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Earth

Endangered Species Condoms 61

Posted by samzenpus from the make-it-growl dept.
The Center for Biological Diversity wants to help put a polar bear in your pants with their endangered species condom campaign. They hope that giving away 100,000 free Endangered Species Condoms across the country will highlight how unsustainable human population growth is driving species to extinction, and instill the sexual prowess of the coquí guajón rock frog, nature's most passionate lover, in the condom users. From the article: "To help people understand the impact of overpopulation on other species, and to give them a chance to take action in their own lives, the Center is distributing free packets of Endangered Species Condoms depicting six separate species: the polar bear, snail darter, spotted owl, American burying beetle, jaguar, and coquí guajón rock frog."
Image

Measuring the Speed of Light With Valentine's Day Chocolate 126

Posted by samzenpus from the speed-of-the-sound-of-loneliness dept.
Cytotoxic writes "What to do with all of those leftover Valentine's Day chocolates? — a common problem for the Slashdot crowd. The folks over at Wired magazine have an answer for you in a nice article showing how to measure the speed of light with a microwave and some chocolate. A simple yet surprisingly accurate method that can be used to introduce the scientific method to children and others in need of a scientific education."

Comment Re:This is not one of those cases (Score 5, Interesting) 233

by derdesh (#30680496) Attached to: Aboriginal Folklore Leads To Meteorite Crater

Okay, I admit, I RTFA, and the crater in question has been dated as millions of years old, long before *anyone* claims humans capable of cultural transmission visited Australia.

According to the article, the author himself thinks that the aboriginal Australians were sophisticated enough to recognize impact craters on the landscape, and what might have caused them, and concoct legends about falling objects to explain them.

With all due respect to the parent post, the Indigenous Australians may have great knowledge that has been dismissed by their Western colonizers, but this is not evidence of such.

Windows

Submission + - Mac Attack! Enterprise PC shop switches to Apple (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
jcatcw
jcatcw writes: "The largest full-service auto processing company in North America, Auto Warehousing Co, is switching from Microsoft to Apple. Over the next 60 days, AWC will begin systematically pulling the plug on all Windows-based PCs. They'll power up Macs for virtually all revenue-generating operations. The move comes on the heels of a quiet replacement of Windows-based servers for data storage and Web operations, which are now running on Apple Inc.'s Xserve RAID machines. The CIO, Dale Frantz, says "This stuff just works." Some might claim that this move is vengence for a spat with MS over licensing some years ago, but Computerworld's Don Tennant calls Frantz a hero and defends the decision as purely business based. Frantz is in good company. Michael Gartenberg has been there and has the Lessons Learned."
Republicans

Submission + - Doomsday for the Greenback

Submitted by jcgam69
jcgam69 writes: The American people are in La-la land. If they had any idea of what the Federal Reserve was up to, they'd be out on the streets waving fists and pitchforks. Instead, they go about our business like nothing is wrong. Are we really that stupid? What is it that people don't understand about the trade deficit? It's not rocket science. The Current Account Deficit is over $800 billion a year. That means that we are spending more than we are making and savaging the dollar in the process. Presently, we need more than $2 billion of foreign investment per day just to keep the wheels from coming off the cart.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - How underwear led to increased medieval literacy (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
Steve
Steve writes: "Everyone thinks the printing press led to increased literacy among the average man in the middle ages, but that just might not be the case. Dr Marco Mostert a historian from Utrecht University is instead suggesting that the availability of cheap paper was the main reason more reading material became available. While this isn't surprising the source of the new cheap paper is. It seems that, according to Dr. Mostert, "These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased — which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making.""
Links

Submission + - Is Scientific Consensus a Threat to Democracy? (ft.com)

Submitted by
chance_encounter
chance_encounter writes: "President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus has published an article in the Financial Times in which he seems to equate the current global warming debate with totalitarian thought control: "The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced." He goes on to state: "The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence." At the end of the article he proposes several suggestions to improve the global climate debate, including this point: "Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term "scientific consensus," which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Hidden Images On Windows Vista DVD

Submitted by
bigwophh
bigwophh writes: "A blog post at Spanish-speaking website inicia.es shows a hidden image of three men standing side-by-side on a Windows Vista Business DVD. So, we decided to investigate further and slapped a Windows Vista Ultimate DVD down on a scanner to see if we could verify the original image and to see if there were any other hidden images to speak of. Well, we were able to verify the hidden image of the three men and found another picture of what appears to be two more faces, and another that looks like a view of Earth from the Moon. A fourth image is also visible, but we haven't been able to make out the details."
Security

Submission + - Stupid Hacker Tricks (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
infoworldjason
infoworldjason writes: "Andrew Brandt put together a humorous, partial compendium of infamous boneheaded hackers, spammers, and script kiddies over here at InfoWorld: "But as any IT pro knows, the more complexity you add to a system, the more likely it is that system will fail in unanticipated ways. The same rule applies to criminals who employ complex webs of technology to further their misdeeds. And besides, despite their reliance on technology, cyberoutlaws are not robots themselves. More often than not it's what makes them human — greed, an inflated ego, loose lips — that ends up getting the better of them..." It's somewhat of a new twist on our Stupid User Tricks and More Stupider User Tricks amuse fests."
Space

Submission + - Hurricane Satellite Could Fail without Replacement

Submitted by statemachine
statemachine writes: An aging weather satellite crucial to accurate predictions on the intensity and path of hurricanes could fail at any moment and plans to launch a replacement have been pushed back seven years to 2016. Last year, forecasts were off an average of 111 miles two days in advance, a figure that has been cut in half over the past 15 years. But experts said that could grow 10 percent to 122 miles if the satellite is lost, causing the "cone of error" well known to coastal residents to expand. QuikScat, launched in 1999 and designed to last two to three years, provides key data on wind speed and direction over the ocean. Weather aircraft and buoys can also obtain similar measurements near a storm, but they do not provide a constant flow of data as QuikScat does. Now the satellite is limping along on a backup transmitter and has other problems. A European satellite called ASCAT is available, but it does not give scientists as clear a picture as QuikScat because the distance between the readings it takes is larger. A NASA and Department of Defense satellite called WINDSAT also measures wind speed and direction, but it too is beyond its expected lifespan, and scientists have had trouble using it to observe tropical weather systems. Even if money were immediately available, a replacement satellite is estimated to take at least four years and cost approximately $400 million to build.
Editorial

Submission + - Hawaii SuperFerry New Technology

Submitted by Lil Jen
Lil Jen writes: This last week protesters staged a traffic simulation showing just how congested the roads will be once the cars are unloaded. They proved that getting through Kahului may take over 2 hours. Right now you can drive through it in ten minutes. This will be an everyday occurance. And this was just demonstrating the Hawaii Superferry effect on Traffic when unloading. Ponder for a moment on what will happen to the rest of Maui. If you've ever driven to or from Lahaina during rush hour, you know it can be bad. One lane on each side can cause major delays, not including the accidents. You may think that Maui will compensate for the new influx of traffic by adding lanes to roads and new roads. But have you seen the roads to Lahaina and to Hana? It would take 20-25 years to build even one extra lane through the Pali and up to Lahaina. And that's Mainland time. Maui time will take closer to 35 years, without exaggeration. Plus, with the new construction that's going on in Olowalu, it looks as though they're clearing right up to the road. This road lines the ocean by mere feet; a new lane has no where to go.

Hana residents will remain Hana residence. This means they won't be able to get to the rest of the island without making it a 2 day excursion. With 250 new cars a day, the road to Hana will take twice as long if lucky. imagine the Road to Hana in stop and go traffic. The people of Hana already hate the tourists, and in turn causes them to close off their natural gems to the public. With all the congestion, they're going to get really upset. This could lead to violence and more of Hana being guarded from visitors.

Then there's the homeless problem. Yes, we have homeless living on our beaches, many with substance abuse problems. If you've been near one of their broken down car/tent shanties, you'll recognize the odors of makeshift bathrooms. This can't continue on our pristine beaches. With the Superferry bringing huge amounts of cars and people from all islands, and especially Oahu, how are we going to control the masses of homeless from taking over our beaches and making them into toilets. With the substance abuse comes crime and violence.

Drug trafficing will never be easier. Having an entire automobile to stash drugs will be easy considering the inspectors are projected to be having less than half a minute to inspect each car.

And what about the cars? We already have a major problem with abandoned cars littering our roadside. What's to stop people from other islands to come over, and leave them here? They can always jump back on the ferry on foot.

Then there's the environmental issues. Our mongoose on Maui have decimated the low nesting bird population. there will be little to no protection from them getting to the other islands. Not to mention the invasive species of plant life and other animal life like coqui frogs. And then there's the humback whale problem. The routes that the Super Ferry take are parallel or intersect the humpback migration routes. Even on the Hawaii Superferry website they show the routes as parallel from Oahu to Kauai and they intersect on the other islands. Even if they went completely different routes, their would be whale collisions. if you've been whale watching, you know that they're cruising around everywhere. They don't stay along the same narrow path. Whales come here to give birth, mate, and swim all around. If the Superferry disagrees with this notion, than take a look at the mother and calf that got lost up a river a couple weeks ago. These are huge mammals that travel all around the world and fuel our tourist industry. It'd be nice if we could continue to have them come here without being slaughtered. Seeing that at least one or two fatalities happen off of Maui per year, I can't imagine what this fast, huge Ferry will do.

The pollution will certainly also become a problem. It's a known fact that our Hawaiian sealife and reefs have decreased dramatically in the last 10-15 years because of human run off. Having hundreds of cars spilling their toxic fluids off the side of the Super Ferry will cause irrepairable damage. The SuperFerry itself will be unloading its own filth too. The vehicle oils will saturate all parts of the island from the ferry and from the roads.

On a positive note, it will bring us more business from the other islands. But then again, our island is doing fine as is. With over 2 million visitors to our island of Maui a year, our tourist trade is flourishing without the new ferry system. Actually it could cause more of a problem seeing that many of our visitors will likely rent a car and spend half their stay on another island.

That's about the only positive thinking I have on the Superferry situation, and even that is riddled with possible negatives. Even if the owners and operators of the Hawaii SuperFerry felt compelled to address these issues in full, the price of a ticket would be raised hundreds of dollars, and it would take 10 hours to get from island to island.

All of this coming from one of the most positive guys on island. I love Maui and all of our islands. This is a special place to live and/or visit. I wish what i've written was fabricated.

Even with all of its obvious impact, the Hawaii Superferry is scheduled to begin its routes later this summer. Looks like big money talks louder than logic.
Displays

Submission + - Battlefield: Reading from Paper vs from Monitor

Submitted by Bamafan77
Bamafan77 writes: There's an interesting hidden battle taking place over this issue. Many (most?) people view printing paper as "wasteful" and something to be avoided at all costs. But the fact is that consuming information from a monitor (even a nice LCD) is NOT as good as consuming information from paper. I use computers for things like storing information, doing calculations, and quick lookup of information. If I need to read something that takes more than a couple minutes, it gets printed. This includes articles, code, long emails, etc.

So I'd like to get the SlashThought on this — do you prefer reading from a screen or do you prefer printing things out before reading?

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Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"

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