Article Archive for March 2009
Tsunami Not Finished
The tsunami of 2004 that killed over 200,000 people, as bad as it was, could’ve been much worse, and might be one day.
According to Scientific American,
Evidently, the 2007 events released only a quarter of the stress trapped within. The teams report in the December 4 Nature and the December 12 Science that another tsunami-unleashing earthquake could occur there at any time.
Ironically, aligning with Velikovsky, and his “cultural amnesia”, those of us who only witnessed this on the TV news, have almost forgotten it happened, a mere 4 years later. This is to me the crux of the problem, when trying to engage folk with the idea of a global cataclysm. Nope, won’t happen, not us.
Science is powerful, but is weak compared to experience. One million people dying in a tsunami somewhere else, is not as powerful as being without email for a week here and now.
Baby Earth Might Uncover Magnetic Field Secrets
Dan Lathrop has built his fourth “baby Earth”, a model designed to help better understand our planet’s magnetic forces. The previous version was just two feet in diameter, and failed to generate a magnetic field of its own. The new model is ten feet across, and will spin at 145 kph. Dan and his team are hoping that this will be big enough to create a magnetic field, and lead to some understanding of how this aspect of Earth ticks.
Of special interest is magnetic pole shifts – what causes them, and when will the next one be. In an interview Dan suggests that we would have a century or two up our sleeves to prepare. Hopefully Dan’s experiment will have results prior to 2012…
Article at NPR
Dan’s Lab site
Dramatic Weather Variations Sometimes Have No Discernible Cause
New Scientist published an eye-opening article a few weeks back, and it is especially relevant to the global warming scaremongering we are experiencing of late… It concerns the year 1709, when winter became a very calamitous affair:
People across Europe awoke on 6 January 1709 to find the temperature had plummeted… The sea froze. Lakes and rivers froze, and the soil froze to a depth of a metre or more. Livestock died from cold in their barns, chicken’s combs froze and fell off, trees exploded and travellers froze to death on the roads. It was the coldest winter in 500 years.
…In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 °C on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days. After a brief thaw at the end of that month the cold returned with a vengeance and stayed until mid-March.
Fish froze in the rivers, game lay down in …
NASA: Impact of Solar Flare
NASA’s 132-page report, entitled Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts, paints a pretty grim picture of the damage that could occur in the USA (and presumably elsewhere in the world) due to severe space weather:
According to the report, power grids may be more vulnerable than ever. The problem is interconnectedness. In recent years, utilities have joined grids together to allow long-distance transmission of low-cost power to areas of sudden demand. On a hot summer day in California, for instance, people in Los Angeles might be running their air conditioners on power routed from Oregon. It makes economic sense—but not necessarily geomagnetic sense. Interconnectedness makes the system susceptible to wide-ranging “cascade failures.”
…He found more than 350 transformers at risk of permanent damage and 130 million people without power. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with “water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods …
Antarctic Mountains Prove Pole Shift?
I’ve been puzzled by this for a long time. On the one hand Charles Hapgood (endorsed by Einstein) gave us the crustal displacement theory (aka pole shift), and found some ancient maps that showed an Antarctica without ice. On the other hand, orthodox science tells us there is plenty of evidence (such as ice cores) that tell us the ice has been there a very long time. And that the trees found buried there were from millions of years ago.
Now we have this from Discover magazine, regarding a recently discovered mountain range deep beneath the ice:
…researchers expected to see a plateau formation, indicating that the peaks had been worn down over millennia. Instead, says researcher Robin Bell: “They are incredibly rough mountains — they look like alligators’ teeth”.
“The surprising thing was that not only is this mountain range the size of the Alps, but it looks quite similar to the …
Cycle Up Some Electricity in a Bunker
Makes no sense to me, but I keep on finding the same factoid:
With the electricity produced by an hour of pedaling, we could light a 100-watt incandescent bulb for an hour.
Or, in other words, one cents worth of electricity. Granted, a 20-watt bulb has some value, and an hour of stationary cycling would keep it running for 5 hours.
If you find yourself in a post-SHTF scenario, please please please place some effort into creating some passive energy. Think windmill, river turbine, solar, steam… Don’t pedal, because burning the food you ate to generate that pedal-power, would most likely create more electricity, without pedaling . And you wouldn’t be so tired, or embarrassed.
