Indoor Surfing

Anyone know where this is? I’d like to try it.

California to run out of water in 20 years?

Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel.

Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab…  – current

What caught my attention is the claim that California will run out of water in 20 years. Really? No point in getting a 30 year loan on a house in that case.

And one expert estimates California’s water supply will run out in 20 years – cnn

Here is the zoom in on CA:

All those fires we had start to make more sense when you consider this.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which supply water and power to millions in the American Southwest, stand a 50 percent chance of running dry by 2021 unless dramatic changes take place in how the region uses water, according to a new study. – csmon

Unlucky black fox spotted

A black fox has been spotted lurking among the grave stones in a cemetery in Chorley.

It’s “the Grim.” Check out the video.

Space shuttle Endeavour moved to launch pad to rescue Atlantis?

In an unprecedented step, a space shuttle was moved to the launch pad Friday for a trip NASA hopes it will never make – a rescue mission. The shuttle Endeavour is on standby in case the seven astronauts who go up on Atlantis next month need a safer ride home.

Atlantis and its crew are headed into space for one last repair job on the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a venture that was canceled when first proposed a few years ago because it was considered too dangerous.

The risk is this: If Atlantis suffers serious damage during launch or in flight, the astronauts will not be at the international space station, where they could take refuge for weeks while awaiting a ride home. They would be stranded on their spacecraft at the Hubble, where NASA estimates they could stay alive for 25 days. Air would be the first to go.

Endeavour and four more astronauts would need to blast off on a rescue flight as soon as NASA determined Atlantis was too damaged to fly home.

On Friday, Endeavour was parked at its launch pad just a mile from where Atlantis is tentatively set to lift off on Oct. 10.

It is the first time since 2001 – when flights were more closely spaced – that both of NASA’s shuttle pads have been occupied. And it will probably be the last.

The Atlantis astronauts say there’s a slim chance any rescue will be needed, and they say they would fly to Hubble even if there were no such backup plan.

Scott Altman, Atlantis’ commander, said it may seem like overkill, but having a rescue ship on the pad is the right thing to do. – ap

PLANET DEBATE GETS GREATER

Photo: An artist’s conception shows the dwarf planet Haumea
and its two moons, Hi’iaka and Namaka.

… So just how many planets are there in our solar system anyway? Eight? Nine? Thirteen? Or thousands? Far from settling the question, the “Great Planet Debate” has revealed just how complex and interesting the question is.

The planethood question got more interesting this week with the naming of yet another dwarf planet, Haumea. It’s traditional to name planets after mythological deities – and Haumea, the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth and fertility, follows that formula.

The football-shaped world was found by Caltech astronomer Michael Brown just after Christmas 2004 (which prompted its initial, unofficial nickname: “Santa”). Haumea’s discovery was shrouded in a scientific controversy that Brown recaps in his Weblog. At the time, controversy surrounded its planetary status as well, because it added to a growing class of objects in the same general class as Pluto. Astronomers surmised that hundreds of Pluto-scale objects may lurk on the icy rim of the solar system’s disk, known as the Kuiper Belt.

The controversy came to a head in 2005 when Brown’s team found the object now known as Eris – a world like Pluto, only bigger and farther out. All this led the International Astronomical Union to agonize over where to draw the line on planethood. In 2006, the IAU came up with a definition aimed at putting the solar system’s eight biggest planets in one class, and Pluto in a different class with Eris and other dwarf planets or “plutinos.”

The Great Planet Debate has been simmering ever since. In August, astronomers held a teach-in on the subject at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which is the base of operations for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. One of the purposes of the meeting was to see how teachers were handling the planethood question. – msnbc

Why do I keep thinking Robin Williams is going to pop out of Haumea in a red jumpsuit?

Bush: Economy at ‘A Pivotal Moment’

The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed to Congress what could become the largest financial bailout in United States history, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets. – nytimes

So, this means the government will own your home until you pay off your mortgage loan. What will that result in?

Ten Proven US Government Conspiracies, and why I still trust the Government.

The FBI says a member of our government carried out the anthrax attacks of 2001. Alone. Just one guy. If we learn that as few as ONE other person helped Bruce Ivins (a US government employee), this would be, by the legal definition, a “Government conspiracy”. The anthrax attacks would be conspiracy to commit murder and to create a public panic for financial gain.

Even if he acted alone, Ivins was a terrorist. He was a pro Israel religious US republican military citizen terrorist who attacked and killed Americans just after 9/11. Uncomfortable, isn’t it? I find it very difficult, even now. Even worse, Ivins, the supposed anthrax attacker, was on the team investigating the anthrax attacks. That means the anthrax attacks were, as the conspiracy theorists calmed, “an inside job.” No one disputes this now. Ivins or not, it was an inside job. Do you get that?

To my faith-based all-trusting republican friends, I say, are you paying attention? Your trust in authority was betrayed. Someone who was on the team supposedly protecting you, turned out to be the perpetrator, the killer.  Why is that little computer in your head not melting down? How can you keep trusting the government?

Well, I sill trust the government. Lets be reasonable: The 8 million people employed by the US Government (I am one of them, by the way) are not all conspiring to rob, poison, kill or enslave the other 297 million.

Many people are lazy but most are good, most people have good motives. That includes most people in the CIA, most people in the FBI, and most people in the Pentagon, the way I see it.

Individuals and small groups both inside and outside our government, motivated by fear, greed, laziness and illogical thinking, do occasionally manage to pull off some real conspiracies. Evil doings of secret groups sometimes stay hidden for many years, even many decades. We know this because people are caught, tried, and thrown in jail for conspiracy. We know this, because years later, the facts come to light. Here are ten real proven US government conspiracies:

The conspiracy of 1865 to assassinate U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and members of his cabinet.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study ongoing from 1932 to 1972 knowingly killed hundreds of low-income African American men. U.S. Public Health Service wanted to experiment with the effects of untreated syphilis. Low-income African American men were lured into study with promise of free health care. Instead they were intentionally lied to and given placebo treatments. Even when they could have easily been saved by penicillin they were left to die for the benefit of the syphilis study program. Tuskegee Syphilis Study Source

Human Radiation Experiments. 1944 to 1974. In 1995 the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments reported that over a 30-year period, the government sponsored, through several different agencies, thousands of human radiation experiments and several hundred intentional releases of radiation. To the question of whether similar abuses could occur again, particularly in the case of intentional releases, the committee gives “a qualified yes.” It notes that some agencies can still invoke national security considerations to waive consent requirements, that agencies are often responsible for their own oversight, and that environmental impact statements relating to classified projects are not available for public scrutiny.

The 1945 Operation Paperclip, the extraction of top Nazi scientists to the US. … the Nazi Intelligence leader Reinhard Gehlen met with the CIA director Allen Dulles. Dulles and Gehlen hit it off immediatly. Gehlen was a master spy for the Nazis and had infiltrated Russia with his vast Nazi Intelligence network. Dulles promised Gehlen that his Intelligence unit was safe in the CIA. As promised, Allen Dulles delivered the Nazi Intelligence unit to the CIA, which later opened many umbrella projects stemming from Nazi mad research. (MK-ULTRA / ARTICHOKE, OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX) Military Intelligence “cleansed” the files of Nazi references. By 1955, more than 760 German scientists had been granted citizenship in the U.S. and given prominent positions in the American scientific community. Many had been longtime members of the Nazi party and the Gestapo, had conducted experiments on humans at concentration camps, had used slave labor, and had committed other war crimes. -ca

MKULTRA is a CIA experiment where drugs were given to Americans without their knowledge or consent. This involved giving LSD, marijuana, barbiturates, heroine, mescaline, alcohol and more to unsuspecting people. … started in 1950 to study mind control and behavior modification. In 1973 Richard Helms head of the CIA deliberately destroyed all the records. MKULTRA Source

Operation Mockingbird was a CIA project created to control the domestic and foreign media [beginning in the 1950s.] They bribed well-known writers and journalists to write … slanted propaganda. The goal was primarily to bribe writers to write about the dangers of communism and suppress any left wing political writing. In 1976 George H.W. Bush the new director of the CIA announced that this activity will stop but they would welcome the voluntary unpaid cooperation of writers. Operation Mockingbird Source

Project SHAD was created by the United States Department of Defense in 1962. They intentionally exposed our military personnel with biological and chemical agents on 46 different occasions. This was done without the military personnel knowledge or consent. They wanted to experiment on how soldiers can be exposed to dangerous chemicals and continue to fight. This testing was conducted from 1962-1973. The Department of Defense refused to admit SHAD existed until 1998. Project SHAD Source

Operation Northwoods, or Northwoods, was a false flag conspiracy plan, proposed within the United States government in 1962. The plan called for CIA or other operatives to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Castro-led Cuba. One plan was to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington”. This operation is especially notable in that it included plans for hijackings and bombings followed by the use of phony evidence that would blame the terrorist acts on foreign governments. Operation Northwoods was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and signed by then-Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and sent to the Secretary of Defense.

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is the name given to two separate incidents involving naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 4, 1964, the US government lied about war ships engaging North Vietnamese vessels in combat.  In 2005, an official NSA declassified report stated. “[I]t is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night.” The Gulf of Tonkin Incident  prompted the first large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Southeast Asia.

The Watergate scandals 1972 to 1974 during the presidency of Richard Nixon resulted in the indictment of several of Nixon’s closest advisors and ultimately his resignation on August 9, 1974. The scandal revealed the existence of a White House dirty tricks squad, which was behind an orchestrated campaign of political sabotage, an enemies list, a “plumbers” unit to plug political leaks and a secret campaign slush fund associated with CRP, all with high-level administration involvement. It brought into the open the involvement of Attorney General John N. Mitchell in the dirty tricks, funds and cover-up, as well as key White House advisers, all of whom went to prison for these crimes, for sentences of one to four years.

All of these proven conspiracies by people in positions of power in the US government over the span of over 100 years aren’t simply cases of evil. Rather, one group, believing it is serving the greater good, harms or attempts to harm another group and tries to hide it. It seems to me compassion testing could be conducted and we could feed all of the non-compassionate people to sharks, then the world would be a peaceful place from that point forward.

But seriously, don’t get paranoid. Look at the evidence, skeptically, case by case. The proven Watergate conspiracy does not mean that the government is watching you right now with satellites that see though buildings. It does not mean that the Apollo Moon landings were faked, that 9/11 was an inside job, that Hoover plotted to get the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, that AIDS is a US military weapon aimed at population reduction, that FEMA has US concentration camps and secret underground bases, that Fluoride in our water lowers IQ and increases suggestibility, that alien stories are used to cover up Nazi UFO technology, and so on.

Boil it down to one person. Imagine that YOU are the entire government. Do you trust yourself? Answer: Mostly, yes. But do you keep a secret stash of cash or candy? Sure you do. That’s the truth about the government, and about the human condition. That’s why I still trust the government, because I trust myself. Trust but verify.

Hawking unveils ’strangest clock’

A £1m clock called the “time eater” has been unveiled at Cambridge University by Professor Stephen Hawking.

The author of A Brief History of Time was guest of honour when the unique clock, which has no hands or numbers, was revealed at Corpus Christi College.

Dubbed the strangest clock in the world, it features a giant grasshopper and has 60 slits cut into its face which light up to show the time.

Its creator John Taylor said he “wanted to make timekeeping interesting”.

The Corpus Clock will stand outside the college’s library and will be on view to the public.  – bbc

I don’t get it. Grasshoppers are gross.

Sperm warfare: High-tech male contraception

… science finally may have found an answer for reversible, reliable and easy contraception for men with a new breed of futuristic, nonhormonal gizmos that promise a high-tech solution to sperm control. Teams around the globe are developing new techniques that can block ducts in the testes, zap sperm before they come out of the body or even scramble sperm production. …

Switching sperm flow on and off

Professor Derek Abbott and his team from the University of Adelaide in South Australia have invented the first remote-controlled key fob that allows men to control a valve that can switch their sperm flow on and off as required.

The size of half a rice grain, the “fertility control micro-valve” is injected by a doctor into the vas deferens, the duct that carries sperm from the testes, a process that needs only a local anaesthetic. The valve can then open and close to control sperm flow out of the body.

“Vasectomy entails surgery, pain and it might not be reversible. Our micro-valve provides an alternative,” says Abbott. Demand for the new valve has been unprecedented. “I’ve been inundated with inquiries from men from all over the world,” he says. The device will now need five years of animal trials before it can be used in human beings. – timesonline

Perhaps if they create a painless pill, and eliminate all STDs … and show conclusively that radio waves have no biological effects… naw. I could think of better things to remote control.

35 cents a gallon gas? How about Nuclear Powered Cars?

Fred Miller bought gas Thursday afternoon at a Rutter’s Farm Store in West Manchester Township . . . for 35 cents a gallon. Yes, 35 cents a gallon. And it was middle grade to boot. The sign at the Rutter’s in the 2300 block of Carlisle Road showed that gas was $3.59 a gallon for middle grade, but when it rang up, it was $0.359. Miller, of Dover Township, bought a little more than 17 gallons for $6.17. That was a big difference, he said. Todd Rutter, head of Rutter’s Dairy, one of the family of Rutter’s companies, did not say how many people got the cheap gas before the problem was corrected. He said it was enough to make a few people happy, but not enough to hurt too much. – york

Those were the days. Time to find some new fuels!

The Ford Nucleon was a nuclear-powered concept car developed by Ford Motor Company in 1958. No operational models were built. The design did not include an internal-combustion engine, rather, a vehicle was to be powered by a small nuclear reactor in the rear of the vehicle. The vehicle featured a power capsule suspended between twin booms at the rear. The capsule, which would contain radioactive core for motive power, was designed to be easily interchangeable, according to performance needs and the distances to be traveled.

The passenger compartment of the Nucleon featured a one-piece, pillar-less windshield and compound rear window, and was topped by a cantilever roof. There were air intakes at the leading edge of the roof and at the base of its supports. An extreme cab-forward style provided more protection to the driver and passengers from the reactor in the rear. Some pictures show the car with tailfins sweeping up from the rear fenders.

The drive train would be integral to the power module, and electronic torque converters would take the place of the drive-train used at the time. It was said that cars like the Nucleon would be able to travel 8000 km (5,000 miles) or more, depending on the size of the core, without recharging. Instead, at the end of the core’s life they would be taken to a charging station, which research designers envisioned as largely replacing gas stations. The car was never built and never went into production, but it remains an icon of the Atomic Age of the 1950s. – wiki

A commenter named Joel on ecogeek writes:

There’s a world of difference between radiothermal and nuclear: the first one uses spontaneous decay, the second one runs on a chain-reaction. If you can get the critical mass of the fuel down to the point that it fits in a passenger car, you have bomb-making material. Plain and simple. That’s probably the real reason we’ll never see nuclear reactors in cars.  It would be interesting to see a series hybrid with a (decay-powered) electric generator to charge the batteries. Shielding might be workable in that case, and it could use an isotope that’s easy to get anyway, like Thorium … Joel