Hurricanes hardly happen...

Reddit has a discussion about emergency and hurricane preparedness.

Bloomberg News: Romney ‘rented’ Mormon church’s exemption to defer taxes for 15 years

SOTP!

One thing about field biology.... itching.

Sweden wants your trash.

Friday cats on Monday:  Grumpy cat gets tickled.

Cat turns archaeologist.

From Swedes to Sketches...

Scandinavian humor (with explanations!)

And of course, if we discuss Sweden at all, we must include: (bork bork bork)

   

Prehistoric monster snake invades New York. Think I saw this movie....

The true cost of coal:

This presents a bit of a challenge, given that the Appalachian communities where the mining takes place are extremely poor, and poverty and low education are associated with a lot of health problems. In addition, many of the problems associated with coal mining—particulates from the mining process and water contamination—don't respect the county borders that divide up the health care data. But even after adjusting for the variations in things like income and education, counties with active coal mines came out far worst in many measures of health. These include the problems you'd expect from mining, such as cardiopulmonary and respiratory issues, black lung, hypertension, and kidney disease. But they also include things like a 25 percent increase in birth defects in mining counties. Ahern summed up the fate of people located near mines rather grimly: "Their property value goes down to zero, then they get ill, then they die."

Shutting down a California Monsanto office for a day.

Etch a Sketch will live on now in perpetuity ....

Stuff I read today....

Radiation detected 400 miles off Japanese coast

Radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant disaster has been detected as far as almost 400 miles off Japan in the Pacific Ocean, with water showing readings of up to 1,000 times more than prior levels, scientists reported Tuesday.

300 million year old forest

Netherlands Closing 8 Prisons Due To Plummeting Crime Rates

DEAR ENTREPRENEURS, ATHLETES AND LOTTERY WINNERS: Here's How To Keep All That Money You Made

 SwedishMealTime chef

 The great escape: the bath toys that swam the Pacific

When 28,800 bath toys fell off a cargo ship in the Pacific 20 years ago, they began an incredible journey. While some washed up in British Columbia and Hawaii, countless others circumnavigated the globe.

Tiny 'Soccer Ball' Space Molecules Could Equal 10,000 Mount Everests

Opus Dei: Neofascism Within the Catholic Church

Teaching science and evolution to religious rural kids.

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

Sweden meets rap

And cooks dinner.

Don't throw your plate scrapings into the garbage!

You could drive your car on that!: [my bold]

Scandinavian Biogas is investing about 10 million euros to upgrade a wastewater treatment plant in Ulsan and will soon start accepting food and other waste for processing into biogas, said Scandinavian Biogas President and CEO Thomas Davidsson.

"Producing biogas is a very effective way of taking care of the waste" as it can be used for heat, electricity and vehicle fuel, Davidsson said in an interview Wednesday. He was in Seoul to participate in the Seoul Climate Change Expo held in conjunction with the third C40 Large Cities Climate Summit.

Turning food waste into biogas can also contribute to efforts to stop global warming.

"If you dump it into the sea, methane will be produced," he said. "And methane released into the air is 21 times more aggressive than carbon dioxide. So it has a great impact on the greenhouse effect."

Ulsan is not alone in looking to Sweden for help. Seoul, South Korea's largest city with a population of over 10 million people, also sees potential in biogas and has teamed up with Swedish Biogas International AB on a pilot project.

"There is a lot of potential," Kjell Enstrom, who heads the company's operations in South Korea, said Thursday in an interview.

South Korea has the ability to produce biogas, Enstrom said, though not of a clean enough level to be used as fuel. That gives companies from Sweden, which has championed the technology, an advantage.

"Within 10 years I think it will be the main fuel in Sweden," he said.

Davidsson, of Scandinavian Biogas, said his company plans to initially sell the biogas to an industrial user in Ulsan for internal heating. The company has an agreement to run the facility for at least 15 years, he said.

Ulsan's Park said that as a long-term goal, the city wants to adopt the biogas system to all its public buses.

Davidsson said that among the advantages of biogas is that is a technology that, unlike ethanol, does not draw resources away from food production.

Take that, ethanol!

Why can't we be like the Swedes?

When they had almost an identical economic meltdown:

But Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing.

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.

Gee.. a thoughtful deliberate action instead of a panicked demand for money. How strange.

California beats Sweden!

Stockholm, Sweden (AHN)-What could be one of the world's oldest trees may have been found in the northern Swedish province of Dalecarlia.

According to scientists, who sent samples of the tree to a laboratory in Miami, Florida, the Norwegian spruce dates back to nearly 8,000 years. It grows at a height of 950 meters above sea level, is more than two meters (6.5 feet) tall and about 20 centimeters (8 inches) in width.

Lars Hedlund, a local councilor from Dalecarlia where the tree was found, told Swedish Radio that the tree was one of the first to grow following the end of the ice age.

The Norway spruce is one of the most common spruces, often used as Christmas trees.

Based on the Guinness Book of Records, the oldest living tree is 4,768 years old and is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, 'Methuselah,' located in the White Mountains of California.

Sorry. Been reading too much about Bush and McBush and needed a morale booster.

Ecosystem? What ecosystem? It's all ice anyway...

There's black gold beneath the snow white Arctic -- and oil companies are gearing up to exploit it on a massive scale. Scientists had hoped to warn of the scope of the environmental dangers of Arctic drilling in a new report, but 60 passages have been removed following pressure from the United States and Sweden.

By all accounts, this ought to be a triumphant day for John Calder. The graying director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Arctic Research division spent four years writing his report titled "Arctic Oil and Gas" -- together with 150 scientists with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP). And now it's finally time for Calder to publicly present his first summary of the report.

[snip]

"All nations with territory bordering the polar region are working overtime to exploit their oil and natural gas reserves in the Arctic (more...)," says Calder, as small beads of sweat collect on his forehead. But it is high time, he adds, to systematically address the potential dangers and problems. "We have compiled a document summarizing the facts on oil and gas production in the Arctic."

Among other things, Calder's report warns against the dangers posed by faulty pipes and tanker accidents. "Oil spills are especially dangerous in the Arctic, because its cold and heavily season-dependent ecosystems take a long time to recover. Besides, it is very difficult to remove the damage from oil spills in remote and cold regions, especially in parts of the ocean where there is ice." Calder also criticizes the destruction of landscapes that comes with building pipelines and describes the way Arctic villages would change once the oil money upends all traditional social structures.

The Phrase "Climate Change" Is Unwelcome

But despite these commendable warnings, there is a significant problem behind the work of Calder and other scientists: it has been devalued by political wrangling. Until recently, the summary ended with more than 60 recommendations the scientists had compiled for politicians. Those recommendations have since disappeared.

Disappeared? Scientific recommendations? During the Bush administration? How very strange....

Beware of the dwarf!

Stockholm, Sweden (AHN) - Travelers using long-distance buses are being warned to take extra caution after Swedish police said cases of thieves using midgets in robbing long-distance coaches is on the rise.

Police said the thieves are able to steal from the unsuspecting bus passengers by sneaking the dwarves into the luggage holds in sports bags and once they are inside, the midgets out from the bags and sift through the luggage of the train passengers.

Once they have collected their loot, the dwarves sneaked back to their sports bags and just wait to be picked up when the coach reaches its destination.

Police said this modus operandi of the thieves have enabled them to steal thousands of pounds in cash, gems and other valuables over the past months.

Favorite target of the thieves-using-dwarves are Swebus buses, which services British passengers across Sweden.

"We have had reports about several thefts by dwarves on the stretch between Vasteras and Stockholm," said a spokesman for Swebus. "We're thinking of installing video cameras."

Definitely a good idea.

I'm noticing a theme here....

I think keeping long pointed objects away from children would be a start...

Sweden's medical negligence board, HSAN, is to investigate the case of a boy who had a six centimetre lollipop stick up his nose for eleven months. None of the seven doctors who examined him in that time managed to find it, reported Expressen.

The stick was not found until the spring, when it was discovered embedded in inflamed tissue.

And this:

A German woman who fell on a pencil 55 years ago has just had most of it removed from her head in a complex operation. But the tip will remain in her brain for ever.

A woman who lived with an 8-centimeter (3.1-inch) pencil lodged in her brain for 55 years has had most of it removed in a complex operation. She is now looking forward to a life without headaches and nosebleeds and hopes to also regain her sense of smell.

"When I was four years old I fell down in Dessau with a pencil in my hand. The pencil bored its way through my skin -- and disappeared in my head," Margret Wegner, 59, told the mass circulation newspaper Bild. "It was incredibly painful."

The pencil missed her optic nerve and a major artery by just millimeters. A doctor treated the wound, but no one dared to operate on her brain. She decided to have the life-threatening operation after 55 years, and it was successfully carried out by a surgeon in a Berlin hospital last week.

Most of the pencil -- six centimeters of it -- was removed but the 2-centimeter-long tip has grown in so tightly that it will remain lodged in her brain.

More echoes from wars past:

Europe's soil is blood-soaked from centuries of fighting but rarely yields mass graves from battles that took place before the two world wars. One such grave has now been found near Berlin with over 100 soldiers who died in the 1636 Battle of Wittstock. Archaeologists say they can learn much from the skeletons which show terrible wounds.

Archaeologists in Germany are examining a mass grave containing the skeletons of more than 100 soldiers who fell in a major battle during the Thirty Years War.

Workers came across the graves by chance while digging in a sand pit near the town of Wittstock, northwest of Berlin, in June.

"The special thing about this find is that there are only very few mass graves in Europe between 1300 and 1850 that can be attributed to specific battles," Antje Grothe, the archaeologist leading the excavation, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Historians and archaeologists called to examine the neat rows of skeletons quickly concluded that they were men who died in the Battle of Wittstock on October 4, 1636, when a Protestant army of 16,000 Swedes beat a force of 22,000 from the Catholic alliance of the Holy Roman empire and Saxony. Some 6,000 men died in the fighting.

War is a horror, no matter what era, no matter what religions...

Strange Mickey Mouse type artifact found

Swedish archaeologists have uncovered signs of a Viking precursor to Mickey Mouse. Among the objects found during excavations at Uppåkra in southern Sweden is an iron age figure bearing a strong resemblance to the classic cartoon character.

But archaeologist Jerry Rosenberg from Lund University is confident that the bronze brooch - used as a clasp to fasten women's clothing - was in fact intended to represent a Lion King rather than a mere mouse.

"The find is from around 900 AD. It was probably a lion's head that originally came from France. It was however more than likely designed by somebody who had never actually seen a lion.

"Instead it turned into this sort of strange, fantasy animal," he told The Local.

You realize what this means, don't you? Disney didn't create the first Mickey Mouse! They can't claim the copyright!

They owe Sweden 500 billion dollars in back pay!