Paleo Post Coming

It'll have to be on Monday though. I'm a little too busy right now.

Climate change threatens California water supply

California's tallest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, may lose nearly all its snowpack by the end of the century, threatening a water crisis in the nation's most populous state, a leading scientist and Nobel laureate said.

California could lose 30 percent to 70 percent of the snowpack to the ills of greenhouse gases and global warming, Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the 1997 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, told Reuters.

A "bad scenario" of atmospheric carbon could mean the loss of 70 percent to 93 percent, Chu said in an interview, citing published climate models.

Desalinization is an industry to invest in then!

ESA Shooting To Launch Jules Verne ATV Mid-Nov.

European Space Agency (ESA) managers are working toward a mid-November launch date for the first flight of the new Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) to the International Space Station (ISS), following a meeting between ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain and NASA Administrator Mike Griffin late last month.

The ATV "Jules Verne" mission is contingent on NASA's space shuttle resuming ISS assembly with the STS-117 mission in June, as well as completion of tests on the 20-ton robotic cargo vehicle in time for it to be shipped to the European launch facility in French Guiana in July for launch on Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket.

Let's hear it for Russianless unmanned resupply! HUZZAH!

demography matters: US-CanadaDifferent

The answer to the title of this post is that one can categorically state that Canada and the US have radically different demographic situations. What then, are the implications of this difference? I suspect that Canadians who are aware of these facts must be somewhat uneasy about the relationship between Canada and the US. Living next to a country that dwarfs yours by most criteria means that a careful balance in relations must be managed. On the other hand, US growth represents export opportunities for Canadian businesses and Canadian economic policy ought to steer toward export-oriented industries. Of course, just about every other country in the world is dependent on exports to the US for economic growth, so this could be problematic for Canada.

I wonder what Canadians think of this...

There Go the Nerves!

She REALLY likes motorcycles. I am in deep doo. oy!

Bats Beat Birds

The sophisticated analysis looked at bats in a wind tunnel to uncover the key differences between how mammals and birds stay aloft.

Bats turn out to have a high degree of control over the ever-changing shape of their wings, said study leader Anders Hedenström, an ecologist at Sweden's Lund University.

The animals can therefore generate lift as their wings move both up and down—a big advantage when hovering.

The bats' trick resembles the way each rotor on a helicopter generates lift whether it's moving forward or backward, Hedenström pointed out.

By contrast, he said, birds' wings are optimally designed to generate lift on their downstroke, and they can "feather" their wings—spreading their feathers like the slats of Venetian blinds—to reduce drag on the upstroke.

Hedenström's findings, which appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science, agree with results that Brown University's Sharon Swartz and Kenny Breuer published in January.

"Aerodynamic forces generated by bat wings during flight are far more complicated than those of birds," said Swartz, an evolutionary biologist.

Birds' wings operate almost as if they were airplane wings on hinges. By comparison, "bat wings are more flexible," she said. "The materials—the skin and bone—are more stretchy. The bones actually bend when the bat is flying.

"At slower speeds, flexible wings seem to have advantages."

Bats, birds, and pterosaurs all had radically different flight techniques. Amazing, ain't it? That is to do the same thing with the same basic body plan they all come up with different answers based on the same concept. Nature's pretty cool.

Dean: Recruit the Evangelicals!

Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean - who once drew criticism by dismissing the GOP as a "white Christian party'' -- told a San Francisco audience that his party should open its arms to a new group of converts: young evangelical Christian voters.

"We ought to reach out to those folks ... and not be afraid,'' Dean told an audience of about 125 at a $50-a head Democratic National Committee fundraiser Wednesday night at the Palace Hotel. The national party chairman noted that in the wake of the 2006 midterm election, nearly 30 percent of evangelical Christians now identify themselves as Democratic voters, up 10 percentage points from the previous election.

Take them. Take them all. You can have them! After all they did great things for the Republican Party, right?

13.2 Billion Year Old Star Found

hm. Interesting. Congratz to the Euros, first off. Secondly, does this have an impact on the population groupings?

FCS UAV To Arrive Early

The Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) has performed so well in tests with the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii that Future Combat Systems programmers hope to accelerate the development of the 40-pound, vertical-lift UAV.

“With the hover and stare capability, the MAV is so good we want to bring it [to the warzone] earlier than planned,” said Col. Charles Bush, director of FCS’ Future Forces division.

The MAV is slated to field by 2010, but FCS official want to move it into the group of Spinout 1 technologies for 2008 — long before the 2015 deployment of a full FCS Brigade Combat Team.

Equipped with videocameras and infrared sensors, the soldier-controlled, three-foot-long MAV will show troops live video of enemy positions on the other side of a hill, Bush said. One soldier can backpack the MAV vehicle and its ground gear, which include controls and a display screen.

First, an unworthy comment: what an unfortunate name for the Colonel. Second, how can they call it a micro anything at 40 lbs!

Twice Fried Soup

My wife and daughter love soups. They love them a lot more than I do. Don't get me wrong, I like a good soup as much as the next guy, but my tastes tend to be rather simple compared to theirs. I like a good tomato soup (maybe with rice) or a cream of mushroom or a good, good cheddar soup. There are a few exceptions and they are the product of my wife: borscht and rosolnik, frex. However, the other members of my immediate household completely disagree. They like something that's an affair to make! Lots of love, passion, energy, and angst. A good example is Avrora's Soup. Another was what I ended up cooking up this weekend.

This one is actually a two stage soup that breaks in the middle into two different soups for different tastes. The Twice Fried label was really for the soup I made for my wife.

8 chicken thighs, washed with bone in.
1/4 poblano pepper
1/4 habenero pepper
1 yellow onion
3 garlic cloves, fresh
fresh cilantro
garlic powder (to taste)
black pepper (to taste)
salt (to taste)
butter
2 lemons
1 1/2 cups rice
2 cups frozen corn

First fill very large kettle with water and set to boil with chicken thighs. Add garlic powder, black pepper, salt, diced fresh cilantro (to taste) and a pat of butter. Boil until meat all but falls off the bones. Remove chicken from soup, debone, shred meat and turn to kettle which ought to be reduced to lightly boiling now.

Take poblano and dice finely. Take half onion and likewise dice. Place a frying pan on burner and heat. No oil or butter. When frying pan is very hot, turn on fan (!!!), and drop poblano on. Actively stir. When slightly blackened, add onion, caramelize that. Then crush two garlic cloves into the mix. When nicely fried, squeeze two lemons over the concoction. Then add a pat of butter and fry a bit more. Then ladle in twice broth from the soup. Pour back into the kettle.

Remove 1/3 of broth and 1/3 of chicken thigh meat. Place in separate pot. Bring to a simmer. In original kettle, add rice and corn. Let simmer until rice is cooked. Then turn to low.

Dice habenaro pepper very finely. Dice rest of onion. Heat frying pan again. Drop in habenaro pieces after having turned back on the fan and this time to high. Blacken slightly. Add onion. Caramelize. Add rest of garlic cloves crushed. Fry some more. Squeeze lemon over frying bits. Add butter after lemon juice has evaporated. Ladle in broth from smaller pot. Pour into smaller pot and bring to a hard boil. If you want, add a little more lemon juice here. Let cool and serve.

All of this takes time, hours actually, so don't think you can just jump in and do this quickly. This is Plan Ahead Food.

NASA study suggests extreme summer warming in the future

A new study by NASA scientists suggests that greenhouse-gas warming may raise average summer temperatures in the eastern United States nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s.

"There is the potential for extremely hot summertime temperatures in the future, especially during summers with less-than-average frequent rainfall," said lead author Barry Lynn of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, New York.

The research found that eastern U.S. summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low-to-mid-80s (degrees Fahrenheit) will most likely soar into the low-to-mid-90s during typical summers by the 2080s. In extreme seasons – when precipitation falls infrequently – July and August daily high temperatures could average between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed nearly 30 years of observational temperature and precipitation data and also used computer model simulations that considered soil, atmospheric, and oceanic conditions and projected changes in greenhouse gases. The simulations were produced using a widely-used weather prediction model coupled to a global model developed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The global model, one of the models used in the recently issued climate report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was utilized in this study to identify future changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns due to the build up of greenhouse gases. This information was then fed into the weather prediction model to forecast summer-to-summer temperature variability in the eastern United States during the 2080s.

The weather model showed that extreme summertime surface temperatures developed when carbon dioxide emissions were assumed to continue to increase about two percent a year, the "business as usual" scenario. These findings are too recent to be included in the latest IPCC report.

This is NY. This is NY on Global Warming! Any questions?

First Map of an Extrasolar Planet

HEY! You In The EU! The Big Bad Bear Is Back!

Russia’s ongoing political offensive against Estonia -- and implicit challenge to the European Union -- constitutes the first serious attempt to reverse the post-1991 status quo in Europe. Moscow seems to be targeting Estonia as a first test case of such a process.

Further Russian challenges to the existing European order are likely to ensue if European governments and institutions tolerate, as seems mostly to be the case thus far, the assault on Estonia.

Oy. It seems that either the EU doesn't collective see what's going on or that I am overly paranoid. OTOH, the Europeans only have limited numbers of relatives on the border of Russia in lands that Russia seeks the play revanchist with. The funny part is that this is easily negated if the EU would just act in a coordinated manner. Oh. Wait. Sorry.

Why Global Warming is Inevitable

Chinese officials recently have stated that China will not accept any binding limits on its emissions until at least 2050. Instead, they have cited the government's plan to achieve relative improvements by reducing the amount of energy expended per unit of economic output by 20 percent by 2010. But China has made little progress toward that goal since it was adopted two years ago. Last week, the Chinese government released data showing that electricity consumption by residential, commercial and industrial sectors -- a key barometer of emissions -- rose by 15 percent in the first three months of this year on a year-to-year basis.

The US is the current and future bad guy in the political circles. We're just plain unpopular in oh-so-many ways these days. One of them is wrt to global warming and the emission of green house gases. We're the largest emitter and have been historically. We get bashed on repeatedly, fairly or not, for that. However, the US will shortly not be the worst offender.

China was originally projected to overtake the US in the late 2010s as the worst emitter of green house gases according to past reports. However, it's now evident that China will over take the US in a couple years at most. As China converges with the US and West in general for per capita wealth, it's emissions will go radically up just based on its overwhelmingly larger population. Additionally, China has vowed to not do anything binding for its emissions for another four decades! If it's emissions scale linearly with the economic output by China - and they probably don't btw - we will see around 22 times the CO2 output of the US by then just by China! Then there's India.




India's carbon dioxide emissions are not as great as Russia's, as yet, but sometime in the next ten years will be and make it the third greatest contributor. If the Indian economy grows and even puts out half the CO2 per capita as America does, then there is going to be a huge problem just based on the massive population.

With the fact that three of the four worst contributors to green house gas emissions is unwilling to regulate those emissions, and that even with the propaganda/informational campaign here in the US making good progress to convince the public that global warming is a serious threat, the rise of India and China in an unregulated fashion will simply overwhelm any net reduction by the USA.

Face it, folks! Global warming is inevitable. It's time to adapt, not to pretend we can stop the juggernaut. We just changed the world. It's not the call of doom. It's not the end of the world. It is just changing and we're the cause. We can make it a lot worse, but denying it, claiming that if we simply mumble the right incantations, will make it better is delusional at best.

UC Wins Contract to Run LLNL

Not a big surprise after the fact that they got to keep the LANL contract.

Islands are Not (Only) Destinations

Analysis of bat DNA published in Journal of Biogeography reveal that several neotropical species descended from ancestors that evolved in the West Indies, and this pattern is consistent with fossils found throughout the region. As the culmination in the study of several independent bat groups, this article shows that reverse colonization is a feature of the entire Caribbean bat community, encompassing groups of bats as different from each other as aerial insectivores, nectarivores, and frugivores.

The evolution of Caribbean bats suggests that far from being isolated destinations, the West Indies have had a dynamic, two-way relationship with the Americas, exchanging species back and forth at different points in their geological history. This discovery further enhances the conservation importance of the West Indies, where habitat loss and climate change —embodied in the intensification of hurricanes— threaten natural habitats more acutely than on the continent.

They did that with birds too. Makes you wonder if there weren't times in the past where islands were the isolating element and then when fortune, geology or climate intervened, terrestrial tetrapods were reintroduced to the mainlands, but changed.

COROT Could Detect Earth-Sized Planets

Initial imagery from France's COROT planet finding probe suggest the spacecraft may be capable of detecting extrasolar planets equivalent in size to our own.

French space agency CNES said on May 3 that COROT (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits), launched on Dec. 27, had provided the first image of a giant planet orbiting a star in another solar system - a yellow dwarf in the direction of the constellation Unicorn some 1,500 light years from Earth. The planet, named COROT-Exo-1b, is a gas giant with a radius 1.78 times that of Jupiter, and 1.3 times more massive, with an orbital period of 1.5 days.

HA!

USAF's Next Bomber Again

As the ground war in Iraq continues, the U.S. Air Force's plan to look beyond counter-insurgencies toward a future bomber may be a hard sell in Washington.

A Pentagon and Capitol Hill--distracted with the path ahead in Iraq--may deem discussion of a new bomber to thwart adversaries in North Korea or possibly China, premature. USAF is beginning to make its case for the system. Against this political backdrop, however, the service is walking another fine line: explaining why it is seemingly playing it safe on the bomber's requirements.

The decision to keep a pilot in the bomber's cockpit has generated discussions centering on why the Air Force's options for a future bomber became as limited as they are and how to proceed with technology efforts in this mission area.

I can't help but wonder if we're not missing an opportunity here. We need to be able to hit anywhere in the world very, very fast and to have a bomb truck with very long staying power on site for strikes. These need not be the same platform. However, in either case there seems to be little point in using the platform being described. Ah well.

Inspired By James: The Flamboyant Cuttlefish

We watched Nova's presentation on the Cuttlefish the other day. When we saw the Flamboyant Cuttlefish's segment, there was an off-hand comment that based on the fact that these things are terrible swimmers, but good, if poisonous, walkers that someday they might evolve to the point where they move onto land. This has been posited a few times by various future evolution types. The fact that anything FC derived came onto land and the poison aspect was preserved it'd be a damned hard thing to stop them coming out and saying 'hi'.

People Anthropomorphize Anything

The Washington Post has an article about how people, especially soldiers, interact with robots they are assigned. In some cases, it gets rather extreme. It annoys me some. It also amuses me more because we do it here at work with the big HPC machines. It also cheers me that, perhaps, just perhaps, we won't be fighting one of those cliched wars between Man and Machine when AI finally comes about.