Hurricane Wilma is another record-breaking phenomenon – let’s hope this monster stays away from land, or at least from densly populated areas. Meteorologist Jeff Masters is pretty excited about Wilma: There has never been a hurricane like Wilma before. With an unbelievable round of intensification that saw the pressure drop 85 mb in just 12 […]
Interesting piece on CNN about how the African cell phone market was totally underestimated by the industry. Now, as cellphones are more and more widely used, they can’t put up cell towers fast enough. “We are developing unique ways to use the phone, which has not been done anywhere else,” says South African Michael Joseph, […]
Tropical Storm Wilma is the 21st named storm of this season, making this the busiest hurricane season ever. Considering that this season included one of the worst natural disasters on the US mainland (Katrina) and one of the 30 deadliest hurricanes (Stan), as well as one of the easternmost hurricanes ever (Vince), this is a […]
This being the information age, it has always been pretty clear that the lack of communication infrastructure in Africa was, and is, a major obstacle to progress. The rich nations of the world can proclaim their intention to “eradicate poverty” all they want, but the real beacon of hope in Africa is not the G8, […]
This is a brilliant piece of engineering to make life easier for millions of people: water on in wheels: Millions of people worldwide are forced to walk long distances on a daily basis to collect their water requirements for the day. Traditional methods of collecting water include the use of 20-liter (5-gallon) buckets, which are […]
The bird flu has reached Europe, and the US government is slowly waking up to the threat of a global flu pandemic. The European Commission said Thursday that the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu has been confirmed in Turkish poultry and probably is present in Romania. If confirmed in Romania, it would be the […]
Boy – I am so glad they were able to straightened this out: A bowl of Neolithic noodles has revealed that China was the most likely birthplace of this popular food. For millennia, arguments have raged about whether the noodle was invented by the Chinese, Italians or Arabs. (…) The researchers discovered the 20 inch-long […]
The Gaston County NC School System announced that it is starting to produce biodiesel from recycled vegetable oil from the school cafeterias to use in operating school buses. That’s a brilliant idea – they don’t have to pay to get rid of the WVO from the fryers in the cafeteria, they save fuel money and […]
This is the first time a letter “V” storm was recorded since they started naming storms in the N. Atlantic. And Vince is one of the eastern-most tropical storms ever recorded, Jeff Masters notes: Vince is in a strange location, but not unprecedented. Vince is pretty far east–16.6 West longitude at the 5am EDT advisory–but […]
Kanzlerin Pestbeule?! Jetzt will ich aber nichts mehr hören, von wegen “wie konnten die Amis nur diesen Bush wählen!” Angela Merkel will be Germany’s new Chancellor.
Congratulations to the Togolese soccer team for that coveted ticket to Germany next year! The other qualifiers from Africa are Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Tunisia. With the exception of Tunisia (1978, 1998, 2002), all African teams are newcomers to the World Cup, which leaves most of Africa’s soccer giants like Nigeria, Senegal and Cameroon […]
I like my cars with a hitch. I have a small utility trailer that I use to haul garbage, furniture, cinder blocks, firewood, and other stuff that I don’t want inside the car or that does not fit inside the car. Over the years I found the trailer-car combo much more efficient than owning a […]
Dr. Pimentel, a long-standing critic of the energy efficiency and sustainability of biofuels, gave a lecture at Duke last Tuesday. I was not able to attend, but the biofuels community in the Triangle is abuzz with reactions to the event. Everyone I heard talk about it was rather under-whelmed. Pimentel came across as unconvincing and […]
Hunter of DKos is on fire – here’s a sample, read his entire rant in response to me right-wing whining about Tom Delay’s legal trouble: Welcome to the world of the politics of personal destruction, you tubthumping, chin-jutting, Bush humping gits. Welcome to the nasty and partisan world that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, […]
With his bare hands an Australian surfer fought off a shark that thought he was lunch – the BBC reports: “He was just sitting on the board waiting for the next wave… and it just hit him from underneath and knocked him off, then actually just took his board and was dragging him and he […]
The Discovery Institute does not like all this fuss?! What are they worried about? Isn’t god on their side? A twist in the case is that a leading proponent of intelligent design, the Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, removed one of its staff members from the Dover school board’s witness list and opposed the board’s […]
Das politische Frankenstein Monster starb sofort, als man die Zutaten ins Reagenzglas verzweifelter Machtpolitik zusammen mischte: In dem Punkt waren sich die Spitzen von Grünen und Union einig: Nett sei es gewesen, dass man überhaupt einmal zusammen saß. Das war fast alles, was die Sondierungsrunde der drei Parteien heute als Ergebnis vorzuweisen hatte. Die Jamaika-Koalition […]
With creationism and “intelligent design” in the offensive across America, the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial has the potential of becoming another Scopes Monkey Trial – the famous 1925 trial that allowed the state of Tennessee to keep anti-Darwinism statutes on the books. Only this time the roles are reversed. In Kitzmiller v. Dover parents and […]
During the years I lived in Stuttgart, I remember several occasions when construction workers found unexploded bombs from WWII. But this recent discovery of a piece of Nazi-era legacy is uniquely horrifying, and within an easy bike-ride from where I lived: Remains believed to be from some 30 Jews forced into labour by the Nazis […]
Remembering a tireless fighter for justice and human dignity: Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi Hunter has died in Vienna at the age of 96, the Simon Wiesenthal Center announced today (September 20th). “Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the International Human Rights NGO named in […]
