Via CBS: Next week, an international panel of top climate scientists, including Americans, will issue a long-awaited report on climate change.
The long-awaited report to be published next week puts hard scientific fact behind the cliché images of global warming. A final draft, obtained by CBS News, contains the strongest language yet on how fast the world is heating up and who to blame.
The answer? Us. READ
Here are some great resource links from a designer blog called “Friendly Bit”.
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Via Dustin Bachrach: Ever want to alert your users to a really important message? Ever care to have some effect that looked like dasboard?
I wanted to do this for numerous sites so I finally I decided to scan the web for some resources. I didn’t find any real conclusive matches on Google. I mean what do you search for?
So, I started thinking about what we were actually doing and then finally I got code working. I’ll post the code and then briefly explain it. Here is a picture so you can get the idea of what it does, or you can simply go to my new website and click on either “About” or on “Contact.” READ
This is a great atheist blog on all things grounded in reality. LINK
Via The Guardian: Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.
A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms – like the ones that battered Britain last week – will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent. READ, Digg comments
Via CNN: NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Chief executives from such major corporations as General Electric and DuPont teamed up with environmental organizations Monday, urging U.S. lawmakers Monday to pass sweeping legislation that would ultimately cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“The time has come for constructive action that draws strength equally from business, government, and non-governmental stakeholders,” said Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, who participated in the program. READ
Via Physorg: Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image’s worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.
While the initial test image consists of only a few hundred pixels, a tremendous amount of information can be stored with the new technique.
The image, a “UR” for the University of Rochester, was made using a single pulse of light and the team can fit as many as a hundred of these pulses at once into a tiny, four-inch cell. Squeezing that much information into so small a space and retrieving it intact opens the door to optical buffering—storing information as light.
“It sort of sounds impossible, but instead of storing just ones and zeros, we’re storing an entire image,” says John Howell, associate professor of physics and leader of the team that created the device, which is revealed in today’s online issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. “It’s analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera—this is like a 6-megapixel camera.” READ
Via Time: Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken.
It shouldn’t be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body’s death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.” And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality. READ
Via Digg: No, this is not another Microsoft bashing tantrum, but a legitimate gripe that I believe could be easily resolved if only developers would take the right stance. Every serious web developer knows the trouble in creating websites that would render correctly in IE. Do some googling and you’ll turn up a lot of complaints from developers about Microsoft’s refusal to support standards, in particular CSS standards. However these same developers would create sites that implement non-standards compliant hacks so as to accommodate IE’s shortcomings. The logic generally being that IE commands most (as of this writing 86%) of the browser market so it would be “Insane” for a website not to “Support” it. Notice I quote the word Support, because websites aren’t supposed to be supporting browsers. Rather it should be the other way around, browsers should be supporting all websites by striving to correctly and completely implement standards. The demand for standards compliance isn’t a radical position to hold, without standards there would be no Internet as we’ve all come to know and love it. Without standards you wouldn’t be able to take your car to any auto shop and have parts replaced, you’ll have to take it to the original manufacturer and if you’re unlucky the parts in your manufacturer’s inventory wouldn’t be suited for your car because the manufacturing process itself isn’t standardized. To state succinctly, standards make our modern world go around.
The normal approach to solving this browser problem has been to promote the adoption of specific products such as Firefox by directly targeting users, but like any other problem, the problem of non-standards compliant browser usage must be tackled from its source, that source is the web developer who writes IE accommodating code. While I have my preference for which standard compliant browser is better, I will not promote any particular product here, as far I am concern, any standards compliant browser would suffice. In other words, anything but IE. Some people would argue that no browser is 100% standards compliant, that may be the case but any developer who has done cross browser testing knows that the difference between standard compliance in browsers such as Firefox/Opera and IE is equivalent to night and day. READ
From Wikipedia: Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrobiologist, and highly successful science popularizer. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He is world-famous for writing popular science books and for co-writing and presenting the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which was the most-watched PBS program[1] until Ken Burns’ The Civil War in 1990. A book to accompany the program was also published. He also wrote the novel Contact, the basis for the 1997 film of the same name starring Jodie Foster. During his lifetime, Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books. In his works, he frequently advocated scientific skepticism, humanism, and the scientific method.
Carl Sagan Wiki entry, Digg stories, Google videos, youtube videos.
