Eideard

The University of Washington has surpassed its 2-year-old world record for operating a glider under the ice, this time by successfully operating one of its seagliders for six months as it made round trips hundreds of miles in length under the ice at Davis Strait.

The result contributes to the longest continuous measurement of fresh water exiting the Arctic through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Davis Strait and into the Labrador Sea.

Scientists worry that climate change may increase the amount of fresh water so much that it impacts the formation of very dense water in the Labrador Sea. That dense, cold water is a critical component driving the circulation of the world’s oceans, according to Craig Lee, a principal oceanographer with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory…

Seagliders developed by the UW School of Oceanography and Applied Physics Laboratory are small, reusable underwater vehicles meant to operate on their own, gliding without propellers from the surface to as deep as 1,000 meters, or 3,300 feet, while collecting such information as temperature, salinity and level of dissolved oxygen. When seagliders are at the ocean surface they can be commanded remotely from nearly anywhere in the world via the Internet and can transmit their data via satellite telephone. Unlike faster-moving propeller-driven autonomous underwater vehicles, which may need to be retrieved by ships only days after being deployed, UW seagliders can operate on their own for months at a time…

In the latest deployment, two Applied Physics Laboratory seagliders went into the water Sept. 5…One operated for 25 weeks, spending 51 days and traveling more than 450 miles under the ice, before being collected Feb. 26 by the Danish Navy. During under-ice operations, the glider periodically sought small openings in the ice cover and succeeded in surfacing 10 times to transmit data. It made two round trips under the ice of about 230 miles each…

RTFA. Lots of interesting news and design discussion. Fascinating stuff.

House of Divine in glamorous Milton Keynes tweeted to say that Lucia and Karol were working on Sunday while another message offered a “Twitter Discount”. The operation has been exposed in The Sun newspaper, which trumpets: “A BROTHEL is touting its services via social networking site TWITTER.”

Since “adult services” have previously managed to use other communications systems — postal services, telephones, shop windows, email, the web, advertisements in tabloid newspapers — this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, but brothel stories are probably good for raising your circulation (fnar fnar).

Whether Twitter is good for business is another matter; the @DivineMK account only has 72 followers at the time of writing, and some of them don’t look like potential customers. Since any Twitter user can see who is following an account, this is hardly private. An email circular would provide a more useful and more confidential information network…

The Sun briefly conveyed its outrage with a quote: “Lib-Dem MP Julia Goldsworthy labelled the brothel’s use of Twitter ‘cynical and inappropriate’.” However, @jgoldsworthy — MP for Falmouth and Camborne, which is some way from Milton Keynes — wasn’t outraged enough to comment on her own Twitter account or, so far, her own web site. Nor has she taken up my invitation to DM me.

Har!

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Senator Arlen Specter’s abrupt move to switch allegiance to President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party was a sharp blow to Republicans and will likely generate more soul-searching for the minority party…

* If he had remained a Republican, he faced a tough challenge for the party’s nomination in Pennsylvania’s 2010 Senate race from conservative Pat Toomey. The moderate Specter beat Toomey in a tight primary in 2004 but faced an even tougher battle this time.

* As far as the Republican base was concerned, his biggest Achilles’ heel was his support for Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill. That bill passed the U.S. Congress in February with support from only three Republicans — Specter and Maine senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe.

* Specter’s announcement sharply criticized Republicans, who lost control of the U.S. Congress in 2006, and lost the White House and more seats in Congress in 2008. “I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,” his statement said…

* Republican strategist John Feehery said Republican leaders in the Senate did all they could to hang on to Specter. More broadly, however, he said: “What it says about the party is they have to make a determination on whether they want to be in the majority or whether they want to be intellectually pure…”

* Republican strategist Scott Reed said: “I always thought Specter would consider switching to become an independent to get re-elected, and it’s too bad that Michael Steele pushed him into the Democrat Party.”

Overdue. And crafty. And bright.

As long as your curbside hookup doesn’t look like this. Har!

Cablevision, the Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable and Internet service provider, has continued its tradition of being a cable industry innovator by introducing 100-megabits-per-second service in Long Island. The service, dubbed Optimum Online Ultra, utilizes DOCSIS 3.0 technology to deliver the ultra-broadband experience over cable’s wires and comes with ability to send data upstream at 15 Mbps. It starts at $99 a month, will be available starting May 11 and will be the fastest service from a cable provider anywhere in the U.S.

Cablevision is facing intense competition right in its own backyard from Verizon, which has ramped up the availability of its FiOS fiber broadband in the areas where it’s allowed to sell broadband. The cable company has responded by constantly upgrading its network and offering higher speeds and recently started offering free Wi-Fi to its customers. Cablevision also announced that it was doubling the downstream speed of its Optimum Wi-Fi wireless Internet service, to up to 3.0 Mbps…

Cablevision’s attitude to broadband is in sharp contrast to those of its peers in the cable business. The company has not announced any plans for metered broadband and has been consistently offering more speeds for lower prices. Time Warner Cable continues to come up with excuses while Comcast has implemented a 250 GB bandwidth cap. Comcast recently launched a 50 Mbps broadband offering in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area and other cities around the country. Many carriers are looking at boosting speeds as a way to overcome the broadband slowdown that has come with a moribund economy.

That’s right. It reads like there is no cap on this new Cablevision package.

One of the commenters at Om’s post – from Sweden – has had 100Mbps up and down for 5 years. He pays $29 per month.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Five House Democrats, including civil rights pioneer John Lewis of Georgia, were among the eight people arrested during a demonstration outside the Sudanese Embassy Monday morning. The representatives were protesting Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s expulsion last month of 16 aid groups from war-ravaged Darfur.

The other four lawmakers arrested were Donna Edwards of Maryland, James McGovern of Massachusetts, Lynn Woolsey of California and the first Muslim elected to Congress, Keith Ellison of Minnesota.

The Secret Service arrested the lawmakers and charged with them crossing a police line, which is a misdemeanor.

The three other activists arrested during the protest were Jerry Fowler, president of Save Darfur Now; John Prendergast, a co-founder of the Enough Project who worked in the State Department during the Clinton Administration; and Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

You didn’t expect any “pro-life” Republicans, did you?

An estimated 50 percent of adults in the United States report that they consume dietary supplements on a regular basis. Some of these supplements contain caffeine—even if it is not listed on the label as an ingredient…In the United States, there is no requirement to state the amount of caffeine present in a food, beverage, or supplement on the product’s label. If caffeine in its pure form is added to a product, however, there is a requirement to add the word “caffeine” to the label’s ingredient listing.

Caffeine is a natural alkaloid that occurs not only in tea and coffee, but also in more than 60 other plants and in plant derivatives, known as “botanicals.” These botanicals, such as guarana, yerba mate, kola nut, and green tea extract, are common dietary-supplement ingredients and their names would be printed on the label’s ingredient listing.

The products analyzed in this study were mostly sports-nutrition and weight-loss products and some vitamin and mineral products, many of which contained complex mixtures of botanicals…The study provides a snapshot of caffeine levels (.pdf) in a sampling of products, each of which listed at least one caffeine-containing ingredient on the label. Top-selling and randomly selected products were chosen from four categories: health/natural food outlets; supermarkets, drugstores, and mass merchandisers; direct marketers, including catalog and Internet vendors; and practitioners, including fitness clubs…

According to NDL’s National Nutrient Database, one 8-ounce cup of coffee (240 milliliters) contains about 95 milligrams of caffeine. Of the 53 products analyzed, 27 products provided—by way of a daily serving defined on the label—the caffeine equivalent of about 1 to 2 cups of coffee, 11 products had caffeine equivalents ranging from 2 to 4 cups of coffee, another 11 had equivalents ranging from 4 to 6 cups of coffee, and 4 products provided an amount of caffeine ranging from 7 to 8 cups of coffee.

If you’re trying to maintain an informed balance in your diet, the report is worth reading.

The bright, energetic feeling may just mean your brain is dazzled.

“And then you s-q-u-e-e-z-e like THIS.”

For all the intrigue that had surrounded the mayoral elections in Sochi, Acting Mayor Anatoly N. Pakhomov managed to avoid confronting his critics — or even acknowledging their existence — until Friday, when he was outfoxed by a grandmaster.

The acting mayor of Sochi, Anatoly N. Pakhomov, listened as Mr. Kasparov spoke.

Mr. Pakhomov, who has the support of the Kremlin, appeared to sail to victory in Sunday’s election…. With little time left in the campaign, he attended a ceremony on Friday in a village near Sochi commemorating the Armenian genocide during World War I, a crucial gesture to the city’s large Armenian population….

But an animated gray-haired man had edged his way alongside the podium, and then he stepped onto it, sending whispers through the crowd. It was Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, who was in Sochi promoting the campaign of Mr. Pakhomov’s archrival, Boris Y. Nemtsov.

Mr. Kasparov, born to an Armenian mother, had been sitting quietly, signing autographs, for nearly two hours….

Mr. Kasparov’s remarks began innocently enough. He made an offhand mention of Mr. Nemtsov, so subtle that it was easy to miss. Then he began to sling arrows at Moscow, saying Soviet Russia had supported Turkey at the time of the massacres.

Mr. Pakhomov, standing behind him on the podium, looked as if he had eaten a lemon.

Two minutes and 33 seconds into Mr. Kasparov’s speech, a local official stepped forward and said his time was up. Mr. Kasparov turned to the crowd with an incredulous look.

“What’s happening?” he said loudly. “I cannot speak? Maybe it’s better to be silent?”

They shouted “No!” and erupted into applause. He went on, at leisure, to criticize the rise of racist violence in Russia, saying that “genocide doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, and to put it mildly the government is doing very little to stop this debauch of nationalism.”

I’ve grown to respect Kasparov a great deal.

Construction at Europe’s largest onshore wind farm is on course to be completed ahead of schedule, with the capacity to generate power for every home in Glasgow.

ScottishPower Renewables has confirmed that 126 turbines have been built at Whitelee, near Glasgow, and work on the final 14 has begun. All 140 turbines, producing up to 322 MW of electricity, are scheduled to be in place within the next few weeks…

Keith Anderson, director of ScottishPower Renewables, said that work on the wind farm was on a scale never attempted before and had required working in partnership with habitat management groups and the forestry commission, to overcome “difficult terrain” and “testing conditions”…

But Mr Anderson said he was delighted with the progress that had been made so far. “First electricity generation from the site was achieved in January 2008 and since then we have been feeding a steadily increasing amount of green energy into the electricity grid,” he said…

A further planning application to extend the wind farm by a further 36 turbines, which would take the overall capacity to 452MW, is currently being considered by the Scottish Government, which has set ambitious national targets to generate 50% of electricity from renewables by 2020, with an interim target of 35% by 2011.

Congratulations are due for coming in early – especially after the NIMBY opposition. Politics is politics and I realize that all the current office-holders and high mucky-mucks are going to take as much credit as possible for all of this. Has it ever been different?

Will there be anything in the news noticing that it was a radical journalist-editor-publisher from the West Highland Free Press named Brian Wilson who capped off a couple decades in the British Parliament by leading the political fight to commit to these alternative energy projects? I hope there might be.

CHARLESTON, S.C – Two months after the local atheist organization here put up a billboard saying “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone,” the group’s 13 board members met in Laura and Alex Kasman’s living room to grapple with the fallout.

The problem was not that the group, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, had attracted an outpouring of hostility. It was the opposite. An overflow audience of more than 100 had showed up for their most recent public symposium, and the board members discussed whether it was time to find a larger place.

And now parents were coming out of the woodwork asking for family-oriented programs where they could meet like-minded nonbelievers.

“Is everyone in favor of sponsoring a picnic for humanists with families?” asked the board president, Jonathan Lamb, a 27-year-old meteorologist, eliciting a chorus of “ayes.”

More than ever, America’s atheists are linking up and speaking out — even here in South Carolina, home to Bob Jones University, blue laws and a legislature that last year unanimously approved a Christian license plate embossed with a cross, a stained glass window and the words “I Believe” (a move blocked by a judge and now headed for trial)…

Polls show that the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years.

Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent from 3 percent. Not all the “nones” are necessarily committed atheists or agnostics, but they make up a pool of potential supporters.

RTFA. Well done enough that I thought at first it came from the Guardian [sorry, NYT].

So – disclaimer: I was an atheist by age 13. Proper philosophical materialist by 18. Science hasn’t bumped into any information changing either of those conclusions in the ensuing years.

Why show this? When I was that young, the Pledge didn’t include “under God”

Catholics who leave the fold largely do so because they disagree with church teachings, while Protestants who leave their particular denominations tend to do so because of life changes, such as marriage or moving.

Those are some of the key findings in a demographic survey just released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which sought to explain the reasons why there is so much fluidity among Americans about religious identity.

What they found was that Americans move between and among religions even more than previously known – and for myriad reasons.

In a survey released in 2006, the Pew Forum found that 28 percent of Americans have left their childhood religion, through conversion or abandonment of institutional religion altogether. They also found that an additional 16 percent had switched between Christian denominations.

Now, the Pew Forum has found that an additional 9 percent of Americans have left the faith of their childhood at some point during their lives for a different religion only to return. That means that a majority of the nation – 53 percent – has identified with a religion different than their own at some point during their lives.

“It really puts an exclamation point on the degree of churn that characterizes religion in the United States,” said Gregory Smith, senior fellow at the Pew Forum.

The numbers for atheists don’t include my favorite shame-faced materialists – the agnostics. Those numbers have grown a tad; but nothing in North America matches the ferment and change that followed WW2 in Europe.

Americans like to think you can’t find an atheist in a foxhole. I’ve known several, actually. You’re just not likely to find atheists in a society that rarely studies science, eschews questions defining the material world or – perish the thought – deeply challenges the political status quo.