gregladen | July 31, 2010On April 1, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced strong new guidance on mountaintop removal permits, which, if applied rigorously, could prohibit most MTR operations and the resulting toxic dumping into streams and valleys.
However, two weeks ago Lisa Jackson's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave the Army Corps of Engineers a green light for the Pine Creek mine permit, a mountaintop removal (MTR) mining site in Logan County, W.Va. This is the first permit decision the EPA has issued under the new mountaintop mining guidelines, which came out last April…
gregladen | July 31, 2010When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time at lakes, but the idea of walking around a lake hardly every occurred to me or anyone else. This might be because the lakes were either really big (like the Great Sacandaga Reservoir) or nestled into deep sided rock canyons carved out by glaciers, and thus, not walk-aroundable. Lakes were central places, termini of inland pathways, points along long distance hikes, not things you walked around.
Eventually, I moved to Minnesota where there are probably between five and ten thousand lakes that a) are about the right size to walk around in several…
gregladen | July 31, 2010Item 1:
Linux has perfectly good fonts these days, and they are getting better.
Patents held by Apple Corporation did not allow basic technology (the Bytecode Interpreter)to be implemented in Linux fonts (without paying). FreeType (the Linux font system) worked around this and things were workable, but still, having the Apple technology would have been better. But now....
As of May 2010, those patents have expired and as of July 12 with version 2.4.0, Freetype ships with the Bytecode Interpreter enabled. Version 2.4.1 was released July 18 to address a small bug found in 2.4.0. Freetype is…
gregladen | July 31, 2010Plankton, base of ocean food web, in big decline
Worldwide phytoplankton levels are down 40 percent since the 1950s, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The likely cause is global warming, which makes it hard for the plant plankton to get vital nutrients, researchers say.
Hottest Decade on Record
The past decade was the hottest recorded, part of an unequivocal pattern of warming dating back 50 years, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report declared on Wednesday.
The annual "State of the Climate" report drew on the findings more than 300 climate…
gregladen | July 31, 2010Earlier this week, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman warned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a letter that approving the Keystone XL pipeline would be "a step in the wrong direction" and criticized the State Department's limited environmental impact statement about the pipeline.
The proposed pipeline would transport 900,000 barrels of oil a day nearly 2,000 miles from Alberta, Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. The project is currently undergoing the State Department's review process since all transnational pipelines must be approved by the State Department as…
gregladen | July 31, 2010Apropos this discussion, for your weekend entertainment:
From SBM Theater, hat tip daedalus2u
gregladen | July 30, 2010So far, my new experimental Skeptical Search Engine has been used hundreds of times, and the top searchers are:
deepak chopra
homeopath
ghost
high fructose corn syrup
god
evolution
zecharia sitchin
creationism
ghosts
global warming
ancient astronauts
ufo
pyramids egypt
love
vaccines
methane bubble
climate change
pyramids
fossil sirenia
carbohydrates
easter island
acupuncture
vaccine
Gmos
bigfoot
This is excellent. One suggestion: Use GMO rather than GMOs and ghost instead of ghosts in order to avoid limiting the search.
gregladen | July 30, 2010Both Erik Paulsen, my representative to the US congress, and Michele Bachmann, the infamous insane person who represents my neighbors a few blocks away, have elected to vote against worker's health compensation for 9/11 first responders.
And they dare to call themselves Americans!!!
According to my other neighbor, Jim Meffert, who happens to be running against Paulsen:
It absolutely sickens me that Representatives Paulsen and Bachmann were among those who turned a blind eye to the health needs of 9/11 rescue workers. These two should be ashamed of themselves. They denied critical help for…
gregladen | July 30, 2010The Rover Spirit is hibernating on a dark slope on the winter end of the planet Mars. Solar panels may be providing enough energy to keep its clock going. If not, it will become suspended in time and not know to wake up and send a signal that it is 'alive.' The panels may or may not keep the battery temperatures above 40 degrees below zero Celsius so that batteries survive the Martian winter, which is said to be almost as bad as the Minnesota winter. But probably not. And for now, the mission controllers are waiting for a beep that could come any time.
The earliest date the rover could…
gregladen | July 30, 2010The anopheles mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, is the primary vector for human malaria. Mosquitoes in general, the A. gambiae included, find their prey by tracking body odor exuded from the breath and skin. Apparently, the composition of body odor determines A. gambiae's preference for one individual over another. It has been known for some time now that A. gambiae preferentially seek out and draw blood from pregnant women (Linsay et al 2000; Ansell et al 2002; Himeidan, Elbashir and Adam 2004), preferring pregnant over none pregnant women at about a 2:1 ratio.
Researchers working in Burkina…
gregladen | July 30, 2010Desiree Schell of Skeptically Speaking diabolically matched The Culture of Fear author Barry Glassner for a live interview, and a fear-riddled edition of "Everything you know is sort of wrong" (on how poor people are breeding so fast they will take over the earth) by yours truly for TONIGHT's Skeptically Speaking show.
gregladen | July 30, 2010Can a fly's eye(s) be used for solar cells? Apparently so. Speaking of which, I have a gripe. Nuclear power supporters have always ignored the fact that Nuclear power (a.k.a. "unlimited safe free energy") is more expensive than other traditional forms of energy. In the mean time, anti "alternative" energy, often the same people, have touted that Solar is too expensive to be worth it. Well, guess what. A recent study seems to have shown that Solar power is cheaper than nuclear. So, there you go.
Berry Go Round # 30, the Plant Carnival, is up and running at Brainripples. This is your…
gregladen | July 30, 2010This one is very much worth the effort. Stop here first for some instructions on strategy, then go here to do this thing.
UPDATED!!!!!
Holy crap! The Kent Hovind poll started out looking like this:
What do you believe about evolution?
It's a religion.
* It's a fact!
* It's a reasonable scientific theory.
Then it changed to:
What do you believe about CREATION?
It's a religion.
* It's a fact!
* It's a reasonable scientific theory.
Huh.
gregladen | July 30, 2010Wanted: A bash utility that sends the contents of a file to standard output. It would be named spew. It would be like cat but with the problems oft' complained about in cat fixed. There would be a few options. One option would be to chomp the final newline if there is one. Other options would change the character encoding. Another option would be to specify several commands to which the data could be sent simultaneously. But otherwise it would be pretty simple. Spew.
See the whole "WANTED" list here.
gregladen | July 29, 2010Up to 140 people are feared dead after a boat carrying passengers and goods capsized on a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials say.
The accident happened on the Kasai river - a tributary of the Congo River - in the western province of Bandundu.
Information Minister Lambert Mende told the BBC the boat had been overloaded and 80 people had been confirmed dead.
After decades of conflict, DR Congo has few roads or rail links and many people travel on often overloaded vessels.
I've not been on this boat, but I've been on one like it. It is true that you can't actually drive from,…