“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
– Lao Tzu
– Lao Tzu
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
The secrets of BushCo
Another humor article: Gallup Poll on morality. (Release date is today). Democrats like divorce, stem cells, premarital sex, and gambling. Reeps like the death penalty, dead animal clothing (fur), animals in test labs, and divorce.
about cool camping sites.
Based on the potential presence of wimpy campers…
About 2-3 hours from Philly: Ricketts Glen
About 5-6 hours from Philly: Ohiopyle (As a bonus, there are 2 Frank Lloyd Wright homes within 5 or 6 miles of each other here and here)
About an hour and a half from Philly: Jim Thorpe and Mauch Chunk Lake Park for biking the Lehigh Gorge and camping
That should be a start…there’s also Worlds End, which is still on my to-do list.
I was at an all-day meeting – sorry for not posting these yesterday!
Approximately 2 billion of the world’s people — nearly one-third of the human population — have no access to electricity. Without electricity to power everything from refrigeration and water pumps to factory operations or other commercial endeavors, those 2 billion people remain mired in an endless cycle of poverty. Some efforts to develop new energy technologies that are easy to install, environmentally sound and — perhaps most importantly — inexpensive to produce are detailed here.
In an exclusive interview with Grist, Al Gore shares the inside scoop on the Alliance for Climate Protection, a new group that will spend tens of millions of dollars attempting to get Americans fired up about global warming. Former EPA chief Carol Browner and other notables involved in the ambitious bipartisan project dish about the group’s funding, leadership, and strategy — a strategy involving big expenditures on paid advertising, which might not sit well with some enviros. Find out about the controversy, and why Gore will fund but not lead the group, here.
A Virginia-based company is seeking clean energy in the watery deep. Within a few weeks, Verdant Power will submerge turbines in New York’s East River to draw energy from the tides. The first phase of the project will run for 18 months, with six turbines supplying energy to a nearby supermarket and parking garage; if this test run is successful, up to 300 improved turbines will be installed in 2010, enough to power 8,000 homes. This hydrokinetic or “in-stream” energy is an eco-friendly alternative to hydropower, wherein water is dammed and released. During the test run, the turbines will be closely monitored to make sure fish are not harmed.
Forbes magazine reports big venture firms are now eying a new wave of startups: those devoted to slowing the advance of global warming, starvation and disease.
And we better hope all of the above work, because we may be in deeper trouble than we thought: Scientists report that climate change estimates for the next century may have substantially underestimated (by 15 to 78%) the potential magnitude of global warming, based on a new analysis of historical (“little ice age” and ancient (last ice age) climactic data. We’re not sufficiently accounted for positive feedbacks that worsen the situation, like methane emissions and increased water vapor in the atmosphere, the researchers said. More here and here.
A new study details how lead exposure leads to brain damage decades later.
Scientists have sighted a spectacular South American frog, which had been feared extinct for a decade. The painted frog is found only in a small remote region of Colombia, and the last sighting dates back to 1995. Conservationists believed it had gone extinct, principally due to a fungal disease, chytridiomycosis, which has caused enormous harm to many species. The team behind the rediscovery say it gives hope that other amphibians may be able to survive fungal attack. Chytridiomycosis is the main reason behind the worldwide decline in amphibians, which sees about one third of all species threatened with extinction.
In findings that could influence our understanding of climate change, a Princeton research team has learned that tropical forests return to the atmosphere up to half the nitrogen they receive each year, thanks to a particular type of bacteria that lives in those forests. Another link between the carbon and nitrogen cycles in the atmosphere.
Tee-hee…You think I posted a news bucket yesterday. 🙂
on the commercialization of climbing Everest: NYT
Apparently 40 people passed Sharp without even considering assisting him before he died.
Get that million-dollar contract: Knoxville News Sentinel
Buh-bye? Philly Inquirer
And while I’m wiping my teras and drowning my sorrows in my coffee cup, I just have to post this quote from Milch:
HBO is braindead. Why would they skimp on the best show they’ve ever had?
Especially since there was no plan to go beyond the fourth season anyway…why not just finish it?
When I saw this first item, I knew I was going to have to come back for today’s download (Consider it an experiment – How many science headlines can the frog pond take in one day?):
The monsoon that brings crucial rain to South Asia may be weakening thanks to the brown haze of pollution over the Indian Ocean. Global warming should have added more moisture to the monsoon, but in fact temperatures over the northern Indian Ocean may have cooled due to pollution, driving the monsoons farther south.
Research suggests that contrary to popular belief, the body has more than one “body clock.” The previously known master body clock resides in a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Researchers at OHSU’s Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have now revealed the existence of a secondary clock-like mechanism associated with the adrenal gland.
Legions of giant crabs clawing their way along the bottom of the Barents Sea are proving a godsend to the few fishermen authorized to catch the lucrative crustacean, but some fear the crabs are threatening the sea’s fragile ecosystem. The Kamchatka crab, also known as red king crab or Alaskan crab, was introduced into the Barents by the Soviets in the 1960s — some 30 years after a first, failed attempt by Stalin — in a bid to bolster Russia’s food supplies. Now, the species is spreading like wildfire along the northern coasts of Russia and Norway and will continue to spread as far as Gibraltar, the southern tip of the European continent, predicted Yuri Illarionovich Orlov, the Russian biologist who first implanted the animal in the Barents Sea. “But that will take 150 years,” he said.
The Japanese parliament Wednesday banned new large shopping malls in suburbs in a bid to prevent the hollowing out of urban centers as the population shrinks. Despite opposition by the business community, the upper house of parliament unanimously backed the proposal amid worries that American-style sprawl would be unhealthy as Japanese have fewer children.
Researchers from the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine have revealed the genetic basis behind one of the best-documented examples of evolutionary change in the fossil record: how whales – which started out on land as dog-like mammals – lost their hind limbs.
If a repeat of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake were to occur, the Port of Oakland could be so severely damaged it would take up to two years to resume full operations, researchers reported Tuesday.
From dkos: Walk Back the Cat: Blame Canada
And from the comments section of the diary: Neo-Cons planted the Iran story