Month: April 2006

Fish Jumping into Boat – Video

Fish Jumping into Boat – Google Video

This video of fish literally jumping into the boat has made the rounds on the Internet. The great debunker of Urban legends has found the source:

The video is a shortened version of a longer clip that originated on the Brazilian Pesca Rondônia web site. (“Pesca” is the Portuguese word for “fishing,” and Rondônia is a northern Brazilian state in the Amazonian region known for its great fishing rivers.) The footage was taken in the Guaporé region, on a portion of the Mequens River inside the Porto Rolins Park (a protected conservation area) where fishing is forbidden. The jumping fish shown in the video are matrinxã (Brycon cephalus), a Brazilian fresh water species.

Militancy in Pakistan

Reuters AlertNet – FACTBOX-Militancy in Pakistan

Here are few facts about religious strife in Pakistan.

The Muslim group percentages are just the reverse of Iraq.
* Most Pakistanis are Sunnis — who regard Abu Bakr, one of the companions of Prophet Mohammad, as his successor. Shi’ites, who account for 15 percent of Pakistan’s 150 million people, revere Ali, a cousin and son-in-law of Mohammad, as his successor.

Can You Say, ‘Bienvenidos’?

Can You Say, 'Bienvenidos'?
Maybe the real fear is more visceral than that. Maybe it's that you don't have to extrapolate immigration and fertility rates very far into the future to see an America in which minorities — Hispanic, African and Asian Americans — are a majority. To put it another way: an America in which whites join the rest of us as just another minority. That's already the case in our two most populous states, California and Texas, according to the Census Bureau, with others including New York, Arizona and Florida likely to follow soon.

Don't freak out, folks. It's not the end of the world. You might ask your black neighbors for advice on how to cope.

Dunkin’ Donuts Tribe vs. Starbucks Tribe

from Wall Street Journal –
Dunkin’ Donuts last year paid dozens of faithful customers in Phoenix, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., $100 a week to buy coffee at Starbucks instead. At the same time, the no-frills coffee chain paid Starbucks customers to make the opposite switch.
When it later debriefed the two groups, Dunkin’ says it found them so polarized that company researchers dubbed them “tribes” — each of whom loathed the very things that made the other tribe loyal to their coffee shop. Dunkin’ fans viewed Starbucks as pretentious and trendy, while Starbucks loyalists saw Dunkin’ as austere and unoriginal.

Early research showed consumers wanted nicer stores, but revealed a potential problem: the loyal Dunkin’ tribe was bewildered and turned off by the atmosphere at Starbucks. They groused that crowds of laptop users made it difficult to find a seat, Dunkin’ says. They didn’t like Starbucks’ “tall,” “grande” and “venti” lingo for small, medium and large coffees. And, Dunkin’ says, they couldn’t understand why anyone would pay as much as $4 for a cup of coffee.

“It was almost as though they were a group of Martians talking about a group of Earthlings,” says Justin Holloway, an executive vice president at Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos Inc., the advertising agency that helped Dunkin’ with its research. One customer told researchers that lingering in a Starbucks felt like “celebrating Christmas with people you don’t know.” Continue reading “Dunkin’ Donuts Tribe vs. Starbucks Tribe”

How to Recognize a Stroke

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. A stroke victim may suffer permanent brain damage when people fail to recognize what's happening. Now, doctors say any bystander can recognize a stroke, simply by asking three questions:

  • ask the individual to smile.
  • ask him or her to raise both arms.
  • ask the person to speak a simple sentence.

If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, time lost is brain lost, so waste none of it dithering on a phone in hopes of getting a dispatcher to say "Gee, your friend has had a stroke; you'd best get her to a hospital." Because a new drug ( Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) has been shown to limit disability from strokes caused by clots (ischemic) provided victims receive it within three hours of the onset of stroke symptoms.

Rebuilding needs, here and there

Rebuilding needs, here and there – Commentary – The Washington Times,
In Los Angeles, 95 percent of outstanding homicide warrants are for illegal aliens. The lethal 18th Street Gang has an estimated 20,000 members, over half illegal aliens, according to a ranking member of LAPD, speaking not for attribution. The LA-based MS-13 (Mara Salvatruchka), whose membership was originally limited to street-tough Salvadorans, now numbers 50,000 (10,000 in Los Angeles alone). These gangs thrive where infrastructure decays.

While I think it is a bit of strech to blame crumbling infrastructure for criminal gangs, De Borchgrave's commentary is alarming. Continue reading “Rebuilding needs, here and there”

World ‘cannot meet oil demand’

World 'cannot meet oil demand' – Markets – Times Online
These quotes are from the probable new head of France's largest oil company.

"Take Qatar. How many projects can you have at the same time? You have more than 100,000 people working on sites. It’s a big city of contractors. Now they have the problem of having to build a new power plant to supply a city of contractors.”

M De Margerie said. The world was confusing the issue of reserves with the scale of the problem in producing those reserves. He said: “The oil reserves are there, that is the good news, but what we can bring on today to meet demand is limited by factors other than what scientists see in a lab or think-tanks.”

Kissinger’s World View

Insightful comments from Henry Kissinger at the recent Baker Center conference on Winston Churchill:(thanks to Tom Barnett’s blog)

We live in a period in which most of what we know from history is inapplicable or applicable in limited ways.”

“Asia today is like 19th C. Europe and the Middle East is like the 17th C. Then there’s globalization which both integrates economically and fragments politically. And somehow we need to synthesize this all in a way the public can understand.”

Reasearch on Pre-Historic Climate Change

AAAS – AAAS News Release
"If you go back in time, you have to go back to the middle Pliocene before you get to see a climate that was as warm as what we are going to see in the next 50 to 100 years in our own time," Chandler said.

Ocean temperatures rose substantially during that warming episode—as much as 7 to 9 degrees Celsius (about 12 to 16 degrees Fahrenheit) in some areas of the North Atlantic. But scientists are puzzled. The carbon dioxide levels at that time — inferred from geochemical data — were roughly comparable to our own time, approaching 400 parts per million.

The natural trigger for the PETM warming episode remains a subject of intense debate, but Thomas said a leading hypothesis involves the release of huge amounts of methane gas that had been trapped in ice compounds called methane hydrates. Methane produces less carbon dioxide than coal when it is burned as a fuel, and it is a powerful greenhouse gas. Most methane hydrates in the present oceans are frozen in sediments in the deep oceans, but some are associated with permafrost soils in the Arctic. Release of the methane can occur through natural processes, including underwater landslides or other seismic events, or by warming of ocean waters. Once released, the gas can induce atmospheric warming that has a positive feedback effect, releasing still more gas as ocean waters and permafrost regions begin to warm. The process can reach a tipping point where it starts to rapidly accelerate.