No need to paint the male gender as a whole as being filled with sociopaths. It's just the law of large numbers at work. There's maybe 30 million American men in the age rage that are likely to pick up srange women; if just 1/10 % of them are sociopathic predators that's 30,000 predators; and since they *are* predators they'll be overrepresented in young women's encounters with men in pick-up scenarios. Small numbers can produce disproportionate problems. In this case it represents numbers the actions of such a small proportion of men that our ideas about how normal people act aren't a reliable guide.

Drink spiking is a very rare crime. Most studies that look for evidence of it find very little. The highest I found was a government study which found date rape drugs in 4.5% of the cases from four sexual assault clinics. Note this is 4.5% of the cases where the assault occurred, so we're not talking about 4.5% of encounters, we're talking 4.5% of rapes. 4.5% is certainly high enough to be a concern in certain situations, like residential parties at a college. In such a situation a date rape drug detector might actually have some utility, even though it addresses relatively rare actions by a tiny proportion of men.

A bigger concern than what we think of as a "date rape drug" is alcohol itself. The same study that found date rape drugs in 4.5% of sexual assault samples found alcohol in 55%. This result is consistently found across studies: alcohol is very frequently associated with sexual assault -- around half of the time. This is especially concerning because some people (men and women both) don't believe that surreptitiously incapacitating someone with alcohol in order to have sex is rape. They don't distinguish ethically between two people getting drunk and having sex and one of them slipping extra alcohol into a drink.

But the fact remains most men wouldn't do something like that. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that a woman might often encounter the few remaining men who would. A typical man has sex with a small number of women many times; a man who has sex with a large number of women only once is bound to be encountered by women disproportionately often.

The only thing that would be more metal than that would be to have Skálmöld play a concert on the fissure while it erupts ;)

No, the Icelandic Met office was, based on a very reasonable - but ultimately wrong - interpretation of the earthquake and surface tremor data.

Hey, dike is the English word! The Icelandic is "berggangur", which is like "rock conduit".

You sound stressed. Why don't you go relax and have a krap?

I'm going to take a wild guess and speculate that the Swiss arm of the business is curiously profitable. Swiss people just LOVE romance novels. Profitable ones especially.

Exactly. If you want to regard yourself as an engineer, you have to start by accepting you are working to serve the interests of the client, not your career. I've seen so many problems occur because programmers want to have a certain technology on their resume. And the sad thing is that it works to get them through the HR filter. If HR is told to look for experience with a particular technology, it doesn't seem to matter whether the candidate's experience with that technology is failure.

Does it have something to do with this, perhaps? ;)

She doesn't need to. The dike has now extended out beyond the glacier and is 60% of the way to Askja.

The real problem isn't the subglacial volcanoes, though. It's Hekla. They've been talking about this in the Icelandic press a bit, basically she usually gives an average of a couple dozen minutes advance warning, and then the ash plume reaches flight level in 5-20 minutes. Yet a dozen or so commercial passenger jets fly over her every day. There's one volcanologist recommending a permanent air traffic closure over her. The current situation really looks to be just asking or a serious tragedy at some point in the coming decades.

Foreigners? It's our volcano. You're the foreigners.

FYI, it was our volcanologists who called the Met Office on their bad claim. Of course, they had every reason to think that there was an eruption, the earthquake and tremor activity has gotten so crazy it's higher than that seen during all but the most powerful eruptions in the area, and it's not even broken out of the ground yet. The amount of magma in motion there is just bonkers.

The best scenario at this point is a Krafla-style eruption - lava fountains slowly releasing the pressure over a decade, a nice "tourist eruption". The worst realistic scenario is a long-lasting, multiple vent fissure eruption stretching between Bárðarbunga and Askja, which would likely be one of our "Oh My God, Oh My God, We're All Going To Die!" eruptions that happen every 100-200 years on average.

Yeah, it's morbidly fascinating to keep up with what's going on underground there. Whenever you run out of superlatives for how extreme the situation underground is, whatever crazy thing you were looking at before increases by half an order of magnitude ;) I thought it was crazy when they said the magma flow was 60 million cubic meters in 5 days. Now the estimate is 270 million cubic meters in 7 days. That's the flow rate of the freaking Hudson River at NYC, plowing straight through rock. And the seismometer readings are just freaking nuts, an earthquake every minute. And now it's on its way to connecting Bárðarbunga with Askja, it's over halfway there. Two of Iceland's most devastating volcanoes. If Michael Bay was writing it, all that'd be left for him to do would be to have an intrusion also go in the other direction to link up with Katla through Veiðivötn and Laki, with a simultaneous Hekla eruption ;)

Iceland's volcanoes have indeed done that quite a few times. Eruptions connected with Laki in particular have been nasty, the 970 eruption was reported to have frozen the Tigris and Euphrates in central Iraq, and the 1783-1784 eruption froze the Mississippi at New Orleans and there was ice seen floating in the Gulf of Mexico. Which is even more impressive when you realize that the closer a volcano is to the poles, the harder it is to alter climate suchly; Iceland's volcanoes give off abnormally high levels of SO2 (also, really unfortunately from a local perspective, HF). Laki's 1783-1784 eruption, for example, gave off a whopping 120 million tonnes of SO2 and 6 million of HF, 6 times more SO2 and orders of magnitude more HF than Pinatubo, the largest eruption of the 20th century.

The problem with that, however, is that these effects are only short term. Meanwhile, volcanoes also give off CO2, which contributes to warming and last much longer. So they provide short-term cooling but long-term warming.

Hello from the Ring of Fire!

I live in a country with 8 active volcanoes, an average of 1.5 hurricanes annually, and regular (i.e. often more than monthly) earthquakes of significant proportions. I've personally experienced three 7+ earthquakes, two tsunami warnings and more 6+ earthquakes than I can remember.

Even the most impoverished houses are built with cinder blocks reinforced with rebar and with the gaps filled. Traditional bamboo houses with pandanus roofs are virtually indestructible, even in a cyclone. The only time I've ever felt unsafe inside a building was in a Chinese-built structure that showed structural cracks after the very first earthquake.

It's perverse, I guess, but those of us with the least to lose seem to have the least to fear, too. In spite of living in one of the most geologically dangerous spots on Earth.

No, no it's really not.

The article is a breathlessly juvenile attempt to assert style over substance. It's an empty - deeply, deeply empty - gesture in the direction of hipness, and as such, has nothing at all of interest to say. Its descriptive abilities are so impoverished that the only way one could even comprehend the article is by watching the promo video. And who wants to do that, when someone composes English that sounds like a high school assignment handed in by one of those kids who tries WAY too hard

.

Not that I had any trust in them anyway.

Blu-Ray, and indeed any modern optical storage, is very short-lived precisely because it's designed to be cheap. The laser disks used to store the Doomsday Project in Britain were still readable after 20 years. Modern optical storage decays typically within 5. Less, as the density goes up. And failures take out far larger percentages of the storage.

Magnetic tape is still the only trusted long-term backup medium. I wouldn't suggest it for something like Facebook purely because of seek times, but it's hard to think of any viable alternative.

With Blu-Ray, to guarantee to avoid complete disk loss, you'd have to be re-archiving the entire archive annually. That adds an enormous invisible cost to the project. They're not going to do that. Which means there's guaranteed loss of backups. How much depends on the exact storage conditions but it won't be pretty.

As for better ability to withstand conditions, it again comes down to the nature of the storage. Optical disks are highly vulnerable to a lot of things that hard drives are not. Overall, optical storage usually performs very badly in comparison, as the things hard drives are vulnerable to are cheaply avoided but the things optical storage can be attacked by are usually a lot harder to deal with.

I'm sure you're aware that none of the above formats (tape included) are considered "archival quality" - they just don't have the sort of durability required by that categorization. No known digital format does and there's nothing you can do to stabilize them. It's a big research area. For now, tape is considered the only method that is economic and durable, with the lowest loss of data per failure.