Say whatever you want about climate change. Go ahead; call it a hoax. Say it's a mass conspiracy by the scientific community to drum up support for grant money. Call it a natural cyclical phenomenon.
You can even drag your religion into it, if you feel you must. I've got no problems whatsoever with evangelicals who want to argue that our earth is God's creation and it is our duty and responsibility to treat it with respect.
Make the case that we have a duty to wean ourselves off oil imports from unfriendly producers like Iran even while steadfastly making the case that it's not a reaction to global warming.
Whatever.
Just do me one favor, please. Don't ever say this:
“I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”
Because if you truly believe it is our God-given duty to burn through every resource on the planet, burning anything that will move a vehicle in the process, then you are simply an idiot.
Bringing a Neanderthal back to life: priceless$30 million
Possessing the Neanderthal genome raises the possibility of bringing Neanderthals back to life. Dr. George Church, a leading genome researcher at the Harvard Medical School, said Thursday that a Neanderthal could be brought to life with present technology for about $30 million.
I thought there were a few of those still around in the House and Senate.
We are watching a fascinating show on the National Geographic Channel about cat sperm which, upon entering the lioness, sits and waits for the eggs to be released, up to 36 hours later, and then they go after it.
Some of the sperm have multiple heads, some have two tails. Very few actually find an egg.
It reminds me of Wal-Mart shoppers on Black Friday.
The New York Times was full of interesting stuff today. Gang Fights in Prison Injure 22 and Kill One
That's right here in the lovely state of Texas. Something seems horribly wrong if you can't control gang activity IN a prison.
A federal prison in Texas erupted in violence early Friday when two gang-related fights broke out almost simultaneously in facing housing units. One inmate was killed, and 22 were injured, officials said.
It was the second outbreak of fighting in a federal lockup in Texas in three weeks.
[...]
The dead inmate was identified as Servando Rodríguez, 38, an illegal immigrant serving 54 months for marijuana and parole violations.
That's 4 1/2 years for marijuana and whatever the parole violations where. Probably marijuana-related. I guess he won't have to finish his sentence. Now there's an open bunk for the next marijuana conviction.
In other news, keep an eye on your automotive underbelly, especially if you drive a large SUV. Catalytic converters are becoming hot items in our new economic reality, thanks to trace amounts of platinum.
Inside the lobby of the New Windy City Mufflers and Brakes shop, Mr. Fernandez said he had heard a rumor that catalytic converters had suddenly become the rage on the black market here, but he did not believe it until his went missing on a well-lighted North Side street.
Theft of scrap metals like copper and aluminum has been common here and across the country for years, fueled by rising construction costs and the building boom in China. But now thieves have found an easy payday from the upper echelon of the periodic table. It seems there may not be an easier place to score some platinum than under the hood of a car.
[...]
People who may have thought their lives had nothing to do with the booming commodities market are finding out the hard way where their connection is — in their car’s exhaust system.
The catalytic converter is made with trace amounts of platinum, palladium and rhodium, which speed chemical reactions and help clean emissions at very high temperatures. Selling stolen converters to scrap yards or recyclers, a thief can net a couple of hundred dollars apiece.
None of this may matter in the long run though. When a giant particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland starts smashing protons this summer, some scientists fear the earth may be sucked into a black hole.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
That would certainly take care of my daily frustrations: the lawn mower maintenance, the roof replacement, garden pests intent on destroying our tomato crop, and of course the credit card bills and other financial woes would get sucked into the hole along with everything else. And an early end to a nasty presidential campaign with no winners needed.
Fire this baby up!
In a worst case scenario, it wouldn't even be important that I give a photo credit to Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times. When we're all possibly getting a free ride to the other end of the universe, who cares?
Southwest Airlines is about to implement nonstop service from Austin to Philadelphia. Theoretically, if I were so inclined, I could make that journey in under 4 hours.
"So what?" you might ask.
Well, one hundred years ago such things were merely dreams and fantasies. A lot can happen in 100 years. And look at what has happened in 5,000 years! And that's only 50 one hundred year cycles. Five billion years is one million 5,000 year cycles.
And yet there are some scientists who apparently have nothing better to do with their time on this planet than lament the inevitable global warming extraordinaire and pondering the solution.
If nature is left to its own devices, about 7.59 billion years from now Earth will be dragged from its orbit by an engorged red Sun and spiral to a rapid vaporous death. That is the forecast according to new calculations by a pair of astronomers, Klaus-Peter Schroeder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico and Robert Connon Smith of the University of Sussex in England.
And while our planet may be consumed by the dying sun in 7.59 billion years, life will cease to exist in a mere 5 billion years as springtime heads for Neptune. In about a billion years our own oceans will begin making lobster dinner.
About a billion years from now, the Sun will be 10 percent brighter. Oceans on Earth will boil away. The Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in its core about 5.5 billion years from now and start burning hydrogen in the surrounding layers. As a result, the core will shrink and the outer layers will rapidly expand as the Sun transforms itself into a red giant.
The heat from this death rattle will transform the solar system; it will briefly be springtime in the Kuiper Belt out beyond Neptune. Mercury and Venus will surely be swallowed, but the Earth’s fate has always been more uncertain.
So, one billion years is only 200,000 of those 5,000 year cycles. We'd better get busy on a solution.
Dr. Smith called the new result “a touch depressing” in a series of e-mail messages. But “looked at another way,” he added, “it is an incentive to do something about finding ways to leave our planet and colonize other areas in the galaxy.”
Depressing? Really? Do these scientists read much about what's going on in the world in the here and now? Darfur anyone? Iraq?
Another option, Dr. Smith said, is to engage in some large-scale high-stakes engineering.
In the same way that space probes can get a trajectory boost by playing gravitational billiards with Venus or Jupiter to gain speed and get farther out in space, so the Earth could engineer regular encounters with a comet or asteroid, thus raising its orbit and getting farther from the Sun, according to a paper in 2001 by Don Korycansky and Gregory Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan.
Dr. Laughlin said that when their paper first came out, they were praised by the radio host Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives for forward thinking.
Wow. I had no idea Rush Limbaugh was so out there with his "forward thinking." To hell with all our current problems; we need to be figuring out how to get off this future cinder block now! Time's a wastin.'
Meanwhile, speaking of fired up, roll me a fat one of whatever those scientists are having. Sounds like a ton of laughs.
When I read this story I immediately got the inevitable song stuck in my head.
Astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light-years across the galaxy — the first planetary system that really looks like our own, with outer giant planets and room for smaller inner planets.
“It looks like a scale model of our solar system,” said Scott Gaudi, an assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University.
While we are on the subject of seeing just what you want to see in a picture as opposed to what might actually be there, here's a classic example.
At first glance, I swear I thought this was an uncircumsized penis being tugged with a latex glove. (Granted, a rather gnarly one!) Alas, my mind is thoroughly in the gutter this morning.
As vulnerable as naked mole rats seem, researchers now find the hairless, bucktoothed rodents are invulnerable to the pain of acid and the sting of chili peppers.
A better understanding of pain resistance in these sausage-like creatures could lead to new drugs for people with chronic pain, scientists added.
Since investigative journalism is in my blood, I dug around and located a sample of the chili peppers from which the capsaicin was retrieved to conduct the tests.
How many of you have seen this stupid phrase stuck on the back of an SUV? Usually just to the left of the Bush/Cheney sticker and right above the "Support Our Troops" ribbon. And yes, if you are fascinated by trivia, as I am, then it's important to know that France, with 211,209 square miles is indeed smaller than Texas by an area almost as large as Louisiana.
I'm sure most of those folks bragging about the size of their state probably couldn't guess within 100,000 square miles just how big it is. What's important is that it's bigger than France, and therefore better.
Texas really isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Lay Texas next to Brazil and you'll get the idea. Let's take this study to the planetary level and beyond.
Damn, that Jupiter sure is a large mo-fo. No damn wonder Pluto didn't make the cut after all.
Now comes the part where things not only get scary, but almost incomprehensible.
If the sun is our bowling ball, I'm staying away from the Arcturus bowling alley. Holy crap! And note the comment on the graphic: "Earth is invisible at this scale." Well, so much for the bragging rights of Texans!
Finally, the obliterator of all egos.
Whatever you do, don't say Betelgeuse three times.
Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky. It is more than 1000 light years away. And you thought it was a long drive across Texas?
I'm not sure why we Americans think it's so important that God bless America. Or why some believe it'll be the end of civilization if two same-sex people tie the knot legally. Or why a Hillary Clinton presidency scares the crap out of so many of us. Maybe if we put ourselves in the correct cosmic perspective, we could get over ourselves.
In case you are wondering if there are any celestial orbs larger than Antares, there are. My Cephei and W Cephei are each more than three times the size of Antares.
