Monday, September 10, 2007
Underwater
clipped from www.postwritersgroup.comStudy Shows High Sea Rise Danger for U.S. Coastal Cities
Sept. 9, 2007
A chilling set of three-dimensional images of climate-triggered sea rise flooding into coastal U.S. cities is due to be released this week by the environmental nonprofit group Architecture 2030.
A sea level rise as little as 1 meter could have catastrophic impact along the country's 12,000 miles of coastline, where 53 percent of Americans live, according to the group's pathbreaking scientific analysis.
Such cities as Miami Beach and Hollywood, Fla., New Orleans, Hampton, Va., and Point Pleasant, N.J., would have major areas under water with a sea rise of 1 meter. By a 1.5-meter rise, Miami and other Florida communities, along with East Boston, Mass., Galveston, Texas, and Atlantic City, N.J., are in deep trouble. By 3 meters, San Francisco, New York, Boston, San Diego and Savannah, Ga., fall victim to severe damage.
Seattle under water
The new study, based on satellite imagery, tidal patterns and on-location measurements of likely coastal city "breach points," analyzes the sea level shifts that global warming could trigger at much smaller increments than earlier reports, government or private. Images of the potential city-by-city flood impact findings, integrated into Google Earth city images, will be available starting Monday at www.architecture2030.org.
"We have a potential calamity on our hands," says Edward Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030. "There's danger of one city after another going down. Flood insurance will evaporate. People will be forced to migrate inland, lose everything. We'll be a nation under siege, with huge pressures on our economy and school, health and food systems."
But how likely is all this to occur? Scientists, notes Mazria, are now predicting a global tipping point -- potentially irreversible disintegration of ice sheets and glaciers -- at roughly 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The level is already 383 ppm and rising at 2 ppm yearly. Without an early turnaround -- within the next decade, many experts believe -- it may be impossible to stop today's dangerous momentum.
And that momentum may be poised for spectacular takeoff. Coal burning -- the great culprit in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions -- has begun a dangerous global expansion that could get a lot worse very soon. About 150 new conventional coal-fired power plants are in various stages of development in the U.S. today. Elsewhere around the world, on average a new coal-fired plant opens each week. Just consider the math of their impact, as calculated by Architecture 2030:
-- Home Depot -- one of several firms promising CO2 reductions -- is funding the planting of 300,000 trees in cities across the U.S. The CO2 emissions from just one medium-sized coal-fired plant, in 10 days of operation, will negate the entire effect.
-- California passed legislation to cut CO2 emissions in new cars by 25 percent and in SUVs by 18 percent, starting in 2009. But the CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized coal-fired plant, operating eight months a year, will cancel out the entire effort.
-- The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative by 11 Northeast states seeks to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2014. But CO2 emissions from just 13 medium-sized coal plants will negate the entire gain.
The only solution, says Mazria, is an immediate, complete moratorium on new coal plants -- and phasing out existing coal plants with renewable fuels as rapidly as we can develop them.
Could the U.S. do this? The big challenge: Reduce the demand for added electricity, the big coal consumer. Buildings account for 76 percent of U.S. electricity use. But by applying already proven energy-conserving materials and methods to all new buildings, plus retrofitting old ones, demand could be reduced dramatically. We actually conserved radically once before, reducing our national CO2 emissions from 1973 to 1983, even while the national economy grew by $1 trillion in today's dollars.
OK, you may say, why should we conserve electricity and halt new coal plants if China is opening a plant a week? Indeed, China already burns more coal than the U.S., Europe and Japan combined.
A big reason for China's coal expansion, says Mazria: "We have no carbon tax on the goods they manufacture. It's as if we'd sent our dirty industries there."
But what's the solution? First, Mazria suggests, the U.S. should clean up its own coal act. And then lead the way in negotiations to bring about an international coal moratorium. The U.S., Japan and European Union consume 78 percent of Chinese exports. "If the U.S. were to join Japan and the E.U.," he suggests, "... China would be hard pressed not to respond -- or agree to stop if we help them with alternative fuels technology."
OK, you say, our leaders don't have the foresight, or the moxie, to do anything like that. Maybe that's true.
But think of the alternative -- a string of Katrina-scale disasters and evacuations around the perimeter of the U.S. each year, depleting our national wealth at an alarming rate.
Take your choice.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
The Book of Hours
clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.orgPoem: "The Book of Hours" by Joyce Sutphen.
The Book of Hours
There was that one hour sometime
in the middle of the last century.
It was autumn, and I was in my father's
woods building a house out of branches
and the leaves that were falling like
thousands of letters from the sky.
And there was that hour in Central Park
in the middle of the seventies.
We were sitting on a blanket, listening
to Pete Seeger singing "This land is
your land, this land is my land," and
the Vietnam War was finally over.
I would definitely include an hour
spent in one of the galleries of the
Tate Britain, looking up at the
painting of King Cophetua and
the Beggar Maid, and, afterwards
the walk along the Thames, and
I would also include one of those
hours when I woke in the night and
couldn't get back to sleep thinking
about how nothing I thought was going
to happen happened the way I expected,
and things I never expected to happen did—
just like that hour today, when we saw
the dog running along the busy road,
and we stopped and held on to her
until her owner came along and brought
her home—that was an hour well
spent. Yes, that was a keeper.
Need a few more square feet?
clipped from news.mainetoday.comHartford businessman's new home to be largest in New England
By The Associated Press wire report
WEST HARTFORD, Conn. — The enormity of the house Arnold Chase is building on Avon Mountain isn't fully apparent from the outside, where only 17,000 square feet of it lies in plain view.
It's the two-level, 33,500-square-foot basement complex, complete with a 103-seat movie theater, ticket booth, concession stand, game room and music annex, that will make it New England's largest occupied single-family home.
At nearly 50,900 square feet, the Chase home will be slightly larger than billionaire Bill Gates' home in Washington, about 4,000 square feet smaller than the White House and 20 times larger than the average-size home in America.
Chase's home, a brick and stucco colonial just below the east ridge of Avon Mountain, is easily seen from the road. But the Hartford-based businessman, who plans to vacate a comparatively tiny 8,900-square-foot home when he moves, doesn't want too many people to know about it. He refused an interview and had a freelance photographer for The Associated Press cited for trespassing as he was seeking permission to photograph the house.
The only single-family residential structures in New England larger than Chase's are two mansions in Newport, which are now museums and no longer occupied. The Breakers weighs in at 138,000 square feet, and The Elms follows at 60,000 square feet.
Chase's home dwarfs many of the mansions along southwestern Connecticut's Gold Coast. The only comparable home nearby is rapper 50 Cent's Farmington estate, a 48,500-square foot mansion he purchased from boxer Mike Tyson. It's now on the market for $18.5 million.
The largest private home ever built in the United States is the Biltmore House in Asheville, N.C., comprising more than 174,000 square feet. Also on the national list are the 109,000-square-foot Oheka Castle in Huntington, N.Y., and Donald Trump's 80,000-square-foot Maison de l'Amitie in Palm Beach, Fla.
The average size of an American home is about 2,500 square feet, up from 1,995 square feet in 1988, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Nearly a quarter of homes in the country were larger than 3,000 square feet last year, twice as many as in 1988.
According to building plans on file at Town Hall in West Hartford, the basement of Chase's home includes the two-level theater with stadium seating, a concession stand, ticket booth, a soda fountain, sitting area, vending machines and separate restrooms for men and women.
The game room, in the "upper" basement, will take up nearly 4,900 square feet, nearly twice as big as the average-size house. That's next to a similar-sized area designated for music.
The above-ground part of the house includes two stories, an attic and a 400-square-foot "observatory" at the top. It has five bedrooms, six full bathrooms and five half bathrooms, which are in addition to two full bathrooms in the lower basement.
Ron Van Winkle, an economist and director of West Hartford's Community Services Department, noted the Chase family has been very generous to charitable causes. He also said the Chase family is an American success story.
Chase's father, David Chase, is a Holocaust survivor who came to this country and became wealthy from real estate and media deals.
"It's a great thing in America that you can go from penniless immigrant to tremendous wealth," Van Winkle said. "I think this says a lot of good things about wealth in America. They try to make a difference, try to invest and build new businesses."
OBE
"We feel that our self is located where the eyes are." UCL researcher Dr Henrik Ehrsson
clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Out-of-body experience recreated
Experts have found a way to trigger an out-of-body experience in volunteers.
The experiments, described in the Science journal, offer a scientific explanation for a phenomenon experienced by one in 10 people.
Two teams used virtual reality goggles to con the brain into thinking the body was located elsewhere.
The visual illusion plus the feel of their real bodies being touched made volunteers sense that they had moved outside of their physical bodies.
The researchers say their findings could have practical applications, such as helping take video games to the next level of virtuality so the players feel as if they are actually inside the game.
Clinically, surgeons might also be able to perform operations on patients thousands of miles away by controlling a robotic virtual self.
Teleported
For some, out-of-body experiences or OBEs occurs spontaneously, while for others it is linked to dangerous circumstances, a near-death experience, a dream-like state or use of alcohol or drugs.
One theory is that it is down to how people perceive their own body - those unhappy or less in touch with their body are more likely to have an OBE.
But the two teams, from University College London, UK, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, believe there is a neurological explanation.
Their work suggests a disconnection between the brain circuits that process visual and touch sensory information may thus be responsible for some OBEs.
In the Swiss experiments, the researchers asked volunteers to stand in front of a camera while wearing video-display goggles.
Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera view of their own back - a three-dimensional "virtual own body" that appeared to be standing in front of them.
When the researchers stroked the back of the volunteer with a pen, the volunteer could see their virtual back being stroked either simultaneously or with a time lag.
The volunteers reported that the sensation seemed to be caused by the pen on their virtual back, rather than their real back, making them feel as if the virtual body was their own rather than a hologram.
Volunteers
Even when the camera was switched to film the back of a mannequin being stroked rather than their own back, the volunteers still reported feeling as if the virtual mannequin body was their own.
And when the researchers switched off the goggles, guided the volunteers back a few paces, and then asked them to walk back to where they had been standing, the volunteers overshot the target, returning nearer to the position of their "virtual self".
Dr Henrik Ehrsson, who led the UCL research, used a similar set-up in his tests and found volunteers had a physiological response - increased skin sweating - when they felt their virtual self was being threatened - appearing to be hit with a hammer.
Dr Ehrsson said: "This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel that our self is located where the eyes are."
Dr Susan Blackmore, psychologist and visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England, said: "This has at last brought OBEs into the lab and tested one of the main theories of how they occur.
"Scientists have long suspected that the clue to these extraordinary, and sometimes life-changing, experiences lies in disrupting our normal illusion of being a self behind our eyes, and replacing it with a new viewpoint from above or behind."
Monday, July 2, 2007
STROKE: Remember The 1st Three Letters... S.T.R.
Our president-elect, Betty Burke suggested that this be posted. For further reading, click on this link.
clipped from www.bio.uci.eduSTROKE: Remember The 1st Three Letters... S.T.R.
STROKE IDENTIFICATION:
During a BarBQ, a friend stumbled and took a little fall - she assured everyone that she was fine (they offered to call paramedics) and that she had just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes. They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food. While she appeared a bit shaken up, Ingrid went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening. Ingrid's husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital - (at 6:00 pm, Ingrid passed away.) She had suffered a stroke at the BarBQ. Had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke, perhaps Ingrid would be with us today. Some don't die. They end up in a helpless, hopeless condition instead.
It only takes a minute to read this...
A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke...totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.
RECOGNIZING A STROKE:
Remember the "3" steps, STR. Read and Learn!
Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke. Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:
- S * Ask the individual to SMILE .
- T * Ask the person to TALK to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently) (i.e. . It is sunny out today)
- R * Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
*NOTE: Another 'sign' of a stroke is this:
Ask the person to 'stick' out their tongue. If the tongue is 'crooked', if it goes to one side or the other, that is also an indication of a stroke. If the person has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call 911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.
Copyright © 2007, Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
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