Can by a whole lot of gas at that extra $300 a month.
Can by a whole lot of gas at that extra $300 a month.
[movel]The setting Earth[/movel]Earth disappears below the lunar horizon. This is the first ever HDTV imagery of Earth as seen from lunar orbit. Select ("click") the still frame and the MSNBC-sourced video segment will play for you (after a brief commercial).
The video was captured by Japan's KAGUYA lunar spacecraft.
For more background:
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2007/11/20071113_kaguya_e.html
The Department of Energy's technical program to reign in global warming recorded an important milestone. OptiBoard has a full report ...
Last edited by rinselberg; 11-25-2007 at 05:56 AM.
Huge swarm of jellyfish destroy salmon farm in Northern Ireland
Scientists blame it on Global WarmingIt was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jellyfish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing ...The species of jellyfish responsible, Pelagia nocticula - popularly known as the mauve stinger - is noted for its purplish night-time glow and its propensity for terrorizing bathers in the warmer Mediterranean Sea. Until the past decade, the mauve stinger has rarely been spotted so far north in British or Irish waters, and scientists cite this as evidence of global warming ...
The eerie purple glow that threatens humanity
Pelagia nocticula, the "mauve stinger". Select ("click") image to enlarge.
MSNBC reports on this multi-million dollar blow to Northern Ireland's economy
National Geographic sounds a desperate alarmFor over 500 million years, the jellyfish has survived in our oceans. Today, global warming and pollution may be contributing to a population explosion, as billions of these sometimes venomous creatures increasingly swarm around our beaches and shorelines. And though they have no bones, blood or brain, some jellyfish are armed with a deadly arsenal unlike any other on the planet. National Geographic Channel's "Explorer" dissects the fascinating physiology of this living fossil, from its 24 clustered eyes down to the tips of its stinging tentacles, and examines how man’s impact on the environment may be creating a growing invasion.
View this chilling three-minute video clip from National Geographic
[youtube]eyCigZ_bsTM[/youtube][movel]Global Warming Countdown[/movel]Michael Crichton's State of Confusion: Climate science gone bad
Global Carbon Project: IPCC predictions already surpassed by reality
Message to climate contrarians: "Stop hiding behind the sun"
Climate change smarts from CNN TV's Glenn Beck
"Fast Facts" on climate change from National Geographic News
Nuclear power plants: Busting an urban myth
Ethanol fuel: Moving beyond corn
FutureGen: Electricity from coal without greenhouse gas emissions
Energy from parking lots
Energy from earth orbiting satellites
Last edited by rinselberg; 11-26-2007 at 06:01 PM.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) isn't the only chemical byproduct of human activity that contributes to global warming.
It may not be long before you stumble onto a new and disconcerting acronym: ANCE.
That would be "Anthropogenic Nitrogen Compound Emissions".
The atmosphere is almost 80 percent elemental nitrogen (N2), but nitrogen compounds (like nitrogen dioxide or NO2) released by agriculture, industry and transport (chiefly road vehicles) are of increasing concern to climate scientists and ecology and environmental researchers.
The planet has never seen this much nitrogen at any time. Human activity now releases 125 million metric tons of nitrogen from agriculture and fossil fuel use annually, compared to 113 million tons from natural sources, according to a 2007 U.N. sponsored report "Human Alteration of the Nitrogen Cycle".
If you're worried about carbon taxes in your future ... wait until you see your Nitrogen bill.
Sources:
- Nitrogen Overdose: Element quietly rivaling CO2 as a global climate threat
- Global Nitrogen: Cycling out of Control
The waterboarding debate
Tightlipped terror suspects get no slack from OptiBoarders: Check the latest poll numbers and analysis ...
Last edited by rinselberg; 12-04-2007 at 09:34 AM.
The earliest life could have evolved from non-living organic chemicals in the small protected spaces that are confined between layers of the mineral muscovite or mica, according to a new hypothesis that was just presented to the American Society for Cell Biology.
Helen Hansma: biochemist; University of California at Santa Barbara."Mica is like a massive sandwich with millions of layers of mineral sheets, which would be the bread," Hansma said. "The nooks and crannies between the bread may have jump-started the formation of life's chemicals and protected them. It's like a giant potluck of chemistry."
Hansma proposes that the narrow confined spaces between the thin layers of mica could have provided exactly the right conditions - effectively creating cells without membranes - for the rise of the first biomolecules. The separation of the layers would have also provided the isolation needed for Darwinian evolution. "Some think that the first biomolecules were simple proteins, some think they were RNA, or ribonucleic acid. Both proteins and RNA could have formed in between the mica sheets," contends Hansma.
RNA is composed of nitrogenous bases, sugar, and phosphates. Hansma says that RNA and many proteins and lipids in our cells have negative charges like mica. RNA's phosphate groups are spaced one half nanometer apart, just like the negative charges on mica. Interestingly, mica layers are held together by potassium and the concentration of potassium inside the mica is very similar to the concentration of potassium in our cells. Additionally, the seawater that bathed the mica [was] rich in sodium, just like our blood.
The heating and cooling of the [diurnal] cycle would have caused the mica sheets to move up and down, and waves would have provided a mechanical energy source as well, according to the new model. Both forms of movement would have caused the forming and breaking of chemical bonds necessary for the earliest biochemistry.
Thus the mica layers could have provided the support, shelter, and an energy source for the development of precellular life, while leaving artifacts in the structure of living things today. Besides providing a more plausible hypothesis than the prebiotic oceanic "soup" model, Hansma said her new hypothesis also explains more than the so-called "pizza" hypothesis. That model proposes that biomolecules originated on the surfaces of minerals from the Earth's crust. The "pizza" hypothesis cannot explain how the earliest biomolecules obtained the right amount of water to form stable biopolymers.
"I picture all the molecules of early life evolving and rearranging among mica sheets in a communal fashion for eons before budding off with cell membranes and spreading out to populate the world."
Science-A-Go-Go: Between The Sheets
LiveScience: Life May Have Started in Sandwich, Not Soup
NSF News: New "soup and sandwich" hypothesis ...
Climate change
Michael Crichton's global warming bunkum goes for a bruise cruise ...
Last edited by rinselberg; 12-08-2007 at 01:38 PM.
The world's heavy oil and oil sands deposits represent a gi-normous potential source of untapped energy. The problem? It has been difficult to recover the useful hydrocarbons from the heavier bitumen and tar-like compounds by any of the known methods, and the recovery processes to date have been attended by costly mechanical and environmental problems.
An international team of scientists has reported that naturally occurring anaerobic microorganisms that "eat" heavy oil and convert it into clean-burning methane are a potential "gamechanger" for the petroleum industry.
It's likely that by 2009, field tests will be underway to see if engineers can sustain, accelerate and control the growth of the microbes and recover usable quantities of methane in situ, i.e. outside of the laboratory, in oil bearing geographic formations.
For more, see Microbes in oil reservoirs: Discovery could revolutionize oil sands production.
Last edited by rinselberg; 01-14-2008 at 04:00 PM.
You know what the world is gonna smell like when all the oil is converted to methane?
The idea is to recover the methane and burn it, yielding energy, carbon dioxide and water. It's not a one-step solution for the world's currently diminishing oil field production or anthropogenic global warming, but it could be a very useful step in a helpful direction.Originally Posted by chip anderson
I suppose, if we were to conjure up nightmare scenarios, there is the "specter" of the microorganisms getting out of control, but these are naturally occurring microorganisms. They are already widespread in the world's oil reservoirs and are currently a disadvantage, because they consume the more useful hydrocarbons in production oil fields before the oil can be recovered. This is a way to turn a naturally occurring problem into an engineered solution.
I don't think there's any risk of environmental damage from the projected field tests.
Last edited by rinselberg; 01-15-2008 at 03:35 AM.
Are you reading more posts and enjoying it less? Make RadioFreeRinsel your next Internet port of call ...
I seem to remember an old regent of England being interviewed about what life was like in her childhood. Her reply said: "That was when the whole world smelled like horses." Perhaps we will be going full circle.
This morning I saw a greenie questionaire that asked amoung other things. Which is more dangerous: Cows or crocodiles (or some other dangerous animal, I don't remember which). Thier answer was cows and went on to explain how the greenhouse gasses from same were destroying the earth.
Tonight it hit me: How many buffalo roamed the plains before the white man came. I know I read of single heards over 15,000,000 after the white man. Now the question of the day: Why weren't the greenhouse gases from the buffalo killing the earth? :bbg:
I don't see that wild buffalo herds in North America, together with all the other methane producing animals, could ever have produced anything more, in terms of greenhouse equivalent. than a small fraction in comparison to the levels of anthropogenic GHGs that we're seeing today.
Let's start with the premise that an American buffalo emits about the same amount of methane (as a fraction of its weight) as a single head of cattle. After a brief "research", I think a fair estimate is that head per head, American buffalo grow to about twice the weight of typical dairy or beef cattle of today, and so, on a head for head basis, a buffalo emits the same quantity of methane as two head of cattle.
The most frequently referenced estimate that I've come across puts the maximum number of buffalo in North America at 75 million head at any one time, before their numbers began to decline with the increased hunting and other factors associated with the growth in the non-native human population here. In terms of methane production, that comes to about the same as 150 million head of cattle.
According to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, the inventory of all cattle and calves in the United States on July 1, 2003 was 103.9 million head. Plus another 15 million head of cattle in Canada, which was also homeland to the wild buffalo herds.
But what about hog farms? As hog waste decomposes, significant amounts of methane are released. I'm not going to attempt the math, but I think it's fair to say that in North America today, methane emissions from farm cattle and hogs together considerably exceeds the amount that was attributable to buffalo during the "buffalo days".
Do we think that the number of wild hogs in North America, plus any hogs that were domesticated by Indians during the "buffalo days", comes to anywhere near the number (or to be more accurate in terms of GHGs: the total weight) of hogs that are being farmed here today?
I can't imagine that. Just in terms of the number of hogs. Plus the fact that today's hogs are "porkers" (bred for weight) to maximize the farmer's return from the slaughterhouse. Nevertheless ...
Considering the latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), methane from all human activities, including livestock, accounted for just 14.3% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) during the year 2004. The single greatest contribution was the use of fossil fuels (diesel and gasoline; aviation fuels; bunker and heating oil; coal; natural gas ...), which amounted to 56.6% of all anthropogenic GHGs during 2004.
The IPCC figures are already adjusted to account for the difference in the greenhouse effect of methane vs. carbon dioxide on a molecule per molecule basis. (A methane molecule is the greenhouse equivalent of about 20 carbon dioxide molecules.)
What all these numbers are saying (to me) is that during the "buffalo days" there was an important elevation of methane in the atmosphere from the large numbers of buffalo and other methane producing animals. But it wasn't accompanied by the considerably larger anthropogenic GHGs that we're seeing today from the use of fossil fuels and other human activities. So there could have been some global warming and cooling trends in prehistoric times as the amount of methane emissions from plants and animals either went up or down in the wake of evolutionary changes in plant and animal species and species populations, coupled with other climate changing factors.
But in terms of what was just posted (one post back) -- here's the rub: Considering these numbers, I don't see that wild buffalo herds in North America, together with all the other methane producing animals, could ever have produced anything more, in terms of greenhouse equivalent. than a small fraction in comparison to the levels of anthropogenic GHGs that we're seeing today.
The bottom line: It's best not to go hog wild trying to buffalo the increasing scientific consensus on the reality of potentially dangerous anthropogenic global warming.
I hope that speaks to Chip's post.
The excruciatingly reliable sources ...
How many wild buffalo were there?
How many cattle are there?
IPCC Summary for Policymakers: 2007 Synthesis Report on Climate Change.
Last edited by rinselberg; 01-15-2008 at 11:18 PM.
Does anybody really know what time it is? Chicago Transit Authority put that question on a lot of people's minds with their double-platinum recording debut in 1969. Does anybody really know what time is? That's a different question. The berg offers a layman's look at how one group of theoretical physicists is trying to connect the dots in a most intriguing way. If you're in, select ("click") the album art to play a cover of the Chicago hit ... mp3 audio format.
I haven't checked for any recent updates on the "Surfer" theory.
String theories are still on almost everyone's front burner.
I have taken a liking to Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), another "Theory of Everything" that offers a mathematical framework that (speculatively) could resolve the contradictions or discontinuity between General Relativity (Einstein) and Quantum Physics and help unravel the mystery of gravity and the origins of the universe.
According to LQG, time doesn't flow in a continuous stream as we tend to think, like gasoline from a filling station pump or keg beer from a tap.
Time only comes in packages. And the smallest package that exists--a Planck Time interval--is expressed as approximately 10-43 seconds.
What this means is that if we were able to see the world with "quantum eyes", it wouldn't look like the world we know. It wouldn't resemble a movie on a theater screen, where time seems to flow in a smooth, continuous stream, and where the motion of objects, like a meteor flashing across the night sky, can be traced by a smooth, continuous curve.
With quantum eyes (LQG), we would see the world as a succession of frames, like the stills or frames on an old-fashioned reel of movie film.
"Back To The Future"..? Reality, according to Loop Quantum Theory, is like a reel of movie film: A succession of still images or frames.
And what a movie! Every second of time would appear as a succession of 1043 frames. Like an animated slideshow that flashes 1043slides in succession, for each second of reality. That's a "1", followed by some 43 zeros. A number far too big to have a name.
If it's ever confirmed (LQG), we could say that the universe has a clock that generates 1043 "ticks" during every second of our "reality". And after each clock tick but before the next one? Nothing. There is no "in between". The Planck Time interval is the smallest interval of time. So time is not continuous, as we tend to perceive it, but discrete; or to put it more colloquially, "digital". Like the numbers on a digital watch.
There's a lot more to Loop Quantum Gravity. And it's all "over my head".
Will scientists ever agree on a "Theory of Everything"... a new, all-encompassing framework for physics that clarifies the unsolved mysteries at the heart of reality? A theory that describes reality all the way from the largest conceivable scale--the scale of the universe--down to the quantum level, where even a single hydrogen atom is as large, by comparison, as the universe is to us?
I expect the next 20 years will bring some resolution. Questions will be answered. And new questions will be raised, as science tries to elevate its game from "The Theory of Everything" to "The Theory of Absolutely Everything" or "The Theory of Everything Including the Kitchen Sink".
Some of the data that will help us decide which theory we like the most--which theory is the most credible--may come from a few hundred feet below ground: From the Large Hadron Collider.
Some of the data may come from as deep as a mile or more below ground, from instruments like WIMP detectors.
And some of the data may come from the sky, from the most distant parts of the universe: From telltale kinds of radio energy intercepted by axion detectors and from orbiting gamma ray telescopes like the GLAST satellite; see Hints of a Breakdown of Relativity Theory?
There's a nicely illustrated 10-page summary of Loop Quantum Gravity theory (from 2004) in PDF format that anyone can view on line or download for free.
Last edited by rinselberg; 05-07-2008 at 03:30 AM.
The U.S. government—and major U.S. banks—seem to have lost their appetite for coal. After spending five years and approximately $50 million on preliminary studies as well as selecting a proposed site in Mattoon, Illinois, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has scuttled plans to build the so-called FutureGen power plant. The facility would have captured the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) that is emitted when coal is burned for electricity generation. Instead, the DOE hopes to help industry add carbon-capture-and-storage capability to advanced coal plants already in the works.
"This restructured FutureGen approach is an all-around better investment for Americans," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a statement announcing the change. The DOE is asking Congress for $407 million to research how to burn coal most efficiently, along with $241 million to demonstrate such carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies—at least $900 million less than DOE said it would have cost to complete FutureGen.
FutureGen would not only have captured greenhouse gas emissions, it also would have produced hydrogen from coal.
For more about this decision, see the report by David Biello in February's Scientific American online.
As recently as November (2007), I posted on the announcement by DOE of the FutureGen Final Environmental Impact Statement, including a description of the FutureGen power generation and carbon capture technology: see DOE announces completion of major FutureGen milestone.
Countdown Iran
Upping the nuclear ante: Iran tests a new centrifuge technology
Last edited by rinselberg; 02-10-2008 at 06:30 PM.
A study published in the December Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences found that not only are humans still evolving, but we are doing so at a faster rate than ever before, with genes that affect our diets and brains leading the race. "If humans had always evolved this rapidly, the difference between us and chimps would be 160 times greater than it actually is," says the study's lead author, University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending.
The findings have turned some traditional assumptions on their heads. For decades, biologists believed that human evolution had ground to a halt about 10,000 years ago, when the dawn of agriculture and technology gave us unprecedented control over our environments and made us masters of our own destiny. But rather than slow evolution down, those advances, Harpending says, enabled humanity to hit the accelerator. With better technology, our ranks have swelled from millions to billions. This has driven us to colonize more and different regions of the globe. More people mean more mutations, and more environments mean more things to adapt to. Migration into the Northern Hemisphere, for example, has favored adaptation to cold weather and less skin pigmentation for better sunlight absorption.
"History looks more and more like a science-fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans—sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, other times as a conquering horde," says study coauthor Gregory Cochran. But what the next generation of mutants will look like is anybody's guess. While Harpending and Cochran estimate that 7 percent of all human genes are undergoing rapid evolution, they concede that scientists haven't a clue what most of those genes do—or what direction they're moving in. One safe bet, they say, is that people from different regions of the world will be less alike than they are today. While malaria-resistant genes are evolving in Africa, genes that suppress body odor [alarming news to the grooming products industry?] and make for coarser hair have emerged in Asia. Meanwhile, the ability to digest milk into adulthood has evolved in Europe, where dairy farming is common, but has yet to appear throughout China and Africa. "We are evolving away from one another," says Harpending.
For more, see Newsweek on line; January 28, 2008; The Fish Within Us.
OptiBoard: A Changing of the Guard
Perhaps you didn't notice, but recently the berg adopted a new avatar.
For four years--from January 2004 to January 2008--the smirking visage of a borderline lunatic Iraqi public affairs officer was affixed to my posts. His real name was Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, but you knew him as "Baghdad Bob". I introduced him as A fellow of infinite jest and later enshrined him under the (admittedly cumbersome) post title 24K "Web gold" - AUDIO tributes to a man called "Bob".
In his stead: Tiktaalik roseae, which is usually shortened to Tiktaalik.
The first fossilized remains of Tiktaalik were discovered in Arctic Canada in 2006. The creature lived about 375 million years ago, when a lineage of lobe-finned fishes was evolving into the first backboned animals to crawl on land. Its discovery was remarkable, because it was no mere accident. The paleontologist who found it knew exactly what he was looking for and exactly where to find it. Tiktaalik has become one of Darwinian evolution's famous "missing links": one that is no longer "missing". Its discovery was a heralded confirmation that modern evolution is more than just an interpretive theory: it's a predictive theory. Evolution not only explains what has already been unearthed, but can also predict what paleontologists may discover next--and where they may discover it.
Tiktaalik is everywhere on the Internet. You can use any of the search engines like Google to retrieve a myriad of reports. There's a clear, concise column about it on the National Science Foundation website which anyone can read by selecting ("click") the image that follows:
Reiseburg: Were you ever a fan of Che Guverra? Hugo Chavz?
Satellite shootdown expected: "Three to make one" for Navy..?
The Navy has three specially modified SM-3 defensive missiles ready on three different warships. If Defense Secretary Gates gives the final go-ahead, the Navy will fire one of the missiles in an attempt to destroy a crippled U.S. spy satellite later today. The launch window opens at 10:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. The first missile will be fired from a ship stationed to the west of Hawaii. It's unclear whether the Navy will be ordered to fire again if the first missile attempt is not judged a complete success.
MSNBC has an updated report with video.
Countdown Iran
Upping the nuclear ante: Iran tests a new centrifuge technology
[movel]Bulls-eye![/movel]Navy says missile smashed wayward satellite
Military tracking debris over Atlantic, Pacific; China expresses concern
MSNBC News Services
updated 4:35 a.m. PT, Thurs., Feb. 21, 2008
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon says a U.S. missile smashed a disabled spy satellite that was headed for Earth and the military is tracking the debris as it falls over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon press conference Thursday that he couldn't rule out that hazardous material would fall to the earth.
But he says so far officials have tracked "nothing larger than a football."
Cartwright says officials also "have a high degree of confidence" — though are not ready to say for sure — that the missile launched from a Navy ship near Hawaii struck the satellite's fuel tank. Officials said the toxic hydrazine fuel in the tank would have caused a hazard had it fallen to earth.
Destroying the satellite’s onboard tank of about 1,000 pounds of hydrazine fuel was the primary goal, and a U.S. official earlier told NBC News that it "looks like the tank was hit."
"It is still going to take some more analysis" to determine what happened to the fuel, but early indications were positive, the official said ...
See complete MSNBC report plus video
Last edited by rinselberg; 02-22-2008 at 01:41 AM.
Hydrogen powered bus service proving problematic for San Jose.
VTA finds hydrogen buses cost much more to run than diesel vehicles
By Gary Richards of the San Jose Mercury News
The experiment sounded so grand three years ago: The Valley Transportation Authority and SamTrans would test three buses that run on hydrogen fuel cells, emit no smog-inducing pollutants and help keep the valley's air clean.
Green, yes. But a new report from the VTA says the $18 million state-mandated pilot project costs too much green - and raises troubling questions about whether the program should continue.
The most glaring figure: Zero-emission buses - or ZEBs - cost $51.66 to fuel, maintain and operate per mile compared with just $1.61 for a 40-foot conventional diesel coach. They break down much more frequently, and replacement parts are next to impossible to order, according to the report.
The VTA experiment could be a blow to hydrogen fuel technology, once heralded as the future of green mass transit options. At the least, the report raises significant questions about whether the state should ease off the accelerator rather than push Bay Area transit agencies to expand the hydrogen project.
"When you say that there is a 50-dollar difference [per road mile] between ZEBs and diesel, that's exorbitant," said Dolly Sandoval, the VTA vice chair from Cupertino.
She and other VTA board members are questioning whether the state should loosen its insistence on hydrogen-fuel-cell technology and allow the agency to consider using hybrid buses to meet clean-air requirements, which is being done in New York City, where hundreds of diesel-hybrid buses are in use.
The article adds:For the complete on line report:Although the cost of a new ZEB (hydrogen fuel cell bus) has fallen from about $3.5 million to $2.5 million, a [comparable] diesel-powered bus costs about $400,000. And ZEBs have on average traveled 1,100 miles before needing repairs in the VTA trial, while a typical diesel bus covers about 6,000 miles.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_8365544
"No, you may not use smilies."
--posted by an OptiBoarder who is no longer active
"I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though it be told you."--Habakkuk.
--today's vintage post
Last edited by rinselberg; 02-26-2008 at 01:21 PM.
For the first time ever, scientists have produced light photography of an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom.
The technique uses a laser that generates extremely fast pulses of light: Light pulses that are just 10-18 seconds in duration.
It's like having an automatic camera with a shutter speed fast enough to take as many time exposure photographs in a single second as there have been seconds of time since the birth of the universe, about 13.7 billion years ago.
The term "attosecond" is used when describing the speed of these laser pulses.
But an attosecond pulse is still a gi-normous 1025 times slower than what many believe to be the shortest possible interval of time, called the Planck interval. (For more about the Planck interval, see my other recent post on Loop Quantum Gravity theory.)
Electrons caught "on film"; for the complete MSNBC report with video:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23336318/
Last edited by rinselberg; 02-27-2008 at 06:41 AM.
One LED if by land, and two LEDs if by sea..?
By Mark Jewell of MSNBC
updated 8:24 a.m. PT, Mon., March. 3, 2008
BOSTON - The Old North Church, a beacon for Paul Revere's famous warning of the movement of British forces, and a symbol of the American Revolution, has gone high-tech with the installation of light-emitting diodes, or LEDs.
The energy-efficient lights illuminate ceiling vaults inside the church, whose steeple was used to display two lanterns as a signal about British troop movements on April 18, 1775 — the night described in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem, which included the line: "One if by land, and two if by sea."
LEDs haven't yet replaced the slightly less-modern compact fluorescents that the church began using two years ago in its modern versions of the steeple lanterns.
For the complete MSNBC report:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23446534/
Last edited by rinselberg; 03-05-2008 at 10:59 AM.
Moses and the Ten Commandments: Revelation.. or hallucination..?
MSNBC staff and news service reports
updated 2:26 p.m. PT, Tues., March. 4, 2008
JERUSALEM - When Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, he may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant, according to a new study by an Israeli psychology professor.
Writing in the British philosophy journal Time and Mind, Benny Shanon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University said two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.
The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an “altered state of awareness,” Shanon hypothesized.
. . .
He said one of the psychoactive plants, harmal, found in the Sinai and elsewhere in the Middle East, has long been regarded by Jews in the region as having magical and curative powers.
For the complete MSNBC report:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23468364/
[pong][/pong]"You may have been up the river, but you've never seen this!"
Do you really think that anyone could have come up with such an ideal set of Laws on drugs?
And the way I read the story the Laws were inscribed in stone by the Finger of God. Wouldn't matter too much what Moses thought in process would it?
Chip
Actually naive enough to believe in God (not intellectual I guess) as well as the story of the Ten Commandments.
Last edited by chip anderson; 03-05-2008 at 12:57 PM. Reason: These Laws deserve capitalization.
Physicist Michio Kaku talks about the possibility of quantum teleportation; i.e. the "beam me up, Scotty" routine from TV's original Star-Trek..
MSNBC Video segment
MSNBC Cosmic Log "Mission Not So Impossible"
Last edited by rinselberg; 03-19-2008 at 05:13 AM.
NEW YORK, MARCH 12 – Michael Heller, a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest who for more than 40 years has developed sharply focused and strikingly original concepts on the origin and cause of the universe, often under intense governmental repression, has won the 2008 Templeton Prize.
Communion Wafers and Noncommutative Geometries: Michael Heller, Polish priest/scientist.
The Templeton Prize, valued at 820,000 pounds sterling, more than $1.6 million, was announced today at a news conference at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York by the John Templeton Foundation, which has awarded the prize since 1973. The Templeton Prize is the world's largest annual monetary award given to an individual.
Heller, 72, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow, toiled for years beneath the stifling strictures of Soviet era repression. He has become a compelling figure in the realms of physics and cosmology, theology, and philosophy with his cogent and provocative concepts on issues that all of these disciplines pursue, albeit from often vastly different perspectives. With an academic and religious background that enables him to comfortably and credibly move within each of these domains, Heller’s extensive writings have evoked new and important consideration of some of humankind’s most profound concepts.
Heller’s examination of fundamental questions such as "Does the universe need to have a cause?" engages a wide range of sources who might otherwise find little in common. By drawing together mathematicians, philosophers, cosmologists and theologians who pursue these topics, he also allows each to share insights that may edify the other without any violence to their respective methodologies.
In a statement prepared for the news conference, Heller described his position as follows:
Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one... (and) there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking the universe, the question on ultimate causality…: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.
Despite the active anti-intellectualism of the Communist regime that controlled Poland for the majority of his life, Heller established himself as an international figure among cosmologists and physicists through his prolific writings – he has more than 30 books and nearly 400 papers to his credit – on such topics as the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics, multiverse theories and their limitations, geometric methods in relativistic physics such as noncommutative geometry, and the philosophy and history of science.
Simultaneously, as a Catholic priest, Heller surmounted the anti-religious dictates of Polish authorities, opening new vistas for the faithful by positioning the traditional Christian way of viewing the universe within a broader cosmological context and by initiating what can be justly termed the "theology of science."
The Global Spiral; Metanexus Institute.Heller’s current work focuses on noncommutative geometry and groupoid theory in mathematics which attempts to remove the problem of an initial cosmological singularity at the origin of the universe. "If on the fundamental level of physics there is no space and no time, as many physicists think," says Heller, "noncommutative geometry could be a suitable tool to deal with such a situation."
MSNBC; from the Associated Press.Karol Musiol, rector of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, wrote in nominating Heller that he "has brought to science a sense of transcendent mystery, and to religion a view of the universe through the broadly open eyes of science."
In his statement, Heller criticized adherents of intelligent design — which holds that aspects of the universe and living beings are best explained by a higher power — as committing a "grave theological error."
Last edited by rinselberg; 03-19-2008 at 05:14 AM.
You've seen it before. What people who are in denial about the probability of continued global warming like to say. In other words, you can't trust scientists.Yeah, right.. in the 1970s they were predicting global cooling.
The fairy tale isn't what scientists were predicting in the 1970s.
The fairy tale is that scientists in the 1970s were predicting global cooling.
RealClimate has more . . .
Don't risk staying after school and writing this 100 times.. click on the "chalkboard" to learn more about bunk-peddling fiction writer Michael Crichton and his global climate Kool-Aid.
Last edited by rinselberg; 04-05-2008 at 07:15 AM.
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