Eyjafjallajökull, its eruption this past week has caused flight delays estimated for weeks. Shutting down Northern Europe and putting the rest of the world in gridlock.

The biggest full moon of 2010

Andrew Fazekas
for National Geographic News
Published January 29, 2010

The biggest full moon of 2010 will rise in the east tonight, and it'll appear with a bright sidekick: Mars will cozy up just to the left of the supersize moon. January's full moon is also called the wolf moon, according to Native American tradition associating this month's full moon with wolves howling in the cold midwinter. (Take a moon myths and mysteries quiz.) The 2010 wolf moon will appear 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than any other full moon this year, because our cosmic neighbor will actually be closer to Earth than usual. The moon will be at its closest perigee—the nearest it gets to our planet during its egg-shaped orbit—for 2010 at 4:04 a.m. ET Saturday, reaching a distance of 221,577 miles (356,593 kilometers) from Earth.

At its farthest from Earth, the moon is said to be at apogee. Perigee and apogee each happen generally once a month, but the moon's wobbly orbit means that the satellite's exact distance at each of those events varies over the year. The moon's phase can also be different during each apogee and perigee. "This month has the largest full moon of 2010, because it coincides with the special moment when the full moon happens to occur on the same day as it is at perigee," said Marc Jobin, an astronomer at the Montréal Planetarium. And in a remarkable coincidence, Mars is at opposition tonight—directly opposite to the sun in the sky—so that as the sun sets in the southwest, Mars rises in the northeast.

Around opposition, the red planet gets closest to Earth. This year Mars swung by at just 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) on January 27, and it will still appear remarkably bright during tonight's sky show. "To the naked eye it will appear as a bright, orange-colored star right next to the full moon—the pair will jump out at you for sure," Jobin said.

Full Moon Illusion


Because this unusually close perigee is happening during a full moon, it is expected to have an effect on Earth's tides.

These effects should be modest, most likely measurable in inches, although perigee tides can be higher if there happens to be a storm surge at the same time. As for observing the effects of perigee on the moon itself, most casual observers should notice an obvious difference in the moon's apparent size as it rises above the eastern horizon, Jobin said.

That's when an optical illusion usually comes into play that makes any full moon seem larger, since the moon is set against familiar Earthly objects rather than appearing high in the empty sky. "The combination of the two effects—perigee and moon illusion—will be really be noticeable and spectacular near the horizon," Jobin said.
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Under a biotechnic economy, consumption is directed toward the conservation and enhancement of life: a matter where qualitative standards are imperative. One uses the word life in no vague sense: one means the birth and nurture of children, the preservation of human health and well being, the culture of the human personality, and the perfection of the natural and civic environment as the theater of all these activities. Here are substantial goals for consumption not envisaged in the abstract doctrine of increasing wants, operating within an ever-expanding circle of new inventions and multiplying productive mechanisms.

quote from Lewis Mumford, his book The Myth of the Machine

Hundreds Of New Species Found In Himalayas
Posted on: Monday, 10 August 2009, 09:35 CDT
-redorbit.com-

.pdf of WWF report

More than 350 new species including the world’s smallest deer, a flying frog, a 100 million-year old gecko, and the first new monkey to have been discovered in over a century have been found in the last ten years located in the Eastern Himalayas. Now, climate change threatens this biologically rich habitat. An environmental group says the growing pressures from unsustainable development in the area is confronting the vital habitats of the mountain range spanning across Nepal, China, India, Bhutan and Myanmar with immense pressures.

A new report claims that climate change, deforestation, overgrazing by domestic livestock and illegal poaching and wildlife trading were the greatest threats to one of the most biologically rich areas on Earth. The WWF is requesting that the governments of Bhutan, India and Nepal make a commitment to work with conservation efforts in the geographic region that goes beyond the borders of the three countries in order to protect and preserve the landscape and the livelihoods of those living in the Eastern Himalayas. "In the last half-century, this area of South Asia has faced a wave of pressures as a result of population growth and the increasing demand for commodities," said the report, "The Eastern Himalayas -- Where Worlds Collide." "Only 25 percent of the original habitats in the region remain intact. For the unique species of the Eastern Himalayas, this means that today 163 are considered globally threatened," it said.

According to the WWF, 353 new species were discovered in the region in the past decade, such as a red-footed tree frog known as a "flying frog”, which got its name because of its large webbed feet that allow it to glide rather than fall. Another new species was a kind of caecilian, an amphibian without limbs that looks like a big underground earthworm. This is an important find because caecilians are one of the least-studied creatures in the world. Also living there is the world's smallest deer. It is a miniature muntjac only 25-30 inches tall and was found in northern Myanmar. And one of the more interesting finds is the first new monkey species to be discovered in over 100 years. The new species of macaque is one of the highest-dwelling monkeys in the world, living in India's Arunachal Pradesh state at between 5,000 and 11,500 feet above sea level, according to WWF. There were also 242 new plant varieties discovered, including an ultramarine blue flower that two Chinese botanists found when they went down into a Tibetan gorge twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in some places.

The incredibly rare flower was described by WWF as "dramatic in both color and form". The flower is perhaps the best symbol of the effects of climate change in the region as its color changes according to temperature and exposure. As the temperatures drop, its color becomes pure blue, but darkens to a purple when the temperature rises. The eastern Himalayas has 10,000 plant species, 300 mammal species and nearly 1,000 bird species, and is the only place on earth that the greater one-horned rhino exists. "This enormous cultural and biological diversity underscores the fragile nature of an environment which risks being lost forever unless the impacts of climate change are reversed," said Tariq Aziz, leader of the WWF's Living Himalayas initiative. The report's findings will be taken into consideration as world leaders get ready for the climate meeting in Copenhagen in December where they must make a new treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.

Five Ways To Save The World
Last Updated: Tuesday, 20 February 2007, 08:55 GMT
bbc.co.uk

Climate change is being felt the world over and if global warming continues to increase the effects could be catastrophic.

Could these men reduce the amount of sunshine hitting earth? Some scientists and engineers are proposing radical, large-scale ideas that could save us from disaster. The first three proposed ideas featured in the film, look at reducing the power of the sun - thereby cooling the planet.

Professor Roger Angel from Arizona - the designer of the world's largest telescope - is proposing to put a giant glass sunshade in space.

Professor Angel's sunshade will deflect a small percentage of the sun's rays back into space.

Dutch Professor Paul Crutzen won the Nobel Prize for chemistry when he discovered the causes of the hole in the ozone layer. His plan is to fire hundreds of rockets loaded with tons of sulphur into the stratosphere creating a vast, but very thin sunscreen of sulphur around the earth.

British atmospheric physicist Professor John Latham and engineer Stephen Salter, have designed a fleet of remote-controlled yachts. These will pump fine particles of sea water into the clouds, increasing the thickness of the clouds and reflecting the suns rays.

Carbon dioxide debate

The other two men in the programme want to tackle the problem of excess carbon dioxide - the cause of global warming. Ian Jones (L) and Klaus Lackner (R) are tackling carbon dioxide head-on

Sydney engineer Professor Ian Jones proposes to feed plankton with gallons of fertiliser. This will make the plankton grow and absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

And New York-based Professor Klaus Lackner has designed a carbon dioxide capturing machine and his plan is to locate more of them across the globe. They would suck in carbon dioxide, turn it into a powder and he would bury it deep under the ocean in disused oil or gas fields. Most of the scientists are reluctant advocates of these ideas, and all believe we should be cutting down on our use of fossil fuels to heat our homes and drive our cars. But is time running out for planet earth? Although these ideas might have unknown side effects, some scientists believe we may soon have no choice but to put these radical and controversial plans into action. Five Ways To Save The World was broadcast on 19 February 2007 at 2100 GMT on BBC Two.

Producer/director: Jonathan Barker
Directors: Cecilia Hue & Anna Abbott
Executive producer: Karen O'Connor

The Zapata Corporation

Trading under the abbreviation (ZAP) on the New York Stock exchange, the Zapata corporation was founded by former President George H.W. Bush. The company is based in Rochester, New York. Pres. H.W. Bush's company was originally founded as a Oil company based out of Texas in 1953. President H.W. and his fellow investors were known for by their industry applied term "wildcatter". The term refers to drilling oil wells in unconventional areas; it would also become applicable for certain banking practices. The alleged ties between the former President while he was vice-president and president of various subsidiaries of the Zapata Corporation and the CIA are well documented. The fact that the company drilled most of its oil from Central and South America further adds to the bitter irony of its namesake.

Karl Menger, the Menger Sponge, and the Institute for Figuring

Intro Courtesy from the Institute For Figuring

"In the 1920’s a young Austrian named Karl Menger extended the work begun by his mathematical predecessor Siepinski. Menger attended a course of lectures by Professor Hans Hahn at the University of Vienna entitled What’s New Concerning the Concept of the Curve; under Hahn’s encouragement he embarked on an exploration of the concept of dimension that him to an expanded definition of this seemingly obvious term. Several years later Menger reported his discovery of a three-dimensional version of Sierpinski’s Carpet, which came to be known as the Menger Sponge. Where the Carpet is poised between a line and a plane, the Sponge hovers of the boundary of the plane and the solid - its fractional dimension is 2.73.

Though it manifestly occupies a volumetric space, the Menger sponge is essentially a linear object – it possesses a topological dimension of 1. Menger proved that it is indeed the universal curve - that is, any possible one-dimensional curve is mathematically identical to some part of its infinitely complex internal morphology. Though the classical Menger sponge is constructed in three-dimensions, it can be embodied in any number of higher dimensions; consequently any geometry of loop quantum gravity can be embedded in a Menger Sponge. Interestingly then, the structure of spacetime may be allied with this foam-like form."

The Menger Sponge is the 20th century adaptation to the 17th century idea of "Spissitude". Henry More described Spissitude as the fourth spacial dimension. In More's view length, breadth, height, and then spissitude would be the unit of measurement for any object.

Spissitude would find a sound scientific basis in the Minkowski Space theory. Hermann Minkowski, using Einstein's theory of special relativity, acknowledged a single dimension of time, which engulfs the the three known dimensions of space; the effect is a "four-dimensional manifold for representing spacetime. Charles H. Hinton coined the word "tesseract". The physical representation of the fourth dimension, the tesseract was linguistically created in addition to kata/ana. Greek in origin, kata means down from and ana means up toward, kata/ana are similar to the theory of vectors and matrices in their nature.

Stegasaurous carvings on the ancient Cambodian temple, Angkor Wat.

Paulo Freire (B.1921)

Apart from his academic and institutional life, Freire participated in movements for popular education in the early 1960s. The most important of these were the Movement for Popular Culture (MCP) in Recife, the Cultural Extension Service (SEC) at the University of Recife (now the Federal University of Pernambuco: UFPE) and the "Bare feet can also learn to read" campaign in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Norte where Freire got his first chance to try out his method with three hundred sugarcane sharecroppers in the interior village of Angicos in 1963. When that experiment proved successful, he was invited by President Joao Belchior Goulart to implement a national literacy campaign. The program intended to make five million adults literate and politically progressive within the first year. According to the national law at the time, adults could only vote if they were functionally literate to some degree. For years this limiting of the Brazilian electoral college had worked in favor of the hegemonic oligarchy. Now the landowners were threatened by the possibility that the peasants would organize into leagues, become literate and swell the ranks of the voters. The coup d'etat of March 31, 1964 deposed the Goulart government and imposed military rule which lasted for over twenty years. Freire was arrested twice and imprisoned in Olinda and Recife for over two months before receiving political asylum in the Bolivian embassy in Rio and proceeding to La Paz where he found the altitude and uncertain politics contrary to his health and left for Santiago, Chile within a month.

Freire Institute, UCLA

Honeybee mobs overpower hornets

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News

15:48 GMT, Friday, 3 July 2009 16:48 UK

Honeybee hordes use two weapons - heat and carbon dioxide - to kill their natural enemies, giant hornets. Japanese honeybees form "bee balls" - mobbing and smothering the predators. This has previously been referred to as "heat-balling", but a study has now shown that carbon dioxide also plays a role in its lethal effectiveness. In the journal Naturwissenschaften, the scientists describe how hornets are killed within 10 minutes when they are trapped inside a ball of bees. Japanese giant hornets, which can be up to 5cm long, are voracious predators that can devastate bees' nests and consume their larvae. But, if the bees spot their attacker in time, they mount a powerful defence in the form of a bee ball. This study found that the heat inside the bee ball alone was not enough to reliably kill the hornets.

"They can survive for 10 minutes at a temperature up to 47C, and the temperature inside the bee balls does not rise higher than 46C," said Fumio Sakamoto, a researcher from Kyoto Gakuen University in Japan, and one of the authors of the study. His team recreated experimental bee balls and took direct measurements from inside them. They anaesthetised giant hornets and fixed them to the tip either of a thermometer probe, or the inlet of a gas detector. Once the hornets recovered from their anaesthesia, the probes were touched to the bees' nest. "The bee ball formed (around the hornet) immediately," said Dr Sakamoto. After 10 minutes the bees were packed solidly enough around the probe to be removed from the nest in a distinct ball. As the temperature inside the ball increased to more than 45C, the carbon dioxide level also rose sharply.

In a parallel experiment, the scientists found that in an atmosphere relatively high in carbon dioxide, the temperature at which hornets could survive for 10 minutes was lowered. "So we concluded that carbon dioxide produced inside the bee ball by the honeybees is a major factor, together with temperature, involved in the bees' defence." Dr Sakamoto is not sure, at this point, whether the bees were effectively "gassing" the hornets, or simply depriving them of oxygen. "Either way, the carbon dioxide increase and/or the oxygen decrease lowered the temperature that was lethal to the hornets, " he told BBC News. "We are going to do the additional experiments about this point using mixed air of various oxygen and carbon dioxide (concentrations)."

The mob of bees also appeared to operate in "two phases". "The hornet may be killed during the first 0-5 minute period, in which the highest level of heat production and carbon dioxide emissions take place," said Dr Sakamoto. This might suggest that the bees are aware of what physiological state the hornet is in. Dr Sakamoto said: "The latter 5-10 min period may be free running to ensure their victim's death."