As this year’s record-breaking hurricane season officially ends (tell that to Epsilon), the residents of the Canary Islands are picking up from the devastation caused by tropical storm Delta. Delta was the first tropical storm recorded to ever get anywhere near the Canary Islands, according to Jeff Masters. Although is was not officially classified as […]
BILD, der bottomfeeder des Schmuddeljournalismus lotet neue Tiefen aus: Deutsche Geisel – Wird sie geköpft? Schluss, der Irrsinn dieses Blattes und seine millionenfache Ruchlosigkeit sind ansteckend wie Aids und haben in Wirklichkeit schon längst die Abdankung von Takt und Mitleid im weiten Kreis seiner Leser zur Folge gehabt. Warum sonst würden sie sich täglich gemein […]
What an extraordinary hurricane season! I wonder if this is the first tropical storm recorded to have hit Africa? Tropical Storm Delta slammed into Spain’s Canary Islands last night at near hurricane strength, killing at least seven people. One man died when he was blown off the roof he was trying to repair, and six […]
Worried yet about the bird flu? At least the Feds are on the job, now, right? There are competent public-health experts hammering out plans for a response to a flu pandemic, right? Meet Stewart Simonson. He’s the official charged by Bush with “the protection of the civilian population from acts of bioterrorism and other public […]
The Council on Foreign Relations held a conference on Nov. 16 in New York where a number of high-powered panelists discussed the threat of a flu pandemic and the status of avian flu preparedness in the U.S. and around the world. The intensity and complexity of the problem, as laid out in the discussions, is […]
Both are depressing: Kanzlerin Sauerkraut climbs behind the wheel of that stalling, choking, smoking dumptruck that Germany is these days. Good luck, you’ll need it. 53 members of the Bundestag from her own “coalition” voted against her. I give this arrangement no more than 2 years. This government will probably fail not so much over […]
We woke up this morning at 5:30 because Julia was not feeling well, and noticed the woods behind our house were burning. Across an area of about an acre (roughly a third of a hectare) the leaf litter on the ground was burning and the fire was rapidly spreading in a wide swath across the […]
Interesting new technology developed in Japan: a sugar-based catalyst to replace the commonly used lye in the transesterification reaction that turns veg-oil into biodiesel: Michikazu Hara, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues have used common, inexpensive sugars to form a recyclable solid acid that does the job on the […]
After apparently reasonably fair elections, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is about to take charge of battered Liberia as the first second female African head of state. This is a very hopeful turn of events for this war-torn, exploited country. On the other side of the continent, Uganda’s strongman Yoweri Museveni had his main opposition candidate Kizza Besigye […]
The recent Sony rootkit scandal takes all that’s wrong with our “brave, new world” of networked computing: spam, viruses, spyware, malware, sloppyware (=Windows) and adds a major technology and entertainment corporation’s bad attitude about consumer’s rights. Earlier this year, Sony sold music CDs with copyright protection software that installs a rootkit on Windows machines, making […]
Kanzlerin Pestbeule is ready to lead Germany … in circles probably. On the surface a national consensus government may seem like a good idea to accomplish needed but painful social reforms in the next four years. That would be the case if this was 1) a government with a mandate, and 2) a government with […]
Remember those paper-and-ink-based information storage devices with the multi-page user interface? Yeah – books! I just read Richard Clarke’s Scorpion’s Gate – the first novel I read in years – and I could not put it down for two nights. The man sure knows how to spin a yarn, but the way the story comments […]
Last week I picked up 10 gallons of used fryer oil from a local restaurant, and on Sunday I made my first one-liter test batch of biodiesel. I got a nice separation but the biodiesel is a bit cloudy, so there is probably some soap. Now I have to wash the stuff thoroughly, dry it […]
On October 13, the International Criminal Court (ICC) unsealed arrest warrants for five leaders of the Ugandan cult-like gang the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA has for many years brutalized the civilian population of Northern Uganda, and abducted thousands of children, sometimes forcing the children to kill their own parents. Yet, these indictments have […]
Northern Uganda has been a war zone or twenty years. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an apocalyptic christian cult, has waged a cruel war on the Acholi people, while the Ugandan military tried to crush the LRA with brute force. The situation is complicated, as the LRA abducts Acholi children, to turn them into child […]
On my trip to the mountains, I filled up at the biodiesel pump in Asheville operated by Blue Ridge Biofuels. It’s a public pump, which is still pretty rare. Most pumps in North Carolina are coop-operated pumps that are not accessible to the public (like our Juicebox). This pump seemed pretty busy – there were […]
This morning I went right back to Tsali to ride another trail. Over night the clouds had disappeared and just a low morning fog hovered in the valleys. The sky was clear, the air was crisp and chilly, just slightly above freezing. Last night, the higher peaks in the distance had received their first dusting […]
A little on-the-road blogging from the mountains. I am in western NC for a couple of days, to install some new equipment at our lab in Sylva. When I come up here I always bring my bike along. This afternoon, after I finally got it all working, I strapped the bike to the car and […]
It is the year 2005 A.D. and a border dispute is brewing between Canada and Denmark over a 1.3 km² rock in the arctic. Both countries are members of NATO, but they had competing flag-raisings, flyovers by jets and even officials visiting Hans Island, an arctic island claimed by both countries. Hans Island is a […]
Europeans appear to take the bird-flu threat seriously: Germany now mandates that chicken be kept only inside. But although Bush said he read “The Great Influenza” his administration still slashes funding for public health preparedness by $129 million in next year’s budget. “Critical funding is shrinking just as public health agencies are being required to […]
