 |
| Ceres |
 |
| The Square-Finger Gesture |
 |
| The insurrection was this big |
 |
| Not even this much ... |
I haven't finished that research, but at the moment it seems to be used when the 'splainer has some degree of fear attached to the subject matter being 'splained.
 |
| and ... |
 |
| and ... |
"Gestures are a form of nonverbal communication in which visible bodily actions are used to communicate important messages, either in place of speech or together and in parallel with spoken words. Gestures include movement of the hands, face, or other parts of the body. Physical non-verbal communication such as purely expressive displays, proxemics, or displays of joint
and ... attention differ from gestures, which communicate specific messages. Gestures are culture-specific and can convey very different meanings in different social or cultural settings. Gesture is distinct from sign language. Although some gestures, such as the ubiquitous act of pointing, differ little from one place to another, most gestures do not have invariable or
and ... universal meanings but connote specific meanings in particular cultures. A single emblematic gesture can have very different significance in different cultural contexts, ranging from complimentary to highly offensive. This list includes links to pages that discuss particular gestures, as well as short descriptions of some gestures that do not have their own page. Not
and ... included are the specialized gestures, calls, and signals used by referees and umpires in various organized sports. Police officers also make gestures when directing traffic. Mime is an art form in which the performer utilizes gestures to convey a story.Charades is a game of gestures."
and ...
(Wikipedia, emphasis added).
And let's not forget that any form of communication can be truthful or false, but gestures are probably a situation where proving someone was not "telling" the truth would be much more difficult to prove.
 |
| ... and ... |
How could we tell if they were saying "taxes will only be this much" or "I was this close to winning" or "I was only going this fast officer"?
More only this much research is needed to know for sure.
 |
| Tsunami Stops Concert |
On xMass eve in 1929 president Hoover was heading up a White House Dinner of elites.(Paraphrased, see also this). It reminded me of the movie "Titanic" where the ship of that state was going down but the band kept playing.
During that celebration fire alarms went off as the Oval Office in the West Wing caught fire.
The President, smoking a cigar, watched the firefight as it burned.
The First Lady wanted the band to continue playing xMass music.
"The stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression cost Fisher much of his personal wealth and academic reputation. He famously predicted, nine days before the crash, that stock prices had 'reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.' "(Irving Fisher). When the government sleeps not every eye is closed, but some eyes are closed (U.S. Geological Survey Unable To Provide Indonesia Tsunami Data Due To Government Shutdown).
 |
| Fig. 1 Ring of Fire |
 |
| Fig. 2 Two Hundred Times Worse |
 |
| "I Wub You The Wong Way" |
 |
| Fig. 1 Sea Level Zones |
Established in 1933, the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) has been responsible for the collection, publication, analysis and interpretation of sea level data from the global network of tide gauges. It is based in Liverpool at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), which is a component of the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).(About PSMSL). That download is only the beginning of it, not the end of it, because then comes the software design and coding to handle it.
 |
| Fig. 1 U.S gets the worst sea level rise (SLR) |
"The surge that's scheduled to hit the American coastline Wednesday isn't coming from a hurricane, but it could still leave a feeling of helplessness in its wake.Go ahead and tell those people who are suffering an economic impact now, that they need to worry about their great, great, grandchildren when it comes to SLR and other climate change factors.
Flood insurance rates are set to skyrocket when a new bill goes into effect on April 1. Known as the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 (HFIAA), it's going to drive the prices of flood insurance plans through the roof for residents of all U.S. coastlines.
How much could they increase? In some areas where flood maps show maximum risk, premiums that were previously $500 could be raised to as much as $20,000 a year or more, according to estimates released in 2013.
"My insurance is more than my mortgage," said Nancy Loft-Powers, a resident of Deerfield Beach, Florida, who told the Washington Post that her premium will be raised from the $7,500 she already pays annually. "I live by the beach in an old neighborhood. I pay [too much] insurance for a crap house that’s not great." (Flood Insurance Rates To Increase, emphasis added)
"McLaughlins’ flood insurance renewal came with a whopping rate hike of $21,000. McLaughlin said he’s convinced FEMA intentionally kept consumers and real estate and mortgage companies in the dark about the rate increases.
The astronomical increase also took McLaughlin’s mortgage holder by surprise. An oversight of this magnitude tends to expose lenders to more risk because homeowners likely can’t afford to pay for the new policies." ($24,000 Insurance Policy, emphasis added).
"Congress ordered a rate increase because the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is $24 billion in debt. It reached that historic amount because revenue from the discounted premiums could not cover payments on flood claims, particularly after two devastating hurricanes, Katrina and Sandy, on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.
...
Rising sea levels from climate change make coastal living even more dangerous, conservationists say. And the flood-insurance program that went into the red paying flood claims is deep in debt to a U.S. treasury funded by taxpayers, advocates say." (Rising Waters, Flood Debt, emphasis added)
The sea-level rise scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not necessarily provide the right information for high-risk coastal decision-making and management, according to new research involving scientists from the Global Climate Forum in Berlin.(Global Climate Forum, emphasis added, cf. this PDF). Those "paleo-records of sea-level change" mentioned in the quote contain records of abrupt SLR.
A commentary, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, warns that the IPCC scenarios are often inappropriate or incomplete for the management of high-risk coastal areas as they exclude the potential for extreme sea-level rises. This missing information is also crucial for a number of policy processes, such as discussions by G7 countries to establish climate insurance policies and allocations of adaptation funding by the Green Climate Funds.
“Although the IPCC scenarios are a big step forward in understanding how the climate system works, these scenarios are not designed from the perspective of coastal risk management and, unfortunately, this is not spelled out clearly both within and beyond the IPCC reports,” says lead author Dr Jochen Hinkel from the Global Climate Forum. Dr Hinkel is also Lead Author of the coastal chapter of the Working Group 2 contribution to the latest IPCC report.
The IPCC sea-level rise scenarios are developed for the purpose of understanding the physics of the earth system through so called process-based models, which are models based on the laws of physics. As a consequence, these scenarios cover only the central range of possible sea-level rise. For example, the scenarios of IPCC Fifth Assessment Report estimate that by 2100 global mean sea-level is likely to rise by 0.28–0.98m relative to 1986–2005. The probability of staying within this range is, however, estimated to be only at least 66 per cent.
...
“Consider, for example, the situation of London,” explains Dr Hinkel, “which is protected against coastal floods through the Thames Estuary Barrier. There was concern that rapid sea-level rise would not allow sufficient time to upgrade or replace the Thames Estuary Barrier because such large engineering tasks require 25–30 years for planning and implementation.” For such a situation, the IPCC scenario range is not the right piece of information, because there is a 0–33 per cent probability of sea-level rise lying outside of this range. Such a high residual risk is not tolerable from the perspective of protecting major cities from sea-level rise. These situations require high-end scenarios in order to make sure that there are options available that can be realised even in the worst case to come.
Co-author Professor Carlo Jaeger from the Beijing Normal University says: “Ongoing work on projecting the central range of sea-level rise should be complemented with the development of high-end scenarios for different time horizons that correspond to different real-world coastal management decisions.”
“Such scenarios should also consider all the information on future sea levels including semi-empirical models, physical constraints on ice-sheet dynamics and paleo-records of sea-level change, because coastal high-risk management requires an analysis of decisions against all available knowledge, including all uncertainties and also ambiguities amongst expert opinions and their distinct approaches,” says Dr Hinkel.
"On a humid March day, trucks laden with goods bump through pools of seawater on roads to the sinking Dutch-era port." (Indonesia)The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here
"More than 130 port cities around the world are at increasing risk from severe storm-surge flooding, damage from high storm winds, rising and warming global seas and local land subsidence." (130 Port Cities)
"In a survey posed to port authorities around the world, the Stanford team found that most officials are unsure how best to protect their facilities from rising sea levels ..." (Seaports need a plan)
"For example, if relative sea levels rise 4 feet, 72 percent of ports in the region will be at least partially inundated." (EPA Says, p.3)
"Port Perceptions of Sea Level Rise ... Seaport managers concerned and under informed" (Stanford Ocean Council says ...)
"Ports have a special need to look ahead, assess their risks and begin adapting to climate change. With truly massive fixed infrastructure, large port facilities worldwide are starting to pay particular attention to the new outlook that sea level rise has only just started. With a useful life of a half century or longer for their assets, it is very relevant to start planning ahead for the new reality. " (Seaport Magazine, Englander says ...)
"Using a mid-range scenario for future sea level rise, we find that, by 2030, more than half of the 52 communities we analyzed on the East and Gulf Coasts can expect to average more than two dozen tidal floods per year. Importantly, the rise in the frequency of tidal flooding represents an extremely steep increase for many of these communities. In the next 15 years alone, two-thirds of these communities could see a tripling or more in the number of high-tide floods each year. The mid-Atlantic coast is expected to see some of the greatest increases in flood frequency. Because many communities are already coping with tidal floods, a tripling in their frequency means that, by 2030, such floods could occur more than once a week." (Union of Concerned Scientists, see third video below).
 |
| Fig. 1 Climate Change and Sea Level |
 |
| Fig. 2 Axis Upheaval |
And of all things, like I wrote about in Friday's post, quoting the science team that works on this physics oriented aspect of SLR / SLF, when the ice sheet of West Antarctica (WAIS) melts, the resulting SLR of 4 ft. will manifest at, of all places, the coasts of the United States!
Not only that, the same thing happens to the U.S. when the ice sheet at Greenland melts (Greenland & Antarctica Invade The United States, 2, 3).
Double whammy!
 |
| Fig. 3 Alaska SLF |
However, meltwater pulse 1C (8,200-7,600 years ago) left traces at numerous locations in the United States, northwestern Europe, and China. It occurred soon after the 8200 year cold event, which resulted from the final catastrophic drainage of glacial Lakes Agassiz and Ojibway around 8400 years ago. The torrent of around 100,000 cubic kilometers unleashed within a few years or less amounted to barely a meter rise in global sea level, if evenly spread across the world's oceans (note 1). Yet the stratigraphic record preserves vestiges of this relatively minor pulse.(The Surge: A Forgotten Aspect of Sea Level Rise, cf. Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 45). SLF is the hidden gorilla in the SLR room, and it should be studied forthwith.
 |
| The entropy species |
"For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth's poor resources could not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.(ibid, link in first sentence of this post). I won't spoil it for you, so read it all, because it is quite interesting.
But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact.
The energy of the sun was stored, converted, and utilized directly on a planet-wide scale. All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half the distance of the Moon. All Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower."
"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). This is the type of entropy that is not a matter of pure physics.
"The heat death of the universe is a historically suggested ultimate fate of the universe in which the universe has diminished to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and therefore can no longer sustain processes that consume energy (including computation and life). Heat death does not imply any particular absolute temperature; it only requires that temperature differences or other processes may no longer be exploited to perform work. In the language of physics, this is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium (maximum entropy)."(Heat Death of the Universe, links & formatting removed). This is an old back and forth debate in science.
 |
| California Trance Auction |
"Officials have implored Californians to cut down on water usage, but recent data show residents saved less water in February than in any other month since the state started tracking water conservation. Southern California residents actually used more water than average that month."(California ... Worst Drought In 1,200 Years, emphasis added). The California reaction to a clear and present danger seems to be "keep on keeping on", "what, me worry?", "what water shortage?", "we never have bad weather like you do" - Bill Maher (paraphrased), and/or "who cares!"
 |
| “The changes we’re seeing are really drastic” |
 |
| March 2015: 401.52 ppm |
 |
| The recent catastrophic rise of CO2 |
 |
| CO2 Levels for February Eclipsed Prehistoric Highs |
 |
| The Pebble comet |
During its brief mission, Philae collected some key data, including images that show the entire comet may be made of pebbles, scientists said at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston this week.(Comet Made of Pebbles, emphasis added). My recollection of the meaning of "pebble" created images of the banks of beautiful streams and even some beaches.
If confirmed, scientists will have to rethink how pebbles as big as some seen on 67P could form so far from the sun.
Definition of pebble in English:(Oxford Dictionary, emphasis added, cf. pebble). This is the type of situation found repeatedly by our spacecraft.
noun
A small stone made smooth and round by the action of water or sand.
Example sentences:
We had sediments, river mud, pebbles rounded by water action, even the remains of aquatic plants on the site.
It's a lovely place and we walked across stepping stones and skimmed pebbles in the river.
They consist of particulate rocks that vary in size from sand to pebbles and cobbles.
Is the act of contemplating life on other planets in the universe a "scientific" thing to do?(Exploded Planet Hypothesis). We are constantly discovering new evidence of "bombardment" from asteroids and meteorites that have damaged all planets that we observe in our solar system.
At least in the sense of wondering how they might approach the issue of clean sources of energy compared with the other side of that coin, the many pollution generating sources of energy?
Or is such contemplation an activity properly left to mystics, UFO folk, and others of that "unscientific" ilk?
In prior posts we have mentioned the contemplations of scientist Freeman Dyson, who wondered how civilizations on other planets, if they exist, would deal with the energy crisis our existing civilization faces.
If scientists like Freeman Dyson professionally contemplate, and even go so far as to predict forms of alien energy systems, such as the "bubble" shown in the photo above, then the contemplation of extraterrestrial potential is by definition scientific ...
 |
| Miss Piggy Is "Using" |
With doublespeak, banks don't have "bad loans" or "bad debts"; they have "nonperforming assets" or "nonperforming credits" which are "rolled over" or "rescheduled." Corporations never lose money; they just experience "negative cash flow," "deficit enhancement," "net profit revenue deficiencies," or "negative contributions to profits."(Propaganda Is A "Toxic Asset", quoting professor Lutz). Which brings me to "The Innocence Project" ... as I understand it ... or as I don't understand it:
The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal organization that is committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people through the use of DNA testing, and to reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. To date, the work of the Innocence Project has led to the freeing of 325 wrongfully convicted people, including 18 who spent time on death row.(Boston Wikerpedier, emphasis added). The innocence, or lack thereof, of both individuals and groups, is a concept that floats atop a massive ocean of cognition.
From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information — or, as 23andme, a prominent genetic testing company, says on its Web site, “The more you know about your DNA, the more you know about yourself.”(On The Origin of Genieology, emphasis added). Yikes! ... There are some other wild and crazy stories that should be told before the music plays.
But scientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people.
Medical researchers aren’t the only scientists interested in our multitudes of personal genomes. So are forensic scientists. When they attempt to identify criminals or murder victims by matching DNA, they want to avoid being misled by the variety of genomes inside a single person.
Last year, for example, forensic scientists at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory Division described how a saliva sample and a sperm sample from the same suspect in a sexual assault case didn’t match.
