"A lot of people would throw tape away because they couldn’t figure out how to make the machine erase properly", Rick recalls.
"It was expensive, so I would take it out of the trash can, wind it up on the reel, clean it up, and use that for recording"

- Richard Finch from KC & The Sunshine Band

Current Mood: ditzy
Current Music: The Sunshine Band - Black Water Gold

Spencer's interest is in using satellite data and a simple climate model to test the simulated feedback processes contained in climate models that are used to forecast global warming.

"I am arguing that we can't measure feedbacks the way people have been trying to do it," he said. "The climate modelers see from satellite data that warm years have fewer clouds, then assume that the warmth caused the clouds to dissipate. If this is true, it would be positive feedback and could lead to strong global warming. This is the way their models are programmed to behave".

"My question to them was, 'How do you know it wasn't fewer clouds that caused the warm years, rather than the other way around?' It turns out they didn't know. They couldn't answer that question."

One problem is the simplicity of the climate models. Because cloud systems are so complex and so poorly understood, all of the climate models used by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use greatly simplified cloud parameters to represent clouds. But the calculations that set those parameters are based on assumed cause-and-effect relationships.

Those assumptions might be working in the wrong direction, Spencer said. "What we have found is that cloud cover variations causing temperature changes dominate the satellite record, and give the illusion of positive feedback."

Using satellite observations interpreted with a simple model, Spencer's data support negative feedback (or cooling) better than they support positive feedback.

"This critical component in global warming theory -­ cloud feedback -­ is impossible to measure directly in the real climate system," Spencer said. "We haven't figured out a good way to separate cause and effect, so we can't measure cloud feedback directly. And if we don't know what the feedbacks are, we are just guessing at how much impact humans will have on climate change."

Source: Science Daily

Current Mood: blah
Current Music: T.G. - The Second Annual Report

There have been 73 missions, manned and unmanned, to the Moon, and understanding its chemical composition, particularly finding water, has always been a priority. So why haven’t we seen significant amounts of water until now?

The answer lies in the Moon’s rotation. Unlike Earth, which rotates on a significant tilt to the Sun, the Moon is barely tilted at all. At the poles, some hills remain in permanent sunlight while some troughs are always in shadow. When water lands in sunny spots, perhaps carried by comets or asteroids, the water transforms directly into gas; if it lands in shadow, the water freezes and can remain indefinitely. The lack of light explains why spectrometers — instruments that can be used for remote water detection but rely on reflected light to do so — never picked up on the water.

This changed last month, when NASA shot a satellite into a permanently shadowed region on the Moon’s surface, throwing a plume of material containing water up out of the shadow.

[…]

Almost as surprising as NASA’s announcement is the lack of attention it has received. Thirty years ago, a development like this would have been heralded as one of humanity’s greatest discoveries. Perhaps the indifference is partly because of the disappointment of astronomers, amateur and professional, who tried to watch NASA’s October blast through their telescopes, but couldn’t see the plume. Or perhaps it’s a symptom of our age, that the problems that bedevil us on Earth limit our interest in other worlds — just when we need them (and the inspiration they offer) most.

Source: The New York Times

Current Mood: Amazed
Current Music: Global Communication - 76:14

Over the next two centuries, the idea of a Moon awash with oceans was kept alive by astronomers and authors, from William Herschel (the discoverer of the planet Uranus) to Jules Verne (“From the Earth to the Moon”).

Then, as astronomical telescopes got better, it appeared that the Moon is airless and waterless. And a lunar atmosphere was needed to retain water since sunlight breaks down water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, and the Moon’s weak gravity is unable to prevent them from escaping. Even if there had been water on the Moon at one time, it would have escaped long ago, the thinking went.

Yet some astronomers refused to give up the idea that the Moon had some water or, at least ice. The ice would have come from comets which crash onto the Moon’s surface (comets contain a lot of ice). And, they reasoned, some of the ice would remain at the bottom of craters and in areas that don’t get sunlight because of the Moon’s tilt.

The first tantalizing data that ice may indeed be present in craters near the lunar poles was suggested by the Clementine probe in 1994 and reconfirmed by the Lunar prospector in 1998. Estimates of the amount of ice on the Moon ranged from a few million tons of ice to a few billion tons, enough to fill a small lake.

This is exactly what NASA has confirmed by “bombing” the Moon last month with one of its spacecraft. Its target was Cabeus, a crater close to the Moon’s south pole, which never gets any sunlight. NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite hit paydirt — the impact dug up significant amounts of ice from the crash site.

Another spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was watching, and observed the water. NASA scientists said last week that about about 25 gallons had been detected, immediately and dramatically changing the viability of a self-sustaining lunar base.

Source: The New York Times

Current Mood: Amazed
Current Music: Global Communication - 76:14

Thought for the day:

"I used to think that it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." - Marcus, B5

Our leaders went to Copenhagen hoping to find the sense of historic momentum that is sorely lacking in everyday politics. Unable to inspire voters with anything like a grand vision of a future Good Life, they instead play at ‘making history’, depicting themselves as the defenders of basic existence from the coming eco-Armageddon. Yet rather than resolving the crisis of political vision, Copenhagen exposed it: on one side our leaders expressed disappointment with we the public’s lack of ‘urgency and drive and animation’ about climate change (in David Miliband’s words), and on the other side everyday people sensibly switched off, seeing Copenhagen as a waste of time and telling pollsters that they don’t think climate change is the biggest problem facing the world. Today’s democratic deficit, the gulf between the rulers and the ruled, will not be fixed by the displacement activity of pseudo-historic international conferences – we need openness, honesty and debate.

Source: Spiked Online

Current Mood: ditzy
Current Music: Evard Grieg - Peer Gynt-Suiten 1 & 2

Millions of years ago, Svalbard experienced much warmer climates and was forested, even though it was located at around the same latitude as at present. For a phase of several hundred thousand years at the boundary between the Paleocene and Eocene (55 million years ago), Svalbard experienced subtropical temperatures with palms and alligators. Although not generally as warm as this, Svalbard remained mild enough temperatures for forest through most of the Cretaceous and early Tertiary period up until at least 30 million years ago. In February 2008, the University of Oslo announced the discovery of the largest dinosaur-era marine reptile ever found — a pliosaur estimated to be almost 15 m (50 ft) long.

[…]

The Norwegian government has, in cooperation with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, built a "doomsday" seed bank to store seeds from as many of the world's crop varieties and their botanical wild relatives as possible. The bank was created by hollowing out a 120-meter tunnel on Spitsbergen cut into rock with a natural temperature of −6 ˚C, refrigerating it to −18 ˚C, and then storing seeds donated by the 1,400 crop repositories maintained by countries around the world. The vault has top security blast-proof doors and two airlocks. The number of seeds stored depends on the number of countries participating in the project. The point of this project is to prevent the diversity of agricultural crops currently stored (typically in the form of seed) in seed banks from becoming extinct as a result of accident, mismanagement, equipment failure, war or natural disaster, or due to a regional or global catastrophe.

References:
Science Daily


Wikipedia

Current Mood: relieved
Current Music: Silence

People who promote "corrective" surgeries and hormone treatment for intersex children believe intersex children will grow up to be adults who fall short of social norms. However, these beliefs are purely speculation because they have never taken the time to speak with intersex adults like myself who did not undergo surgery, or to do follow-up studies on the children whose bodies they irrevocably changed. Doctors simply decided that these bodies, which nature created, are not desirable. In my personal experience, this couldn't be further from the truth.

[…]

Read on article at Hida Viloria's website

Current Mood: sympathetic
Current Music: on the radio