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 hours, Wilma smashed the all-time record for lowest pressure in an Atlantic hurricane this morning. The 4 am hurricane hunter report put the pressure at 884 mb from a dropsonde, and the meteorologist reported an even lower 881 mb pressure extrapolated from 10,000 feet flight altitude. This easily bests the previous record of 888 mb set in Hurricane Gilbert of 1988. The eye of Wilma during this round of intense deepening oscillated between 2 and 4 nautical miles, and the area of hurricane force winds only covered an area up to 15 miles from the center. This is an incredibly compact, amazingly intense hurricane, the likes of which has never been seen. The Hurricane Season of 2005 keeps topping itself with new firsts, and now boasts three of the five most intense hurricanes of all time–Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.
Jeff Master’s Wunderground Blog, 12:04 PM GMT on October 19, 2005

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, chief executive officer of Safaricom, one of two service providers in Kenya. For an impoverished continent, low-cost phones make “a perfect fit.”
(…)
“We all misread the market,” Joseph said.

The mistake, providers say, was to make plans based on GDP figures, which ignore the strong informal economy, and to assume that because land line use was low, little demand for phones existed.

The real reason for weak demand was that land lines were expensive, subscribers had to wait for months to get hooked up, and the lines often went down because of poor maintenance, floods and theft of copper cables.

Cell phones slice through all those obstacles and provide African solutions to African problems.
Cell phones reshaping Africa CNN, October 17, 2005

via Timbuktu Chronicles, who asks

The follow-up question could be, what other industries multinational and indigenous, are underestimating and or miscalculating the market for their products and or services in Africa?

Good question! One service, I think is way underestimated in Africa are public libraries. Rural Africa is way under-served when it comes to information access – the cellphones story proves that. Libraries are critical information infrastructure, especially in low-income communities. Just like cellphones, libraries have both an effect on the economy and on the social dynamics. A good library can provide information for farmers, small businesses and students, helping them to be more competitive and to adapt better to changes. And they help change people’s information access expectations. People who expect information will demand more information. And that attitude is essential for democracy to take root.

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 truly remarkable season.

The historic Hurricane Season of 2005 now has the distinction of being the busiest ever. Wilma’s formation this morning gives 2005 21 named storms, equaling the mark set in 1933. With over six weeks still left in hurricane season, that mark will likely be surpassed.
Jeff Master’s Blog

To a large extent, as far as I understand, this record season of destructive storms was triggered by unusually warm waters in the Carribbean. I think this should give every global-warming-denier pause.

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, it’s a cell tower.

Richard Dowden is one of many who see the rapid development of communication infrastructure, namely mobile phone coverage, as the key to dramatic changes in Africa:

Africa is changing fast. Driving those changes are mobile phones and radio stations and China’s appetite for raw materials. The G8’s agenda of aid and debt relief may, if delivered, play a secondary role.
(…)

The internal driver is the mobile phone revolution that has transformed business and politics in Africa in the past ten years. In 2001, only 3 per cent of Africans had telephones of any sort. Now there are 50 million mobile-phone users, with numbers growing by 35 per cent a year. The phone companies completely misjudged the market – they thought that only the super-rich would buy mobiles. But it turned out that the people who really needed them were small self-employed businessmen, market women, taxi drivers and the casual workers who keep Africa going. In some areas, beer sales have plummeted as people have invested their meagre earnings in mobile phone cards instead. The pace of life has picked up hugely.

It’s good to talk – even better to sell, the New Statesman, 17th Oct. 2005
(via textually)

Read the rest of this entry »

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 laboriously carried on the head. Extensive suffering occurs in the process. This method is very time and energy consuming and is also the cause of many serious health problems.

The Hippo Water Roller was specifically designed to alleviate the suffering caused by a lack of access to water. The Hippo Water Roller is a barrel-shaped container designed to transport 90 liters (20 gallons) of water. It comprises of a drum with a large screw-on cap and a clip-on steel handle.
Hippo Water Roller

They also suggest that a full Hippo Water Roller offers good protection fom landmines!

via Tmbuktu Chronicles

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 first instance of the deadly strain known to have reached Europe, and would bolster the theory that it may be spread by migrating birds.
CNN.com – Bird flu strain found in Turkey – Oct 13, 2005

In another example of breathtaking competence, the US government holds tippy-top-secret meetings about the fact that a global flu pandemic would be really, really, really bad (something that many public health officials have been saying for years) and then they go ahead and leak this information to the NY Times:

The administration is putting the finishing touches on its long-awaited pandemic plan to be released after Leavitt returns from his trip. A draft version, dated Sept. 30 and leaked to The New York Times, reportedly predicts a major outbreak might kill up to 1.9 million people and make half the country sick.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, says he learned of the administration’s prediction on Sept. 28 in a top-secret meeting in a secure room in the Capitol. He and a few other senators met with Leavitt; Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The administration, Harkin says, predicts U.S. deaths from pandemic flu could range from 100,000 to 2 million, and as many as 10 million might be hospitalized. Up to 100 million might become sick. Seasonal flu epidemics kill about 36,000 people each year in the USA.
‘Imagine what would happen if a Category 5 viral storm hit every state’, USA Today, 10/11/2005

via REVERE

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 noodles inside an overturned, sealed bowl under 10 feet of floodplain sediment in Lajia, by the Yellow River in north-western China. The meal was probably left untouched because of an ancient disaster: the site harbours a settlement that was probably destroyed about 4,000 years ago by a major earthquake and flood.
Neolithic noodles were made in China, Telegraph (UK), 13/10/2005

I do think, though, that the Italians do get credit for the brilliant idea of mixing tomato sauce with noodles.

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 the production of the biodiesel is a great lesson in chemistry and economics. But best of all, they reduce the exposure of their students to a significant health hazard because biodiesel dramatically improves the emissions of diesel engines.

That’s what I call a win-win-win situation: reduction of health hazards, educational lesson AND money-saver!

Praise the Lard!

Other Biodiesel News:
ADM Announces Plans to Build Biodiesel Production Facility. They are planning to make the “good juice” from canola oil.

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 there have been hurricanes that have been even further east than Vince. For example, in 1965, Hurricane Carol made it to 16 West near the coast of Portugal before being downgraded from a tropical storm to a tropical depression. And in 1961, Hurricane Debbie hit Ireland as a Category 1 hurricane, passing longitude 8 West before losing hurricane characteristics. So, Vince’s location isn’t unprecedented. But this sure is a weird exclamation mark to put on the end of a once-in-a-lifetime hurricane season!
Wunder Jeff Master’s Blog at Weather Underground

Why are they NAMING storms, anyway?
(Image credit: Navy Research Lab, Monterey, CA.)

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 on the sidelines in Germany next year. The biggest surprise probably was Côte d’Ivoire’s squeezing by Cameroon:

The major drama came in Group 3 as Cameroon’s Pierre Wome missed an injury-time penalty against Egypt, which would have taken them through to Germany. His miss allowed Cote d’Ivoire, who won 3-1 in Sudan, to qualify for their first-ever finals.
Four first-timers reach FIFA World Cupâ„¢ finals 8 Oct 2005, by FIFAworldcup.com

The team from Togo had been at the top of Group 1 and it needed only a draw against the team from the Congo, so at this point this was not a huge surprise. This is a huge accomplishment for Togo. And maybe the excitement over the World Cup participation of The Hawks will help unify the deeply divided West-African nation as the Togolese gather around TV sets and transistor radios next year to witness their boys face off with some of the giants in World soccer next year.

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 truck. However, it is not easy to find a place that will install a small Class I hitch to a car. “We don’t do cars” and “we don’t install hitches” is all you hear.

Well, I finally gave up and ordered a hitch for the Jetta from an etailer – eTrailer.com – and installed it myself. It cost me $150 for the parts and 2 hours last Sunday afternoon. Oh – and it gave me a great reason to buy a nice drill, because I had to drill 4 1/2-inch-holes into the body of the Jetta. The whole operation went well, and the hitch works great, now. And I also have a much better understanding of why no one wants to install these hitches.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 inconsistent.

Lyle from Piedmont Biofuels about Dr. Pimentel:

He was a rambling old man. The slides in his power point presentation were not consistent or powerful. He traveled through different energy measurements, sometimes metric, sometimes American, sometimes BTUs, sometimes kilocalories. And he provided a strange mixed up message that was virtually incomprehensible.
On the one hand he faulted over population for the earth’s demise, and he struck me as someone with a genuine interest in conservation. On the other hand, he offers nothing but coal as a fall back position for dwindling energy reserves.
“Burn it while we still can,” was a common refrain. Forget biodiesel. Make liquid fuels from coal. Shrug.
He offered a forty five minute lackidasical trip through a hundred numbers and measurements, none of which are supported by any other energy balance research. His numbers are at odds with Argonne National Laboratories, the National Renewable Energy Lab, the USDA, and the DOE.
He seemed alone on a whacko fringe, like someone who might enjoy an evening with the cold fusion folks, or perhaps the handful of global warming skeptics.
Energy Blog: Pimentel Tonight

Too bad that the work of this rambling old man produces headlines in the national news that reflect badly on alternative fuels.

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, Hugh Hewitt, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and a legion of insignificant lowest-rung toadies like yourselves nurtured into fruition daily with eager, grubby hands, and now look upon with dull-faced faux horror.

I know you hate me, and anyone else to dares disturb the thin strands of alternate reality in which George W. Bush is an intellectual giant, Saddam really was responsible for 9/11, the economy is getting better by the minute, and we capture the most very important members of al Qaeda on a weekly basis.

But here’s some advice. You’d better start hating me more. This is the world you forged and, unfortunately for you, I’m beginning to take a fancy for it. Welcome to the politics of your own party, finally sprouting from the ground on which you planted the seeds and shat upon them.
Daily Kos: Bush Supporters of the Far Right: Cries from the Lake of Fire

Wow – Hunter says it all …

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 had to pull his leg rope off to actually get away from it,” paramedic Dean George told local radio.

“It came back again so he pushed it away with his hand,” Mr George said.
Man fights off five-metre shark – BBC News, 26 September 2005
(emphasis mine)

Wow! A five-meter-shark (15 feet) with his bare hands!

Except that when you follow this story south, the story actually changes. The South African Independent reports:

Australians marvelled on Monday at the valour of a surfer who fought a four-metre Great White shark and survived with only a few gashes to his legs.

Josh Berris, 26, had his death-defying moment on Sunday at Kangaroo Island near Adelaide.
Surfer tells of birthday battle with shark, The Independent Online, South Africa – September 26 2005.
(emphasis mine)

OK – a four-meter-shark (12 feet) – that’s a really big shark!

Look at this story from Australia (where the incident happened):

The surfer, 26-year-old Josh Berris, suffered lacerations to both legs after being attacked at a renowned seal breeding area off the island about midday (CST) yesterday.

Mr Berris put a hand in the shark’s mouth to push it away during the attack, which happened while he was surfing with four friends near Cape du Couedic on the island’s south-western tip.

Two of his friends dragged an injured Mr Berris from the water and pulled him onto rocks at a cliffbase, before climbing up steep cliffs to make an emergency call from a nearby ranger station.

Mr Berris remained in stable condition in Adelaide’s Flinders Medical Centre today.

Witness Dave Dowie said the shark, more than two metres long, circled around its victim after the initial attack.
Surfer survives shark attack, News.com.au (AAP story) – 26-09-2005.
(emphasis mine)

OVER TWO METERS! More than 6 feet! That’s still a big shark. But it is funny how the shark grew as the story travelled North …

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 action from the start.

“We thought it was a bad idea because we oppose any effort to require students to learn about intelligent design because we feel that it politicizes what should be a scientific debate,” said John G. West, a senior fellow at the institute. However, Professor Behe, a fellow at the institute, is expected to be the board’s star witness.
In Evolution Suit, a Web of Faith, Law and Science – New York Times

Or maybe they are worried that they haven’t got their science story quite worked out. If Stephen Meyer’s paper on “Intelligent Design” is supposed to be their science story, ID is toast.

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 ist passé – zumindest in dieser Legislaturperiode.
Sondierung: Union und Gr�ne beerdigen Schwampel – Politik – SPIEGEL ONLINE – Nachrichten

Ja – grosse Überraschung!

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 students, with the help of the ACLU, are fighting to keep creationism out of the science curriculum in Dover, PA.

Aided by the American Civil Liberties Union, 11 parents of Dover, Pa., schoolchildren have filed a federal lawsuit against that town’s school board, accusing it of violating the principle of separation of church and state. The school board requires that at the beginning of the 9th grade unit on evolution, teachers are supposed to read a statement to a biology class: “Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact…Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.”

Science teachers balked and many Dover parents were angered as well. The plaintiffs are asking the court to void the intelligent-design policy in the class.
WSJ.com – Scopes, 2005: ‘Design’ Theory Faces Legal Test

Why not mention ID in biology? Because if creationism gets a foothold in the public schools, the religious right is going to demand that the astronomy teacher has to talk about how Galileo might be wrong and the pope might be right, after all, that the earth is the center of the universe. Then they are going to require that geography teachers teach the “scientific theory” that the earth is flat.

The middle ages never happened in America. The religious right is determined to change that.

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 during World War Two have been found by construction workers at Stuttgart airport.

The skeletons were found on Monday near the entrance of a U.S. military airbase which borders the airport, the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office and the Baden-Württemberg bureau of investigation said in a joint statement.

Medical checks suggested the bodies were buried around 60 years ago and were possibly the remains of Jewish prisoners from the nearby Echterdingen labour camp who had starved to death in late 1944 and early 1945, the statement said
Reuters AlertNet – Mass WWII grave discovered at Stuttgart airport, Sept 21, 2005

I know the airport quite well, and I was vaguely aware that there had been a labor camp. To hear about this mass grave, though, is chilling. To my generation, the Holocaust is history. Important history, but history that belongs into books and museums. Human remains covered in dirt resurrects this history from its dusty pages and make it stare at you with hollow eyes and a tired, tortured grimace. No, we’ll never forget.

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 Mr. Wiesenthal’s honor, adding, “When the Holocaust ended in 1945 and the whole world went home to forget, he alone remained behind to remember. He did not forget. He became the permanent representative of the victims, determined to bring the perpetrators of the history’s greatest crime to justice. There was no press conference and no president or Prime Minister or world leader announced his appointment. He just took the job. It was a job no one else wanted.
SWC News Items – Simon Wiesenthal Center