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POPSWeather Balloons To Control Climate Basic calculations suggest that, in maybe a week or less, ten million tons of raw materials could produce enough balloons to cover the entire earth at twenty miles altitude. That may sound like a lot of material, but in fact it's about the same amount that goes into building 100 miles of a modern highway—so it's well within reach of even a small nation to acquire the materials if they have the hardware and software and a desire to control the weather of the earth. Shifting mirrors inside balloons to make some areas warmer and others colder, to make some wetter and some drier gives at least rudimentary power for Josh's "Nano-enabled Climate Control for the Earth." These balloons may well be helpful in slowing, stopping, or even reversing the trend of global warming, as long as we recognize the very real danger of unforeseen, unintended, and possibly irreversible consequence.
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POPSThe Little Titanic At 17.41p.m. Hans Hedtoft informs "we are sinking slowly" and at 18.06 the trawler picks up the beginning of an SOS after which there was no longer connection to the Greenlandic ship. No wreckage could positively be identified as coming from Hans Hedtoft. And not until 9 months after the loss, the only piece of wreckage washed ashore on Iceland: a lifebuoy. The Hans Hedtoft sank 40 years ago.
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POPSObama Defends His Spending Explosion As “Spreading The Wealth" You read that right. More than a quarter million dollars per household. Legacy media can't bother with these complex calculations, possibly because their IT budgets have been slashed what with the Times stock price and all. Suffice it to say that Barack Obama's new math doesn't survive even the most cursory review. Put simply, every working person in America will receive a monstrous increase in taxes when the Bush tax cuts expire. Tack on the "WealthSpreader™" tax and we've got a surefire recipe for economic disaster.
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POPSWhy Republican Base loves Sarah Palin
This article. goes right to the heart of why the Republican base is so in love with Sarah Palin. She doesn't give them facts, she gives them the red-meat they lust for. I'm sure most, can remember people like Palin, in high school. The bubbly types, who dub anyone who doesn't fit their interpretation of what's "IN", a pariah. Yes, they have a blueprint of what is "IN", the right style, a snooty air, a superficial manner will get you, "IN". As bad as this exclusivity is, it could be tolerated if they also had a "live and let live" attitude. But unfortunately, anyone who crosses their path, who's not "IN" they will socially banish. They do this, by falsely labeling, and contriving suspicions of any non-"IN", creating an impression that something is shockingly wrong with anyone who, by their calculations, cannot be part of their "IN" crowd. But what's most perplexing is... It's one thing to behave like this in a state of childhood but carried into adulthood? Mind boggling! :-?
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POPSPolling Funnies Pay attention to the details, note trends within polls rather than aggregating disparate poll reports, and never forget that every media outlet is selling a story, and every poll is bought by someone for a specific purpose. The election is something far different from any poll
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POPSAPPLE GENIUS WORTH 8.4 BILLION: Guardian.co.uk's charles ARTHUR
The author puts a keen focus on how we gave Apple enough information to make 8.4 billion seem fair. Extremely sharp and incisive. I learned a lot. I think Mr. Arthur is a bit too quick to be interpreting Steve's algorithm at this point. I find that the program is genius in large part because while Steve Jobs and Apple™ know the tempo of every song to a frightening accuracy. Five seconds of silent thought will tell you the reasons Mr. Jobs will not fill in a BPM (beats per minute) column. To truly understand the tempo manipulation: you;d need to see the algorithm itself! So said, knowing the speeds of the songs I play on drums (it's the drums or the treadmill - I'm doing the exercise thing), I find the program to be almost wildly genius. What's wildly evil os that 1) Apple knows but will not divulge BPM; 2) Apple uses the tempo element of you collection on playlists made for you that are so good that when I play I do not even look at what is coming next as iy has all been so
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POPS How A Catholic Priest Gave Us The Primeval Atom Theory
Returning to Belgium in 1925, where he worked at the Catholic University of Leuven as a part-time lecturer, his big break came two years later in 1927 when he proposed his theory of an expanding Universe to explain the movement of the galaxies, published in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels. Lemaitre was still pretty hazy about how the process of expansion could have begun. Like many scientists, he was still committed to the idea of a static Universe of unchanging size... Einstein, though interested, was largely dismissive, telling Lemaitre that, "Your calculations are good, but your physics is terrible". Einstein was also a little suspicious of the religious implications of these ideas. He declined to describe himself as an atheist (or a theist, or a pantheist) and liked to use the vocabulary of religion, most famously in his misguided rejection of much of quantum physics, "God does not play dice!" British physicist, Fred Hoyle coined the Big Bang term
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POPSNeed a Job? $17,000 an Hour. No Success Required. John Kenneth Galbraith, the great economist, once explained: “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”
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POPSEqual pay for women (not in the Dem campaign) As for Biden, his 14 male staffers split a total payroll outlay of $1,077,128.40. So, Biden’s average male employee earned $76,937.74 per annum. Biden’s 27 female employees divided $1,517,874.47, or $56,217.57, on average. Among Biden’s top five highest-paid aides, one was a woman. Among the top 20, 11 were women. All told, for every dollar that Biden paid his average male staffer, his female equivalent made only 73 cents. This number is significant. Not only does Biden discount women by more than a quarter per dollar paid to men, on average. Biden collides into the standard by which his own campaign berates major companies for alleged pay discrimination.
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POPSThe Eight Year Bailout
Swanson nails it in this excellent article--see link for all of it, but here's some: For at least two years as vice president, Cheney received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Halliburton in "deferred compensation." Of course, that was justifiable in terms of the public good: society might have collapsed had Cheney not piled up more riches. But his riches and Halliburton's were a little crumb off the loaf of large-scale looting that has been the primary focus of our government all these years. While Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes called their book about Iraq "The Three Trillion Dollar War," they were being very conservative. If you read their book, you find that incredibly conservative calculations place the amount of money wasted at no less than five trillion dollars, and mounting, with no end in sight. And who gets that money? Well, certainly not "the troops" so cynically used to squeeze it out of those gelatinous masses of spineless goo that go by the name "House" and
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POPSTechnology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. Paul Saffo, the futurist, says he could divide the technology world into two kinds of people: engineers and natural scientists. He says the world outlook of the engineer is by nature optimistic. Every problem can be solved if you have the right tools and enough time and you pose the correct questions. Other people, who can be just as scientific, see the natural order of the world in terms of entropy, decline and death. Those people aren’t necessarily wrong. But the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.
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POPSOld forests absorb CO2 too; study They hold Carbon That will be released, when culled, they are also, contrary 'calculations', Not carbon Neutral. The Value of old growth forests can never be calculated, and are Priceless. Their Value should not be based on some cheap corrupt accounting trick. they Help us Breathe, the Earth Breathe And The Planet has Lung Cancer
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