the Space Programs and his fellow founding fathers all agreed to stay the launch until the turbulence passed which would be merely one more day.

The White House exploded in anger.

By 10:am EST, I put down the phone after my father confirmed the flight was cancelled and went off to the dentist's office to get a molar repaired. I came in and saw the TV on in the office, the dentist and receptionist were watching the launch. "It has been cancelled," I said. They said, the announcer admitted there was a call to cancel and they were waiting to see if it was going to be implimented. I said, "It won't be launched. I was promised that."

So, the dentist started working on my molar.

The receptionist screamed. The dentist said, "What is the matter?" and ran out of the room. I bolted upright. "The space shuttle blew up!" she yelled.

I tore into the room. "I hope the astronauts were already out when it happened!" I said.

"No, they launched it," whispered the dentist.

I literally grabbed the TV. "NO! How dare they! NO!" I grabbed the phone and called the JPL. My father was crying and I was yelling at him. "You said it wasn't going to be launched! Look! It blew apart right where the crosswinds are! How could you?"

He said, Reagan begged them to do it and if they didn't do it, they would have serious funding problems so the concerns of the scientists were overridden. In disgust, I told the dentist to please give me a new appointment, I had things to do. I called a number of papers and talked about this, everyone was interested until...the White House ordered NASA to lie about the pressure applied by them.

So it wasn't included in the "investigation". I wasn't asked to testify. No scientist dared say a thing about this. Hush-hush-hush, just like the fake 9/11 investigation and the fake Warren Report.

Readers might think, I am making all of this up. Fine. Be sceptical, it is a good thing, to be a sceptic. I am sorry the people who are involved in this story won't talk. They know which side their bread is buttered on and I am the black sheep, the black hole of the American Space Program's darkest secrets.

As an outsider, a reject, I can view things more clearly.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Black Holes Don't Merely Dent Space/Time Fabric, They Will Eventually Pull It All The Way Down Into New Big Bang

2006-01-25T11:12:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Years ago, I figured out my own scheme describing how the space/time continuum works. Since all these wonderful terrestrial and space observatories have been pouring in raw data, astronomy has been relentlessly pulled away from what I believe is a the false "universe is expanding faster and faster" storyline to a new model which is, the universe is sliding down steeper and steeper gravity pits created by increasingly gigantic black holes and that we are in a collapsing universe, not an expanding one, the fabric of the PAST is getting stretched more and more, the FUTURE is being compressed.

From Space.com:

A spinning black hole in the constellation Scorpius has created a stable dent in the fabric of spacetime, scientists say.

The dent is the sort of thing predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. It affects the movement of matter falling into the black hole.

The spacetime-dent is invisible, but scientists deduced its existence after detecting two X-ray frequencies from the black hole that were identical to emissions noted nine years ago. The finding will allow scientists to calculate the black hole's spin, a crucial measurement necessary for describing the object's behavior.

I have exchanged emails over all this stuff with my parents who are well known astronomers as well as many other things, they being the ultimate polymaths.

I don't do the numbers crunching of physics but my dad said, I was probably on the right path only he didn't want to think about this too much, a common problem with cosmic matters, namely, it is all about thinking about the End of Time.

It is curious to me how the infinitely expanding universe model keeps its grip on most astronomer's cosmos. My grandfather warned me about this, he knew Einstein and was pre-einsteinian, having gotten his degree before Einstein became famous. It seems, most humans like to cling to whatever they learn no matter what which is why astronomic changes are called "revolutions" after the great Copernicus book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestrium. The facts on the ground are being misinterpeted by observers who are reluctant to revise old ideas. Eventually, the accumulated information will force everyone to rethink, what is the space/time fabric and how shall we represent it, graphically as well as in numbers.

One can't do the numbers unless one can do the artwork for imagining things is the first step towards describing them.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Our Galaxy Is Spiralling Down Into The Great Attractor's Black Hole
Einstein, Schroedinger and the Big Box
When Galaxies Collide
Popping the Balloon
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Xtreme Weather: Global Warming Means Greater Hot/Cold Variables Swings

2006-01-21T08:35:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As Europe and Siberia freeze or endure gigantic storms with hurricane force winds, here in America, it is shockingly warm, the picture above is my mountain farm with zero snow and more rain on the way. This is what global warming is all about. Drastic extremes.

From the BBC:

Severe cold weather gripping large parts of Russia has now spread west, causing chaos in Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and Scandinavia.
Officials in those countries say there is growing pressure on energy supplies, with power shortages as Russia cuts deliveries to fight the freeze at home.

Dozens have died of the cold, with temperatures as low as -33C recorded.

Forecasters have said that the freeze will last several more days, and could intensify in places.

The energy grid is near collapse in Europe. Russia still pipes gas to the west but their own needs to keep their badly designed housing system running means much less fuel for other countries. The tensions between Russia and Urkaine are rising. Russia has no need to nurse Ukraine along ever since that country has decided to join the USA in a tighter alliance. The USA has zero oil or gas to spare for anyone, indeed, up until this month, we have been gobbling down the oil reserves of Europe at a mad rate, all because poor Europe wanted to keep prices down on the international oil markets.

Guess what? The oil markets are now shooting up and this, despite the warmest winter in our history, bar none. It is amazingly warm. Day after day, above freezing up here in the northeast. In the south, late spring temperatures reign. The Jet Stream snakes up and down, writhing wildly. Usually, waves of cold ooze down in winter, pretty much blanketing the northern hemisphere or southern hemisphere depending on the tilt of the planet vis a vis the sun.

Now, the full fury of the cold air is narrorwly channeled and the increasing winds coupled with greater amounts of water in the atmosphere equals tremendous storms, the equivilent to hurricanes with isobars at 950 mb or lower. 8' of snow fell on Hokkaido, for example, in just a very few storms. On top of everything, volcanoes have been bleching dust into the stratosphere and the fine particulate ash is particularily good at attracting H20 molecules, so this is elevating the possibility of tremendous snow falls.

This is probably why excessive global warming can switch suddenly to Ice Ages as massive amounts of moisture suddenly are dropped upon significant parts of the earth and literally blanket it, reflecting back the sunlight just as the sun decides to do the variable star stuff and shut down activity slightly.

A slight change in solar activity can trigger a cascade of snow events when there is tremendous energy/moisture in the system and we now know that ice ages start very suddenly, not even over the course of centuries but over the course of a handful of years, I suspect, a two year window, myself.

From Xinhua net:

Fang was one of the approximately 160,000 passengers held up for hours at various railway stations in Beijing and Zhengzhou, capital of central China's Henan Province and also a hub of the north-south Beijing-Guangzhou Railway, due to the unexpected snow spell that began to fall in vast areas of China on Wednesday.

Railway stations in Beijing and Zhengzhou had launched red emergency warning schemes, the serious degree of China's three-level passenger security emergency system, to properly allocate stranded passengers, ensure their safety and food supply, and arrange additional trains.

It is the Lunar New Year in China and everyone is trying to travel since this is the most important holiday in the year.

From Aftenposten. Norway:

Storms rage north to south
While residents of northern Norway were battening down the hatches in the face of hurricane-force winds, thousands at the southern tip of the country were without power after heavy snowfall.

A sudden dump of snow over the past few days has cut power lines, and around 3,000 households in Agder were without power on Wednesday. Crews worked to repair the damage, but by Thursday morning, more problems were being reported.

Just another example of this all or none weather. Here, it was 44 degrees at sunrise, in the middle of January. Usually, it seldom hits 44 degrees F during a heat wave here. When we do get a cold wave, and we have had several, it drops to well below zero suddenly, a 60+ degree drop in a few hours. Then, only three or four days later, the south wind comes blustering back and it goes way above freezing. My road is a mess, alternating freezing and thawing on a weekly basis.

I worry about this, for if all the spring water runs off as rain, it isn't here in April, we have had some very dry Aprils lately, near drought conditions. "April showers" have become April's sunshine with nary a cloud to be seen. Getting March winds during January is unsettling. The wild geese barely moved south this fall because there were virtually no north blowing winds to ease their journey so they hung out here. Every time it goes below zero, they fly frantically about but since the cold doesn't stay, they have calmed down more and more. They know there is global warming and they don't mind but then, they don't farm.

This week, all over the news, was the story of the Pluto launch. Goody gum drops. We can learn all about Pluto's atmosphere but not our own since Bush and his right wing puppet running NASA just killed the extremely important Deep Space Climate Observatory! Yet another reason to impeach and arrest Bush and his cabal.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
NASA Kills Deep Space Climate Observatory
Developing Major Eruption In Alaska Bringing Major Storms
Global Warming And This Hot Winter
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

NASA Kills Deep Space Climate Observatory Just In Time For Global Warming Disasters

2006-01-16T15:26:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Mother Nature as Medusa; not something we want to see! Just like they killed the Hubble Space Telescope by refusing to repair it, in this case, the observatory was already built and cost $100 million and they canned it for political reasons.

From the New York Times:

NASA has quietly terminated the Deep Space Climate Observatory, citing "competing priorities." The news media took little notice. Few Americans, after all, had even heard of the program. But the entire world may come to mourn its passing.

OK, does anyone imagine Al Gore, our real President, would have done this crime? Any crimes, for that matter? This is utterly craven, wasteful and dangerous. Understanding what is going on is literal life and death.

Mother Nature doesn't give two hoots about us, She is relentless and does what She wants and watching Her and molding our actions to suit Her is life and fricking death! This wasteful, stupid idiodicy just so we can pretend to go to bone dry Mars is sheer criminality. This planet is the most precious and valuable in the solar system if not the entire Orion arm of the Milky Way, for crying out loud! Why does NASA want to study Mars and ignore Planet fricking Homeland Earth?

Traitors to the planet. they are.

From the Independent:

Global warming is set to accelerate alarmingly because of a sharp jump in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Preliminary figures, exclusively obtained by The Independent on Sunday, show that levels of the gas - the main cause of climate change - have risen abruptly in the past four years. Scientists fear that warming is entering a new phase, and may accelerate further.

This is a must-read article. The USA, in particular, is responsible for this. As it gets hotter, we burn more coal and gas to run our inefficent, ass-backwards energy systems. Much more coal is burned to create air conditioning than anything else! The fastest growing areas are in the sunbelt and there is near zero generation of solar energy in this pig headed region that should have known better thirty years ago.

I should know, I used to lecture about this in Arizona in the seventies!
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Astronomers Find A Space Slinky and A Stellar Tornado

2006-01-14T17:40:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Two interstellar spirals in the news today: one is a magnetic slinky coiled around increasingly tightly massed gasses and a star which is pouring out tremendous energy from one pole which is exciting the surrounding gasses in a tremendous, rainbow colored tornado.

From Space.com:

Astronomers have discovered a giant magnetic field that is coiled like a snake around a rod-shaped gas cloud in the constellation Orion.

Timothy Robishaw, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, involved in the discovery, described the structure as a "giant, magnetic Slinky wrapped around a long, finger-like interstellar cloud."

Astronomers call that wound-up shape "helical."

The discovery, presented here this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, was made in the Orion Molecular Cloud, a known stellar nursery in the constellation Orion. It supports a previous theory about how magnetic fields interact with interstellar gas clouds.

This is an interesting development. Gravity has intrigued scientists ever since Newton and magnetism, since it was discovered probably by the Norse, being close by the North Pole, most likely, and unlike sailors elsewhere, sailing often in fog, magnetism has tickled minds for generations, every child is fascinated by it. Just take them down to a stream with a magnet and watch their amazement as the magnet pulls iron out of the loose gravel.

Magnetism is everywhere just like gravity and to see it so forcefully coiled around a large formation rather than being simply bipolar within a spinning sphere, means there is going to be a lot of rethinking how magnetism works and what the rules are concerning it.

This also reminds me of slinkies. This is one toy that would have never been bought if it weren't for TV. When I was a child, the lilting slinky song stuck to the mind and even though we had not so much as a stairstep in the house in Arizona, we wanted one. Well, we could take it to some rock formations but it wouldn't work, dropping it off of a cliff was verboten though possible fun.

We did take it inside the 86" Observatory and it made a wonderful racket clanking down the metal stairs and so it found a fond place in our hearts as a noisemaker.

Also in the news:

High-energy particles spewing out of a young star in a nearby stellar nursery are plowing through interstellar clouds and creating a giant spiral structure in space that looks like a glowing, rainbow-colored tornado, scientists said today.

The star spewing the particle jet lies 480 light-years away in a star-forming region known as Chamaeleon I.

In a photograph taken with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, that star is actually not visible because it is located off the upper edge of the image.

The luminous tornado-shaped structure is known as a Herbig-Haro object and estimated to be about 0.3 light years, or nearly 2 trillion miles, long and shows up in the infrared.

Herbig-Haro objects are formed when highly energized particles—usually electrons and protons—are ejected from a young star and collide with nearby clouds of interstellar dust and gas. The jet particles stream out of the stars at speeds of more than 100 miles per second and heat the surrounding clouds to an infrared glow that can be detected.

A number of galactic objects have this same thing, one pole ejecting very violently a stream of energy that can go trillions and trillions of miles into space.

Streaming out from the center of the galaxy M87 like a cosmic searchlight is one of nature's most amazing phenomena, a black-hole-powered jet of electrons and other sub-atomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light. In this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, the blue of the jet contrasts with the yellow glow from the combined light of billions of unseen stars and the yellow, point-like globular clusters that make up this galaxy.

The really big globular galaxies are space's monsters which have gigantic black holes in the center and it seems this one has some tremendous turbulence to cause such a gigantic energy jet.

From Stokely.org, pictures of Rome.
Nature not only abhors a vacuum, She loves spirals. Using newly regained understanding of mathematics and geometry, during the 1600s and on, artists, scientists and builders used various spirals and double helixes to create hypnotizing designs and interesting constructs.

Gravity, exponential growth and magnetism all work together to create a host of spiralistic situations.

From Joshua Barnes, University of Hawaii:

That rotating disk galaxies should exhibit spiral structure is scarcely surprising, but the nature of the spiral patterns is not completely understood -- probably because there is no unique cause of spiral structure.

18.1 Material Arms & Density Waves

Because disk galaxies rotate differentially, the orbital period is an increasing function of radius R. Thus if spiral arms were material features then differential rotation would would soon wind them up into very tightly-coiled spirals. The expected pitch angle of material arms in a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way is only about 0.25 degrees (BT87, Ch. 6.1.2). In fact, pitch angles measured from photographs range from about 5 degrees for Sa galaxies to 20 degrees for Sc galaxies (Kennicutt 1981). The most likely implication is that spiral arms are not material features.

The other possibility is that spiral arms are density waves; in this case the stars which make up a given spiral arm are constantly changing. Observational and numerical evidence lends strong support to the idea of spiral density waves.

He has some interesting computer models showing how galaxies tend to form spiral arms when there is gravitational interference from some other galaxy.

Which takes me to my favorite topic: if we are all exploding away from each other at a faster and faster pace, why are all these galaxies sliding into each other, messing around with each other, inside each other's gravitational pools? This wouldn't be possible, would it?

This condundrum lurks in the background of Einsteinian physics, like a black hole, barely seen but utterly in control.
******************************************************
Previous articles:
Our Galaxy Is Spiralling Down Into The Great Attractor's Black Hole
Einstein And Schroedinger And the Big Box Universe Paradox
******************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Developing Major Eruption In Alaska Could Bring More Snow, Lower Temperatures

2006-01-14T10:42:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The frantic polar bears must be celebrating today, St. Augustine Volcano in the Alaskan volcanic chain is pumping lots of dust into the northern stratosphere. This means dropping temperatures and lots of snow if it keeps up.

From Yahoo:

Augustine Volcano erupted Friday for the third time in a week, sending an ash plume toward communities on the southwest Kenai Peninsula.

Tom Murray, scientist in charge at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, said the mountain on an isolated and uninhabited island about 180 miles south of Anchorage erupted for 45 minutes, starting shortly before 4 a.m.

The eruption was stronger than a pair of eruptions Wednesday and lasted longer. Murray said additional eruptions are likely.

45 minutes is not much but it is an indication that the volcanic activity triggered by the Great Boxing Day Quake is beginning in ernest. Volcanic action always has a time delay after terrific earthquakes. Already, Mt. St. Helens is acting up as well as another volcano in Antarctica. None of these are very large eruptions so far. By the way, I noticed last evening at sunset, the fine white dust reflected the light to make a golden, melted butter sunset. Here in the Northeast in winter, we have few sunsets to see so if anyone in the drought areas get to see beautiful sunsets, just thank St. Augustine!

Looking at history, the big eruptions usually fallow by five years, they seldom are instantaneous, but then, we have only 200 years of earthquake/volcanic information to go by. Geology doesn't deal very well with very small time frames going back in time. Nonetheless, the earth's history has been punctuated with very great volcanic eruptions that alter the environment and has a very great effect on living creatures within this environment. For example:

The first evidence of large volcanic eruptions that shook Antarctica around 25 million years ago has unexpectedly been discovered in rock cores retrieved from the seabed as part of an international ocean-floor drilling project in which the National Science Foundation (NSF) is a partner.

Scott Borg, who heads the geology and geophysics program for NSF's Antarctic Science Section, said the rock cores, drilled from the sea floor off the Victoria Land coast near Cape Roberts, show surprising evidence of enormous volcanic eruptions. These eruptions are believed to have significantly altered global temperatures at the time.

"The discovery of the volcanic material is really quite exciting,'' Borg said. "It is clearly evidence of a major eruption, several times larger than Mount St. Helens (in Washington State) and possibly comparable with the eruption that destroyed Pompeii."

Um, the Pompeiian blow up wasn't all that much, not compared to the Santorini blow up which brought down more than one Bronze Age civilization and drove hordes of Dorian and other Steppe people towards the Mediterranean. Antarctica is geologially active and now is on the move again, as well. I expect to see much more activity there. A new undersea volcano has been discovered there this year, for example.

Also from SpaceDaily archives:

These records (ice cores drilled by scientists) show ice sheet advances and retreats that match Milankovitch cycles - variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun, in the tilt of the Earth's axis and in the direction the planet's axis is pointing. The finding, reported in the British journal Nature, suggests a link between these orbital oscillations and the timing of Antarctic ice ages.

The core was drilled in 1998-99 as part of the Cape Roberts Project, an effort by scientists from seven nations to retrieve climate histories trapped in millions of years of sediment beneath the floor of the Ross Sea. Drill sites located just offshore from the Transantarctic Mountains and near McMurdo Station, the main U.S. base in the Antarctic, have retrieved cores from three drill holes. The report in Nature discusses sediments found in the second of these cores. While the Antarctic ice sheets formed approximately 34 million years ago, the parts of the core described in this paper were deposited during a period lasting about 400,000 years, approximately 24.1 to 23.7 million years ago.
*snip*
These new findings, however, show that Antarctic ice sheets advanced and retreated at regular intervals during a 400,000-year period between 24.1 and 23.7 million years ago. The records in the core showed the cycles lasted approximately 100,000 years and 40,000 years -- the same time spans characteristic of some Milankovitch cycles.

"It appears that the Antarctic ice sheet has responded in a very major and rhythmic way during this period," explained Peter Webb, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University and co-chief scientist on the project. "The growth and reduction of the Antarctic ice sheet at its margins is similar to that of the Quaternary Ice Sheets in the Northern Hemisphere."

The earth's planetary lithosphere and atmosphere are very complex and tremendously dynamic. Many forces work with each other making it difficult to isolate elements and declare them to be causal by themselves.

The sun's position relative to the earth, the earth's tilt relative to the sun, whether we are all traveling through dust free space or through dirty cosmic matter, the proximity of other star systems who move at different rates than we do through all this, the sun itself has cycles, 20 year cycles where the polar opposites switch, when there is strong or weak solar storm activity as well as mega-cycles when the sun generates less heat than other times, the oceans have cycles, too, everything sways in various rhythms that go up and down, ocsillations just like a steam engine, hot and cold, fast and slow, the pendulums are many and sometimes they suddenly fall in unison just like planets sometimes line up with each other rather than being at disparate points relative to each other.

The Ice Ages have a rhythm, this is obvious. We are actually at the opening stages of a new Ice Age, if the rhythm model is any guide. The movement of continents is continuous and they contribute a great deal to the climate here because if any of the land masses end up polar, huge ice build ups begin, these cycle with the sun and the earth's movements.

People who want to pollute with impunity don't want to accept the idea that pollution is bad so they like to point out how this or that means whatever it means to them, namely, everything is very simple and isolated examples negate the entire ecosystem.

The reason why we should not pollute is pretty simple: we don't know how this will interface with the world and finding out the hard way means extinction. It isn't just the carbonic pollution, it is all the pollution. Or take the famous neon pigs in Taiwan! Or human/mouse gene splicing! All in the name of extending human lives, we create monsters in our labs as well as destroying the environment in our ever widening quest for impenetrable bubbles.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Taung Child Killed By Eagles 2 Million Years Ago

2006-01-13T10:38:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Scientists now think the famous Taung child, one of the earliest humanoid fossils, was killed by huge hunting eagles. The eagle is, to this day, an emblem of celestial executive powers.

From Xinhuanet:

A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds.

"These types of discoveries give us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors, the world they lived in and the things they feared," Lee Berger, a paleo-anthropologist at Johannesburg's University of Witwatersrand, said as he presented his conclusions about a mystery that has been debated since the remains of the possible human ancestor known as the Taung child were discovered in 1924.

We started out as the smaller, weaker branch of the Great Apes. 5 million years ago, all the apes could walk upright, then the gorillas and chimpanzees reverted to frequent fourlegged ground walking but falling back onto their knuckles, unlike all other monkeys which universally walk on the forearms flat handed. Many animals evolved into walking on the fingertips or in the case of horses, deer, antelope and cattle, on the fingernails.

But the only knucklewalkers in nature are our nearest relatives.

Eagles don't hunt in jungles, they can't fly in and out easily. They soar high overhead and using their special magnifying telescopic vision, they can spot small animals from great distances, this evolved hunting on the great savannahs and plains. Early humanoids were chased out of the jungles and ventured further and further into hostile territory, using their hands to carry what pitiful weapons they could grasp, rocks and sticks, which they used to beat off predators and incidentally, kill each other.

Mythology preserves the idea of eagles carrying off people. Like Zeus carrying off Granymede. and Prometheus' punishment to be devoured by eagles for daring to give humans the power to make fire which, incidentally, protected humans from eagles back around a million years ago.

Emblem of power and fear, eagles probably have haunted our dreams since the very beginning which is why a sudden shadow causes one to pause and look up in alarm.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Evolution Expert Can't Resist Thinking Humans Are Pinacle of Perfection
Human Evolutionary Success Tied To Innate Need To Imitate
Orangatangs Use Tools Too
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

R=ka: Our Galaxy Is Spiralling Down Into The Great Attractor's Black Hole

2006-01-12T20:24:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Astronomers wonder about all the contridictory data concerning the time/space continuum. Tons of data flow in and makes hash of assumptions. Einstein was right, he was wrong, he was right about being wrong, actually, we have to think about our journey in time as a spiral, not a straight line. Then some things might make sense, sort of.

From the New York Times:

As Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas said, Einstein's biggest blunder was believing the cosmological constant was a blunder.

Since the 1998 discovery, astronomers have been racing to chart the history of the expansion of the universe more precisely to pin down the properties of dark energy. Observations by Dr. Riess and his colleagues with the Hubble Space Telescope two years ago have determined that the universe hit the gas pedal about five billion years ago.

Dr. Schaefer used as his mileage markers 52 gamma ray bursts, which are 100 to 1,000 times as powerful as Type 1a supernovas, and can thus be seen much farther away, or back in time. The bursts, which can be seen only from space, have been studied by satellites like the High Energy Transient Explorer, or HETE.

The most distant burst, at 12.8 billion light-years, occurred when the universe was 6 percent of its present age, Dr. Schaefer said.

His measurements put the dark energy in a controversial category named phantom energy, which if it continued unabated would rip apart the cosmos in a few billion years.

Well, we will be "ripped apart" when our little galaxy is sucked into the Great Attractor! You see, pretend we are a little bug on a wine glass. When we look at a glass, we see straight through to the other side but if we transit the exterior of the glass, it is a long journey. We can't understand how it can be curved when, from our limited view front and back, it looks pretty flat but we can see perfectly well where we were in the past and where we want to go. Thinking about our TRAVEL in time vs where we can see things today, we traveled in a vast spiral. From point A to point B. Our spiral travel is inside a mega bubble of the Big Bang. So there are two images here, the expanding balloon with all elements spiralling towards greater elements which punch ever deeper gravity pools in the fabric of the balloon.

Mother Nature absolutely loves spirals.

The logarithmic or equiangular spiral was first defined symbollically by Descartes in 1638 by the equation

r=ka

which relates the polar coordinates of any point in the spiral and expresess an exponential growth pattern. In nature it is usually associated with the growth of dead tissues forming structures, like shells of many invertebrates, corals and several horns found in mammalian species, by an accretionary process.

Ever wonder about the structure of reality? It is most marvelous. Many systems follow many laws, seems Mother Nature is a megomaniacal mathematical tinkerer. This is what "intelligent design" really means! The forms of nature repeat themselves on many levels. Hurricanes and Nautilus shells and galaxies, big and small, follow the same mathematical formula.

And if our galaxy's path through time and space left accretions like a trail, why, it wouldn't surprize me at all to see it is the same pattern a mere sea creature makes, growing progressively larger.

Mother Nature knows that simplicity creates an infinite range of effects when different materials and scales of action are applied. And She delights in this which is why we get to riddle everything out, as we learn Her many tricks, we should remember that the same things stay the same no matter how big or small. Why would the Universe "blow apart" by shooting out to nowhere when we are in a spiral down into another, greater black hole? Doesn't sound like we are going in the opposite direction, does it????

Eh?

Well, no one will listen to me. Maybe I should go back to listening to one giant black hole's B flat 5 million octaves below Middle C!
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Einstein and Schroedinger and the Big Box Paradox
Creating Black Holes
The Universal Balloon
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Global Warming And This Hot Winter

2006-01-12T10:28:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Global warming doesn't mean everyone is warm, it means a more dynamic system that stresses biological systems because it is more flexible and thus, unpredictable.

From the BBC:

The dramatic decline of some frog populations is directly connected to global warming, a new study claims.

The scientists looked at biodiversity hotspots in Central and South America, and found compelling links between frog extinctions and changes in temperature.

They believe the perfect conditions are being created for the spread of a fungus that is deadly to amphibians.

Amphibians are the canary in the mine. They are much more vulnerable to chemicals in the environment, to the effects of human waste in water systems due to everything passing directly through their skin, they are temperature sensitive due to being cold blooded animals, they are sensitive to sun radiation which means, thinning the ozone layer affects them far faster than it affects mammalian animals.

Like the krill in the sea, they are bellweathers of change and they are rapidly losing ground. I know, myself, that on the ground, casual encounters with frogs, they are far fewer today up here than years ago, for example. Even the toad population which is less sensitive to the temperatures than frogs and live well even in droughts, digging themselves in, are suffering due to lack of reliable water for reproduction which must happen in water.

The astonishingly warm winter here is also due to dynamism is the weather systems, namely, when the Jet Stream arcs and dives, it does it more radically each year so one is either very warm or really cold until the loop shifts to a new dynamic, reversing the effects, namely, it snakes across the top of the planet, ever more powerful.

Scientists have noticed the upper atmospheric winds have increased. Part of all this is due to energy from the sun being greater than normal. The polar caps on Mars have significantly reduced this last 20 years, my grandfather drew pictures of them at Lowell Observatory at the turn of the 19/20th centuries and they were one third greater in size back then. This means the sun is warming up not only the earth but the solar system.

We just entered an increased cosmic dust phase as our sun slithers through a veil of debrie in space, our galaxy has sheets and sheets of this stuff, all the cosmic dirt in the darkness of space, sucked into the black hole's gravity well, and we are part of this junk, circling the drain. The stuff moves at different speeds relative to each other and the rest of the cosmos. As they move closer to the galactic core, they encounter more and more debrie and this affects anything that does this, of course!

So in our case, this means the amount of cosmic dust showering the planet has shot up in volume, stars in dust clouds burn brighter than ones that aren't in dust clouds so perhaps our sun will increase its brilliance due to all this, we don't know everything, thanks to astronomers and all those observatories and our lovely doomed (thanks, chimpie!) Hubble Space Telescope and other monitors, we can see more and more how we fit in the cosmos and how this will impact on us human organisms which is why we need a space program!

Stuck on the home planet can be dangerous!
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Three Catagory 5 Hurricanes Had Lightning Over Ocean

2006-01-10T08:41:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Normally, hurricanes have no lightning but this summer, the most ferocious ones had lightning in a most unexpected place: at sea. NASA wonders what happened.

From NASA:

Surprise: During the record-setting hurricane season of 2005 three of the most powerful storms--Rita, Katrina, and Emily--did have lightning, lots of it. And researchers would like to know why.<
*snip*
"Generally there's not a lot of lightning in the eye-wall region," he says. "So when people see lightning there, they perk up -- they say, okay, something's happening."

Indeed, the electric fields above Emily were among the strongest ever measured by the aircraft’s sensors over any storm. "We observed steady fields in excess of 8 kilovolts per meter," says Blakeslee. "That is huge--comparable to the strongest fields we would expect to find over a large land-based 'mesoscale' thunderstorm."

One of the more interesting features of the hurricanes this year was the incredible speed at which they went from catagory 1 to catagory 4+. Hurricane Wilma took around 90 minutes from catagory 1 to catagory 5! This ia beyond amazing. Frightful. On so many levels, this last hurricane season was a record maker.

The data about the lightning is most interesting. Something was going on between the troposphere and the lower atmosphere right above the ocean. According to NASA, most occasions for lightning in hurricanes happen when they hit mountainous lands. The hills break the wind upwelling and allows lighting to form.

But in this case, the lightning came in a burst at the same time the hurricanes, while over the open ocean with no land anywhere near the system, suddenly grew in strength. The windspeeds were rapidly accelerating and on the leading edges where the rotation was developing the fastest was were the biggest groupings of lightning events. When each hurricane struck land, the lightning was long gone.

I blogged about Katrina in August. As a reminder, here is the satellite image:

It fed off of the Pacific, the Caribbean and the Gulf all at once. This image was taken when it was just finishing off the lightning display.

New Orleans is the latest place in the Eye of the Storm. Last year, when one killer hurricane after another struck Florida and the Gulf coast, each storm slid past New Orleans. The one that nearly hit, they evacuated the city...except for the poor and the elderly who have no trasportation and no where to go. The mayor refused to house them and they survived that death trap only because the dice were rolled and the number was seven, not snake eyes.

Just had to quote myself from last August, days before the hurricane hit New Orleans. I am not President of the USA so of course, they died, didn't they?

But then, the war in Iraq wouldn't be happening, either.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

3.7 Earthquake Hits New York/Canadian Borders Today

2006-01-09T15:41:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

We just had a 3.7 eathquake just north of here today! It is a small tremor, as they go, but interesting because the geology where I live is very complex and a lot of it is very ancient indeed, this being the place where the first landmasses of the North American continent first saw the light of day nearly a billion years ago.

Here is the website showing the exact location of the earthquake. It was right by a state park called Flat Rock Gulf State Unique Area. Try topping that name!

On the border of Franklin and Clinton counties right on the border of Canada! This area is fairly flat and laced with lakes and streams. It is also where several landmasses converge. The St. Lawrence Seaway is nearby as well as Montreal.

This schematic drawing tries to give a vague idea of the larger, complex geological elements of my state of New York. Few parts of the earth aside from Siberia (!) have been mashed about as much as where I live today. Luckily for me, this happened mostly half a billion years ago to around 150 million years so I am intact still.

The earthquake is where the red star is shining. It is right on the confluence of a number of totally unrelated continental masses got jammed together when Africa paid us a little visit after the Permian. Our state is pretty stable, geologically speaking, since no one is pressing on us right now, unlike California, for example. We do get earthquakes. I have noticed a series of earthquakes starting right around the New Madrid Fault on the Mississippi River, then one after another, every few days up the Ohio River and now ending up here on the St. Lawrence. Next, Greenland?

Here is a God's Eye view of how we came crashing into the nascent North American continent back in the very beginning. At this time, Florida was off over the other side of the planet, no where near any Bushes or Disney. We came tearing across oceans that barely could support single celled lifeforms, spewing volcanic dust which didn't matter since the air was positively Venusian in its toxicitity. Between the warmth of the new born planet's core and the increasingly dense acidic air, everything got nice and warm, this brought about a huge blossoming of life in the oceans of the planet. Meanwhile, the Taconics hit North America and created mountains higher than the Himalayans. Since there was nothing growing, it all washed down rapidly in muddy floods. Most traces of the volcanoes were shifted away to the west, huge mud flats formed and filled the hollows.

By the time plants colonized our area, we were being folded and squeezed by Panagea. Because our past is so complex, the landscape today is interesting if one looks past all the trees and old refrigerators and rusty cars littering the landscape (heh).

This is a schematic of my valley. The hills on the east side run east to west and the Rensselaer plateau heaves straight up on the other side of the Little Hoosiac, leaving a narrow valley between us. California has new landscapes that have the same features, hills running crosswise to long rifts. One of the steepest roads in America is my own road which is called Plank Road until it crosses the stream and then is called Greenhollow Road except to old timers who call it Elm Street or Jones Hallow or "them thar hills". Don't ask for directions if you are lost.

We are famous because a gas truck lost control on Plank Road and crashed into the town, blowing it up forty years ago. Doesn't stop people from racing up and down today. I nearly got washed away on this road last fall during the October floods.

Our little stream runs in the opposite direction from the Hudson River. Despite the glaciers which turned the flatlands on the western side of us into the world's longest fjord, our water still runs due north in a pretty straight line following the ancient crash zone when the Taconics hit the Rensselaers. This means, it is an earthquake zone if something happens like a meteor strike or whatever. Not that it will matter at that point.

Ask the dinosaurs.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

The Brit Budgie That Can Cross Stitch

2006-01-09T09:10:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Another animal story today, this time, a very clever bird indeed. I want to discuss animal intelligence---And speculate as to why certain humans refuse to learn lessons from life.

From the Sun:

SPIKE the budgie is a clever little sew and sew — she can do STITCHING.
And the three-year-old bird is so darn good she has been voted Young Cross-Stitcher of the Year.

Spike spent months watching her owner Sandra Battye creating patterns before picking up a needle in her beak herself.

They are now birds of a feather and work on tweed and other fabrics together.

The British are famous for their strong feelings about pets. Lovers and friends call each other, "pet" as a sign of affection. Dogs and cats are constant companions. My very first cat book from 1950 was the official cat fancier's guide in England. There was no such book in America at the time!

Bird watching has been a British interest for a very long time and my great godmother in America, born before the Civil War began, picked up this fancy from the British. Butterfly watching and collecting bugs goes way back, the British have tamed fish and bird and mammal for generations. The animals as human books were extremely popular in Britain, as we all well know from such classics as Wind in the Willow.

The lady who co-resides with this Budgie wasn't an animal trainer using classic Pavalovian/Skinner reward techniques to get an animal to do tricks. Tricks are learned responses imposed on an animal, sort of like how TV commercials work on humans. This manipulation only shows how easily an organism can be trained into doing things it would not do if free.

This Budgie like so many animals I have observed over the years, enjoyed interacting with humans. I even had a Rocky Mountain Skunk that lived with me when I was a small girl, had its stink bomb yet never used it on me. I followed me about like a cat or dog. Slept in my lap when I was reading a book. I found it in my sock drawer one morning, evidently, Door Kitty brought it into the house.

Animals choose humans and when they love the human, they love to imitate or participate in whatever the human is doing. In the Budgie's case, the sewing actions triggered strong nesting instincts and birds are famous for weaving nests. I used to raise weaver birds and watching them build nests was endlessly fascinating.

The bird in this story freely chose to participate in what its mind saw as joint nest building. Birds test mates this way, seeing how diligent and hard working they are in nest building. So this bird was overjoyed to see the sewing happening and its joint efforts is a tremendous award for its psyche, it glows with joy every time the nest building is launched. This melding of human and animal is always a wonder to see.

I have this smarty horse named Sparky. When we got him, he loved to escape from wherever we shut him up. He would always loiter around my shoulder, peering at what I was doing, every time I opened or closed gates. Then he would imitate my hand movements using his lips! He could open all sorts of latches and chains! I would yell, "Who let the horse out??" because he didn't run away, instead, he would come to the house.

One day, I noticed a shadow at the front door and suddenly, the door handle moved and in came Sparky, triumphant. He figured out how to enter the house! Later, he observed how humans rang the door bell and then I would let them in. One day, he rigged his way out of the pasture, came to the house and ding-donged the front door causing the dogs to bark. This amused him so much, he enjoyed the "bell rings/dogs bark" matrix, I had to disable the bell until I figured out how to pen him in.

He tried to open the truck doors, too. One day, I found him with his head inside the window, pulling at the door handle from inside. Then he learned about the truck horn. Poking it with his nose made it honk and then the dogs would bark. Another great toy.

I am a firm believer in participating with animals, doing things that are fun. This is how I got the sheep to do things. I can talk to my animals and discuss what we are doing and why. Seriously, they listen to this and if I am not persuasive, they let me know (heh). Sometimes, I say, "What are you thinking of doing?" when they look suspicious. Then they would try to look innocent but then when I go searching for what they have rearranged or done, bingo.

Naughty, naughty.

I wish some humans were as smart as animals but maybe this is asking too much.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

More Firestorms Hit Colorado and Arkansas During Hot Winter

2006-01-08T22:32:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The astonishing multiple firestorms continue to rage across a broad swath of the Midwest from the Rockies to the Mississippi River basin. I believe this is very uncommon if not downright rare.

From Yahoo:

Wildfire outbreaks that have been menacing the dry southern plains across Texas and Oklahoma spread to Arkansas and Colorado on Sunday, where wind-whipped blazes destroyed at least nine homes and forced hundreds of people to evacuate, authorities said.

The evacuations in southern Colorado were forced by two fires that had destroyed five homes and burned at least 6,000 acres in Huerfano and Las Animas counties, not far from the New Mexico line.

In Arkansas, a 3,000-acre wildfire destroyed four homes Sunday east of Hamburg. Four volunteer fire departments were battling the blaze, and Deputy State Forester Larry Nance said it likely would be Monday before they could gain control.

The fires continue to rage hither and yon on the Great Plains. According to the hydrolic maps at NOAA, the drought sections are all south of where the fires have been raging. This is interesting for several reasons.

Perhaps the severe drough areas have little to burn? Wouldn't surprize me. Animals will graze things down to dust if there is nothing to eat. Even when grazers are fairly fat, they will graze all day, every day, no matter what. It is impulsive for them to graze which is why turning them out to various pastures, you can fatten them up amazingly. So when things go dry, they keep eating until they can't find a single grass stem left.

But the parts that are burning are dry but not disasterously dry so they have fuel left over for fires. The winds are blowing very strongly around the stationary high. This wind comes roaring out of the Rockies. I have experienced this wind, in Arizona, it blows down to us during March and part of April, blowing from the northeast to the southwest. We lived in the Seven Falls notch and Mt. Lemmon and Rincons would accelerate the wind so much, we could practically fly in the wind. Anyone dropping a match could and did start forest fires. This was our fire season.

I have never heard of winter fire seasons like this year's! It is totally wierd, even when it is dry, it isn't fire season in winter yet, this is what is going on, actually, winter is staying away so maybe it isn't so wierd, after all.

East Africa is having a terrible drought, too. From the BBC:

The Kenyan government has said it will buy up all the country's available maize stocks to feed those in the drought-stricken north-east.
Describing the situation as "very severe", it said it would put aside $14m (£7.9m) to purchase the maize.

Kenya says its main priority is to feed the 2.5 million people at immediate risk, almost 10% of the population.

The United Nations food agency has warned that 11 million people across the Horn of Africa need food aid.

The situation all over Africa is increasingly critical as many forces work in concert to bring ecological destruction on that continent. This is while huge floods this week hammer Malaysia and Indonesia and massive amounts of snow hit Japan and Manchuria. All or none.

Also from the BBC:

The United Nations refugee agency is interviewing about 650 Sudanese migrants arrested by Egyptian police in a violent operation last week.
Egypt wants to deport them, as many have been refused refugee status.

But the UNHCR is speaking to them all individually to see whether any were refugees and so should not be deported.

Some 27 people died when police broke up a protest camp in Cairo last week. The Sudanese had been asking the UNHCR to send them to Western countries.

There will be over 10 million refugees. Like in Dafur which the media tried in vain to get people distracted from other matters like the wars raging in the Middle East, these refugees will put pressure on all other systems. They get herded from pillar to post and massacred at regular intervals.

Deteriorating planetary conditons force tribal and peasant populations to migrate or raise trouble. This is one of the many bad side effects of allowing things to get way out of kilter. Look at the people displaced from Katrina! This last week, some of them tried to stop the demolition of their homes in the 9th Ward which is slated to be pretty much eliminated.

As we go into an extended period of little rain here in America, we have to be wary of what happens next, namely, dust bowl conditions occuring. The quality of life in places like Oklahoma can deteriorate rapidly. I have been in dust and sand storms. They can be quite brutal. It isn't merely wind blowing. You are literally sandblasted and I have had car windshields rendered useless in sand storms in Death Valley, for example, many years ago during a drought.

One would imagine this would prompt Bush to start talking about the Kyoto Accords (heh, yeah, right).
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

John Cage's 639 Year Concert and the Universe Plays Major Music Millions Octaves Lower

2006-01-07T14:21:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

John Cage wrote a piece that could be played "forever" but obviously, can't. But some Germans are playing this piece on the world's oldest organ, 639 years into the future. But the universe plays music at millions of octaves lower than our hearing!

From the BBC:

The world’s longest performance of a piece of music is being played in Germany, and it will go on playing for another 639 years.

John Cage's composition ASLSP, or to give it its full title As Slow As Possible, is part of what organisers have described as ‘a revolution in slowness.’ Organ2/ASLSP is due to be performed on the town organ in Halberstadt in northern Germany over a decidedly leisurely 639 years.

Apparently some 360 spectators, paid DM30 (UK£10) to see the recital's organist inflate his instrument's bellows and they'll have to come back in another 18 months time in order to hear him play the first chord - and one each year or so thereafter.

I toured a number of German churches, asking to listen or being allowed to play the organ, an instrument my mother mastered and taught to me when I was a child. I adore organ music in a stone church. The sounds echo and resonate in ways they can't in a concert hall or buildings made of less cave-like materials. In Mainz, it was winter, a light snow was falling and the organist came in to practice early in the morning. I climbed about the ancient Romanesque redstone cathederal while cascades of melodious sounds echoed and rippled throughout. A marvelous time.

Halberstadt is an interesting place.

We took off at 0745 o'clock with a load of 2300 gallons of gasoline, 6000 pounds of bombs, full load of ammunition, and the usual weight of men and equipment. Everything on plane was in perfect working order.

Joined the group formation at 1010 o'clock and flew into target without incident but was forced to use 2400 R.P.M. and 40" at times.

Dropped our bombs at 1152 o'clock, everything still in good shape. At 1200 o'clock we were hit by fighters which stayed with us for one hour and fifty minutes. They attacked us from 5-7 o'clock position at first and gradually, as more enemy fighters joined, they attacked us from 3-9 o'clock positions.

It was bombed a lot during WWII. But the Churches built by so long ago endured all this, the strong stone foundations and walls were built to survive raids and wars, for this church was finished right after the fearful millennium 1000 AD. Happy to see the world didn't end, the barbarian people of Europe went on a cathedral building binge that lasted 500 years.

In 1361 the famous Blockwerk organ was constructed. This organ stood in the cathedral of Halberstadt and was the first one with a claviature of 12 notes. Even this very day the scheme of this claviature is used on our keyboard instruments. So one can say that the cradle of modern music was in Halberstadt. In the year 2000, 639 years have passed after the „fatal day of Halberstadt” (Harry Partch) the play of Cage „as slow as possible” will be performed for 639 years. The place will be St. Burchardi one of the oldest churches of the city. Built around 1050 by Burchard of Nahburg, this church functioned as Cistercian convent for more than 600 years. In the 30 years lasting war, St. Burchardi was partially destroyed but rebuild in 1711 and secularized by Jérome in 1810. For 190 years the church was used as a barn, a hovel, a distillery and a sty.

Note there are few windows on the lower levels. Many buildings from this time, just at the end of the Dark Ages, went without windows because they were defense points during wars and sieges. The continuously playing chords will resound in this abandoned church for the foreseeable future. It is entirely mechanical with clever counterweights running the bellows.

The Universe is resounding with massive chords of unbelievable heft.

The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster. These ripples are evidence for sound waves that have traveled hundreds of thousands of light years away from the cluster's central black hole.

In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C. For comparison, a typical piano contains only about seven octaves. At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe.

The ripples from central black hole of the mega-galaxy that all the neighboring galaxies are falling into, as they merge, the resounding clash reverberates throughout the dust, gasses and debrie that litters the cosmos.

In the news this week, also, is the astonishing information that our very own Milky Way is also making celestial music. In this case, a few million octaves low C major. A merrier, lighter melody!

Here is a map showing the C major wave effect below the Galactic Center. Elephants, we now know, can make rumbling or bellowing sounds with wave lengths our ears can't catch by the gigantic ears of the elephant can hear it perfectly well much further away, but even an elephant can't pick up sounds at millions of octaves lower!

The warp, seen most clearly in the thin disk of hydrogen gas permeating the galaxy, extends across the entire 200,000-light year diameter of the Milky Way, with the sun and earth sitting somewhere near the crease. Leo Blitz, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues, Evan Levine and Carl Heiles, have charted this warp and analyzed it in detail for the first time, based on a new galactic map of hydrogen gas (HI) emissions.

They found that the atomic gas layer is vibrating like a drum, and that the vibration consists almost entirely of three notes, or modes.

Like the bellows of the mightiest Wurlitzer, like an eternal Kettle Drum, the gods play with music on an inimaginable scale. Our galaxy isn't some stationary object. It travels through space and time. It warps both as it moves, it moves internally, rotating on the axis of an innermost black hole and we glide along towards Andromeda, and all are sliding towards the Great Attractor who plays even greater instruments than our little galaxy. And as we rip apart a smaller, stray galaxy, it makes our skirts ripple and wave in a Dionysian display of energy and destruction.

Play it again, Milk.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

LSD On the Mind

2006-01-07T14:13:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Happy 100th Birthday to the Swiss scientist who discovered LSD. Time to remember and explain the lyrical acidian revelations of this intresting drug which the CIA tried to use, driving people to suicide or insanity. It was a key to my own past, a very incredible key.

From the New York Times:

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe."

Of course, the connection to the Universe comes from the Dream World and our subconscious. This is where our big brains can go to work, forging connections, opening doors, figuring things out, the creative genius within lives here, not the conscious mind. Most people are denied even the slightest interaction with this part of their own minds. Terror Incognita.

The conscious mind actively works to not remember bad stuff. It works as the guardian, keeping dark memories at bay. It is a narcotic, designed to lull the host human into feeling reasonably good. It doesn't always work. Indeed, it can be a menace, because it can't, itself, see the unconscious mind which often takes over and drives events in the waking world, causing a person to commit crimes, do self destructive actions, horrible things. This is why understanding and knowing one's own dark unconscious was supposed to be the cure, according to Dr. Freud.

Unfortunately, when people use Freudian analysis to discover their own other halves, this doesn't work since that half doesn't really speak the same language as the waking mind. I can attest to my own self's attempts, the imposition of language tames what is going on there and alters it so much, it barely begins to resemble the real actuality.

Indeed, perhaps much of our language abilities revolve around our ancestor's attempts at explaining and naming these unnamable things.

Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.

But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."

I have used real Sandoz LSD. It is radically different from most of the later concoctions cooked in labs in San Francisco. Tim Leary gave me the pills.

This was way back when everyone was very ernest about how one had to trip with a guide in order to not suffer from the effects of the drug. The psychological effects are very powerful. Dr. Hoffman knew, like Freud, that exploring the mind is like any artistic enterprise. Namely, surrounding oneself with the appropriate things, one can ease the soul as one enjoys the waking dream as the unconscious mind awakens and takes over everything. Dreaming while awake.

The esthetics of LSD are interesting. It isn't like other hallucinagenics, it literally blinds oneself when it is at the most intense. You can't "see" anything, people who can recall dreams all note how attempts at reading text is nearly impossible because the letters cease to be groups the eye glides over but rather, become individuals who trigger all sorts of memories and associations which are most distracting. The more one tries to read, the more impossible it becomes.

Psychiatrists in Europe and researchers in America discovered that Freudian analysis was a real hoot when using small doses of LSD. The doors to the past flew open and people reacted to memories long buried. Only it is, like all things from the World of Dreams, dangerous, for the mind makes up things, makes up stories, decieves itself all the time. It is addicted to doing this, and the unconscious mind is particularily prone to this since no one is around to supervise it.

Thus, the only way one can discover one's own past is to be able to argue with one's own treasonous mind.

You can't gull yourself. Every pretty thing the sleeping mind hands over, one has to patiently prod for more things. Research to discover the truth or falseness of claims the darker half reveals is essential. I am proud of the fact that every detail I uncovered upon using LSD turned out to be true to reality. It took twenty years to confirm some of the data.

It strikes me as very funny that the creator of LSD who used it many times until he had a bummer trip when his psychiatrist friend gave him speed!---Hahaha. A lot of acid in SF in the old days was speed laced with some hallucinagenics!---He called people like me names for succeeding at what he attempted?

Indeed.

For he changed very little around himself except for himself whereas I and my friends tried to change the world. The roots of the enviromental movement are laced with LSD. We thank him for this but we also want to be saluted for actually doing something about what we learned! LSD look alikes were bad for the brains, bad for people. Many people including Tim Leary, used it too much. This was because they couldn't walk in and out of the Sleeping World on their own. They never really sought out the Keys to that Kingdom which lie beyond the Gates of Death.

Just like Tolkien and CS Lewis shuddering at those who loved their books, freaked out that we actually did what they only dreamed of, hating us for not being uptight, annoyed, straightlaced bougeoise. They wanted us to affirm their constricted, constipated lifestyles, unable to pick up a sword and ride a horse like we did, to climb mountains and sail the seven seas. To reach for the stars or walk around the earth on foot.

They wanted to take the tremendous, amazing powers of the mind and lock it right back up in the narrow closet that penned it in! It is all so very sad. I bet, Dr. Hofmann would not want to admit he was wrong about my taking LSD. It was my mind, my trip, my desire, my victory. It made my art possible. It made my dances on stage magical. It is a very dangerous drug but also a very great drug.

Unlike most people, I didn't use it to party, to mess around, to make the mind even more deranged. This is why it was made illegal. This is also why we fall into the same trap all the time, whatever we use to pry open the Door to the Sleeping Self, we are punished by the gods who happen to live there, you know.

They are really dangerous. We are them.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Einstein and Shroedinger and the Big Box Universe Paradox
Dr. Freud--Psychiatry Runs in Eternal Circles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

A Series of 6 Magnitude Plus Earthquakes Shake the Earth

2006-01-04T09:41:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Two days ago, there were no significant earthquakes. I have noticed that since the Great Boxing Day Quake, whenever the earth is still, it means it will have a series of large quakes in unison very soon. In this case, it happened again. Three significant quakes in 24 hrs, all on important faultlines, one at the roots of the San Andreas.

Click here to see minute by minute earthquake map of the earth.
Antarctica, the Atlas Shrugging Off Ice, led the way with a big 7.3 blow out in the southern Atlantic. This occured in the ocean so no one noticed except geologists and fans of geological processes such as myself. Then, as usual, Australia, the errant child of Antarctica, kicked the Pacific Plate at the sharp point where the Fuji Islands are. This was a 7.1, still quite significant.

Then a few hours later, the rift zone of the Gulf of California had an onimous 10.0 kilometer series of quakes, starting at some mag 4s and then blasting out a 6.7 and is still shaking as I type, another group of 4+s. The Great Boxing Day Quake was exactly 10 kilometers under, too. The most devastating quakes seem to be at this depth. Going through the data, one notices when there is going to be a significant alteration of the landscape, quakes at the 10 km level seem to occur most frequently. The earth rumbles at various levels, the crust being a very complex entity, but the ones humans should worry about the most are the 10 km level quakes.

Scientists have been wondering about Mt. St. Helens. She has been erupting lately and a new lava flow path is forming, evidently. Like when one squeezes a sponge, water comes out of various places, so it is with volcanos. The Pacific Plate has been shoved good and hard by Australia especially since the rift off the coast of Indonesia has opened. Geologists know that pressure builds before an earthquake and we all know that the pressure on the American Continent is now tremendous. Each day that we have no significant 5+ quakes in California, the worse it is, not the better!

People want to imagine they are dodging the bullet. They are not.

Instead, each month, the bullet gets bigger. It goes from a .45 to a .50 caliber to artillery shells to bunker busters to nuclear bomb size. Getting ready for this inevitability, one has to think about many things including water and food. Storing water and cycling it through containers set in a place they can't fall down, namely on the floor, is very important, for getting water after a great quake will be very difficult since most water systems will be disrupted.

Electricity will be disrupted, too, and storing batteries and having a generator is a good thing. I have all that, myself. People living on the bottom stories of buildings in earthquake zones are in the most danger. This is why Japan has very strict internal construction codes. California has strengthened their codes, too, but only in a laggard fashion and certainly they are weakest in the area of domestic construction. For example, I doubt they require triangulation of all corners and joints plus steel strapping! My house has this, since I built it myself. All houses should have this!

Yet this is what I see, to my horror, at a USA government website: From official gov webpage:

Advanced house framing, sometimes called Optimum Value Engineering (OVE), refers to a variety of techniques designed to reduce the amount of lumber used and waste generated in the construction of a wood-framed house. These techniques also improve a home's energy efficiency.

Advanced framing techniques create a structurally sound home with lower material and labor costs than a conventionally framed house. Additional construction cost savings result from reduced waste disposal, which also helps the environment.

Advanced framing actually replaces lumber with insulation material and maximizes the wall that's insulated, which improves the whole-wall thermal resistance or R-value.

You should look at the diagrams at this place! Amazingly STUPID! Gah!

Want to live in a house built like cards? Follow these instructions! No interior wall will be physically anchored to anything stronger than SHEETROCK? Insane. Totally insane. When high winds hit, the interior walls form at least some sort of triangulation to soak up all the energy of the wind's force. And earthquakes! Imagine having all your interior walls collapsing simultaneously? Goodbye, life.

I can't believe this is being peddled as good construction, all to save a measly 4 Rs insulation value! Hanging a blanket over a window saves more R value! All intersections of walls and exterior in my house are double studded. Namely, I used more than the usual wood and they are bound together with steel strapping which is screwed into the wood. Then I have the real wood exterior, not chipboard which they use on most houses these days and outside of that isn't cheap plastic siding but real wood, in my case, a lot of oak 1 5/8"x4" boards. But then, oaks grow on my property and I have a woodmill. I know it is very expensive but...This is what works, in the long run.

The modern open house plan many people want these days are energy inefficient but worse, very dangerous in earthquakes. As we saw this week in Germany with the collapse of the roof of a skating rink during an icestorm, vaulting can give way if the exterior walls push outwards. Another reason to have interior walls that are very tightly anchored to exterior walls!
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Stranded Pilot Whales in New Zealand Shot Because They Couldn't Be "Saved"

2006-01-02T11:53:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Over 60 pilot whales got stranded in New Zealand and since humans couldn't shove them back into the ocean, the government decided to shoot them to "put them out of their misery." What is happening in the vast seas to cause this sort of disaster? We examine it today.

From the BBC:

Dozens of stranded pilot whales have been shot dead in New Zealand to end their suffering when it was ruled too difficult to get them back in the sea.
The department of conservation said any attempt to refloat the whales would be too dangerous for the humans involved and would probably not have worked.

The whales were stranded on a beach near Farewell Spit, on the north-western tip of the South Island.

More than 100 whales were freed from the same area about two weeks ago.

All over the planet, the ocean's most intelligent lifeforms are freaking out and throwing themselves upon the shores to die. If this happened once in a blue moon, it could be attributed to an accidental happanstance but it is all too frequent, now.

Nor are there massive numbers of oceangoing mammals so they are so crowded, some are foced to hunt for food in dangerous places. Quite the contrary. Some whales hover on the edge of extinction. All living things in the oceans are being aggressively hunted down by those animals of destruction, the god-like humans. We are using all the tools of technology we can devise to rig up ways to corner and capture all living things in the seven seas not to mention all the lakes and rivers, too.

The smelt numbers in California are way down, for example. Wild salmon are rapidly disappearing all over the planet, they used to flourish everywhere in the northern hemisphere since the Ice Ages, humans drew pictures of covorting salmon on deer antlers 40,000 years ago.

More than one news story this last year is about how increasingly powerful sonar created by Americans so we can spy out all possible aquatic menaces, these sonar now travel huge distances and are, to the delicate receptors of the aquatic mammals, like continuous screaming inside the head, it is literally driving them insane.

These mammals have huge brains and our interactions with them have shown us clearly, they can think, learn, figure things out and remember stuff and so the painful intrusion into their brains by these sonar pulses makes thinking nearly impossible. Navigating dangerous waters or communicating with each other over more than a few yards becomes too difficult and "accidents" then happen.

Scientists want to study all this to see if our screaming sonar is causing mayhem in the seas but the fact is, the number of beachings and other events has shot up since the dawn of sonar and has escalated greatly in the last 20 years and I think we should force the military to not use these systems unless they can prove they don't torment marine mammals!

Instead of waiting passively to see if they all die!

And shooting stranded animals? Again, this is insane. We could suppose they would stay stuck and die but we can't know for certain they would stay stuck and die! What are we, god?

I read again and again, about animals being "saved" and then immediately "put out of their suffering" which is pretty creepy since killing something isn't exactly saving it, is it? At least, I don't want to be saved by an ambulance crew that immediately puts a bullet in my head because they think I might not survive!

Gads. Eech.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Evolution Research Expert Can't Resist Thinking Humans are the Pinnacle of Perfection

2006-01-02T10:32:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The New York Times interviews a British scientist who tries to celebrate the diversity and wonder of evolution but at the end, falls into the same pit of delusion as anti-evolution American Christians fall into: believing we are better than any other living creature. Insane, isn't it?

From the New York Times

IF chimpanzees observed New Year's Day, they would have much to reflect on. In 2005, they joined humans, chickens and mosquitoes, as well as less famous occupants of the planet, on an exclusive but growing list: organisms whose complete genomes have been sequenced.

What would they make of this news, I wonder? Perhaps they would resent the genetic evidence that they are related to us. Or perhaps they would, as I do, revel in being part of the immensity of nature and a product of evolution, the same process that gave rise to dinosaurs, bread molds and myriad organisms too wacky to invent.

The scientist, Olivia Judson of the Imperial College (hahaha, great name!), is correct that if there is a "god" that has to supervise the minute of creating and co-ordinating life forms so they work together, then this is pretty much the definition of "Mother Nature" which "Christians" stubbornly refuse to worship, much less behave nicely around Her. Indeed, much of their ideology is an excuse to indulge in humanity's favorite pastime: preening ourselves and thinking we are better than anyone and anything in the universe (except for god, of course).

As God's junior partner, partaking of His greatness and glory, we get to imitate him which means killing off lots of living things including humans we don't like.

One would expect a scientist to understand this basic human psychology/psychosis. Our sick need to pretend we are superior to all other things is why we are so destructive and cruel. Overcoming this by forming sympathetic bonds with other creatures is one of the good things about humans and is the key to why we were able to tame so many different species. But the dark side of taming creatures is that we eat them or use them as tools. The only reason these creatures put up with it is because we enable them to have many young and to flourish for any animal that we don't tame and care for is slated for annihilation and extermination.

For example, we nearly ate all the great herds of wild horses until the lucky day came when we figured out how to use them to ride, for example. Then we bred them and protected them from human predation. Now that we use fossil fuels, we are reverting to eating horses since they are not useful to us right now. This means, we won't kill them all off but will hold them in reserve for when the oil runs out. As it is, the world population of equus contracted hugely after WWI thanks to the automobile. There were many more millions of horses around before 1920. Quite a few breeds nearly disappeared during the 1950s.

Anyway, here is the last paragraphs of the ruminations of Olivia:

More than that, I find that in viewing ourselves as one species out of hundreds of millions, we become more remarkable, not less so. No other animal that I have heard of can live so peaceably in such close quarters with so many individuals that are unrelated. No other animal routinely bothers to help the sick and the dying, or tries to save those hurt in an earthquake or flood.

Which is not to say that we are all we might wish to be. But in putting ourselves into our place in nature, in comparing ourselves with other species, we have a real hope of reaching a better understanding, and appreciation, of ourselves.

Obviously, this woman has never witnessed a flock of birds or a herd of wildebeest or anything in nature. Monarch butterflies migrating to winter quarters! Geeze. I can think of a zillion examples. What sets us apart from most animals, though, is the fact that we don't chase away near relatives. Namely, any animal group that interbreeds heavily collects genetic defects. Tight tribal groups that refuse to drive away family members into other tribes and to take in and adopt strangers born in other family groups ends up in serious trouble, weakened by inbreeding!

This is why we "get along" with strangers and fight intense interfamilial battles!

A young man who can't go out and charm a strange female is doomed to have no offspring, for example. If the charm fails, whole populations can collapse such as in Japan today where the males can't figure out how to get the females to co-habit with them. All mammals have it hardwired to drive off at least some offspring. Usually, it is the males if it is a herd species but if it is loner species like many cats, for example, then all the young are driven off. Elephants and whales keep female young nearby but they drive off the males they give birth to, forcing them to roam and seek free females far from mom.

This is why many herd/flock/pack animals seem "friendly" to us and are easily tamed by us and trained to work with us. Acceptance of strangers is greater than acceptance of direct offspring, especially the males! This is probably why we are pretty relaxed about sending our boys into battle, perhaps to die? Deep down, on the genetic level, we really don't care?

Few people want to go speculate about that. But watching how indifferent many are about dying soldiers, one wonders.

And to think humans are peaceable is particularing gruesome. We are anything but! The only animal on earth that can and will and is annihilating all other species and wages giant battles with fellow humans, racing to kill babies and small children as fast as possible in order to depress competition and inflate one's own devouring of natural resources, why, history is a bloody mess made that way by bloody humans who couldn't wait after expulsion from the Garden of Eden, brother killing brother!

Indeed, the reason why there are zero near relatives, no homohabilis/neanderthalers walking this earth is due to the horrible fact that we murdered and ate all of them we encountered and are now eating more distant relatives, the last of the primates, namely, chimpanzees and gorillas. We use them for medical research and torture them or put them on display as clowns when we aren't eating them for dinner or mowing down the last shreds of their diminishing Garden of Eden.

Once we finish them off, we will turn back to eating each other if we continue down the path we have tread so far. When we had vast herds of other animals to eat, we slowed down on the cannibalism but it is coming back with a vengence as the world's population rises higher and higher. Right now, we just hope to create "Lebensraum" by waging war and economic depradations, more than one powerful colonizing tribal/national group is building or starting to discuss building huge walls that rival the first huge wall, the Great Wall of China, built to keep out other humans from lush agricultural lands.

The ancient Greeks wrote about the worst crime of humans: hubris. Hubris is when a human thinks they are a god. This is a psychosis. Many a ruler has flattered himself and encouraged flatters to tell him or her, they are gods. Going back to the beginning of civilization, the desire to preen oneself into super superiority has plagued humanity. It is a mental illness created by our own minds.

Of course, I suppose when my stallion, Sparky, stands facing into the wind on my mountainside, head held arrogantly high, nostrils flaring, he probably thinks he is the highest incarnation of god on earth. A divine horse. Whinninging, sharp eyed, he thinks, "Oh oh, here comes that human with an apple. Mmmm. Apples! OK, you can put a bit in my mouth and ride me. Rats."
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Human Evolutionary Success Tied to Innate Need to Imitate
Study Finds Chimps Act Like Bush
Bring on the Spear Carriers
Dumb Intelligent Design
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Tropical Storm Zeta Forms Right On Cusp Of New Year

2005-12-30T21:17:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Zeta is born. Record hurricane season continues unabated even as record warmth along with brush fires in the Midwest and giant waves from the huge weather system in the Pacific pounds the West Coast, the changes caused by global warming are now catastrophically obvious.

From Yahoo:

Tropical Storm Zeta formed Friday in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, another installment in a record-breaking hurricane season that officially ended last month.

Zeta, the 27th storm of the season, formed Friday about 1,000 miles south-southwest of the Azores islands, according to an advisory posted on the National Hurricane Center's Web site. It posed no immediate threat to land.

The center said it would send out a full advisory later Friday. Tropical storms have winds of at least 39 mph.

It was not immediately known if Dec. 30 was the latest date for the formation of a tropical storm in the Atlantic. But earlier this month, Hurricane Epsilon became only the fifth hurricane to form in December in 154 years of record-keeping. Hurricanes form when their winds exceed 74 mph.

Will the earth have hurricanes year round now? This is a serious querry. Building stuff in Florida and the Gulf at a frantic rate, all this can be undone forever by raging hurricanes. Unlike New England, Florida is flat as flat can be. On top of that, the ocean rising will swamp much of Florida, too.

New Orleans is doomed. You can't spend all our wealth on building in that obviously inadequet zone, not if we can spend our treasury on more important things, not that this matters while we are wasting over $200 billion+ on the stupid war in Iraq!

But this has to be considered! The drought/flood cycle is a disaster for all of us. I see signs of it up here in the Northeast, we usually have the evenest rain pattern in America. Same number of inches of moisture a month, up until the last 20 years! Now, that too, is destabilized.

KSBW Channel:

The latest storm along the Central Coast stirred up big, pounding waves along the Central Coast Wednesday.
The wind-whipped waves didn't cause any major flooding but did fall close to beach businesses on the Capitola Esplanade. Sandbags were kept close at hand but weren't needed, and some people came down to the coast just to watch the high surf.
"The water was coming up to the windows. That was something to be concerned about. I'm going to get the storm shutters today. I think it's time," said Zelda's Restaurant owner Ed Leipelt.

I have surfed in California and looking at the pictures of the waves brought back memories! The earlier waves were perfect surfing but it seems today, they are rougher and less even, no classic, glass-clear curl. Storm waves can really pound you into the sand!

At one of my old haunts, Manhattan/Venice beach, they had to berm the sand to prevent flooding and are handing out sandbags and there are the usual mudslides but then, we should talk! We had them up here, too, in Vermont, this week due to rain! Rain in northern Vermont after Xmas?

Ye gads.

Because I farm or have worked outdoors much of my life, I am hyper aware of the weather and look at today's map! This isn't a winter map! It is a Spring map. The storms are all moving south to north! There is snow, but it isn't sweeping down from the north, it is always part of a huge rain system that finally reached cold air. This is why all our snow storms this year have been half rain or more than half rain which makes my mountain very, very slippery. Already, many trees have been damaged from the ice when the storms transit from rain to snow. These are the most dangerous of storms.

Several years ago, much of Great Lakes Canada had so much ice on the lines, the huge power pylons collapsed. Electrical linesmen from my community had to move up into Canada for three months to rewire the place! Just this week on TV, we watched the damage from icestorms in the south cause trees to collapse on houses.

This isn't normal. I assure you, it isn't.

Meanwhile, back to watching Bush's massive planetary/economic/legal trainwreck. Gotterdammeridiot time.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Apres de hurricanes
Weather Develops Long Range Drought/Flood Patterns
Rain Forests Dry Up
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Einstein, Schroedinger and the Big Box Universe Paradox

2005-12-29T09:31:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I grew up crawling around observatories and haunting my parents' conversations with other astronomers and of course, my grandfather's gleeful explanations about reality always is the past even now (by the time your brain processes the data, it is already in the past, you see). So I have a twisted view about physics or rather, a realistic view. Since I am sick with the flu and running a fever, I figured, this is time to explain the space/time paradoxes.

From the New York Times

Einstein said there would be days like this.
Akiko Nishimura for The New York Times

This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."

No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.

These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy.

You can read the rest of the article, it is quite interesting. No diagrams, of course.

So I have decided to fill in all the blanks and add a lot of my own stuff.

Einstein, who my grandpa used to hang out with, even after I was born, famously said that God doesn't roll dice. Well, he was blinded by his own point of view and thus couldn't see the obvious: God IS a pair of dice. Mother Nature rolls him. Namely, within the parameters of the universe, random chance causes all sorts of things to happen but they are compelled to happen only in set circumstances and they follow rules of the road. Humans have tried to figure out both the mathematics of chance and the laws of physics so we can riddle out what is going on in reality. Thanks to various happenstances and random events like metorostrikes or star explosions, we have evolved as a planetary ecosystem as well as individuals, to the point that we have various organs with which we can sense things going on around us and a brain to project into the future so we can manipulate events in our favor. Like being able to visualize where the spear is going to arc so we can hit a running target from far away, for example.

Over recent human history, we have developed many tools to extend our vision and help us calculate more and more distantly into the past and project possibilities more and more into the future which is a lot harder to do. Predicting anything is very difficult even when one has a lot of information at hand. Using information about previous actions help us predict future actions.

All of which takes me to this: we cannot see the actions of the opposite galactic universe because the curve of space/time flows the wrong way. We can see backwards, we can see forwards except straight up.

If we didn't have lines on highways, when cresting hills, everyone would have to stop to see if there is anyone coming up from the opposite side. We can see down into the valley we crossed via the rear view mirror/telescopes but we can't see forwards past the crest of the hill. If we draw a straight line, we see open, clear sky, unless there is a storm, heh. Looking through the rear view telescopes, we can see the entire history of our trip if it is bowl shaped, namely, our Milky Way galaxy, as it drives along the galactic plane, can see all the way back to where our galactic plane first began to flex and expand.

One of the startling facts of physics is how things mirror each other, positive/negative, the dipole model is very strong. Sometimes, the forces at work are invisible such as the spin axis vs the planetary plane.
Interestingly enough, the oldest and most distant galaxies show clearly the two forces for the discharge of energy is so violent, it shows up nearly as brilliantly as the rotating inflowing material that is falling into the black hole.
From the Chandra orbital observatory:

Quasars are thought to be galaxies that harbor an active central supermassive black hole fueled by infalling gas and stars. This accretion process is often observed to be accompanied by powerful high-energy jets, which is depicted in the artist's illustration.

Compton Scattering of Microwave Background
As the electrons in the jet fly away from the quasar at near the speed of light, they move through the sea of cosmic background radiation left over from the hot early phase of the universe. When a fast-moving electron collides with one of these background photons, it can boost the photon's energy up into the X-ray band.

Radio Image
The observed X-ray brightness of the jet, which depends on the power in the electron beam and the intensity of the background radiation, is consistent with the predictions of the standard Big Bang model. The jet's brightness also implies that enormous amounts of energy were deposited in the outer regions of the host galaxy of the quasar at a very early stage. This energy input could have had a profound effect on the evolution of the galaxy by triggering the formation of stars, or inhibiting the accretion of matter from intergalactic space.

The energy from the Big Bang was so great, translating it into other forms was very violent. As the massive energy/force of the Big Bang traveled forwards in time, it spread outwards like a big bubble, the black hole eddies shot away from each other thanks to the propulsive force of the Big Bang. As the black holes sucked in debrie, they grew larger and larger. We think, some exploded a long time ago and produced multiple galaxies which are, in various groups, falling back into each other to form mega-black holes again.

Here is some interesting information about the earliest recordable emnations from the Big Bang: From the European Space Program:

Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the first stars formed as little as 200 million years after the Big Bang. This is much earlier than previously thought.

Astronomers have observed large amounts of iron in the ultraluminous light from very distant, ancient quasars. This iron is the 'ashes' left from supernova explosions in the very first generation of stars.

We do not know exactly how and when galaxies, stars, and eventually planets formed in the early Universe. Astronomers look back in time to these early years by observing objects so remote that their light needs thousands of millions of years to travel to Earth. These objects provide clues about conditions in the early Universe.

Click here to view a picture of a very distant quasar which probably isn't some mere star but rather, a very rapidly moving, powerful black hole with polar jets of energy shooting out even as material falls inwards, note the surrounding gas that is thousands of light years in depth, burning as if the jets shooting out of this growing entity are a blowtorch and the spin is visible as the hottest tip of this torch lights up the dense gases.

Even today, we can see in our own galaxy, the extent of the debrie created by these sort of energetic actions, all the dust spiralling into our galaxy is the leftovers of more than one giant explosion eons ago. We can see it only if it obscures light, there is a lot of this stuff out there. And it is falling into all the galactic pools created by black holes like the one(s) in the center of our own Milky Way.

Our galaxy is falling into Andromeda's pool and she is falling into the Local Group which is sailing merrily into the maw of the Great Attractor which is, you can bet, since the universe is uniform and mirror image, is falling, too, back into a gravitational pool which is illustrated above in the graphic, "the Uniform Universe". Namely, if quantum mechanics is correct and if all data on the elemetary level is the same and changes the same no matter how far apart, then this is true of the universe.

Opposites attract and things that fall into each other are falling, not flying apart.

The appearance of acceleration due to redshifting is due not to the fact that everything is flying apart more and more but rather, as our Great Attractor deepens its gravity well, the light traveling around the curve of space has to travel more and more time in order to reach us as we slide faster and faster down the gravity hole of the Great Attractor. I hope this is coming across clearly because it irritates me, being untrained in the mathematical models scientists use to make a point, all I know is, we can't have a Great Attractor without it changing the nature of our own space/time observations because we are not moving in a straight line outwards, away from the Big Bang.

As the top illustration shows, if we are in a gravity pool, the pool is moving back towards the Big Bang only we can't see forwards, only backwards, and if all things in nature are dipole by the fact they must be both negative and positive in some way, or that they are matter/antimatter at all times somewhere, this means, we will bang into our mirror universe when we fall into the Great Attractor.

Not that it would matter much, we will long be ground into tiny elementals by then, anyway.

Why this universe ever got started in the first place is another riddle. Good thing we have the Spaghetti Monster to blame for that.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Apres de Hurricanes, Texas Burns: Global Warming Hits Home Base

2005-12-28T08:02:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

In classic "Gods punish foolish humans" mode, Mother Nature is battering Texas right after our childish and disgraceful behavior at the final Kyoto Accords talks in Canada. The right wing American Southwest will get to enjoy the climate from hell they worked so hard to create. A bad choice. Even energy bubbles need water.

From Yahoo:

Rancher Dean Dillard was able to save his 72-year-old mother's home from grass fires by soaking the land around it. But many of his neighbors weren't as lucky.

Wildfires that raced through Texas and Oklahoma Tuesday devoured scores of homes, including at least 25 in rural Cross Plains. The fires, fueled by gusty winds and a drought, were blamed for at least one death and a handful of injuries.

"It looked like we had been bombed in a big war, the whole city was on fire everywhere," said Dillard.

As a cattle owner, I would like to tell the fools in Texas, it is damn hard to graze large bovines when the place is on fire, there is no rain and it is hellishly hot. What ails these dudes? Are they all fakes like Bush? Don't they have the elementary brain mass to cog out the idea that you need rain to raise cattle?

These idiots are responsible for Bush existing. They cheer as they kill the Kyoto Accords and they snarl at Earth First. Well, they are getting Earth's FIST. As the voters of Texas who voted for the present form of planetary arrangements run from catastrophe to catastrophe, one wonders when they will figure out what is going on. Here is some more data to assist them in this learning process.

Purdue, courtesy of our reader, Jcrit:

The most comprehensive climate model to date of the continental United States predicts more extreme temperatures throughout the country and more extreme precipitation along the Gulf Coast, in the Pacific Northwest and east of the Mississippi.

The drought/flood cycle which is bothersome up here will be very bothersome down there. Another hint to all those Texan ranchers and farmers: downpours are bad news. They wash away topsoil. They drown the darn cattle, especially the calves. And they spawn tornadoes. You don't want more of these. Seriously.

How can people farm and be so stupid at the same time? Just like loggers hating environmenalists. My forest which I make money off of, is dying thanks to stupid pollution problems as well as global warming. Hello, hello? Anyone home? Can't log dead forests that burned up, dudes.

From the NYT:

Seven Northeastern states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, have embarked on a regionwide plan to reduce power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. Two years in the making, the plan is the first collective effort in America to adopt mandatory controls for greenhouse gases. It is further evidence of the states' willingness to address an issue that Washington has largely ignored, as well as a timely antidote for the administration's dispiriting performance at the recent global warming conference in Montreal.

The governors' message would have been stronger still had it not been for the defection of Gov. Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts Republican. He pulled the rug out from under his own negotiators with an 11th-hour complaint that the plan would impose unacceptable utility costs on consumers.

Listen, the costs to consumers if the planet goes to literal hell is going to be immense so saving pennies now isn't a good idea. Indeed, the costs will rise and rise, anyway, so why not set up a system today that operates without polluting the holy hell out of the earth? Eh? The bubbles we have created won't last long if Mother Nature decides it is time to wipe us out and we are getting tornadoes in Massachusetts as well as New York, in the mountains, no less! As well as Mass. trees are dying just as horribly as my trees.

Everyone in Texas who isn't hiring Mexicans to work in the hot sun for them is complaining about all the Mexicans coming to el Norte to work in the hot sun for them. Well, look at this map. If most of Mexico is going to have 100+ degree days over 100 days a year, how habitable will that be?

I have seen droughts in Mexico. Livestock hung up on barbed wire fences, dried out so hard even the vultures aren't interested in the carcasses. Scorpins scuttling all over the place at night. Dust devils roaring around in the afternoon, strong as small tornadoes. Yup. Lovely.

And it will be much worse. Any desert dweller knows that 90% of the rain that falls runs away lickety split. The desert rejects the water. Any loose dirt is long gone thanks to the wind. Caliche which is nature's cement, rocks and sand remain. The Sahara wasn't much of a desert 35,000 years ago, it was lush.

Our ancestors called the Great Plains "The Great Desert." Well, this just might be an appropriate name in the future. And Kansas will have a lot more things wrong than teaching about evolution when this happens. They will be the crucible of evolutionary changes, the survival of the fittest, adapting to desert conditions.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Weather Develops Long Range Patterns
Greenhouse Gases Highest in Over Half Million Years
Obvious Global Warming
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

Dr. Freud--Psychiatry Runs in Eternal Circles, Chasing the Psychotic Tail

2005-12-27T21:27:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Psychotherapists gathered this week in La-La-Land, California. Like Freud in Vienna at the edge of the cliff leading into the madness of WWI and Naziism, psychotherapists of the Vienna School stand on the edge of America and wonder what is going on. No one seems able to get a grip on madness and I think this is because our species is totally insane all the way through thanks to our elaborate brains.

From the insane New York Times:

One of several prominent therapists who agreed to visit Disneyland at the invitation of this reporter, Dr. Seligman was here in mid-December for a conference on the state of psychotherapy, its current challenges and its future. And a wild ride it was.

Because it was clear at this landmark meeting that, although the participants agreed it was a time for bold action, psychotherapists were deeply divided over whether that action should be guided by the cool logic of science or a spirit of humanistic activism. The answer will determine not only what psychotherapy means, many experts said, but its place in the 21st century.

"In the 1960's and 1970's, we had these characters like Carl Rogers, Minuchin, Frankl; psychotherapy felt like a social movement, and you just wanted to be a part of it," said Dr. Jeffrey Zeig, a psychologist who heads the Milton H. Erickson Foundation, which every five years since 1980 has sponsored the conference in honor of Dr. Erickson, a pioneer in the use of hypnosis and brief therapy techniques.

"Now," Dr. Zeig continued, "well, therapists are becoming more like technicians, and we're trying to find the common denominator from the different schools and methods to see what works best, and where to go from here."

I am listening to Arnold Schoenberg, the musical counterpoint and contemporary of Dr. Freud. As one who grew up immersed in the Vienna Kultur thanks to the Deutsch/Occult side of the family, I find a great affinity with Freud's Weltanschauung.

He realized early on that drugs couldn't fix the psyche nor could hypnotism or autosuggestion or electric shocks. In desperation, living in a world of disintigrating political and economic connections as the West devoured the planet earth and soon turned to cannibalizing each other, he wished to find the magic Key to the human brain, that vast dark chamber forged when we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden in Africa and forced to forage for food savagely. The brain evolved to give us the ability to understand subtle clues and worse, to convincingly lie to others while intending to eat them for dinner.

Even Freud couldn't accept this.

Today, psychiatrists have been reduced by the dynamics of funding insurance and hospitals, into pill dispensers. They don't want to hear what is ailing the mind, they just want to give a pill that will make the symptoms less obvious and then throw you back into the cesspit.

But it is literally life and death that we humans understand our own minds. For we are killing not only ourselves, we are killing this planet. A serious mistake!

Dr. Freud, like myself, looked towards the ancients and their tales of how we came to be what we are. He, like myself, looked into the magical world of mythology and ancient practices, seeking clues to follow in the cavern of the mind. More, or maybe worse, he and I both come from a peculiar class of people: we remember the Outer Darkness, namely, what goes on when our minds take over and run things while the conscious self is asleep.

Most humans can't remember more than a tiny handful of dreams, a pitiful few dried up pedals, faded and inert, left over from the wild blossom of dreams. As a person who remembers all dreams all my life, I assure you, dreams are very vivid. They include non-visual elements that are probably much more important than the pictures: smells, stray thoughts and of course, feelings.

The emotions that ripple through a dream like a subterranean river go to the very core of the human brain, it is probably welling out of the most primative parts. This is where love and hate are forged. Where sadness resided next to escasy.

If one swims in the dark, Lethian Rivers of the Memory one might find, like a shell on the beach after a tidalwave, fragments of memories the mind wished to supress, memories that could, when dragged out into the daylight, enlighten oneself about why one does various destructive actions.

Alas, many humans are not only content to run around psychotic, wrecking not only everything around them but even the entire planet earth itself, they often glory in exactly that which is sickest in their own minds. For part of all this is the fact that our minds were created to be evil. Like in "betray friends, cannibalize strangers and kill your own family" insane. To control this prehistoric mega-madness, humans created culture and this culture usually works to inhibit or even eliminate the darker forces that want to go bezerk all the time, eating everything and everyone.

When Freud tried this, via dream analysis, he didn't fix anything broken, what he found was, the dream world is very dangerous and few can endure what they experience there, if they remember it. As a person who can, I assure you, it is not fun. One really can't share this stuff except as artwork and of course, all artists are like myself in this regard: they live more in the dreamworld than waking world.

To be, or not to be ... that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles - and by opposing them end them?
To die... To sleep... no more...
And by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to..
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished!

To die... To sleep...
To sleep? Perchance to dream!
Ay there's the rub! For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause...

In the labyrinth of the mind, we run into ourselves and no crueler critic is alive than one's own concience! Like the Angel at the Gates of Eden, this entity wields the Sword of Truth.

In Europe, I saw "Hamlet" in German. It was very interesting and cast a different light upon the play. DRITTER AKT. ERSTE SZENE:

König----
Und lockt ihm keine Wendung des Gesprächs
Heraus, warum er die Verwirrung anlegt,
Die seiner Tage Ruh so wild zerreißt
Mit stürmischer, gefährlicher Verrücktheit?

Rosenkranz--- Er gibt es zu, er fühle sich verstört,
Allein wodurch, will er durchaus nicht sagen.

One of many German words for insane is "verruckt". Geistesgestört (disturbed spirit), geisteskrank (spiritually sick), irre (irregular), irrsinnig (erroneous thinking), krankhaft (very sick), sinnlos (senseless), unsinnig (insensible), verrückt (fatally crooked), wahnsinnig (abandoned thoughts). We now know that many mental diseases are part and parcel of many whole body problems and it isn't often something one can think one's way out of despite Freud's enthusiasm in the search for that Holy Grail of Mental Health.

Hamlet
Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage:

I am/I am not; that here is the question. Freud liked Hamlet for he was a man who was always trying to analyze his own mind as well as the minds and motives of others. He hallucinated and he debated not only with himself but with everyone while at the same time, to throw off his criminal Uncle's intentions, pretended to be insane which was a dilemma since the entire situation the poor Prince was in, was psychotic thanks to his Uncle's crimes.

This is like America today. We bloggers spend many happy hours tracking the psychosis of our insane ruler and his gang of criminal friends. Many Americans desperately want to believe that Bush isn't insane, he is normal and we are crazy for seeing what is going on since self delusion is a powerful tool the brain has evolved over millions of years of suffering. So blindly, they follow this obviously demented man and his friends, assured that safety lie in committing graver and graver crimes against humanity.

The inner cannibal feasts on flesh and laughs and still, devotedly, is followed by the flock hoping for safety in the dark cave of the night of the soul.

And so, Dr. Freud fled Vienna, chased out by fellow Viennese, Herr Adolf Hitler who then turned on his last, living relative, after supervising the suicide of his only niece, and this poor woman, a schizophrenic in a German asylum, was gassed to death and burned.

One of the earliest victims of Hitler's mad Holocaust.

Something to ponder as the clock nears midnight, as the New Year dawn is a glimmer in the East.
*************************************************************
Previous Similar Articles
Human Evolutionary Success Tied to Innate Need to Imitate
Bring On the Spear Carriers
Science vs God
On Being and Nonbeing
*************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest

The Weather Develops Long Range Patterns of Drought/Flood Zones

2005-12-26T14:18:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As global warming continues to change the ocean currents and air flows of our planet, we see vast changes on the ground. One of the most noticable changes are in the Temperate Zones which are much more active and has been having flood/drought cycles that are not seasonal but due to shifts in persistent highs as they travel from west to east across the upper latitudes.

The NOAA Storm Track Web Page:

Storm tracks and cyclogenesis/cyclolysis locations for the past 10, 30, and 90 days. Tracks are based on an algorithm developed at the Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC) [Serreze (1995), and Serreze et al.

I won't quote more because NOAA has been told by Bush to be nasty to anyone who accesses this public information. He would really like to have it cloaked from view just like everything else he is able to control and have no one see it except the rich, of course. But you can click on it to see their charts and maps.

I have used some of this information (wow! I happen to be a taxpayer so I would like to inform NOAA that they get their money from me in the bitter end, eh, guys?) to make easier to read, simpler charts. The main point is, from the summer solstice cycle to the winter solstice which was just a few days ago, we have been in a persistent cycle of a high over Spain/Canary Islands and the Pacific Ocean west of Mexico. The vast majority of storms have been either on the equator, as usual, or above the 40th degree latitude.

This map shows the main tracks of major storms this half a year. Right now, right over my mountain, is a storm, it is bringing rain and warm temperatures since it is not following the usual winter track but is following the same slot all those hurricanes this year traveled. We have had some severe blasts of winter but mostly without much snow. This is because of the drought conditions over the Rockies. Very few storms are coming ashore on the West Coast, as you can see, the persistent low is over the upper Pacific next to Alaska and most storms have curved away from the West Coast and sailed back up north again. This is keeping the Rockies unusually dry.

One chart shows storms tracking from Japan, across the Pacific and then they peter out when hitting the US and then, once into the Mississippi Valley, get moisture from the Gulf and become a storm again. These dip way down into Georgia and then chug up the coast to the Northeast. This means our storms are unusually warm. No Arctic Expresses.

If you go to any website running daily Jet Stream forecasts, one sees this winter a wobbly line due to the fact that the jet stream is scrolling up and over these highs instead of plunging down across the continent.

The chart at the top of this page shows the footprint of rainfall this half a year. It was very much an all or none proposition. One reason why the spectatular hurricanes from the Gulf petered out so rapidly when approaching landfall this year was due to this persistent drought pattern. Note how a great deal of rain fell in the Gulf itself and only three pretty narrow tracks made it over land, one curling down over the Central America, the other running straight up the Mississippi Valley and the last one across Florida. We got clipped by these storms and we had a terrible drought for over two months up here. Now we are in a wet cycle with frequent rain...In winter! If this isn't standing Nature on Her head!

Past weather patterns can be thrown out the window these days. A more dynamic system is proving to be one big surprize. Like everyday is Boxing Day for Mother Nature. She boxes us and we try to duck!

One of our readers alerted me to this editorial in the New York Times:

ONE year ago today we stared aghast at images of the Southeast Asian tsunami. These were mostly improvised clips rendered all the more poignant by their amateurishness. Video cameras taken on vacation to record the everyday pleasures of the beach were suddenly turned to quivering utility as they documented the panic and mayhem of a natural disaster. Somehow, domestic pleasure turned on its head only added to the sense of chaos and loss. Who can forget the disbelief in the recorded voices? This can't be happening to us.

Human beings are never prepared for natural disasters. There is a kind of optimism built into our species that seems to prefer to live in the comfortable present rather than confront the possibility of destruction. It may happen, we seem to believe, but not now, and not to us. There is nothing new in this attitude.

I hate to differ with the good man, but this isn't true!

In warm, pleasant climes, people get careless. They ignore dangers because there are so few. Like pampered pets, they become trusting and lacsidasical. People with this sort of attitude don't last long up here in the cold mountains. We watch the weather with a very wary eye. "If you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes (and it will change)" is an old joke out here. Propably the Indians cracked it when the Pilgrims showed up.

For a Temerate Zone, we have it pretty drastic here, quite often. When haying the fields in a fog, I noticed the horse and the oxen getting very nervous and anxious. Chip and Dale's great big ears with many sensitive hairs, swivveled and cocked to the west. Their noses quivered and they rolled their eyes to me and mooed. Distantly, I heard the rumble of thunder, I am nearly as sensitive to this as the oxen. I screamed to Chris and John to run for their lives and I gathered up all the livestock who were already quite alarmed and we all run as fast as possible to the stables.

Bang. Black as night, 90 mph winds, lightning, trees groaning and crashing to the ground. One of my neighbors was lifted out of the hayloft by the twister but he fell onto some more hay and wasn't even hurt, along with a calf.

But you see, people who don't pay attention don't last long. And we sniff out winter. How many days left before it comes, we weigh it carefully, those of us who live in tents, anyway! Now that I don't live in a tent, I am more careless, slightly. Don't need to worry so much.

But our ancestors had to be very wary and move fast. This included telling if a drought was settling in. This is why we are basically nomads and why we tend to range about the place. This is why we spread so far, so fast.
************************************************************************************************
Previous similar articles:
Siberian Swans Come To Merry England
Atlantic Current is Weakening
Global Warming Causes More Snow to Fall
Wishful Thinking About Mother Nature
***************************************************************************************************
To return to homepage click here
To read more science news click here
Washington Pest