Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Monday, July 25, 2005
Trans-USA Challenge Shatters North America Driving Record
Trans-USA Challenge Shatters North America Driving Record: "July 13, 2005 -- The Trans-USA Challenge driving team has broken one of the most hallowed long distance driving records in the world. The journey began at the northern-most point in the United States accessible by road, Deadhorse Alaska. From there, the Trans-USA team drove to Key West, Florida, the southern-most point. The entire trip, which mapped out at 5440 miles, took only 82 hours and 24 minutes, shattering the 1996 record of 96 hours.
The Trans-USA team was comprised of two Americans, Jason Miklian and Scott Roecker. For their expedition, the team equipped their 2005
Volkswagen Jetta TDI with several enhancements, including both a Dieselgeek Panzer skid plate and fuel tank modifications to limit possible delays. These enhancements, along with shrewd map reading, enabled the two man team to shatter the previous time. In the words of Miklian, 'We feel that this record is now impossible to beat.'
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Sunday, July 24, 2005
Transterrestrial Musings
Transterrestrial Musings: "you can tell a newspaper is 'serious' because it requires its on-line readers to register, so that it can spam them"
Daily Kos: Government Harassment: Climate change scientists investigated
Daily Kos: Government Harassment: Climate change scientists investigated: "In letters to the three scientists last week, Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, demanded detailed documentation about the hundreds of studies on which they were an author or co-author. Mr. Barton also sent a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation that requests information
about the work of the three professors, as well as a list of all grants and
awards in the area of climate and paleoclimate science, which number 2,700
in the past 10 years."
Hunting Witches
Hunting Witches: "Mr. Barton's attempt to dismiss all this as turf-battling on the part of Mr. Boehlert, like his spokesman's claim that such demands for data are normal, is disingenuous. While the Energy and Commerce Committee does sometimes ask for raw data when it looks at regulatory decisions or particular government technology purchases, there is no precedent for congressional intervention in a scientific debate. As Mr. Bradley pointed out in his response to Mr. Barton, scientific progress is incremental: 'We publish a paper, and others may point out why its conclusions or methods might be wrong. We publish the results of additional studies . . . as time goes on robust results generally become accepted.' Science moves forward following these 'well-established procedures,' and not through the intervention of a congressional committee that is partial to one side of the argument."
Hunting Witches
Hunting Witches: "'THIS IS HIGHLY usual,' declared a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee when asked this week whether the request by committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) for information from three climate scientists was out of the ordinary. He and his boss are alone in that view. Many scientists and some of Mr. Barton's Republican colleagues say they were stunned by the manner in which the committee, whose chairman rejects the existence of climate change, demanded personal and private information last month from researchers whose work supports a contrary conclusion. The scientists, co-authors of an influential 1999 study showing a dramatic increase in global warming over the past millennium, were told to hand over not only raw data but personal financial information, information on grants received and distributed, and computer codes."
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Born To Explore! The Other Side of ADD
Born To Explore! The Other Side of ADD: "After going through a quick read of Unequal Protection, I still believe that Thom Hartman is not going far enough with his direction of where the real problem lies. The only reason that corporations have got away with this is because our goverment/s have alowed it. Why? The usual, greed for money, greed for power, greed for notoriety. Kickbacks from large companies is too large an incentive, for some politicians to ignore. The same as the owner of a large corporation seeing the easy profits to be made, misleading the masses.
But the same core problem that is causing all of our grief/s, is the same. People who have no ethics, no morality, no real caring for the rest of mankind. They are selfish, and only interested in enhancement for themselves, not realizing that they are hurting themselves in the long run, as well as everybody else."
• Key Players in the Plame Affair
