The bodies of thousands of rabbits culled every year from the parks in Stockholm's Kungsholmen neighbourhood are being used to fuel a heating plant in central Sweden. ...and as surely as night follows day...
The decision to use Stockholm's rabbit cadavers as bioenergy to warm Swedes living in Värmland doesn't sit well with Stockholm-based animal rights activists. No, reeeeeeaaallly ...
"Those who support the culling of rabbits surely think it's good to use the bodies for a good cause. But it feels like they're trying to turn the animals into an industry rather than look at the main problem," Anna Johannesson of Vilda kaniners värn ('Society for the Protection of Wild Rabbits') told the local Vårt Kungsholmen newspaper....
Posted by: Mike ||
10/13/2009 09:19 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11140 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Hey Sven, it's kind of chilly in here. Throw another fluffy bunny on the fire. Make sure he's extra fluffy.
#5
How many BTU in a rabbit carcass? I wouldn't think that it'd be worth the conversion. Why not just turn 'em into dog food?
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
10/13/2009 14:52 Comments ||
Top||
#6
Look at the Fibonacci thingy, Mitch. Once they cross the midline, there are too many rabbits, and clearly not enough dogs. And after a while, everyone already has a rabbit fur vest and cap.
A shepherd said he saw his flock "burn and completely disappear" after he let them wander into a rocky depression to search for grass in a remote area of northern Jordan.
Moses himself only got a bush. But it turns out there is a scientific explanation:
Government experts dispatched to the burned region in Um Jaozeh on the outskirts of the city of Salt revealed that a nearby waste treatment plant had saturated the soil with methane gas and organic materials.
"The underground fire erupted when some local residents set fire to dried grass in the vicinity and the sparks spread," said Bahjat Edwan, president of the Jordanian Geologists Association. Holes were dug in the area to release the trapped gas and the area was flooded to neutralise the problem.
The explosion sparked rumours of an impending volcanic eruption, causing panic across the desert kingdom.
More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the worlds biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again....Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. Im not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, Im talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal and Search for Future Influence From LHC, posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half....
It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck, Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God. It is their guess, he went on, that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an anti-miracle....
Posted by: Mike ||
10/13/2009 14:02 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11130 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
The HADRON SC may explain the strange cloud formation oer MOSCOW recently, since GUAM-WESTPAC is being curr used for [night-time]UV SAUCER DESIGN TESTING - the Enviros won't like it one bit iff we infect alien planets wid our dastardly arrogant fascist earth germs via WORMHOLE-LOST FLYING SAUCER.
* CRACKED.com > IIRC FIVE? MOVIES ALIENS SHOULD SEE BEFORE ATTACKING EARTH.
* ION GUAM PDN FORUMS > US AIR FORCE LOSING THE BATTLE TO SURVIVE [e.g. USAF-USN Joint Services Basing]?
A drunken man was swept away in Lauenbrück from the train because he had pressed his bare buttocks as a protest against the window of the departing train. The 22-year-old student from Saxony-Anhalt was lucky that he was not run over, and came back with bruises and abrasions to the hospital.
On the route between Bremen and Hamburg, the man together with a friend was caught without a ticket by the conductor and had to leave the train. There, the 22-year-old pulled down his pants in protest and pressed his bare buttocks against the window of the departing train. He was dragged about 200 yards and fell into the space between the train and the platform edge. He was 150 meters behind the platform end. Passengers pulled the emergency brake.
The conductor stood in shock after the incident. The railway line remained closed over an hour, two dozen trains were delayed. The 22-year-old, whose blood alcohol content was at 0.2%, now will be prosecuted for dangerous interference with rail traffic. Google translation with some errors corrected. Original link here.
#1
One of these days I'm going to have to expound on my 2012 conspiracy theory. Basically, that something _might_ actually be happening but it's not anything any of the new age people have detailed. Those are all "placeholder" theories so that when the Earth gets hit by some sort of supernova shock wave they can say it's because of the solar system crossing the Dark Rift or something like that, boosting their credibility and reducing the credibility of mainstream science.
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/13/2009 12:49 Comments ||
Top||
#6
I've heard the reasoning (Word used extremely loosely)That on that date we cross the Galactic Equator, so what.
it's just an imaginary line.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
10/13/2009 13:16 Comments ||
Top||
#7
The Mayan spokesperson was unavailable for comment.
The Mayan spokesman has been complaining mightily that he has to spend so much time answering stupid questions from people who're getting it wrong... and no, nothing bad is going to happen, so could they please leave him in peace.
"Yep, I'm sitting here in a cave with 2,000 gallons of gasoline and enough spam to last for a year..."
They disappeared the morning of Jan 1.
I suspect they will be making a comeback anytime now.
Posted by: Kelly ||
10/13/2009 14:56 Comments ||
Top||
#12
#6 I've heard the reasoning (Word used extremely loosely)That on that date we cross the Galactic Equator, so what.
it's just an imaginary line.
Actually, the galactic equator isn't an imaginary line.
But: we aren't anywhere near the galactic equator. We're about 150 light years away from it in the direction of "galactic north."
But suppose you know that (for instance) a supernova shock wave will hit on a certain date and you have all your patsies set up to declare that "Earth will have thus and so happen" on that date because "it's crossing the galactic equator" it could set things up for further con games down the road.
It's just another fun experiment you can perform when you have superluminal travel and the primitive marks' planet doesn't.
[Iran Press TV Latest] Gabon's Constitutional Court has ruled out the opposition's challenge to the country's election results, clearing the way for Ali Ben Bongo to replace his father as president.
The court said it has studied eleven requests from opposition parties, who called for the August 30 election result to be annulled. Second-placed candidate, Andre Mba Obame, has gone on a hunger strike to protest the result of the election.
The decision was read out on state television on Monday evening by Marie Madeleine Mborantsuo, the court's president.
Ali Bongo's victory with 42% of the vote sparked a rampage by opposition supporters in two of the oil-producing country's major cities, shortly after the poll results were announced on September 3.
The ensuing unrest prompted the police to use teargas and batons to disperse protesters.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/13/2009 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11127 views]
Top|| File under:
"Clearly I had my seatbelt on, so it's impossible that I'd be leaning over sucking his d*** unless he is hung like a donkey or I've got a f****** rubber neck."
Or she loosened her seatbelt to be able to reach, which clearly hasn't occurred to her, due to the shock of the experience. Lucky that no one was seriously injured.
#3
I worked for years in accident reconstruction before I retired. I am so thankful that I never had to testify in a case like this. I guess re-enactment is not a possibility here.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (October 13, 2009) Oil demand in developed countriescurrently 54 percent of all oil demandlikely reached its all-time peak in 2005, according to a new research report by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. While world oil demand is now set to grow as the world economy moves from recession to recovery, the demand lost in 30 developed countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is not likely to ever be regained, the report finds.
The economic downturn has been masking a larger trend in the oil demand of developed countries, said IHS CERA Chairman and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize, Daniel Yergin. The fact is that OECD oil demand has been falling since late 2005, well before the Great Recession began.
The key factor making it unlikely for OECD demand to ever return to its 2005 peak is that petroleum demand in the transportation sectorwhich accounts for 60 percent of OECD petroleum demandis likely to flatten out after years of steady growth. Oil demand outside the transportation sector has already been relatively flat since 1980. Now the conjunction of several long-term factors is doing the same to transportation:
Rest at the link.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
10/13/2009 15:09 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11126 views]
Top|| File under:
America is not going to bleed its wealth importing fuel. Russia's grip on Europe's gas will weaken. Improvident Britain may avoid paralysing blackouts by mid-decade after all. Not gonna be allowed to happen...
The World Gas Conference in Buenos Aires last week was one of those events that shatter assumptions. Advances in technology for extracting gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than almost anybody expected.
Energy bills could hit £2,000 Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said proven natural gas reserves around the world have risen to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, enough for 60 years' supply -- and rising fast.
"There has been a revolution in the gas fields of North America. Reserve estimates are rising sharply as technology unlocks unconventional resources," he said.
This is almost unknown to the public, despite the efforts of Nick Grealy at "No Hot Air" who has been arguing for some time that Britain's shale reserves could replace declining North Sea output.
Rune Bjornson from Norway's StatoilHydro said exploitable reserves are much greater than supposed just three years ago and may meet global gas needs for generations.
"The common wisdom was that unconventional gas was too difficult, too expensive and too demanding," he said, according to Petroleum Economist. "This has changed. If we ever doubted that gas was the fuel of the future -- in many ways there's the answer."
The breakthrough has been to combine 3-D seismic imaging with new technologies to free "tight gas" by smashing rocks, known as hydro-fracturing or "fracking" in the trade.
The US is leading the charge. Operations in Pennsylvania and Texas have already been sufficient to cut US imports of liquefied natural gas (LGN) from Trinidad and Qatar to almost nil, with knock-on effects for the global gas market -- and crude oil. It is one reason why spot prices for some LNG deliveries have dropped to 50pc of pipeline contracts.
Energy bulls gambling that the world economy will soon resume its bubble trajectory need to remember two facts: industrial production over the last year is still down 19pc in Japan, 18pc in Italy, 17pc in Germany, 15pc in Canada, 13pc in France and Russia. 11pc in the US and the UK and 10pc in Brazil. A 12pc rise in China does not offset this.
OPEC states are cheating on quota cuts. Non-compliance has fallen to 62pc from 82pc in March. Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela et al face a budget crunch. Why comply when non-OPEC Russia is pumping at breakneck speed?
The US Energy Department expects shale to meet half of US gas demand within 20 years, if not earlier. Projects are cranking up in eastern France and Poland. Exploration is under way in Australia, India and China.
Texas A&M University said US methods could increase global gas reserves by nine times to 16,000 TCF (trillion cubic feet). Almost a quarter is in China but it may lack the water resources to harness the technology given the depletion of the North China water basin.
Needless to say, the Kremlin is irked. "There's a lot of myths about shale production," said Gazprom's Alexander Medvedev.
If the new forecasts are accurate, Gazprom is not going to be the perennial cash cow funding Russia's great power resurgence. Russia's budget may be in structural deficit.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/13/2009 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11132 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
"Not gonna be allowed to happen"? Pls explain, Fred. Isn't most of the work going to happen in the more pro-gas states like TX and OK (rather than CO or CA)?
#2
As I regularly tell you. Natural gas powered vehicles are the solution to US energy imports and energy independence.
Here in Perth, every bus, taxi, delivery vehicle, and most high mileage private cars are natural gas powered.
NG is also safer than petrol.
The problem is car manufacturers have only just started making NG powered vehicles. So for years here, brand new vehicles would go into the shop for an NG conversion before being driven.
I'll self snip my normal rant about the idiocy of electric vehicles.
Electric vehicles require substantially more energy to power them than petrol/diesel/NG powered vehicles because of the inherent inefficiences electricity production, distribution and storage.
Electric vehicles would be OK despite their energy inefficency if ample surplus electricity were available from nuclear and coal power stations.
#5
CNG in the US is the answer for cars. Honda makes the only pure CNG vehicle that I know of for the US market but I would not get one just yet. The tank is too small and there are not enough refuel stations. What we are doing is working the conversion of our car. It can run on either gas or CNG at the turn or a switch. This way if the CNG runs low, its back to gas until we get home. You can buy a CNG compressor to fill your cars at home. The compressor is a bit slow, takes the night to fill a car, but you plug it when you get home at night and by morning your good to go. The compressor costs about 2,500 dollars. The conversion for the car is also about 2,500 depending on the size tank you buy.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
10/13/2009 7:45 Comments ||
Top||
#6
You can also make synthetic diesel from natural gas - some is being made to blend with conventional diesel in order to meet some stringent emissions rules, especially in Europe. It is still quite costly - 2-3 times more than conventional - and I don't know how energy-inefficient the processing is, but it is easier to handle than CNG or LNG and you can go farther on a fill-up. I figure if you can make synthetic diesel from natural gas you can probably also make jet fuel.
New US natural gas supplies (mostly shale and tight sand gas) do seem to be large, and have shut down LNG importation projects and most high-cost offshore conventional gas drilling; these new gas wells are not 'great' - but there are thousands of them, and we can drill many more, with (seemingly) predictable results, which sets a ceiling on gas prices (absent any demand increase). And there's lots more gas elsewhere, available to us through LNG imports, if it is cheaper than our own new gas (so far it mostly is not.) So far though, Britain does not seem to have big new domestic supplies, so they are still dependent on Russia - and on LNG imports from West Africa or the Persian Gulf or Trinidad; unfortunately for the Brits, LNG re-gassification plants are NIMBY projects, so they'll mostly stay beholden to Moscow.
#7
I say it's not gonna be allowed to happen because without a never-ending energy crisis the bottom drops out of the Green movement. With the bottom goes the justification for vast government spending and great gobs of power accruing to the dictatorial class.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/13/2009 8:29 Comments ||
Top||
#8
There's no single answer. More CNG is cool, but we still need nuclear, coal and petroleum -- in that order :-)
#9
Followup on Fred's "not gonna be allowed to happen" -- won't be allowed to happen because, according to the greenies, extracting oil from shale takes too much water. That's bad, ya know, especially when you return the water to the environment, even if you treat and clean it. Can't be clean enough for them, so you're not allowed to extract oil and gas from shale.
That's it. Settled. Accept your lower economic status, chumbalones, and let the elites do your thinking for you.
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/13/2009 11:05 Comments ||
Top||
#10
Fred's correct while gas is at $2.50 per gallon. At a sustained level of $5.00 per gallon, something I fully expect once the recession is over (say 3-5 years) there will be tremendous pressure to ignore the greens. Not just because of Joe Six Pack's pressure, but because we will relapse into recession. This will costs the states a pretty penny, especially with the pension crisis hitting them. They will be broke. And extraction fees will be their only new source of revenue. Pennsylvania will lead this charge and New York will join.
#11
I once owned a heavy truck (3 ton van 302 ford engine) cross fitted for either gasoline or propane, I did a cost-per-mile analysis and it was dead even. no gain either fuel.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
10/13/2009 13:22 Comments ||
Top||
#13
Electric vehicles require substantially more energy to power them than petrol/diesel/NG powered vehicles because of the inherent inefficiences electricity production, distribution and storage.
Definitely not true about production. What's the efficiency of internal combustion---8% to 10%?Distribution is matter of engineering.
Storage we haven't solved yet.
On the plus side
(a) Think relative mechanical simplicity (and hence price: both initial & upkeep; to the castumer).
(b) No partial combustion products (real pollutants unlike CO2), just a bit of O3---which is actually refreshing.
(c) No noise pollution.
The metro desk at the Times was informed today that all magazine and newspaper subscriptions have been canceled. If reporters want to check out the competition in the Post or the News, they can buy their own copies. The reason is obviously to save money, and the Times claims it can put the saved money toward freelancers.
Here's the memo sent to the metro staff by metro administrative manager Gloria Bell, (Take a look how quick-to-the-point this note is; these days, explanations for these sort of cuts are pretty unnecessary).
Folks,
You all know how tight budgets have become. They are getting tighter. Because of that we have decided to cut all subscriptions to newspapers and magazines that come in from the news dealer. If you wish to read any of the tabloids or out of town papers, either purchase your own or share with co-workers who purchase them to read on their way to work.
Please note, too, that any subscriptions you have regularly purchased and expensed may not be reimbursed anymore. Please check with me before you pay for anything. Most periodicals, including the tabloids and other daily newspapers, are available online through Ebsco masterfile which you can get to through the Research Dept's web page.
Sorry about this but the money we spent on these papers can be put to better use like paying freelancers. As always, thanks for your cooperation and understanding.
Later, a follow-up note was sent out, with the subject line, "Good Suggestion."
Please put any newspapers or magazines that you care to contribute to our "share and share alike" system, on the cabinet tops that used to house the Metro stacks. Thanks.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/13/2009 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11132 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
The headline is a bit misleading. The Ebsco service has to cost a bit for a company like the NYT.
#3
Agreed, Anguper Hupomosing9418. A better, if less succinct, headline might be, NYT no longer pays for outside subscriptions for employees I s'pose this will give their people the opportunity to explore the wonderful world of on-line reportage, even blogs. Can iPhones access the wonderful world of the internet from the subway?
#4
Was it not just two weeks ago when the Times, red faced from the Van Jones event, said they needed to pay closer attention to what was being reported?
Maybe this is an attempt at culture change in the Times, get them on the computer and blogs.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
10/13/2009 7:51 Comments ||
Top||
#5
If you get your instruction from the WH, why would you need to know what others are saying? /rhet question
#6
Interesting that they didn't suggest that the reporters get the information for free from their competitors' websites. Perhaps that was done verbally.
A Florida judge says he plans to order the teenager who ran away from Ohio to Florida because she feared physical harm for converting from Islam to Christianity sent back to Ohio.
The Orlando judge said Tuesday that he will sign the order when he gets the documents on 17-year-old Rifqa Bary's immigration status.
Bary has been in foster care in Orlando while her case was being reviewed. The judge says he will likely turn over the case to an Ohio court in the next few weeks.
Bary ran away from her parents' Columbus-area home in July, saying she feared being killed for changing religions. But a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation found no credible threats to Bary.
#1
If she turns up dead, the judge and everyone else that was involved in sending her back should be charged with 1st degree murder, convicted and executed.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal and Search for Future Influence From LHC, posted on the physics Web site 
Man with naked buttocks swept away by train
[Iran Press TV Latest] Gabon's Constitutional Court has ruled out the opposition's challenge to the country's election results, clearing the way for Ali Ben Bongo to replace his father as president. 
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (October 13, 2009) Oil demand in developed countriescurrently 54 percent of all oil demandlikely reached its all-time peak in 2005, according to a new research report by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. While world oil demand is now set to grow as the world economy moves from recession to recovery, the demand lost in 30 developed countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is not likely to ever be regained, the report finds.
America is not going to bleed its wealth importing fuel. Russia's grip on Europe's gas will weaken. Improvident Britain may avoid paralysing blackouts by mid-decade after all. 
