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8 reasons to rejoice when gas hits $8/gallon - Short term pain? You bet. But the long term gain is what this excellent article is focusing on.Labels: currentEvents, green power, transportation
—Mike @ 10:29
One of my pet peeves - I've always said that you can always tell when it's a slow news day if any of the top news stories are quoting opinion polls. After the laughable results of polls regarding the recent Presidential primaries, people are finally starting to question why so much attention is paid to them in the first place. How do we know people are even cooperating with the pollsters? I probably wouldn't, just to mess with their heads for having bothered me with their useless questions. Here's a story entitled "Of what use are opinion polls?" OK, I've already paid too much attention to polls just by blogging about them, so that's the end of that subject.Labels: currentEvents, politics
—Mike @ 20:10
George meets George -My nephew George got to shake hands with the President yesterday at his Thanksgiving visit to Berkeley Plantation in Charles City VA; he and his mom made the news, too! There are two video links on the TV station's web page; be sure and watch both clips to catch all the Gaston family coverage!
Labels: currentEvents, family, videos
—Mike @ 14:51
Quote du jour -President Bush says he's really going to buckle down now and fight global warming. As a matter of fact, he announced today that he's deploying 20,000 troops to the sun.--David LettermanLabels: currentEvents, haha, politics
—Mike @ 10:14
Offering hope in mine disasters - By next year, inventor and former Navy submarine technician Russell Breeding hopes to have ready an inertial sensor tracking device, a system that uses "microelectro mechanical sensors" to track miners within three meters of their location. With last week's double mining disasters, this would've come in very handy.Labels: currentEvents, technology
—Mike @ 15:12
A different kind of clock - Father Time always find clocks fascinating, and this one's no exception, but some of the data is just a tad frightening. Info provided by various sources, including the World Health Organization, the CIA Factbook, the US Census Bureau, the UN and other official sources.Labels: currentEvents, time
—Mike @ 11:46
Somebody 'splain this to me? - Pfizer has announced a weight-loss drug for dogs. Yes, dogs. I'm missing something here... don't dog owners already have total control of their pet's food intake? We need to buy a product to give us -- what -- more than total control? Have pet owner gone completely off the deep end? Or is it we don't feel we can do anything without a drug anymore? Or are the dogs secretly going out to fast food restaurants while we're not looking? Funny, yet sad.Labels: currentEvents, medical
—Mike @ 23:23
Is this the way power will be distributed in the future? - Some cities are starting to form mini-energy districts to ensure reliable power. Sounds very smart to me.Labels: currentEvents, green power
—Mike @ 17:16
Some Central NJ flood photos from our nor'easter this week - NJ Route 18
Easton Ave
Rutgers Boat house
[Thanks, Barb]
Many people are still being housed in shelters, unable to return to their homes until safety inspections can take place. Some areas reportedly had more damage than would be expected in 500 years from this storm. Area collections of blankets and toiletries are ongoing.Labels: currentEvents, NJ, weather
—Mike @ 15:40
Blood transfusion breakthrough - Danish researchers have perfected an inexpensive and efficient way to convert any blood type into a universal donor type -- an achievement that promises to make transfusions safer and relieve blood shortages.Labels: currentEvents, medical
—Mike @ 20:17
ABC's World News - is the latest nightly network news broadcast to try out a limited-commercial-interruption special-sponsorship arrangement, and they plan to repeat it each Monday this month. As long as they continue that policy, they can count on me as a new loyal viewer.Labels: currentEvents, TV
—Mike @ 20:09
Buying stamp futures - The friendly folks at the Post Office have announced the new Forever Stamp will go on sale April 12 -- buy it now and it's good for first-class postage forever, regardless of any future rate increases. Nice idea! Maybe folks will buy them up by the thousands, and will them to their descendants.
Sorry for the lack of postings here lately -- lots of fun activities and lots of extra work hours have combined to squeeze out spare blogging time. Things should calm down sometime soon. Maybe?Labels: currentEvents, services
—Mike @ 23:06
Now here's someone with foresight, vision and perspective - Following a briefing on Iraq at the White House on September 4, 2002, Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri wrote this letter to President Bush, advising of the need for postwar planning. Here are some interesting excerpts: [Thanks, David]I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it...
The extreme difficulty of occupying Iraq, with its history of autocratic rule, its balkanized ethnic tensions, and its isolated economic system argues … for detailed advanced occupation planning if such military action is approved...
Specifically, your strategy must consider the form of replacement regime and take seriously the possibility that this regime might be rejected by the Iraqi people, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy...
We need to ensure that in taking out Saddam, we don’t win the battle and lose the war.Labels: currentEvents
—Mike @ 10:46
It sounds almost too good to be true... - ...a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”.
That's how this article at NewScientist.com starts off, in describing the drug dichloroacetate (DCA), and it's been creating quite a stir since it was first published a few weeks ago. DCA "has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe", according to the article, but because it has no patent, and therefore no way for a pharmaceutical company to exploit for profit, there hasn't been much research into it thus far.
Now, the Department of Medicine at the University of Alberta in Canada has created this DCA Research Information web page to track progress of further developments and possible trials of DCA. Stay tuned...Labels: currentEvents, medical
—Mike @ 08:41
One scary film - Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth... go buy it, rent it, pay-per-view it or borrow it.Labels: currentEvents, green power, movies, nature, weather
—Mike @ 21:43
It seems crazy - that we'd need a law to specify that you can't keep people bottled up on a plane for up to 11 hours, waiting on a tarmac without adequate food, water or sanitary facilities, yet that's what we've been reduced to, thanks to the airlines ignoring more and more occurrences of such situations lately. Not surprisingly, some 12,000 people (as of this writing) have already signed this online petition to Congress, calling for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights.Labels: currentEvents, transportation
—Mike @ 20:09
Providing clean drinking water in the 21st Century... - ...may have just become a whole lot easier, due to an announcement about new ways to control water movement using carbon nanotube membranes.We have, at a very fundamental level, discovered that there is a new mechanism to control water transportDown the road, this technology has the potential for turning salt water into pure drinking water almost instantly, and for removing the tiniest of impurities.Labels: currentEvents, technology
—Mike @ 10:07
Happy to see... - that Little Miss Sunshine has received four Academy Award nominations today!Labels: currentEvents, movies
—Mike @ 23:33
I was wrong - Nearly four years ago, when I was still writing anyone I could, imploring for more time to find the Iraqi WMDs before declaring war, I predicted that this campaign wouldn't end until as many Americans died in the war as had perished here on 9/11, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Unfortunately I was off base. We passed that mark in the last few days as the 3,000th American soldier in Iraq died, and there's still no end in sight. In fact, now we're talking about sending even more soldiers over. And I don't understand it any more now than I did back then.Labels: currentEvents
—Mike @ 22:38
More? - There's additional reading available in the Archives.
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