Norway saves the planet and other stuff

Thank you, Norway!  Helping keep the Brazilian rain forests alive.

Kate Beaton.

Joe Hill, who should never be erased from history.



Library books that people try to censor most.

Myth Surrounding Alleged Iranian Nuclear Facility Begins to Unravel

Bill Nye and women's reproduction.

When and Where to See the Super-Rare Supermoon Lunar Eclipse

The evils of microbeads.

Cats v Aquarium and other such matters

Cat v aquarium.

A cure for Alzheimer's?

Gary Younge:  be careful of a polarizing debate over the causes of terrorism.  Nothing is that simple.

Ahmed Merabet's eulogy of his policeman brother:

One must not confuse extremists with Muslims. Madness has neither color nor religion. I want to make another point: stop painting everybody with the same brush, stop burning mosques or synagogues. You are attacking people. It won't bring back our dead, and it won't appease our families.

How long would you survive on other planets without a spacesuit?

BooMan: Why we are not Norway.  (Excellent list of questions)

Does there have to be historical accuracy in movies?

Sleepy time.

Northern lights

How beautiful...

   

Dibs and dabs

How I feel after watching too much politics on tv.

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’

The 35 Most Unforgivable Facebook Statuses

So much joy

Gays finally able to get married.

So much sorrow. Norway.

So many lies.

So much stupidity.

So much fraud.

So much of everything.

Because I really need it

Things that make me laugh:

Hilarious political signs.

You are being watched by a duck.

Censorship!

When weather goes wrong!

Owl ball.

Angry Norwegians in scuba gear chasing the Google Map car....

And speaking of cars... Toyota jokes!

We're all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee......

Weird lights over Norway

Halo cloud over Russia

Meteor over Utah:



Update 12/10: New giant virus discovered!!

Update: Mahakal in comments links to the report:

Russia confirms failed missile launch

And this:



Ssshh... we really know space aliens are involved!

Green tea and mushrooms

Sounds like the start of a joke.... but apparently it helps in fending off breast cancer.

And deep space is messy:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 17, 2009) — A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope offers a rare view of an imminent collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with millions of times the mass of the sun.

The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Millions of years ago, each core was the dense center of its own galaxy before the two galaxies collided and ripped each other apart. Now, these cores are approaching each other at tremendous speeds and preparing for the final cataclysmic collision. They will crash into each other in a few million years, a relatively short period on a galactic timescale.

What big teeth you have, Grandma:

A marine monster described as the most fearsome animal ever to swim in the oceans boasted a bite up to 11 times as strong as that of Tyrannosaurus rex.

The fossil remains of the huge pliosaur were dug up last summer from the permafrost on Svalbard, a Norwegian island close to the North Pole.

Analysis revealed that it was a turbo-charged swimmer. Its front flippers allowed the creature, dubbed Predator X, to cruise along comfortably but when prey came into range the power of its hind flippers kicked in to provide extra acceleration.

Measurements of its jaw and the killing power of its dagger-like teeth have shown that it could bite down with a force of 33,000lb per square inch compared with T. rex’s 3,000lb per square inch. Alligators have the strongest bite today with about 2,500lb per square inch.

And I doubt we're talking about crunching on coconuts, either.

Fish wars

As predicted, when the catch gets low, anger rises, the sense of injustice grows, the irritation at fellow fisherman increases:

Norwegian government coastguards filmed the crew of the Prolific, a Shetland-based trawler, openly discarding more than 5,000 kg of cod and other dead white fish, or nearly 80% of its catch.

According to the coastguard, the boat had previously been inspected in Norwegian waters and declared legal, before crossing into UK waters where it dumped its load. The incident took place on 2 August but the video only came to light in Britain yesterday.

It is illegal to discard fish in Norwegian waters, but boats are forced to do so in European Union waters if they have caught the wrong species of fish or fish that are too small. Last year the EU estimated that between 40% and 60% of all fish caught by trawlers in the North sea is discarded. The practice of dumping is widely recognised as unsustainable but inevitable given the present EU quota system.

Yesterday, Norwegian minister for fisheries and coastal affairs Helga Pedersen, speaking to angry fishing communities in northern Norway who had seen the film, said she would press for review of the EU fishing policy and wanted to ban any boat discarding fish that were caught in Norwegian waters.

Check the link to see the video of what five tons of fish looks like. What a waste.

We can thank the car companies for the oil fix we're in

Look at the background of this cute Norwegian car called a Think: (my bold)

Think's journey to the world market has been similarly full of detours. The company (previously called Pivco) began in 1991 and by 1998 had built more than 1,000 small and charismatic electric runabouts, sold mostly in Norway (where you still see a few on the road). Then, in 1999, the company was bought by the Yankee giant Ford Motor Co., which was scrambling at the time to comply with California's Zero Emission Vehicle mandate, essentially requiring automakers to build fleets of electric vehicles. Ford renamed the company Think Nordic and began a complete redesign of the car. When, in 2003, the American automakers succeeded in modifying California's mandate, Detroit's flirtation with electronic vehicles ended. General Motors Corp. famously killed the EV1 program, and Ford sold Think to a Swiss electronics firm.

"The lawyers stopped us," says Ole Fretheim, the factory's manager. Think went bankrupt in 2006.

The irony is that Ford had already poured $150 million into the Think City project, engineering among other things the car's rigid steel space frame, the crash structure. If and when it comes to the U.S. market -- the company opened an office in Menlo Park, Calif., earlier this year with plans to sell cars stateside in 2009 -- the Think City will be a rarity: A full-speed electric car meeting U.S. and European crash standards.

"The car was 95% complete when Ford stopped development in 2002," says Fretheim. In the long run, he says, the down time might have been a good thing. "When we started work again we had better options for batteries."

95% complete. We almost were there and the automakers tubed it. Why? Why? Why?

In response, here are five electric cars you can buy right now. (link via NTodd at Dohiyi Mir)

Evil socialized medicine

Southern Beale gets to see it function on a trip (in more ways than one) to Norway.

Clearly, our health care system in the US is much much... ah... more .. uh.. differenter!

Gay earthquakes, the new terrorist threat

An Israeli MP has blamed parliament's tolerance of gays for earthquakes that have rocked the Holy Land recently.

Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the tremors had been caused by lawmaking that gave "legitimacy to sodomy".

Israel decriminalised homosexuality in 1988 and has since passed several laws recognising gay rights.

Two earthquakes shook the region last week and a further four struck in November and December.

Well, there's a whole lot of shaking goin' on:

OSLO — A magnitude-6.2 earthquake, the largest ever recorded on Norwegian territory, hit off the Arctic Svalbard islands early Thursday, the national seismic monitoring center said. No casualties or damage were reported.

The quake could have been catastrophic if it had hit a more densely populated area, said Conrad Lindholm, senior researcher of the seismic institute NORSAR.

And in Nevada:

WELLS, Nev. - Windows shattered and building facades and signs fell, but no one was seriously injured when a powerful earthquake shook this rural northeastern town on Thursday.

The quake, which had an estimated magnitude of 6.0, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., struck at 6:16 a.m., near Wells in a sparsely populated area near the Nevada-Utah line.

Elko County commissioners declared a state of emergency. "Almost all of the businesses are shut down. We have no services and no fuel," Commissioner Mike Nannini said.

Damn those gays! We told them to keep the stereo down and not to jump up and down on the ceiling after 10pm...

Present day Noah's Ark

The Italians have the right idea:

ROME, April 6 (UPI) -- Italian environmentalists are drafting a plan to protect the country's biodiversity.

The World Wide Fund for Nature and the Environmental Protection Agency are working together on the plan, which will be used to protect Italian plants, animals and ecosystems.

The two groups will focus on key "eco-regions" -- the Alps and the Mediterranean -- ANSA reported. The Alps, one of the last surviving natural areas in central Europe, are home to 13,000 plants and 30,000 animals.

The WWF says the Mediterranean has 25,000 plants, 62 species of amphibians and 179 kinds of reptiles.

The WWF is coordinating Italy's efforts with groups from Germany, Austria and Switzerland to protect areas that cross international borders. ANSA said 20 different groups are targeting the Mediterranean region.

A recent report said over 45 percent of Italy's vertebrates, 40 percent of its plants and 30 percent of its natural environments are threatened.

As do the Norwegians:

Norway is building a Doomsday bunker that has every known crop seed in the world.

So... will we stop denying the coming catastrophe or continue trying to ignore it?

The {UN} report claims that global warming will lead to desertification, droughts and rising seas and that those living in the tropics will be the worst hit -- from sub-Saharan Africa to the Pacific islands. Billions could face water shortages, and ocean levels might rise for centuries to come. It could lead to a sharp drop in crop yields in Africa and bring heatwaves to Europe and North America. Europe's Alpine glaciers will disappear and much of the coral that comprises Australia's Great Barrier Reef will die from bleaching.
The scientific conclusions -- based on 29,000 sets of data -- also said that up to 30 percent of the Earth's species faced a higher risk of vanishing if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average in the 1980s and '90s. "The urgency of this report prepared by the world's top scientists should be matched by an equally urgent response from governments," said Hans Verolme, director of the global climate change program at the conservation organization WWF. "Doing nothing is not an option."

For after the end of the world

Norway is building a Doomsday bunker that has every known crop seed in the world:

While some of us are stocking up on duct tape, gas masks and enough bottled water to last through the initial weeks of the end of the world, the government of Norway has partnered up with the Global Crop Diversity Trust to prepare for the event that doomsday leaves some survivors. The Svalbard International Seed Vault, dubbed the "doomsday vault," will house samples of every variety of crop seed available in every country in the world. The vault's purpose is safeguard agricultural biodiversity in the event that nuclear war, climate change, a meteor hit or another Earth-shattering event destroys all current plant life in the world or in a particular region.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust has named several other uses for the vault, including replacing seeds lost in damage to any of the 1,400 seed vaults around the world, safeguarding seeds for developing countries and spreading general knowledge of the threat to crop diversity (the United Nations puts the percentage of genetic diversity already lost to ecological damage at 75 percent). But other uses aside, the design of the vault screams "the end is near." This is definitely a structure built with doomsday in mind. Its main purpose is to provide diverse crop life in the event that life as we know it disappears.

[snip]

To protect the global treasure, the tunnel features several reinforced doors before you get to the vaults, and the entrance will be under 24-hour video surveillance. The architects have purposely designed the structure to require no human maintenance at all, for obvious and chilling reasons. The entrance will not be hidden. On the contrary, it will be easy to spot and artistic, equipped with special panels that will reflect light from both sun and the moon quite dramatically. The idea is that the vault should call attention to itself, just in case everyone who currently knows about the vault is unable to share their knowledge of what lies deep inside one of the mountains of the Svalbard islands.