Some Stray Thoughts on Global Warming

Some things have occurred to me regarding the global warming trend. It was recently brought to my attention that the Northwest passage is now open for travel and exploration. A giant peat bog is now available for playing around in - I think, in northern Canada. These are things we did not have since they were buried under tons of glacial ice. It is true that the sea level will rise, altering coastlines the world over and submerging most islands. But for anyone who has ever played Sim City, islands are not the best landforms for booming populations of humans. Unless we are planning on shrinking ourselves to take up significantly less space on this planet, or give up the American dream of owning our own chunk of land with a nice big house on it, we are going to be needing continental land mass for living on and growing crops.

God forbid if some terrorist nut cases end up nuking some part of the planet, that region will be uninhabitable for thousands of years, at least. Maybe the Iranian warlords over there in the Middle East might want to think about that for a while before they push the wrong button. I do believe al Quaida and the Taliban have a suicide wish - because that's what will happen if they even try such a tactic - the entire Middle East will be wiped out in less than a day.

There's more to the Global Warming situation than a lot of folks realize. First of all, as the ice melts, sea level will rise everywhere. However, there is a concept in geology called isostatic rebound. As glacial ice melts away, the excess weight on the continental plate is decreased. The continental plate takes advantage of this and buoyantly bobs upward, similar to a spring being released after the pressure is taken off. In the final analysis, we may all end up with more coastline, instead of less, once all the ice is done for.

Since it is melting anyway, and since we need as much fresh water as we can get. I believe that the best course of action would be to harvest as much of the fresh water from these glaciers as we can, before it all ends up in the saline sea water. We could build massive reservoirs and catchments to collect it in and transport it to parts of the planet where it will do the most good, where fresh water is most needed for growing crops and making life livable.

These were just a few thoughts I have scurrying around in my mind, of late. Until later...

A Pet Peeve

Declawing of animals should be outlawed.

People who get their pets declawed do not seem to realize what they do to their beloved pets. All that matters to them is material possessions like sofas, rugs, and window treatments.

I wish people would think about the animals feelings, for once in their lives. Why do certain people even bother to buy or adopt animals?! A status symbol - to show off how much they can afford to spend on a living toy?! Animals are not toys, not things, not mere objects! They are thinking creatures with feelings and, yes, they do feel pain. In order to declaw a cat, or any animal, the fingertips are surgically removed - or else the claws will grow back. I have heard of cats crippled with arthritis from declawing. But hey, who gives a damn about these animals' quality of life or the right to live a pain free life when we can just give them an injection to put them to sleep and put them out of their misery. God forbid if we should be expected to watch the poor creatures suffer because of what their adopted parents did to them at an early age. Look at your fingers. Where do your fingernails start growing from? It is the same for all mammals -and likely for all animals with claws, talons, or fingernails. GET THE POINT?! [pun intended].


Even those monsters who do animal testing for cosmetics have to cut their test animals' vocal chords so the testers won't be bothered by the animals crying and screaming in pain. It's one thing to do genetic testing on lab mice and rats to find cures for cancer - especially since the US federal government refuses the use of stem cells for real human embryos for such tests. Why test a bunch of human cells to find cures for human ailments and illnesses - when we can just as well torture some innocent creatures for the same thing?! Except, maybe, because they are not human, and do not have human DNA! If we used the human stem cells, we wouldn't even have to use the mice or rats anymore. It would cut down on the costs for the research since we could go directly to the human genome to do what we must do - it would save valuable time and needless suffering of those with such illnesses. It would also save countless animals needless suffering, as well.

Do not worry; I am not an advocate for PETA. I have never, and will never condone or support such a radical group. They care more about the political dramatics than they do about the animals they claim to protect. Just like the so-called pro-life advocates who are just as likely to throw their own children out on the streets at the age of twelve - or younger - because the child happens to be gay. All life is precious - but to these groups - only under certain conditions.

I saw a Rotweiller without its ears and tail clipped, for the first time in my life, this past weekend at the local pet expo - so I guess there's some hope. Animals are not perfect, and neither are humans. Guess what folks, humans are animals, too. That tends to offend some folks. It offends me when we expect other creatures, including ourselves to be perfect, to fit our ideals. I also do not much care for folks who go around and say that everyone is evil and going to hell. I admit that I make mistakes in this world, all the time. But, it is usually the humans, who are the most disappointing to me. The only creatures that ever cared about me were, and still are, the furry, four-legged kind. I have a rapport with animals. Currently, I have two beautiful cats, whom I adore - and a bunch of furry neighbor friends, several of which have been trying to cheer me up lately - since my human friends are apparently incapable of giving a damn. I am sure they are trying to tell us something. Too bad we cannot quiet our thoughts enough to listen, to them or each other.

Bolivian Crater Information and a Rant

This image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/
Source: http://intute.ac.uk/sciences/worldguide/html/image_2093.html

Apparently, there hasn't been much research done on the Bolivian impact crater. This is due to its remote location. I did get a few bits and pieces of information about it.

• It's called the Iturralde Structure or the Araona Crater.
• It's located at 19 degrees 49' South by 68 degrees 19' West - NW edge of the Salar de Uyuni, Eastern Bolivia
• Oval - elongated in a north-south direction and bowl-shaped - 8km across
• Flat-bottomed with very steep inner walls [similar to the Barringer Crater, AZ] with raised external rim
• It is located downslope of some volcanic craters with evidence of a more recent lava flow being diverted as well as a diverted river. This proves that it is relatively recent. Also, even though some weathering has obviously occurred, the crater is still in relatively good condition - albeit, buried under layers of decomposing organic-rich soils and vegetation.

This is about all there is about this crater. No tektites, shocked minerals, or other necessary evidence. Most of the data is biological in nature with a detailed study of the soil layers and their organic and ecological implications. Geological evidence is minimal and largely absent. Where's the evidence of a human settlement destroyed by the impact? The age is not even determined: estimated to have originated between five and twenty thousand years ago. If they had conducted proper geological sampling and measurements, a more accurate date could be determined. Who cares what the ecologies were/are inside the crater since the impact? They can do that later! We need to know when it occurred and any other pieces of evidence regarding the impact itself. This is not very encouraging. It is science of the most absurd kind. A botanist led the expedition who apparently decided that the geology was of little importance. Why did they go to investigate the crater in the first place? It's a geological impact structure - that's what drew them to the site. Instead they decide to study what plants have lived inside since the impact. The impact and the crater itself are of little importance to the advancements of science. Apparently! The sad lack of geological evidence has some scientists believing that it is merely a volcanic crater instead of one created by a meteor. The vast majority of the evidence is from satellite images - that's the only way we know its size and general shape. There is just nothing written about this crater. Maybe evidence has been gathered but not yet put out there in print for reference. It is a very vexing problem. Until later...

Listing and Summaries of Some of My Projects - Part 1

This is just a quick general run down of the research topics I have yet to make progress on.

I want to design a device for releasing the pressure build up in volcanoes, similar to the way scientists release pressure along the San Andreas fault, to minimize the destructive earthquakes by causing small scale ones where the pressure is building up. I already have a design in mind and the most cost effective way to do it would be to use already existing materials. Patenting is not necessarily an issue at this point since the invention is not marketable in any way I can see, but will be a benefit to humanity and to science.

The Pleistocene mass extinction: As mentioned before, I am trying to assemble data and analyze it to find a pattern of global mass extinction congruent with the global immigration of human hunter gatherers in an attempt to illustrate that human over hunting was the primary cause of the extinctions. At the same time I am gathering data about the deglaciation that was also happening and given by many scientists and scholars as the primary cause of the extinction, in order to show that there are problems with the prevailing theory. The Bolivian impact crater adds a new interesting twist to the information.

Cretaceous Tertiary Boundary Event: I started this project many, many years ago and never got the chance to finish it and then I lost my copy of the original draft. Hopefully, I will find it soon. I did do a shortened version of it for a research writing class a few years back, but it was far from the quality of the original. It was also a very detailed study of a great deal of evidence from the K-T layer and impact crater, as well as a detailed survey of major animal groups that were affected, went extinct, and even ones that did not suffer greatly. I was trying to be thorough and cover the most important evidence and intended to add some speculation regarding the details. I intend to redo and/or finish what I started.

Jericho Geology: The ancient and biblical city of Jericho is legendary for its great walls, supposedly the first city walls to ever be built. Apparently, the city of Jericho is also considered the first human city as well. Then I found out that it was built along a very tectonically active fault zone. The issue is that the city and its wall was destroyed and rebuilt many times. For centuries, people just figured it was due to wars. But I believe it can be argued that massive earthquakes were the cause of the city's repeated destruction. This adds speculation about why they kept rebuilding the city in the same location. What was so appealing about the location to keep people there despite massive destructive earthquakes?

Aegean Dual Subduction Zone: A tectonic anomaly in the Aegean Sea. I call it an anomaly since its rarely observed in nature and the implications are enormous. What will happen if the center plate sinks into the mantle? What are we to expect with a section of the sea floor, devoid of the crustal layer? A new crust would form, but much thinner, and weaker, and with volcanic forces causing more problems. It's just a very interesting phenomena, and one to keep an eye on.

I will post more of these projects later this week, and hopefully add an update. Until then...

Tid Bits and a Little Bit of Progress

I made a little bit of progress this past weekend on my Pleistocene research. It was a minor thing but it's still progress. I did a little bit of preliminary research on the mass extinction and I even took some notes - about two and a half pages worth - in a quad ruled notebook. I prefer to handwrite a lot of my stuff. It would help if I had a computer at home, but as it is, I like to take advantage of available resources when I can.



How exactly did I do this preliminary research? I merely did a basic google search on the web and read information from various sites on the topic. It looks like some other folks have been noticing the human migration and extinction pattern overlap. Though, key researchers still seem dumbfounded as to the cause of the extinctions. One site mentioned that such an extinction is not typically found during previous deglaciations. Other pertinent pieces of information relevant to my research is a general timeline of the beginnings of each region's extinctions with Africa, India, and Indonesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia being the oldest and the Americas among the most recent. This makes my point about it being a global mass extinction.



There was also a very interesting new piece to the American part of the puzzle. A newly discovered impact crater from a meteorite impact in the Bolivian Amazon area with evidence of human settlements being wiped out by the collision. Incidentally, this event occurred 30,000 years before present and the source of the discovery looks to be reasonably reliable since it was discovered by the Scientific Exploration Society. This puts a whole new light on initial colonization of the Americas. If geologists can determine the most reliable date of the crash and anthropologists have determined with reasonable certainty that one or more human settlements were indeed destroyed, then there is now even stronger evidence that there were humans here long before Clovis.



I never truly understood that argument from a logical standpoint anyway. So many scholars just assumed that the people who invented the Clovis points came here at the same time as they invented their new weapon of choice. It makes more logical sense to say that people arrived at some date prior to the invention of Clovis points. There is a long span of time between the evolution of humans and their invention of Clovis. They would most likely have arrived here closer to the Clovis time, but not necessarily just days or even a few years before. There is nothing about the Clovis points themselves that tells definitively when their inventors came to this continent - other than they arrived before creating their invention.



If I invent something in another country, say Greece, I would most certainly have to arrive there in Greece prior to my making said invention. However, I would not be obligated to invent it as soon as I got off the airplane that brought me there. I could design, build, and patent it over the course of fifty years if need be. So, why do we assume ancient peoples did any differently? Humans very well could have been here thousands or even tens of thousands of years before they invented Clovis points. It looks like the evidence speaks for itself.



The impact also may have contributed to the extinctions in the Americas. Another point my argument brings to mind is that humans would have had to colonize or inhabit in some way each subsequent region prior to the extinctions. It would make no sense for the extinctions to occur prior to human arrival to their environments.



I even came across that article about scientists finding evidence of extinctions due to human hunters in Australia. But I noted that the vast majority of the sites and studies were primarily focusing on the Americas. I do not fully understand why they seem to be ignorign the rest of the continents. Maybe because if they do they know damn well that they will happen upon the same pattern as I am attempting to illustrate. They love using the deglaciation as the primary cause - but this too occurred globally - not just here in the Americas. Also, South America would not have been impacted nearly as much by deglaciation. A Hyperdisease is biologically unlikely since diseases rarely if ever jump species. To assume such a process for a mass extinction as extensive as the Pleistocene's is to jump to very erroneous conclusions.

Just like the Bog People exhibit at the Carnegie Museum last year. Most, if not all, of the deaths were assumed to have been religious ritualistic in nature. However, if any person were found dead in a ditch along the side of a well traveled highway today, noone would assume it was religious or ritualistic at all. It would be deemed a homicide. People kill people everyday in this world! Why would our ancient ancestors have been any different?



Also of noteworthiness: the technical writing class I am currently taking is looking at the Helicobacter pylori epidemic that has been a human ailment as long as humans have been around. One article I critiqued for our online workbook was very interesting, even regarding my Pleistocene research. There are at least seven individual strains of the bacteria currently in operation, which in turn evolved from three ancestral strains. Interestingly, they are geographically traceable and can and are being used to determine the relative dates of colonization of various regions - e.g., continents. It would be very interesting to correlate the two series of evidence - the arrival of humans plotted against the beginnings of the extinctions in those regions. I might be able to run a preliminary chart or graph of this evidence. I might even correct for the timing of the Bolivian Bolide event.

Plans and Proposals

I have very recently come to the conclusion that I might want to look into the patenting process and procedures regarding the two inventions I mentioned in my last post. It would be in my best interest to patent them both as soon as possible, so as to have the concepts locked in as mine (and my partner's) - I have decided to continue with his help on the remote sensing program. The volcanology related invention is mine alone, however. I am not entirely sure how else to proceed on these inventions. If we need a prototype prior to patenting - then we got some problems since both ideas are still in the conceptualizing stages, at the moment. I have already discussed this with my partner, he understands my concerns and agrees that we might want to look into this ASAP to determine where we stand. If we can obtain the patents first, we might be able to use that as leverage to obtain grant money for training and development for both inventions.

While I was thinking this through, I remembered a small project I did for a biology class years ago on terraforming Mars into an Earth-like and inhabitable planet by utilizing its own natural resources with a little bit of technological help from us to kick it off and get the process started. I am not sure if a process such as this is a patentable idea. Can one even patent such a process? Besides, it's not like as if people just come up with these kinds of ideas every day - except maybe in science fiction stories. However, the article that I based my project and presentation on was based on science and real world reality, not pie in the sky concepts. My professor OK'd the article and the report - and I ended up getting an A on the project. Even though I got some of the ideas from the inital article, I did add some realistic ideas of how to do exactly what my report proposed. I do think I still have the report somewhere in storage - though I don't think it's on disk. The article was from a science fiction magazine - though from the science discussion section - not from a story. This magazine is no longer in publication - Science Fiction Age. I do believe that it is possible to do what I proposed in that initial report, but it gives me ideas about moving foreward on that exact topic. A presentation would be in order - powerpoint all the way, baby! So, I now have another project peeking out wanting attention. I may as well add it to my outline list of topics.

Update, Some Progress, and Conclusions

I printed out a couple articles on the Aegean Tectonics project and I have one on the Jericho Geology that I have to make a photocopy of because I don't have access to it online, but I have to wait for the library to open to do that. Other than that and the outlines I mentioned the other day, there's not much more to tell.

However, I am coming to some conclusions about at least some of these projects as I go through the list and make outlines and get some initial thoughts down in writing and on disk. Don't ask me why I am doing this, since I don't really know the true reason. Maybe it's some odd thing about me that I get antsy about leaving all the other projects on the backburner while I focus on just one to the point that I find it difficult to concentrate on that one with all the others buzzing around in my head. Or maybe I just have a deep burning desire for utter chaos in everything I do. I'm even reading articles on how to generate more ideas - like as if I don't have enough to worry about already! Yoi!

As to those conclusions:
The Yellowstone Project is basically an invention to perform controlled eruptions of volcanoes. I don't know if it will fly - it's literally a long shot - but if it's workable - it could be very useful and helpful. After the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I seriously doubt this country would be able to deal with such a large scale natural disaster or evacuate every habitable town and city eastward of that massive volcano.

Another project that seemingly fell into my lap relatively recently would make use of remote sensing programming to find "certain dangerous things". Yes, this is another invention, of sorts. Let's just say that I'm planning on usurping the prize in a somewhat hostile takeover - kind of the way Bill Gates got back at Steve Jobs and for a similar reason. My former "partner" decided that backstabbing one of his friends is the preferrable way to do business - yes, I'm the friend he betrayed. And payback's a bitch!

As to the other projects: It looks like the Pleistocene Extinction, the Cretaceous Tertiary Collision and Extinction, the History of Evolutionary Theory, and the Jericho Geology will all end up as books, mostly due to the extensive nature of each of them. I'm going to be covering a lot of information on each of these topics and I can do it piece by piece and part by part - each part ending up as an article or even a series of articles before I turn it all into a comprehensive book on the subject. This may be a reason why I am having a hard time getting much momentum going on any of my projects, most of them are a bit overwhelming. That's putting it mildly! Crikey!

I think I mentioned having to create a website for this science and technology writing class I'm taking this semester. However, I don't think it's quite what I feared. It's a group project but I haven't heard more about topics or anything. Now, if only I could find someone who is a lot more computer capable than I... Hmmm... Gonna have to get the word out...

Also of note, there's a proofreading fundamentals class coming up in a couple weeks - similar to the freelance writing workshop I attended over the summer. No hesitations here, this time - I learned my lesson last time. I'm definitely going for it - I'll be registering for it this week. It's at the same place and time as the workshop, on the 29th of this month. There's another one on getting your invention/idea to the marketplace, but there's a timing problem. Maybe they'll offer it in the spring listing. I certainly hope so, especially with two inventions/ideas to play around with. Another thing I'm thinking of doing is look around online for free tutorials on some of this to see what I can learn and get accomplished in the meantime. Well, tally ho!