Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
The methane time bomb in the Independent
This is not good at all.
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, just outside of Philadelphia, in the Italian section. It’s a photograph glazed onto ceramics. The dates are in the 1920’s, close to a century in the weather and they are still sharp and unfaded. I haven’t been able to find any definitive information on the photo- transfer technique used back then, one possibility is silk screen. Not all information is on the first couple of pages of a Google search. But FORGOTTEN FACES: A WINDOW INTO OUR IMMIGRANT PAST has this: “an artisan fashioned a photograph from gold, platinum and iridium alloys and fired it onto an enamel surface. A portrait made in this way can survive in a cemetery for well over 100 years.” Today it can be done with a laser printer.
Something is eating into this one, but note that the rest of the image is still unfaded.
This one is heartbreaking.
Friday, February 23rd, 2007
According to a new study, crucial weather and environmental satellites soon will fail, and their replacements are insufficient and behind schedule.
• In particular, there is ‘’substantial concern” about the pending loss of an important satellite-based instrument employed by tropical weather forecasters and hurricane researchers.
The QuikSCAT information helps scientists estimate wind speeds at the ocean’s surface. That information contributes to year-round forecasts of marine conditions, and it’s crucially important to hurricane specialists, helping them assess the strength of storms that are far from land and often enabling the identification of new tropical systems.
OUTDATED DEVICE
But the device is well past its designed lifetime, which was expected to end by 2002, and budget concerns and technical compromises prompted NOAA to replace it with a less sophisticated instrument that still hasn’t been launched, the committee said.
• Much of NASA’s budget and many of its scientists are being diverted to the human space program that was reenergized by President Bush’s proposal to send astronauts back to the moon and onward to Mars.
The president’s 2007 budget reduced NASA’s research and analysis budget for science missions 15 percent compared to 2005. Since 2000, the agency’s earth-science budget has been slashed 30 percent. That caused the elimination of some projects, including measurements of solar radiation and Earth radiation that could help scientists understand global warming.
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006
I’m not one for self-portraits, but this one might save some lives. Here’s how I’m coping with the heat. A tub of water cooled with frost hacked from my freezer cools the blood in my feet that will eventually, I hope, reach my fevered brain.
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006
Consider using the “Egyptian Method”: wet a sheet or bath towel that is large enough to cover you with cool or cold water, and wring it or run it through the spin cycle on a washing machine until the sheet is quite damp but not dripping wet. Place the dry towel or sheet on your bed underneath your body and use the wet sheet as your blanket. The damp blanket will keep you cool. A tip that I might end up using before the Summer is over. From How to Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night
UPDATE 8/1/06: I tried this last night using a thin beach towel and it worked really well. With a fan blowing over me I was comfortably chilled. A heat index hovering around 110 is predicted for the next three days. The higher the humidity the less effective evaporative cooling is. This will be a real test for the Egyptian method. The wet towel on the neck technique, below, also works.
Place wet towel on the back of your neck and also the top of one’s head. Athletic team doctors have used this for years!
From: How to Cool Yourself Without Air Conditioning Both on WikiHow
Friday, February 10th, 2006
They think it is Spring. A foot of snow is predicted for tomorrow night! View Large
