A park near my house. Under fog instead of under snow is a welcome change.
a foggy day
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Have it Facebook’s Way
Facebook de-friends Burger King:
Facebook is no longer friends with Burger King, which it charges improperly used the site to pump up biz by offering users a free Whopper sandwich if they dumped 10 of their pals on the social-networking site.
Facebook disabled the fast-food chain's "Whopper Sacrifice" app this week, saying that it violated the site's privacy
policy by alerting users when they were de-friended. Under normal
circumstances, de-friending is a quiet, anonymous act; Facebook doesn’t
inform you if you've been dumped.
from the department of I Bet They’re singing a Different Tune Now
Over at Balloon Juice, in a post anticipating the predictable flow of Bush revisionism we can expect from the dank and undisclosed locations of the right, they reminded me of this little ditty by The Right Brothers that came out a few years ago. It was during a yahoo pulse of Republican victory laps – maybe the '04 election cycle? Wonder if they still perform this.
Kind of surprised the Obama campaign didn't put this on 24 hour rotation during the election.Catchy tune though. And how many times is Zell Miller going to find himself in a pop tune?
Also, listening again the song skates awfully close to a ripoff of Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire."
Beating the Odds
US Airways Plane Crashes In Hudson River
No deaths or life threatening injuries! Surviving a commercial plane crash makes you a member of a pretty exclusive club. These folks are very very lucky.
Some perspective From PlaneCrashInfo
Survival rate of passengers on
aircraft involved in fatal accidents
carrying 10+ passengers
|
| Survival rate of passengers on aircraft ditching during controlled flight | 53% |
Source: PlaneCrashInfo.com accident database
Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches – Times Online
Interesting to see e-activities described in CO2, and to note that the benefits of 'paperless' transactions have balancing costs.
Times Online.
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.
While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.
While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
As mentioned later in the article, what the IT burn is displacing is key. My view is that through entertainment and social networking we are increasing the carbon footprint of our personal lives.
If your internet use is in place of more energy-intensive activities, such as
driving your car to the shops, that’s good. But if it is adding activities
and energy consumption that would not otherwise happen, that may pose
problems.
Newcombe cites Second Life and Twitter, a rapidly growing website whose 3m
users post millions of messages a month. Last week Stephen Fry, the TV
presenter, was posting “tweets” from New Zealand, imparting such vital
information as “Arrived in Queenstown. Hurrah. Full of bungy jumping and
‘activewear’ shops”, and “Honestly. NZ weather makes UK look stable and
clement”.
Blue Biotechnology
My cGRASP blurb in the European Life Sciences Journal:
Salmon,trout, and the other salmonids are species of great economic and social importance to
Canada and many other nations worldwide, particularly for coastal, rural and Aboriginal communities. T
he Consortium for Genomic Research on All Salmonids Project (cGRASP) integrates salmonid programmes in four nations – Canada, Norway, USA and the UK – into a unified research effort to develop critical genomics resources and tools that will further our understanding of salmonids, and support research in the areas of aquaculture, wild stock management and environmental protection.
Canada and many other nations worldwide, particularly for coastal, rural and Aboriginal communities. T
he Consortium for Genomic Research on All Salmonids Project (cGRASP) integrates salmonid programmes in four nations – Canada, Norway, USA and the UK – into a unified research effort to develop critical genomics resources and tools that will further our understanding of salmonids, and support research in the areas of aquaculture, wild stock management and environmental protection.Blueprint redux
The Hogue lab and the Blueprint trademark are alive and well at NUS in Singapore.
Brief History: Between 1997-2007 the Hogue Laboratory (Blueprint.org)
was located at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto where we developed BIND
and other bioinformatics resources. Dr. Hogue was affiliated with the
University of Toronto as a non-tenure track Associate Professor.
Facing funding and staffing cutbacks in 2005, the intellectual property
amassed by the group was sold by Mount Sinai Hospital & founders to
Thomson-Reuters Scientific in March of 2007.
was located at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto where we developed BIND
and other bioinformatics resources. Dr. Hogue was affiliated with the
University of Toronto as a non-tenure track Associate Professor.
Facing funding and staffing cutbacks in 2005, the intellectual property
amassed by the group was sold by Mount Sinai Hospital & founders to
Thomson-Reuters Scientific in March of 2007.
In late 2007 Dr.
Hogue moved to Singapore where he is now tenure-track faculty in
Southeast Asia's Premiere Research University – the National
Unviversity of Singapore.
And he has put up the archives of the old Mt. Sinai-based phase of the project. Ah, memories. Having helped open the Blueprint node in Singapore a few years ago, it's great to see Blueprint find new life there.
Global Warming is Over? Yay!
I have noticed a lot of opinion traffic, like this, seizing on the recent cold snaps across North America and spinning it as an end to Climate Change theory. Now I am no climate change expert by any means, and I sure as hell would like the scientific consensus to be wrong (see recent Vancouver photo at right), so I dropped in on RealClimate to see what's going on.
So what to make of the latest year's data? First off, we expect that there will be oscillations in the global mean temperature. No climate model has ever shown a year-on-year increase in temperatures because of the currently expected amount of global warming. A big factor in those oscillations is ENSO – whether there is a a warm El Niño event, or a cool La Niña event makes an appreciable difference in the global mean anomalies – about 0.1 to 0.2ºC for significant events. There was a significant La Niña at the beginning of this year (and that is fully included in the D-N annual mean), and that undoubtedly played a role in this year's relative coolness. It's worth pointing out that 2000 also had a similarly sized La Niña but was notably cooler than this last year.
While ENSO is one factor in the annual variability, it is not the only one. There are both other sources of internal variability and external forcings. The other internal variations can be a little difficult to characterise (it isn't as simple as just a super-position of all the climate acronyms you ever heard of NAO+SAM+PDO+AMO+MJO etc.), but the external (natural) forcings are a little easier. The two main ones are volcanic variability and solar forcing. There have been no climatically significant volcanoes since 1991, and so that is not a factor. However, we \are at a solar minimum. The impacts of the solar cycle on the surface temperature record are somewhat disputed, but it might be as large as 0.1ºC from solar min to solar max, with a lag of a year or two. Thus for 2008, one might expect a deviation below trend (the difference between mean solar and solar min, and expecting the impact to not yet be fully felt) of up to 0.05ºC. Not a very big signal, and not one that would shift the rankings significantly.
There were a number of rather overheated claimsearlier this year that 'all the global warming had been erased' by the La Niña-related anomaly. This was always ridiculous, and now that most of that anomaly has passed, we aren't holding our breath waiting for the 'global warming is now back' headlines from the same sources.
the good shepherd
I was disappointed to see the crap rating from rotten tomatoes. I loved this movie. Chronicling the genesis of the CIA, at nearly 3 hours, it was plodding enough to feel authentic and perhaps that's what I enjoyed. It rang true from start to finish. And this exchange between Damon and Pesci illuminated, in my view anyway, the organizing psychology of the American ruling class, for better or worse.
Dear Santa, I want 132 bloodthirsty “Roman War Soldiers” for Christmas
My daughters have taken over some of my ancient and ragged comics from the early seventies, and browsing one of the them I noticed an ad that fascinated me as a kid. 132 raging Romans, snarling at each other's throats, for only $1.98! Never did send away for them (by the time I rated an allowance my interests had moved on I guess. I would love to see what actually came in the mail. 132 pieces of something I guess.
iBiome 
