From Aries to Perseus (by Pegaso0970)
About
A quiz once told me that the word "sanguine" describes me.
Ask me
We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up;
This is our world.
All we have to do after that-
Is to die.
-Ikkyū
About
From Aries to Perseus (by Pegaso0970)
Most of the relevant mental machinery is not consciously accessible. People’s explicitly held, con- sciously accessible beliefs, as in other domains of cognition, only represent a fragment of the relevant processes. Experimental tests show that people’s actual religious concepts often diverge from what they believe they believe […]
Religious believers and sceptics generally agree that religion is a dramatic phenomenon that requires a dramatic explanation, either as a spectacular revelation of truth or as a fundamental error of reasoning. Cognitive science and neuroscience suggests a less dramatic but perhaps more empirically grounded picture of religion as a probable, although by no means inevitable by-product of the normal operation of human cognition.
(Source: en.wikiquote.org)
cwnl:
Across the Center of Centaurus A
A fantastic jumble of young blue star clusters, gigantic glowing gas clouds, and imposing dark dust lanes surrounds the central region of the active galaxy Centaurus A. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope has been processed to present a natural color picture of this cosmic maelstrom.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA) - ESA/Hubble Collaboration; Acknowledgement: R. O’Connell (U. Virginia)
![mohandasgandhi:
Is the Keystone Pipeline Really Dead? The president postponed the project - but Big Oil is already looking for another way to burn Canada’s tar sands
The oil industry fought hard to keep Keystone alive, making wildly exaggerated claims that the pipeline – the country’s largest infrastructure project – would create tens of thousands of jobs and decrease America’s reliance on oil from the Middle East. TransCanada, the company building the pipeline, had already spent nearly $2 billion buying land and parts for the project, anticipating approval by the end of the year. But Keystone took another blow when The New York Times unearthed evidence revealing an unsavory relationship between TransCanada and the State Department.
Even worse, scientists warned, the amount of carbon locked up in the tar sands – 230 billion tons – would be more than enough, if burned, to spike global warming to catastrophic levels. James Hansen, NASA’s leading climate scientist, predicted that if Keystone went through it would be “game over” for the planet. “The pipeline became more than an environmental or energy issue,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “It was almost a philosophical referendum on who we are as Americans, and what we care about.”
Although most Americans don’t know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East. Of the 9 million barrels of oil we import each day, 2 million come from Canada – half of them from a vast expanse in Alberta called the tar sands. Most of the major oil companies have operations there, including two of the biggest funders of the climate disinformation machine: ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, the Kansas-based refining and pipeline operation that handles 25 percent of the tar sands oil currently heading into America.
Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business. To get at the tar sands, oil companies must first cut down huge tracts of the boreal forests that cover Alberta before deploying huge, industrial-scale shovels and draglines to dig up the tar sand itself – a black goo that resembles roof tar mixed with beach sand. After dumping the goo into enormous vats of superhot water to separate out the sand and skim off the oil, refiners use an expensive and complex process called hydrocracking to turn the thick, sulfury gunk into gasoline or diesel. Finally, all the water and sand left over from the process – laden with heavy metals and toxins – is pumped into giant holding areas that form massive lakes of toxic sludge. In Alberta, all this takes place on a scale so large that it can be seen from space; the “lakes” of sludge alone are among the largest human-built projects in the world. It has also wreaked enormous environmental destruction in Canada: killing off scores of migrating ducks, polluting local water supplies and coinciding with an alarming increase in cancer rates for indigenous people who live downstream from the tar sands operations.
Right now, the tar sands produce some 1.5 million barrels of oil a day – but by 2030, oil producers in Alberta hope to double that output. There’s only one problem: The tar sands are landlocked. Unlike Saudi Arabia, where oil can be quickly and easily transported to the sea, the tar sands are transported to market through an extensive network of pipelines. And with the Midwest currently experiencing an oil glut, thanks to a boom in shale oil, Canada’s tar sands can receive top dollar only if they’re transported all the way to the Gulf Coast, where they can be refined and shipped overseas. The Keystone XL pipeline, in effect, was a way for oil companies to leapfrog the United States by digging a four-foot-deep trench and laying a three-foot-wide steel pipe nearly 2,000 miles long to get their product from Canada to Europe and Asia.
[…]
To counter [opposition to the pipeline], TransCanada preyed on the public’s economic insecurity, claiming that the pipeline would create 20,000 jobs in construction and manufacturing, plus an additional 118,000 spinoff jobs that would inject $20 billion into the U.S. economy. Fox News went even further, suggesting that the pipeline “could provide up to a million new high-paying jobs” in the U.S. The numbers came from a report by a Texas consulting operation called the Perryman Group – which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be little more than an ex-professor from Southern Methodist University who accepted funding from TransCanada for predicting a jobs boom. The State Department, by contrast, estimated that building the pipeline would employ no more than 6,000 construction workers – and that once Keystone was finished, the number of permanent pipeline jobs could be as few as 50.
As for the idea that the pipeline would increase America’s energy security: Much of the tar sands shipped to Texas would likely wind up overseas. Valero, one of the biggest refiners contracted to buy the oil from the pipeline, already exports six percent of its gasoline and 18 percent of its diesel, mostly to South America. What’s more, the most profitable market for refiners right now is selling diesel to Europe. “For the refiners, this is all about buying low-cost tar sands crude and selling into high-profit markets in the European Union,” says Stockman, the researcher at Oil Change International. “This oil is not going to replace oil from the Middle East. That’s not the way the global oil market works. This is not instead of – it’s as well as.” The Keystone pipeline, in short, wouldn’t increase our energy independence – it would just further fuel our oil addiction.
Steven Anderson, a retired brigadier general, became an outspoken opponent of the pipeline based on his experience overseeing the U.S. Army’s supply chain during the Iraq War. “That’s where I really saw the absurdity of our addiction to oil,” he says. “It was not just the strategic costs of maintaining our military presence in the Middle East, but the operational costs of keeping our troops moving and viable during a time of war.” Anderson estimates that of the 1,000 trucks the Army had in motion each day during the height of the war, 300 of them were devoted exclusively to moving fuel around. By Anderson’s estimate, at least 1,000 American soldiers died transporting fuel. “It was absurd and tragic,” he says.
The pipeline, Anderson says, would actually undermine our energy security by perpetuating the fantasy that America can drill its way to freedom and prosperity. “It allows us to think we can keep driving our SUVs, that everything is fine,” he argues. “It is not fine. We need to make big changes to how we think about energy in America. The Keystone pipeline is not the solution to our problems. It is emblematic of it. If we build this pipeline, we will look back on this in 50 years and see how foolish we were.”
[…]
But the decision [to postpone the Keystone pipeline permit], while a major victory for the environment, may prove short-lived. In postponing the pipeline, the president offered no bold statement about the need to curb America’s addiction to oil or to invest in clean energy. In the end, Obama opted to delay the pipeline with a bureaucratic shuffle, arguing only that the route through Nebraska needed further study. The failure to take a firm stand against converting Canada’s tar sands into oil leaves the door open for Keystone – or another pipeline just like it.
(Read the full article here)
[Image via Esquire]
This is worth the read.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvccjaYIfo1qzhl7go1_500.jpg)
The oil industry fought hard to keep Keystone alive, making wildly exaggerated claims that the pipeline – the country’s largest infrastructure project – would create tens of thousands of jobs and decrease America’s reliance on oil from the Middle East. TransCanada, the company building the pipeline, had already spent nearly $2 billion buying land and parts for the project, anticipating approval by the end of the year. But Keystone took another blow when The New York Times unearthed evidence revealing an unsavory relationship between TransCanada and the State Department.
Even worse, scientists warned, the amount of carbon locked up in the tar sands – 230 billion tons – would be more than enough, if burned, to spike global warming to catastrophic levels. James Hansen, NASA’s leading climate scientist, predicted that if Keystone went through it would be “game over” for the planet. “The pipeline became more than an environmental or energy issue,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “It was almost a philosophical referendum on who we are as Americans, and what we care about.”
Although most Americans don’t know it, the U.S. gets more oil from Canada than it does from the entire Middle East. Of the 9 million barrels of oil we import each day, 2 million come from Canada – half of them from a vast expanse in Alberta called the tar sands. Most of the major oil companies have operations there, including two of the biggest funders of the climate disinformation machine: ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, the Kansas-based refining and pipeline operation that handles 25 percent of the tar sands oil currently heading into America.
Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business. To get at the tar sands, oil companies must first cut down huge tracts of the boreal forests that cover Alberta before deploying huge, industrial-scale shovels and draglines to dig up the tar sand itself – a black goo that resembles roof tar mixed with beach sand. After dumping the goo into enormous vats of superhot water to separate out the sand and skim off the oil, refiners use an expensive and complex process called hydrocracking to turn the thick, sulfury gunk into gasoline or diesel. Finally, all the water and sand left over from the process – laden with heavy metals and toxins – is pumped into giant holding areas that form massive lakes of toxic sludge. In Alberta, all this takes place on a scale so large that it can be seen from space; the “lakes” of sludge alone are among the largest human-built projects in the world. It has also wreaked enormous environmental destruction in Canada: killing off scores of migrating ducks, polluting local water supplies and coinciding with an alarming increase in cancer rates for indigenous people who live downstream from the tar sands operations.
Right now, the tar sands produce some 1.5 million barrels of oil a day – but by 2030, oil producers in Alberta hope to double that output. There’s only one problem: The tar sands are landlocked. Unlike Saudi Arabia, where oil can be quickly and easily transported to the sea, the tar sands are transported to market through an extensive network of pipelines. And with the Midwest currently experiencing an oil glut, thanks to a boom in shale oil, Canada’s tar sands can receive top dollar only if they’re transported all the way to the Gulf Coast, where they can be refined and shipped overseas. The Keystone XL pipeline, in effect, was a way for oil companies to leapfrog the United States by digging a four-foot-deep trench and laying a three-foot-wide steel pipe nearly 2,000 miles long to get their product from Canada to Europe and Asia.
[…]
To counter [opposition to the pipeline], TransCanada preyed on the public’s economic insecurity, claiming that the pipeline would create 20,000 jobs in construction and manufacturing, plus an additional 118,000 spinoff jobs that would inject $20 billion into the U.S. economy. Fox News went even further, suggesting that the pipeline “could provide up to a million new high-paying jobs” in the U.S. The numbers came from a report by a Texas consulting operation called the Perryman Group – which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be little more than an ex-professor from Southern Methodist University who accepted funding from TransCanada for predicting a jobs boom. The State Department, by contrast, estimated that building the pipeline would employ no more than 6,000 construction workers – and that once Keystone was finished, the number of permanent pipeline jobs could be as few as 50.
As for the idea that the pipeline would increase America’s energy security: Much of the tar sands shipped to Texas would likely wind up overseas. Valero, one of the biggest refiners contracted to buy the oil from the pipeline, already exports six percent of its gasoline and 18 percent of its diesel, mostly to South America. What’s more, the most profitable market for refiners right now is selling diesel to Europe. “For the refiners, this is all about buying low-cost tar sands crude and selling into high-profit markets in the European Union,” says Stockman, the researcher at Oil Change International. “This oil is not going to replace oil from the Middle East. That’s not the way the global oil market works. This is not instead of – it’s as well as.” The Keystone pipeline, in short, wouldn’t increase our energy independence – it would just further fuel our oil addiction.
Steven Anderson, a retired brigadier general, became an outspoken opponent of the pipeline based on his experience overseeing the U.S. Army’s supply chain during the Iraq War. “That’s where I really saw the absurdity of our addiction to oil,” he says. “It was not just the strategic costs of maintaining our military presence in the Middle East, but the operational costs of keeping our troops moving and viable during a time of war.” Anderson estimates that of the 1,000 trucks the Army had in motion each day during the height of the war, 300 of them were devoted exclusively to moving fuel around. By Anderson’s estimate, at least 1,000 American soldiers died transporting fuel. “It was absurd and tragic,” he says.
The pipeline, Anderson says, would actually undermine our energy security by perpetuating the fantasy that America can drill its way to freedom and prosperity. “It allows us to think we can keep driving our SUVs, that everything is fine,” he argues. “It is not fine. We need to make big changes to how we think about energy in America. The Keystone pipeline is not the solution to our problems. It is emblematic of it. If we build this pipeline, we will look back on this in 50 years and see how foolish we were.”
[…]
But the decision [to postpone the Keystone pipeline permit], while a major victory for the environment, may prove short-lived. In postponing the pipeline, the president offered no bold statement about the need to curb America’s addiction to oil or to invest in clean energy. In the end, Obama opted to delay the pipeline with a bureaucratic shuffle, arguing only that the route through Nebraska needed further study. The failure to take a firm stand against converting Canada’s tar sands into oil leaves the door open for Keystone – or another pipeline just like it.
[Image via Esquire]
This is worth the read.
Medical students, y u so funny?
Why is the past different from the future? Caltech physicist Sean Carroll explains how the arrow of time is not an intrinsic property of physics, but rather an emergent feature.
Lets talk about the Nebulae!
1. What is a Nebulae?
The word “nebula” is derived from the Latin word for “clouds”. Indeed, a nebula is a cosmic cloud of gas and dust floating in space. More than one nebula are called nebulae. Nebulae are the basic building blocks of the universe. They contain the elements from which stars and solar systems are built.
2. What are the different types of Nebulae?
- Emission Nebula - An emission nebula is a cloud of high temperature gas. Emission nebulae tend to be red in color because of the abundance of hydrogen. Additional colors, such as blue and green, can be produced by the atoms of other elements, but hydrogen is almost always the most abundant. A fine example of an emission nebula is the Orion Nebula (M42).
- Reflection Nebula - A reflection nebula differs from an emission nebula in does not emit radiation of its own. It is a cloud of dust and gas that reflects the light energy from a nearby star or group of stars. Reflection nebulae are frequently the sites of star formation. They usually tend to be blue in color because of the way that the light is scattered. Blue light is scattered more efficiently. The Trifid Nebula (M20) in Sagittarius is a good example of a reflection nebula.
- Dark Nebula - A dark nebula is a cloud of dust that blocks the light from objects behind it. They are very similar to reflection nebulae in composition and look different primarily because of the placement of the light source. Dark nebulae are usually seen together with emission and reflection nebulae. The Horsehead Nebula in Orion is probably the most famous example of a dark nebula. It is a dark region of dust in the shape of a horse’s head that blocks the light from a much larger emission nebula behind it.
- Planetary Nebula - A planetary nebula is a shell of gas produced by a star as it nears the end of its life cycle. Their name can be a bit misleading. They actually have nothing to do with planets. These nebulae were given this name because they often look like planets due to their round shape. The outer shell of gas is usually illuminated by the remains of the star at its center. The Ring Nebula (M57) in Lyra is one of the best examples of a planetary nebula.
- Supernova Remnant - Supernova remnants are created when a star ends it life in a massive explosion known as a supernova. The explosion blows a large amount of the star’s matter out into space. This cloud of matter glows with the remains of the star that created it. One of the best examples of a supernova remnant is the crab Nebula (M1) in Taurus. It is illuminated by a pulsar which was created by the supernova
3. What’s the cause of Nebulae’s color?
They are also among the most beautiful objects in the universe, glowing with rich colors and swirls of light. Stars inside these clouds of gas cause them to glow with beautiful reds, blues, and greens. These colors are the result of different elements within the nebula. Most nebulae are composed of about 90% hydrogen, 10% helium, and 0.1% heavy elements such as carbon, nitrogen, magnesium, potassium, calcium, iron.
4. Can we see the colors of nebulae in our naked eyes? There are a few nebulae that can be seen with the naked eye and many more that can be detected with a good pair of binoculars. A telescope is required to bring our fine details. Unfortunately, the human eye is not sensitive enough to bring out the rich colors of most nebulae. It is the photograph that does the most justice to these incredible objects. Perhaps the most well known nebulae is the Orion Nebula, also known as M42. It is one of the very few that can be seen with the naked eye.
-I hope this will help you to understand more about the Nebulae. This is just the basic information about the Nebulae. =))
(Photo credit: Bob Franke)
What are the Odds You Even Exist Today?
I love talking about this topic, but I can never find the right words to express my thoughts. Click through for a larger version!
Augmented Audio Game Spurs Fitness By Immersing Runners In Zombie Infested World
Zombies, Run!, is a soon to debut augmented audio running game for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android that challenges users to rebuild civilization after a zombie apocalypse by completing location-specific tasks while running in the real world. Users cue the app and don headphones to collect medicine, ammo, batteries, and spare parts which can be used to build up and expand their base — all while getting orders, clues, and a story through their headphones. Missions last around 20-30 minutes and can be played in any city. The platform additionally records the distance, time, pace, and calories burned during all runs, and may soon include RunKeeper integration. PSFK spoke to founder Adrian Hon about his work.
Full Story:PSFK
This would actually get me to break my weight rule and start running again sooner.
Jesus, I definitely need this. Or something like this.
cwnl:
Orangutan Culture Develops Like Human Culture
A team of anthropologists have shown that orangutans may have the ability to learn socially and pass these lessons down through generations — evidence that culture in humans and great apes has the same evolutionary roots.
In humans, certain behavioral innovations tend to be passed down from generation to generation through social learning. Many consider the existence of culture in humans to be one of the key factors that differentiates us from other animals.
Around a decade ago, biologists observing great apes noticed geographical variations in behavior that suggested that they were passing certain innovations down through generations, just as humans do. To this day, there is much debate about whether geographical variations in behavior is driven culturally or through genetic and environmental factors.
Researchers from the University of Zurich have now studied whether the geographic variation of behavioral patterns in nine orangutan populations in Sumatra and Borneo can be explained by cultural transmission. They have concluded that it can.
The team analyzed more than 100,000 hours of behavioral data and created genetic profiles of more than 150 wild orangutans. They measured the ecological differences between the habitats of the different populations using satellite imagery and remote sensing techniques.
Co-author of the study, published in Current Biology, Carel van Schaik said: “The novelty of our study is that, thanks to the unprecedented size of our dataset, we were the first to gauge the influence genetics and environmental factors have on the different behavioral patterns among the orangutan populations.”
