– Initial Conditions for the 2006 Atlantic Hurricane Season
In 2005, by contrast, the entire hurricane-prone section of the Atlantic was much warmer than average. In fact, at the opening of the 2006 hurricane season, sea surface temperatures were 2 degrees cooler than they had been at opening of the 2005 season, said Adamec. The warm temperatures in 2005 allowed a record seven storms to form by the end of July. (Link to temperature maps)
The other major difference between conditions in 2005 and conditions in 2006 is the position of the Bermuda High, a semi-permanent high-pressure system that sits over the Central Atlantic. Hurricanes that form in the Atlantic tend to circle the Bermuda High. In 2004 and 2005, the Bermuda High expanded to the south and west, pushing storms into the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. But as of May 31, 2006, the Bermuda High remained small and in a position that would steer storms up the East Coast of the United States or out into the Atlantic.
Month: June 2006
Hawking: John Paul Weighed in on Universe
Hawking quoted the pope as saying, "It's OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God."
The scientist then joked that he was glad John Paul did not realize that he had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began.
"I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo," Hawking said during a sold-out audience at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Scientists respond to Gore’s warnings of climate catastrophe
Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe
If there is one subject that has produced the most heat on this blog, it has been on the environment. Here is another contrarian article on Gore's new movie, which we featured in an earlier post.
Illustration shows there are vast areas with below average surface sea surface temperatures! This includes well below averages in the eastern North Pacific Ocean, the northwest Pacific Ocean, and the southern Oceans. Only the northern Atlantic Ocean is nearly all above average. (Link)
Celsius Rising?
TCS Daily – Celsius Rising?
The new soda comes in three flavours – cola, lemon and lime and ginger ale. It was launched in 2005 when it won the Beverage Industry’s Best New Product award for an energy drink also scientifically proven to actively burn our calories. In other words, drinking Celsius burns more calories than the drink itself contains.
Celsius contains a thermogenic blend. The process of thermogenesis (thermo: heat, genesis, creation) has, of course, been understood for some time. Thermogenetic agents stimulate the natural resting metabolic rate (RMR) that raises body temperature – which causes the body to burn additional calories.
Retailing for around $1.99 per 12-ounce bottle, Celsius, depending on the flavour, contains between five and ten calories. Janice Haley, vice president of Elite FX, Inc., which developed Celsius, says, “It naturally raises your metabolism by 12 percent over a three- to four-hour period. The net effect of this is that the 5 – 10 calories is more than ‘eaten up’ as the body burns between 67 to 72 calories.” Continue reading “Celsius Rising?”
Jordan – Palestinian State
Backward reels the news — The Washington Times
Israel’s unspoken ulterior motive, which Jordan’s King Abdullah and ranking officials know all too well, is to make Jordan the Palestinian state, leaving what’s left of the West Bank as a sort of no-man’s-land buffer between the two countries. While Mr. Sharon was still prime minister, he suggested to King Abdullah he resume responsibility for the West Bank, which was Jordan’s mandate prior to the 1967 war.
King Abdullah understood, as his late father King Hussein did, this would be the first step in a geostrategic gambit to turn Jordan into a full-fledged Palestinian state. Continue reading “Jordan – Palestinian State”
Why Ann Coulter Matters
TIME.com: Viewpoint: Why Ann Coulter Matters
The same day I was reading Ann Coulter’s book, I read Margaret Talbot’s excellent New Yorker piece from last week on Oriana Fallaci, the Coulteresque Italian journalist who is not intimidated by the
“penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that which victimizes it.” She has written that the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art which the sons of Allah have always excelled.” Fallaci has said that Muslims “breed like rats,”
As it happens, it’s illegal in much of Europe to say such outlandish things: Fallaci currently faces trial in Italy for defaming Islam. At least in the U.S., Coulter is not threatened with prosecution for being Coulter, but as I read Talbot’s piece I wondered why the de rigueur intellectual response to Coulter in the U.S. is to dismiss her automatically. 
America’s obsession with loving or hating Coulter is a psychological phenomenon almost unique in our culture. Her various epigones on Fox News can’t quite match her ability to induce people to take deeply seriously what is obvious satire. I’m not saying Coulter doesn’t believe what she says — if you talk with her mother, who’s even more conservative, you’ll know that she does — but she knows that outrage is the blunt cousin of argument, that irony is more accessible than a thousand position papers. She knows that saying what no one else would dare to say will get her attention.
Can the Net make ticket scalping legit?
Can the Net make ticket scalping legit?
Internet companies such as TicketsNow.com and StubHub are trying to clean up the industry’s image by weeding out con artists, offering up no-nonsense pricing and guaranteeing on-time delivery.
StubHub is an online marketplace where anyone, brokers and individual ticket holders alike, can buy and sell. To secure transactions, the company holds the money paid by a ticker buyer. Then, like an escrow service, StubHub tracks the ticket and pays the seller once the buyer receives it.
Why Zarqawi’s death matters
Why Zarqawi’s death matters. By Christopher Hitchens
That bomb at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, for example, was no improvised explosive device. It was a huge charge of military-grade ordnance. Are we to believe that a newly arrived Bedouin Jordanian thug could so swiftly have scraped acquaintance with senior-level former Baathists? (The charges that destroyed the golden dome of the Shiites in Samarra were likewise rigged and set by professional military demolitionists.)
Zarqawi was all along receiving help from the mullahs in Iran. He certainly seems to have been able to transit their territory (Herat is on the Iranian border with Afghanistan) and to replenish his forces by the same route. If this suggestive connection is proved, as Weaver suggests it will be, then we have the Shiite fundamentalists in Iran directly sponsoring the murderer of their co-religionists in Iraq.
And the Atlantic Magazine Cover Story that this article refers to about:How a video-store clerk and small-time crook reinvented himself as America’s nemesis in Iraq
Ignoring Bejing’s Directives
Economist.com
Local leaders rarely incur heavy political penalties for failing to carry out the central government’s economic directives. Officials in Beijing frequently order clampdowns on the makers of pirated goods. Offending factories are sometimes closed. But local officials who condone such operations as a way of boosting their local economies are seldom punished. Nor are officials who turn a blind eye to polluting industries, unless they cause big accidents or trigger unrest. Transgressions are so widespread that it would be destabilising to launch a crackdown. But just to make sure that career-damaging information does not reach Beijing, local governments often arrest petitioners who travel to the capital to raise complaints.
Central leaders are comforted by the knowledge that direct political challenges to their authority by local governments are extremely rare. Li Fan, an independent consultant in Beijing who advises local governments on election-related issues, says there is strong demand among lower-level officials for political reform. But very few rural townships have pushed experiments with freer elections or more open government beyond the party’s guidelines. And none has tolerated organised opposition or open attacks on the party leadership. China’s local leaders know where to draw the line.
Record meteorite hit Norway
Record meteorite hit Norway – Aftenposten.no
Astronomers were excited by the news.
“There were ground tremors, a house shook and a curtain was blown into the house,” Norway’s best known astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten.no.
Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.