Saturday, December 22, 2012

North Star closer TPT

The North Star has moved from 434 light years as measured  in 1990 to 323 light years as measured by newer methods.  111 light years in 23 years time? Pretty fast movement. Also another indication that Science is NOT about being settled. It is constant revision as new data and methods appear.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Pygmy Whale Not Extinct as PT



FTA: "The living pygmy right whale is, if you like, a remnant, almost like a living fossil," said Felix Marx, a paleontologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. "It's the last survivor of quite an ancient lineage that until now no one thought was around."

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Grand Canyon carved earlier TPT

The awe-inspiring Grand Canyon was probably carved about 70 million years ago, much earlier than thought, a provocative new study suggests — so early that dinosaurs might have roamed near this natural wonder.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Record Keeping...when you want something to last

I've been watching a PBS documentary, The Story of India.
One section stood out as unusual more than the rest...mostly because when I tried to google for more information... NOTHING came up. Even on the PBS website supporting the documentary with extra photos, links and commentary, they had pictures and discussion of the palm leaf manuscripts but nothing about copper plates.


The Story of India: Part 4: Michael Wood documentary
25:58
Here in the former royal library is a vast store of Ancient Tamil literature going back to the Cholans and beyond...
grammar, poetry and philosophy.
26:10
Many of the texts are preserved on fragile palm leaf manuscripts
which are now being carefully restored.
and one fascinating and little known aspect of their culture is that
the Cholans also wrote their own history.
26:27
What would be a manuscript book, a chronicle in Western Europe, say in the 10th and 11th century,
here in the Cholan empire is copper plates.
This is just one document from a temple treasury. About 15 copper plates.
26:48
There’s the seal of Rajendra, the son of Raja Raja the Great. The umbrella and the fish , the tiger.
Weighs about 40 kilos.
27:00
and there’s thousands of these. thousands of these,
most of them still kept by individual temples.
These things were used for recording
genealogies,
royal pedigrees,
land grants
but also history
and they include the history of how Raja Raja the Great, came to the throne.
27:17
...
Now that I have this, I've been able to find a few other links.=>
Wiki link on the use of copper plates for records in India. The earliest is denoted as 'pre-Ashoka Maurya' who lived from 304 BC to 242 BC.
:

Thursday, August 30, 2012

The past 5.5 years of Recession/Depression




An excellent comment on an article today. Here is the link to the original article.

My comments at the end.

Right Wing Pitbull wrote:
This tells the story, why the Bush administration was so bad at the end of its term.

Don’t just skim over this, it’s not very long, read it slowly and let it sink in. If in doubt, check it out!!!

The day the democrats took over was not January 22nd 2009, it was actually January 3rd, 2007 the day the Democrats took over the House of Representatives and the Senate, at the very start of the 110th Congress.

The Democrat Party controlled a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995.

For those who are listening to the liberals propagating the fallacy that everything is "Bush's Fault", think about this:
January 3rd, 2007 was the day the Democrats took over the Senate and the Congress.
At the time:

The DOW Jones closed at 12,621.77
The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
The Unemployment rate was 4.6%

George Bush's Economic policies SET A RECORD of 52 STRAIGHT MONTHS of JOB GROWTH

Remember the day...
January 3rd, 2007 was the day that Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee.
The economic meltdown that happened 15 months later was in what part of the economy?

BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES!
Unemployment... to this CRISIS by (among MANY other things) dumping 5-6 TRILLION Dollars of toxic loans on the economy from YOUR Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac FIASCOES!
Bush asked Congress 17 TIMES to stop Fannie & Freddie - starting in 2001 because it was financially risky for the US economy.

And who took the THIRD highest pay-off from Fannie Mae AND Freddie Mac?

OBAMA!

And who fought against reform of Fannie and Freddie?

OBAMA and the Democrat Congress
So when someone tries to blame Bush,

REMEMBER JANUARY 3rd, 2007.... THE DAY THE DEMOCRATS TOOK OVER!"

Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democrat Party.

Furthermore, the Democrats controlled the budget process for 2008 & 2009 as well as 2010 & 2011.
In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases.

For 2009 though, Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the 2009 budgets.

And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete 2009.
If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets.

If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself. In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th.

There is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on!

We must limit him to one term.
*****
Now for my comment...
People make decisions, not based on what happened in the recent past. Instead they make decisions on their expectations for the future. The 2006 election changed a lot of peoples expectations about the future so the economic collapse of 2007 and 2008 was based on what democrats were promising to do to people. Business and investors have been paralyzed since then with the ever promised but continually postponed tax rate increases. Once business and investors are no longer demonized and tax rate uncertainty is cleared away, the economy will boom.  The boom will be inspite of what Obama has done so far and because of what Romney and a Republican congress promise to do. We saw it before with the change from Carter to Reagan. We need that again.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Sea level rise; "People seem to think..."

Doggerland: Britain's Atlantis:

Projected coast line around Britain in 6500BC and earlier. Currently most Human population is situated near water and especially the Oceans. Probably then as well.

FTA:
The area was once the ‘real heartland’ of Europe and was hit by ‘a devastating tsunami', the researchers claim.
The wave was part of a larger process that submerged the low-lying area over the course of thousands of years.
...

'People seem to think rising sea levels are  a new thing - but it’s a cycle of Earth history that has happened many many times.'


Comment:
With the current debate over anthropogenic CO2 increases and future catastrophes, it always amazes me that people have picked the 1970's as the "ideal" climate which we must prevent from changing by massive taxes and regulations. The earth has been warming naturally since the last glacial maximum extent which occurred about 18000BC.  The Great Lakes and New York State were under massive ice sheets. It has warmed since then and Humans have adapted to the changes.   CO2 is plant food and to the extent it comes from 'fossil' fuel, it is returning carbon into the carbon cycle that once existed as plants and animals. During some interglacial periods, it was far warmer than present. Yet the earth still cooled enough to have an ice age.

What makes now so unusual that we think Human activity is able to change these cycles or that we shouldn't prepare to adapt in either direction to conditions that are historically precedented?




Saturday, June 30, 2012

Not really TPT

Since this used to be common knowledge but contrary to what people seem to think now.
Plants grow from CO2 and higher levels are better for plants and people. 

The hoax of CAGW... catastrophic anthropogenic global warming being caused by increased CO2 levels is an  anti-human activity.

original source: Source: Susanne von Caemmerer, W. Paul Quick, and Robert T. Furbank (2012). The Development of C4 Rice: Current Progress and Future Challenges. Science 336 (6089): 1671-1672.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

" They Didn't Die, They Thrived"

Japanese Tsunami Debris arrive sooner TPT

See this story.

FTA: "This should be a warning to everybody that this stuff is coming a lot faster than we thought it was.

...
 "It looks like there is a very, very abundant community of Asian organisms that have been floating in the ocean for a year and are intact and alive on this float," Chapman said. "Everybody is worried because the majority of them do not live on this coast."

...

 "The other thing astonishing to us is that they should have died or starved to death, but are obviously in very good shape. They did very, very well floating across the ocean on this thing. They didn't die, they thrived,"

...
My comments:  What do you think?  Is this the first time in the last 14000 years that life forms have arrived from Asia on the western Hemisphere?  Somehow I doubt it.  Further increases my skepticism of human migration over the Behring land bridge.  Why postulate a massively challenging land based migration when the world is interconnected by Ocean?  

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Supernova affect earth life

Wow!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/24/svensmarks-cosmic-jackpot-evidence-of-nearby-supernovae-affecting-life-on-earth/

Different  TPT.

FTA: A mark of a good hypothesis is that it looks better and better as time passes. With the triumph of plate tectonics, diehard opponents were left redfaced and blustering. In 1960 you’d not get a job in an American geology department if you believed in continental drift, but by 1970 you’d not get the job if you didn’t. That’s what a paradigm shift means in practice and it will happen sometime soon with cosmic rays in climate physics.