Category: cool stuff

No Warming Yet This Century

The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change | the Daily Mail
The truth is that there has so far been no recorded global warming at all this century.

The world’s temperature rose about half a degree centigrade during the last quarter of the 20th century; but even the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research – part of Britain’s Met Office and a citadel of the current global warming orthodoxy – has now conceded that recorded temperature figures for the first seven years of the 21st century reveal there has been a standstill.

The centre now officially expects global warming to resume at some point between 2009 and 2014.

Maybe it will. But the fact that the present lull was not predicted by any of the complex computer models upon which the global warming orthodoxy relies is clear evidence that the science of what determines the world’s temperature is distinctly uncertain and far from “settled”.

Underwater Astonishments (video)

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.494964&w=425&h=350&fv=bgColor%3DFFFFFF%26file%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fstatic.videoegg.com%2Fted%2Fmovies%2FDAVIDGALLO-2007_high.flv%26autoPlay%3Dfalse%26fullscreenURL%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fstatic.videoegg.com%2Fted%2Fflash%2Ffullscreen.html%26forcePlay%3Dfalse%26logo%3D%26allowFullscreen%3Dtrue]

Thanks to underwater photographer Chip Welfeld for this amazing video. You should check-out Chip’s also. pictures.from www.ted.com posted with vodpod

South Korean investors quit China over rising costs

Feed Article | Business |
Lately, a growing number of South Korean factories have abruptly closed down and the South Korean owners have disappeared as a slew of policies, including rising labour costs and an end to tax breaks, bite into their profit margins.
The wage rise, yuan appreciation and higher input prices are the main reasons, The minimum wage in Qingdao has risen 43 percent in the past three years to 760 yuan ($107) per month. 20 to 30 percent of the 6,000 South Korean firms in the eastern port city were losing money.
Other government initiatives to share China’s growing wealth more widely and to minimize social tension are also deterring employers who are required to provide more mandated benefits for their workers and are paying higher pollution fees.
Employers are grumbling in particular about a new labour contract law, which went into effect at the beginning of this year, that makes it harder to lay off staff.

Obama’s Mom

A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path – New York Times
Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.

She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart — a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.

Phone That Reads Your Thoughts Out Loud

Nerve-tapping neckband used in ‘telepathic’ chat – tech – 12 March 2008 – New Scientist Tech
A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a “voiceless” phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice. Thanks Chip Welfeld   The Audeo has previously been used to let people control wheelchairs using their thoughts. Watch a video demonstrating thought control of wheelchairs

Skeptics on Human Climate Impact Seize on Cold Spell

Skeptics on Human Climate Impact Seize on Cold Spell – New York Times
According to a host of climate experts, including some who question the extent and risks of global warming, it is mostly good old-fashioned weather, along with a cold kick from the tropical Pacific Ocean, which is in its La Niña phase for a few more months, a year after it was in the opposite warm El Niño pattern.

If anything else is afoot — like some cooling related to sunspot cycles or slow shifts in ocean and atmospheric patterns that can influence temperatures — an array of scientists who have staked out differing positions on the overall threat from global warming agree that there is no way to pinpoint whether such a new force is at work.

The Ultimate Date Rape Drug

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.480189&w=425&h=350&fv=videoId%3D1119221786%26playerId%3D452319916%26viewerSecureGatewayURL%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fservices.brightcove.com%2Fservices%2Famfgateway%26servicesURL%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fservices.brightcove.com%2Fservices%26cdnURL%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fadmin.brightcove.com%26domain%3Dembed%26autoStart%3Dfalse%26] from www.vbs.tv posted with vodpod