Predictions of how quickly Earth's oceans will rise over the next century rendered obsolete

Well, that didn't take long, did it?

Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth's oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.
...
The scientists said they do not yet understand the precise mechanism causing glaciers to flow and melt more rapidly, but they said the changes in Greenland were unambiguous -- and accelerating: In 1996, the amount of water produced by melting ice in Greenland was about 90 times the amount consumed by Los Angeles in a year. Last year, the melted ice amounted to 225 times the volume of water that city uses annually.
...
The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are among the largest reservoirs of fresh water on Earth, and their fate is expected to be a major factor in determining how much the oceans will rise. Rignot and University of Kansas scientist Pannir Kanagaratnam, who published their findings yesterday in the journal Science, declined to guess how much the faster melting would raise sea levels but said current estimates of around 20 inches over the next century are probably too low.

While it is possible that increased precipitation in northern Greenland is somehow compensating for the melting in the south, the scientists said that is unlikely.

Let's see how Bush responds to the latest findings...

Nonstick pans might give you cancer

This article from CNN tells us that a chemical used to make Teflon, which is what makes foods cooked in nonstick pans not stick, could give us cancer. How many years have I been eating food cooked in this kind of pans? Maybe a quarter of a century...

A group of scientific advisers to the Environmental Protection Agency voted unanimously Wednesday to approve a recommendation that a chemical used in the manufacture of Teflon and other nonstick and stain-resistant products should be considered a likely carcinogen.
...
The chemical also can be a byproduct in the manufacturing of fluorotelomers used in surface protection products for applications such as stain-resistant textiles and grease-resistant food wrapping.

Ah, that's just great, I love stain-resistant paints and shirts, so am I gonna get skin cancer from wearing them now?

Tom Toles

Funny and sad cartoon.

Man, it must be hard to age in a country where someone like Bush is at the helm.

Love is...

Isn't this the cutest thing ever?

Bush the Clueless

A House investigative committee has released a report about the response to Katrina and it calls the government response DISMAL. It's all the more shocking and worth noting when you realize that the whole panel was made up of Republican lawmakers.

From CNN:

The response of government at all levels to Hurricane Katrina was "dismal," poorly planned and badly coordinated, showing that more than four years after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, "America is still not ready for prime time."

The report, which runs more than 500 pages, called the response to Katrina "a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare."

"At every level -- individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental -- we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina. In this cautionary tale, all the little pigs built houses of straw," the report stated.

The commission said that the president didn't receive "adequate advice and counsel from disaster officials," but also that "earlier presidential involvement might have resulted in a more effective response." It also singles out Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, for his delayed response and ineffective decision making.

This is the panel's conclusion:

"It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which specific dire warnings had been issued for days. This crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted," the committee said in the report. "If 9/11 was a failure of imagination, then Katrina was a failure of initiative. It was a failure of leadership."

And this is Bush's response:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday that Bush has not talked to Chertoff about resigning.

"The president appreciates his strong leadership," McClellan said.

So, a Republican panel concludes that Katrina's disaster resulted from a failure of leadership and Bush tells us the guy they singled out is a strong leader. Why am I not surprised?

99942 Apophis

That's the name of a 50 million tons asteroid that is apparently on a collision course with Earth in 2036. The chances are deemed small, from 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000, but still, it could happen, and if it hits, it's a pretty big one too.

This CNN article talks about how a couple of NASA astronauts have devised a way to slightly alter the orbit of an incoming object by using gravity applied by a special pendulum-shaped spaceship orbiting the asteroid instead of nuclear missiles or robotic impactors.

Sounds pretty cool. Let's hope they're right.

Settling in...

It's official, we now live in Southbury. The move went well, and we're now in the process of unpacking and getting settled. Southbury is a very nice little town, and the house is really beautiful. So far, the only drawback I found is the commute, quite a bit longer for me then the one I had before, but in time it might get better, once I get to know the roads better. Today, we also sell our old house in Stratford. Saturday, Ray and I went down there to say goodbye together one last time. It was very emotional. We loved that house. It was our very first one, and the one were we met our kids for the first time.

TORINO 2006

Tomorrow the Winter Olympics start and I would not care much about them [I'm not into sports at all... although I don't mind the athletes... ;-) ] if it weren't for the location: Torino, Italy, my hometown.

So I decided to honor it by mentioning it here and posting this cute little picture too.

Giant boots mark the venue of the Winter Olympics figure skating competition at the Palavela Arena in Turin, Italy.
BBCNews

Southbury... here we come...

YES!! Tomorrow is moving day. Farewell Stratford, Hello Southbury!!

I have to say, Ray and I will miss our current home a lot. We've lived there for almost 6 years and we've been through so much among those walls. But time as come to move on, and I'm confident we'll love our new house just as much, if not more, given it's much nicer and bigger.

Anyway, tomorrow morning the movers will empty up 175...


... and later on in the day, fill up 481.


Can't wait :-)

Caché

A French movie about a married couple who suddenly starts receiving videotapes of their apartment that indicates to them that they're being spied upon. They are, as they put it, "under surveillance."

The movie is very interesting and very well developed, but while Michael Haneke, the director, is great at generating lots of mysteries and questions, he give us very little in terms of answers.

The puzzling labyrinth he makes us tread has very tall walls that don't let us catch even a glimpse of what might lie just next to us. Even the most shocking image from the movie (one of the most shocking images I've ever seen in a movie) leaves us with several, "but?!"

Caché's cast is led by veterans Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil, great at their craft and well matched here as the worried wife aggravated by her husband's secretive ways and guarded behavior.

Grade: 8/10

Match Point

Match Point is the latest movie by Woody Allen and is a good one, after a series of blunders. It's about love, passion, temptation, betrayal, and the dire consequences that sometimes ensue.

Allen's direction is great, and the movie is well developed, albeit a little slow at times. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is excellent as the common man who marries a rich woman he professes to love but for whom he seems to care only peripherally, while the woman he really desires is his brother-in-law's fiance.

The latter is portrayed somewhat whimsically by Scarlett Johansson, a good actress (she was flat out great in Lost in Translation) who looks too theatrical when upset with her married lover.

Good performances also come from Emily Mortimer and the always great Brian Cox as Rhys-Meyers' wife and father-in-law.

The best thing about the movie is certainly the game of cat-and-mouse that the two lovers start playing from the moment they meet and never really end. Then of course, there is the tension that Allen is masterfully able to create and that envelops us without ever letting go.

All considered, the movie is good and is definitely worth a look for any Allen fan.

Grade: 8/10

Same-sex marriage update

The Republicans are going to try to make the issue a political lighting rod again, just in time for this year's midterm elections, even though Bush didn't really make a big deal about it in his State of the Union speech last week (probably because HE isn't up for re-election this year...)

From Raw Story:

The Marriage Protection Amendment was originally introduced by Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO) in 2003, and leveraged as a wedge issue by the GOP during the 2004 election cycle as a way of mobilizing its base to vote against same-sex marriage.

Senator Wayne Allard (R-CO), a co-sponsor of the 2005 joint resolution, "believes that a constitutional amendment is the best way to make it crystal clear that marriage is between a man and a woman."

Although the primary concerns of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) community are equal rights and protection under the law, including visitation, property and child custody rights, the GOP has successfully framed the legislation as a religious argument rather than a legal issue in order to fire up their base and rally them to the voting booths.

Thankfully, it doesn't look like the GOP has the numbers to pass the amendment in the Senate or the House this year either (and I say thankfully because I am sure that it would be approved by at least the 38 states needed in order to be added to the US Constitution, especially considering almost 20 have already amended their own state constitutions.)

Meanwhile, in our northern neighbor's latest elections, the right has won the majority of the vote (but not a full majority of seats in the Parliament, forcing them to have to govern by forming a coalition) and although things aren't as rosy as they were with a leftist government, it doesn't seem like Stephen Harper, the new Prime Minister, will be able to roll back gay marriage (he had promised during his campaign that he'd revisit the issue if elected.)

From Yahoo! News:

During the campaign, Harper pledged to revisit the issue of same-sex marriage, which was legalized last summer by Parliament in a 158-133 vote. The vote was somewhat symbolic, given that the nation's largest provinces had already legalized same-sex marriage by court order, guaranteeing marriage equality for the large majority of the Canadian population. Likewise, a second vote on same-sex marriage would be similarly overshadowed by the existing court decisions, which may not be overturned by Parliament.

If a new vote on marriage were to reverse the law, the stage would be set for a definitive ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court -- which is widely expected to uphold gay equality. A victory before the high court in this context would simply serve to restore marriage rights to the small fraction of the country that is not covered by a provincial court decision. An unlikely loss could roll back same-sex marriage.

Fortunately, polls suggest that even the conservatives consider the issue "settled, and should remain so," and 66% of those who voted for Harper oppose a second parliamentary vote on it. In any case, it looks like a second vote would reaffirm gays' marriage rights, albeit by a narrower margin.

A number of analysts speculate that Harper is hoping for just that result, an outcome that would allow him to fulfill his campaign pledge without ushering in a period of confusion and triggering a distracting constitutional case. Near the end of his campaign, Harper positioned himself toward the center and downplayed the issue of gay marriage, calling it a low priority.

So, it looks like Harper took a page from Bush's book, using gay marriage as a wedge issue during his campaign to draw supporters to the polls, even though he had no real intention to roll back same-sex marriage (probably because he knew he didn't have the nation's support to do so.)

It worked for both. Let's just hope they don't actually set out to do what they promised.

The death of movie theaters?

Last week, Steven Soderbergh's latest movie, Bubble, was released, for the first time, in theaters, on DVD, and on a TV channel all at the same time. This event brought a lot of publicity to the picture, which floundered nonetheless at the box office, quite likely precisely because of its widespread release on so many different media.

The producers claimed to have decided to release the movie this way (instead of following the traditional theatrical release, followed by a DVD between 6 and 12 months later, and TV showings on subscription channels like HBO in 18 to 24 months) in order to "accelerate the timetable for getting their money back."

Well, as Brandon Gray puts it in this Box Office Mojo article:

Bubble's box office points out how a simultaneous release on television and DVD effectively eliminates the theatrical window of revenue -—people are more apt to choose the most convenient formats, which are TV and DVD - —and, hence, reduces the overall revenue pie.

Movie theater chains' owners can't be too happy about such a strategy, and I can't blame them. It would only take a few successes, maybe just a couple, for more and more movies being released this way, which would cut their revenues dramatically. Bubble's intake for the first weekend in release was, supposedly, $5 million dollars, but it made only $70,664 in theaters.

With such low box office receipts, more and more theaters (especially those shiny mega-multiplexes) would be forced to shut down. Only art houses, whose usual box office is probably less than $70,000 per weekend anyway, would survive. Say goodbye to viewing epics and blockbusters on huge screens, with digital dolby surround and stadium seating. You won't see that in art houses.

I'm glad that Bubble didn't make a big splash at the box office (those $5 million are mostly from expected rather than actual sales, since they count DVDs shipped to retailers, not actually sold,) because, frankly, I like going to the theater to watch a movie on a big screen, in the dark, with a great sound system.

Yes, as soon as I can I expect to buy a big screen TV with a good surround sound system at home, which will make my viewing experience great even if I'm not in a movie theater. But you can't beat the experience of watching a movie like Titanic, or The Lord of the Rings on the big screen.

George Lucas started the whole 'should we move to digital projection right away or stay with the traditional format a while longer' debate , and that's one thing. But actually killing the movie theater viewing experience? Sorry, I don't agree with that.

Is secondhand smoke a pollutant?

Not if you ask the tobacco companies, but it is now in California, following a state agency's ruling on the matter:

California became the first state to declare secondhand smoke a toxic air pollutant Thursday, putting tobacco fumes in the same category as diesel exhaust, arsenic and benzene because of its link to breast cancer.

The unanimous decision by the state Air Resources Board relied on a September report that found a sharply increased risk of breast cancer in young women exposed to secondhand smoke. It also links drifting smoke to premature births, asthma and heart disease, as well as other cancers and numerous health problems in children.

This is a huge step forward in the fight against tobacco. If secondhand smoke is considered poisonous (which it clearly is,) the public must be protected from it. This might in turn mean even fewer places or open spaces for smokers to freely light up, which in turn will translate into fewer people taking on the habit, given it's lack of social acceptance and difficulty to practice it.

The latest Islamic frenzy

Ok, I read this article today and it's just crazy. Apparently some Danish newspaper published some cartoon about the Prophet Mohammad and the Muslim community got very upset. It seems that "depicting the picture of the prophet is prohibited under Sharia law," which I can understand needs to be respected in Arab countries where Sharia law is the law of the land, but
this is a European newspaper.

The same cartoon was then reprinted or shown in France, Italy, Britain, and Germany, and the uproar ensued. In Tunisia and Morocco, France Soir, the French newspaper that published the cartoon was confiscated and a few editors have lost their jobs over this.

My problem? One of the firings happened in Jordan (fine it's their law over there, Muslim is the state religion) but the other one happened in Paris. Now, for what I recall, France isn't a Muslim country and doesn't follow Sharia law. It's a democracy with freedom of the press and free speech. How can they capitulate like this because someone protests in some other part of the world? If you feel that you offended somebody, you issue an apology, you don't fire your editor.

Understandably, the journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders "voiced 'incomprehension' at the decision by France Soir's owner to fire his editor."

And just consider what happened in Jordan:

The publication of the cartoons in Shihan, a weekly tabloid newspaper in Jordan, resulted in the firing of its editor. Shihan published the drawings with an editorial urging Muslims to "be reasonable." It is illegal in Jordan for a publication to defile religion and disturb civil order.

A spokesman for the paper said editor Jihad Momeni, a former member of the Jordanian Senate, had been fired.

In his editorial, Momeni asked, "Who offends Islam more? A foreigner who endeavors to draw the prophet as described by his followers in the world, or a Muslim with an explosive belt who commits suicide in a wedding party in Amman or elsewhere?"

So, he knew he was going to run into trouble, but tried to explain his reasoning (which to me makes perfect sense,) alas to no avail. But after all, the law in Jordan is clear. So, it would seem, is in the US, where freedom of the press is enshrined in an old document you might have heard of. It's called the Constitution. So what has CNN (the most trusted name in news) decided to do?

CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of respect for Islam.

Again, why? If Muslims can't understand what a cartoon really is, maybe they are all fanatics. C'mon, it's a cartoon.

This is nuts. How did we come to this?

Like I said before, haven't the terrorists already won?

The end of a great show is near

It's now official, NBC has cancelled one of the best shows on television ever and certainly one of its most critically acclaimed ones.

The West Wing is one of my favorite shows and I loved it since the beginning, on September 22, 1999. It always garnered great reviews, has won an onslaught of awards, and used to get pretty good ratings too.

Unfortunately, it's not one of the easiest shows to follow, especially given the rapid-fire style of dialogue that became its trademark, and what made it absolutely great.

Some people might also argue that it's a show for the intelligentsia, and not for the average viewer, but I beg to disagree. I learned a lot about how American politics works (yes, it's a TV show, but the closest thing to the real deal, according to Washington DC's insiders) and even when I couldn't really follow all the plot lines, it was just a joy to watch such a great cast masterfully deliver such great scripts, week after week.

It had become a staple of our TV viewing habits, and we followed it to Sunday when the network moved it, all but assuring its demise, plagued by sinking ratings.

We'll be very sad when it's over on May 14, with the inauguration of the new president. I wonder who it'll be. Will they go with the predictable Democratic candidate, or will they elect a Republican, since they won't actually need to develop a storyline around him and make him look good every week.

Coretta Scott King

As I said in a previous post, her death is a huge loss for America. It's even a bigger loss for the GLBT community. Here's what she had to say about our civil rights' struggle:

"I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice, but I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people."

- Reuters, March 31, 1998.

"Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group."

- Chicago Defender, April 1, 1998, front page.

"We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny... I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be. I've always felt that homophobic attitudes and policies were unjust and unworthy of a free society and must be opposed by all Americans who believe in democracy.
She said the civil rights movement "thrives on unity and inclusion, not division and exclusion." Her husband's struggle parallels that of the gay rights movement, she said.

- Chicago Sun Times, April 1, 1998, p.18.

"For many years now, I have been an outspoken supporter of civil and human rights for gay and lesbian people. Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Ga. and St. Augustine, Fla., and many other campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions."

- Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1998, sec.2, p.4.

"We have a lot more work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination. I say 'common struggle' because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry and discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere. Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender, or ethnic discrimination."

- Coretta Scott King, remarks, Opening Plenary Session, 13th annual Creating Change conference of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Atlanta, Georgia, November 9, 2000.

"We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community."

- Reuters, June 8, 2001.

"For too long, our nation has tolerated the insidious form of discrimination against this group of Americans, who have worked as hard as any other group, paid their taxes like everyone else, and yet have been denied equal protection under the law... I believe that freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. My husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' On another occasion he said, 'I have worked too long and hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concern. Justice is indivisible.' Like Martin, I don't believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others. So I see this bill as a step forward for freedom and human rights in our country and a logical extension of the Bill of Rights and the civil rights reforms of the 1950's and '60's. The great promise of American democracy is that no group of people will be forced to suffer discrimination and injustice."

- Coretta Scott King, remarks, press conference on the introduction of ENDA, Washington, DC, June 23, 1994.

What a magnificent mind we have lost.