"A change in our climate is taking place very sensibly." [Snowfall has become]..."less frequent and less deep." [Rivers that once]... "seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now."--"Notes on the State of Virginia" by Thomas Jefferson, published in 1785.
The Holocene is our current geological epoch. It began after Earth’s last Ice age ended some 11,700 years ago.
Obama suggested that people whose insurance plans were disqualified by the ACA "go shopping" on the ACA exchanges for new ones. Isn't that what they did when they bought their original plans, shopped for what they wanted?
The direction of health care, whether they say it or not: "In CBO’s estimates, the increase in spending for Medicare and Medicaid will account for 80 percent of spending increases for the three entitlement programs between now and 2035 and 90 percent of spending growth between now and 2080. Thus, reducing overall government spending relative to what would occur under current fiscal policy would require fundamental changes in the trajectory of federal health spending. Slowing the growth rate of outlays for Medicare and Medicaid is the central long-term challenge for fiscal policy."--From the CBO Chairman's Blog. This is the reason for the ACA.
Of the 270 Apollo 11 Moon Rocks and Apollo 17 "Goodwill Moon Rocks" that were given to the nations of the world by the Nixon Administration approximately 180 are currently unaccounted for.
The letter "H" has been a source of conflict; to pronounce or not? In ancient Rome, they were snooty not about people who dropped their Hs but about those who picked up extra ones. Catullus wrote a nasty little poem about Arrius (H'arrius he called him), who littered his sentences with Hs because he wanted to sound more Greek. Originally in Britain, "H" was pronounced but, by 1858, it changed so if one wanted to speak correctly, he would say "erb", "ospital" and "umble". (These people dropping their h's were described in the Times as "h-less socialists.") Is it "a hotel" or "an otel"; is it "a historian" or "an historian"? Now there is no single correct version.
"H" owes its name to the Normans, who brought their letter "hache" with them in 1066. Hache is the source of our word "hatchet," probably because a lower-case H looks a lot like an axe. Leave it to the Normans to see a weapon everywhere.
India has launched a rocket containing an orbiter probe with the aim of being the first Asian nation to reach Mars.
Israel is angry the Obama administration has identified them as the source of an attack on a military base near the Syrian port city of Latakia on Wednesday. Israel has not acknowledged carrying out the strike, one of half a dozen such attacks widely ascribed to Israel in recent months, but an Obama administration official told CNN on Thursday that Israeli warplanes had indeed attacked the Syrian base, and that the target was “missiles and related equipment” set for delivery to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Third World Exploitation: The 19 Billion dollar case involving Chevron and their Texaco unit in Ecuador is really enlightening. Bribery, coercion, and made up scientific research all contributed to a massive fraud using the Ecuador courts as enforcer. Thieves and the Third World courts are a great combination for future exploitation of the rest of us.
Golden Oldie:
An unparalleled archive of shipwreck images will be presented for sale at Sotheby’s London auction on 12th November 2013. Taken by four generations of the Gibson family of photographers over nearly 130 years, the 1000 negatives record the wrecks of over 200 ships and the fate of their passengers, crew and cargo as they travelled from across the world through the notoriously treacherous seas around Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly between 1869 and 1997. The archive will be sold as a single lot in Sotheby's Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History sale, and is estimated to achieve between £100,000 and £150,000.
"This is the greatest archive of the drama and mechanics of shipwreck we will ever see--a thousand images stretching over 130 years, of such power, insight and nostalgia that even the most passive observer cannot fail to feel the excitement or pathos of the events they depict."--Rex Cowan, shipwreck hunter and author
Average wages in China have quadrupled since 2000. U.S. wages are going up 2 to 3% per year – Chinese 10% to 15%.
From an article in GreenTechGrid that collected interviews with energy storage CEOs: "The cost of regulatory intervention at the federal legislative and FERC levels is seen as highly prohibitive. CEOs are avoiding direct engagement at those levels, and most want their industry associations to pick up the burden of FERC-level regulatory intervention."
Who was....Erik Weisz?
"If you want to be an optimist about America, stand on your head. Our country looks so much better from the bottom up, than from the top down. What you see if you look at the country from the bottom up is that it is full of people who just didn't get the word. They did not get the word that China is going to eat our lunch or that Germany is going to eat our breakfast and so they just go out and start stuff, and invent stuff and collaborate on stuff. If I were to draw a picture of America today it would be the Space Shuttle taking off. You've seen that picture -- all that thrust coming from below. That's all those people who didn't get the word. But in our case, our booster rocket – Washington, DC – is cracked and leaking energy. And the pilots in the cockpit are fighting over the flight plan."--Tom Friedman
The average heavy truck consumes as much fuel as 40 sedans in a year. Such vehicles make up just 1% of the U.S. vehicle fleet, but consume 20% of the fuel.
Tom Noguchi, the famous pathologist, has a book describing the wounds suffered by Robert Kennedy. Soot was found in Kennedy's hair; soot in the scalp hair meant the gun had been triggered within inches of his head, Noguchi wrote in the book. But none of the witnesses could explain the position of the wound behind the ear--Sirhan shot from the front right--and none of the technology or experts could prove the bullets were from Sirhan's gun despite the overwhelming and obvious witness evidence.
Only 3% of people who are engaged or married have a prenuptial agreement, according to a 2010 survey by Harris Interactive.
Oil production in the US has jumped by 2.5 million barrels per day since 2007 and is still growing. But analysis shows that the growth is slowing. Currently, the net increase from new oil wells drilled minus decline from existing oil wells in the Bakken and Eagle Ford oil shales is 50,000 barrels per day. Tom Whipple, using EIA data, suggests oil production will peak by 2015, without an investment surge in drilling rigs.
Kepler-78b is a planet only slightly larger than the Earth, the most similar in size to the Earth of any exoplanet yet directly discovered. Its orbit, however, is extraordinary in the sense that it circles a Sun-like star 40 times closer than planet Mercury does to our Sun. At such a scathing distance, even rock is liquid. More, its orbit should degrade and it should be sucked into its sun. Maybe it already has been.
AAAAAAaaaaaaaddddddd...........a picture of ghostly towers of steam and gas venting from fumaroles in the geothermal area in Hverir, Iceland against an aurora background that looks like "Alien."
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