Blackmoor Vituperative

This is cool. HP will send you a postage-paid envelope to send back empty inkjet and laserjet cartridges to be recycled.

A very sad article about plastic.

Since at least the early 1990s, trillions of discarded plastic items have converged, held together by swirling currents, to form the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that now covers an area twice the size of the United States and weighs about 100 million tons. “Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there,” said one researcher quoted in a February dispatch in London’s The Independent. An oceanographer predicted that the Patch would double in size in just the next decade. A 2006 United Nations office estimated that every square mile of ocean contains, on average, 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.

( The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”, from TreeHugger)

Sheryl Crow and Laurie David were on Bill Maher’s show this evening, publicizing a tour they are doing to promote awareness of “global warming”. You know, I don’t mind that they believe that planetary temperature shifts are a real, human-caused phenomenon. What I do mind is that they call it a “fact”, based on the experts they choose to believe, and completely discount the experts who disagree [1] [2] and the people who choose to believe to those experts. It’s a theory, not a fact, and claiming it’s a “fact” is just an attempt to prevent informed discourse.

An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission.

NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged the feature over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

(from NASA, NASA – Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn)

Proof that the masters of Saturn are gamers.

Check out this giant crystal cave in Mexico.

Scientists have created a tiny cable — much thinner than a human hair — through which they can transmit visible light, potentially paving the way for improvements in solar energy, computing and medicine.

The achievement, described in research published on Monday in the journal Applied Physics Letters, involves a re-imagining of the coaxial cable — that commonplace conduit of cable television, telephone and Internet service — on a minuscule scale.

(from eWeek, Tiny New Cable May Spur Big Technological Advances)

A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city…

(from the October 2001 issue of Scientific American, Drowning New Orleans)

Here’s a neat video of water in microgravity:

I have long been of the opinion that religion — more specifically, Protestant Christianity as it is practiced in the USA, the religion with which I am the most familiar — is fundamentally anti-life and anti-human. In other words, evil.

It’s just an opinion. Many reasonably-intelligent, well-intentioned people disagree with me, and I do not think less of them for it. However…

Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV — and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer — goes poof. Not so fast: We’re living in God’s country now. The Christian right doesn’t like the sound of this vaccine at all. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful,” Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, “because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.” Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they’ve probably never heard of.

(from The Nation, Virginity or Death!)