Unseen World!

A little-known island continent of floating toxic plastic garbage, TWICE the size of Texas, is growing in the pacific between California and Hawaii. Officially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, until it can be taxed, U.S. officials will continue to ignore it. I heard of it once many years ago, but it apparently has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950’s, and now consists of 80% plastic. It has also been called Gilligan’s Island, from the trashy TV sitcom that won’t go away.

The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers – floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

I had no idea that there is a 3.5 million ton island of plastic and garbage floating in the Pacific ocean between Hawaii and San Francisco.  I found this out last night when I was marveling at the ridiculous petroleum-based packaging that housed my Oscar Meyer Center Cut Bacon. Not only was the plastic container over the top, but the shrink wrapped bacon inside was “freshness overkill.” I made the comment about just another example of our dependence on oil and petroleum products when my daughter asked me if I had heard about garbage island?

So I did some digging.  What I found is that “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” or the “Trash Vortex,” has been around since the 1950s. Circular wind and ocean currents in the North Pacific Gyre have collected trash that originates onshore and has made its way into the Pacific.  Greenpeace has a nice animation on how the gyre works.

The garbage island has been growing tenfold every decade and is now twice the size of Texas.  Plastic makes up 80% of the waste, the majority of which is non-recyclable and highly toxic Bisphenol A.  The world produces 7 billion pounds of Bisphenol A per year for hard, clear plastic called polycarbonate.

I’m pretty sure we can find better ways to save our collective bacon than continuing to use polycarbonates in our packaging, and to think twice about how we dispose of the non-recyclable plastics that are thrust into our lives.

Written by Gerry Matlack

In the wake of World War 2 the United States government enacted legislation which prohibited any other nations from receiving the scientific bounty derived from the Manhattan Project. This meant that despite the participation of British scientists in the project, Britain recieved none of the benefits of the research. The year after the United States’ first successful nuclear bomb test in July of 1945, the British government decided that they too must develop a nuclear program in order to maintain their position as a world power. This pilot project eventually developed into the Windscale Nuclear plant.

In October 1957, after several years of successful operation, the workers at Windscale noticed some curious readings from their temperature monitoring equipment as they carried out standard maintenance. The reactor temperature was slowly rising during a time that they expected it to be falling. The remote detection equipment seemed to be malfunctioning, so two plant workers donned protective equipment and hiked to the reactor to inspect it in person. When they arrived, they were alarmed to discover that the interior of the uranium-filled reactor was ablaze.
Windscale’s two nuclear piles had been constructed in concrete buildings just outside of the small village of Seascale, Cumbria to produce Britain’s bounty of weapons-grade plutonium. The fission reactors had a straightforward air-cooled configuration which allowed each one to exhaust its excess heat through a tall chimney. Breeder reactors such as those at Windscale create plutonium by bombarding the most common isotope of uranium (uranium-238) with neutrons. Any uranium atoms which happen to absorb a neutron briefly become uranium-239, an unstable element which rapidly decays into neptunium-239. Having a half-life of only 2.355 days, this element also soon decays, resulting in the desired plutonium-239.

Each of the heavily shielded Windscale reactors was comprised of a stack of massive graphite bricks. A series of vertical boreholes through these blocks acted as channels for the reactor’s control rods which were used to absorb loose neutrons and thereby govern the fission rate. Hundreds of horizontal channels were carved into the blocks in a octagonal pattern for inserting canisters filled with whatever substances the scientists wished to bombard with neutrons. Many contained uranium to convert into plutonium, but others were special isotope cartridges for producing radioisotopes.

The canisters were pushed into place through the front of the reactor– known as the charge face– and once the neutrons had worked their magic and turned a good portion of the metallic uranium into plutonium, they were pushed out through the back into a water duct for cooling. The reactor itself was cooled by way of a fan-driven air duct which forced air over the reactor core and out the 400-foot-tall discharge stacks. As a last-minute modification, and at a great effort and expense, a filtering system was added to the top of each chimney at the insistence of a physicist named Sir John Cockcroft. These filters came to be known as “Cockcroft’s Folly” due to their engineering difficulty and questionable value.

It was not understood during the plant’s construction that graphite which is subjected to neutron bombardment has a tendency to store that energy within dislocations in its crystalline structure. This stored energy is called Wigner energy, named after physicist Eugene Wigner who discovered the effect during his own experiments. Left unchecked, graphite has a tendency to spontaneously release its accumulated Wigner energy in a powerful burst of heat. This was made apparent after two years of operation, at which time unexpected temperature increases were observed in the cores. On one occasion this occurred while the reactor was shut down.

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Written by Matt Castle

The passenger manifest for British South American Airlines (BSAA) flight CS-59 might have made a perfect character list for a murder-mystery. Aboard were two businessman friends touring South America on the lookout for trade opportunities: a fun-loving Swiss and a self-made English executive. Also travelling were a Palestinian man who was rumoured to have a diamond stitched into his jacket, and a South American agent of the Dunlop tyre company who had once been the tutor to Prince Michael of Romania. The oldest passenger was in her seventies, a widow of German extraction returning to her Chilean home after an inconvenient World War had unexpectedly extended her stay abroad. And to add a whiff of espionage, a member of a select corps of British civil servants known as King’s Messengers joined the flight, carrying a diplomatic bag bound for the UK embassy across the border.

The date was August 2nd, 1947, and the flight was scheduled to depart from Buenos Aires, Argentina, bound for Santiago, Chile. The intrepid voyagers were to fly in the Star Dust, a shiny Lancastrian aircraft derived from the legendary Avro Lancaster World War II bomber. Its aircrew were ex-Royal Air Force to a chap, and the machine was captained by an experienced and decorated wartime flyer named Reginald Cook. Traversing the Andes Mountains in atrocious winter weather was an undertaking that would demand all his knowledge and skills, yet the journey should have been well within the capabilities of both man and machine.
The dependable airliner could fly at speeds of 310 miles per hour and at altitudes of well over 20,000 feet— higher than most aircraft of the time and sufficient to clear the tallest peaks in the area. Reginald Cook had been recruited to the airline from the elite RAF Bomber Command Pathfinder Force, and like all BSAA pilots had received additional navigational training.

The crew maintained Morse-code radio contact with the ground for the duration of the flight, and just before it was scheduled to arrive they signalled their approach. But then a mysterious signal was received at Santiago airfield—comprising the letters “S-T-E-N-D-E-C”. Aware of no such Morse abbreviation, the radioman at Santiago requested a repeat of the signal, and the same cryptic message was received twice more. This inexplicable message was the last one received from flight CS-59; it answered subsequent signals with silence, and it never arrived at its destination. Mount TupungatoAn extensive aerial search was mounted, while the Chilean and Argentine armies combed the area on foot. No trace of Star Dust was found. For over fifty years the disappearance ranked as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the aviation world, and a lively and inventive mythology grew up around the incident.

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This article was written by Dan Gillis!

Residents from the town of Peshtigo attempt to escape the inferno.On October 8th, 1871, the small Wisconsin logging town of Peshtigo was consumed by one of the most severe and woefully under-reported fires in human history.

After a hot and dry year, with a mere two inches of rain falling from July through September, churchgoers were praying for much-needed precipitation. The creeks had dried up, and the Peshtigo River, which many residents relied upon for transportation and water, was dangerously low.

In the midst of that quiet Sunday evening, the tiny township was totally annihilated – charred by a gigantic fire that engulfed the buildings, the countryside, and even the townsfolk themselves. Even today the little-known blaze holds the distinction of being the deadliest fire ever to occur in the US.
More than 2,000 people were in the town on the morning of the fire. The population was swollen by crews of volunteers, enlisted to battle the sporadic wildfires that were scattered throughout the surrounding areas. The smoke from these fires hung in the air, making breathing difficult. Shortly after 8:30 pm, a dull roar caused alarm throughout the town. Flames from scattered wildfires had been whipped up into a blazing inferno by strong winds, placing a fire on a direct path towards Peshtigo. The firefighters and residents rushed to battle it with buckets of water, but quickly realized the gravity of the situation. They threw their buckets aside, headed to their homes to collect their families, and fled toward the relative safety of the Peshtigo River.

Soon a two-thousand degree Fahrenheit surge of flames overtook the small community. The extreme heat agitated the atmosphere into a flurry of superheated tornadoes and hurricane-force winds. A scorching hail of embers, white hot sand, and debris peppered the town. Rooftops were blown off of houses, and chimneys crumbled.

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Why is Friday the 13th Considered Unlucky? It’s a story of once upon a time…….

The number 13 and the Friday both are unlucky and significant for the Christians and the old ancient Norse culture. It is nothing more then superstition but it has been considered seriously by a community or religion or society. The history reveals that there are no such documented evidences of Friday the 13th before 1900.

The Christians believed Friday 13th as Bad or good, because the crucifixion of Jesus also supposed to have taken place on Friday which is called Good Friday.

As per Norse phenomena if 13 people sit together on a dinner or something like that one of them must die. So for them the 12 is the completion number and not even a single more then that.

The fear of Friday and especially the Friday 13th has remained in the minds of people without any logic.

Chronologically speaking the 13th Fridays were never thought to be as unlucky as they are after propaganda.

The Friday on the 13th of any month can arrive when the month starts with Sunday. Maximum three, 13th Friday can come in One year.

This year has been quite tough for the people with fear of Friday and especially Friday the 13th. This year it happened three times, one in February then in March and now in November. The next three Fridays on 13th will be in 2015

Well, if you have your faith on Friday the 13th and you are safely home after your work and nothing went wrong then cheers

No clue as to what happened though, cant find any official reports on it, maybe and accidental ejection or more likely a structural failure. Only info I have is

"A September 21, 1995 video of a F-14 fly-by that goes wrong. The aircraft nearly breaks the sound barrier (you can see the mist forming), then explodes because of what was apparently an engine compression failure. The two pilots, from VF-213 (Black Lions) ejected successfully. The carrier battlegroup, with the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), was 1,400 kilomters west of Guam at the time."

If you look closely at the back of the aircraft in the first frame you see that thin streak protruding from the rear of the plane, its only there for 1 frame, the next to you have to look really closely and you can see a very faint smoke trail, difficult to see in the still images but if you import the movie into Windows movie maker 2 (free) and play it frame for frame its much more noticeable.
When a jet engine ‘flames out for instance you get a puff of smoke from the fuel and the reeds trying to fire, but this is obviously a bit more terminal.
As for the sound barrier, this effect is common with anything moving fast in an area of high humidity and is caused by the changing air pressure around the object as it knifes its way through the air causing condensation to form. The speed at which this would occur depends on the shape of the object and the surrounding air pressure and % of humidity at the time.
You can witness this type of effect to a much lesser degree by watching formula1 for instance ( vortices off the tailfins) when they race in high humidity conditions or on a normal aircraft on short final approach sometimes off the flaps and spoilers prior to landing.
It can happen before he breaks the sound barrier, during or after that.
The point to note is, If he did pass through the sound barrier at that point these folks on the deck would of known about it for sure with a loud cracking sound (like a extended firecracker going off) shortly after the flyby which is most certainly not present.

I was watching this movie other day i.e. “Red Planet” where their so called robot AMEE goes haywire and starts playing “Guerilla tactics” and trying to kill them. Then I started wondering what exactly is “Guerilla tactics” as I keep hearing this word in every now and then warfare movies. Have you also wondered?

Guerilla tactics is the usage of "sneaking" and "ambushing" in warfare. To attack, and disappear. Often practiced from dense areas such as woods, or jungle.

Guerrilla warfare is the unconventional warfare and combat in which a small group of combatants use mobile tactics in the form of ambushes and raids to combat a larger and less mobile formal army.

The guerrilla army uses ambush and mobility in attacking vulnerable targets in enemy territory. Guerrilla warfare is countered with counter-insurgency warfare.

This term means "little war" in Spanish and was created during the Peninsular War. The concept acknowledges a conflict between armed civilians against a powerful nation state army, either foreign or domestic.

The tactics of guerrilla warfare were used successfully in the 20th century by, among others, the People’s Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War, the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence, and Fidel Castro’s rebel army in the Cuban Revolution. Most factions of the Iraqi Insurgency and groups such as FARC are said to be engaged in some form of guerrilla warfare.

For full information

What are the Scientology beliefs?
Scientology teaches that man is an immortal, spiritual being composed of three parts: the first of these is the spirit, or thetan, (from the Greek letter theta, meaning “thought” or “spirit”), the mind, and the body. The body is not the person, and the most important of these three parts is the thetan.
The official Scientology website also states “In Scientology no one is asked to accept anything as belief or on faith. That which is true for you is what you have observed to be true. An individual discovers for himself that Scientology works by personally applying its principles and observing or experiencing results.”
Scientologists believe that the basic command in life is to survive, and this command is broken into eight dynamics, meaning urges or impulses. All activities can be understood and harmonized with each other to increase survival. The dynamics are Infinity (God or Creator), Spiritual, Physical Universe, Life Forms, Mankind, Group Survival, Family, and Self.
“Through Scientology, a person realizes that his life and influence extend far beyond himself. By understanding each of these dynamics and their relationship, one to the other, he is able to do so, and thus increase survival on all of these dynamics.”A principle of great importance in Scientology is the Arc Triangle. Affinity, reality, and communication form an interdependent triangle that adds up to understanding and assists relationships. A Tone Scale in which things are given a number, or a “tone,” and as a person’s knowledge of the Tone Scale increases, so does his happiness, well-being, self-esteem, and other desirable qualities.

Scientology beliefs – Drugs, Reincarnation, Peace
Scientologists believe that all drugs are poisons that inhibit spiritual freedom. L. Ron Hubbard found that drugs and chemical residues are stored in the tissues of the body, and as long as they remain in the body a person’s abilities can remain suppressed. To dislodge the toxins, a person participates in a Purification Rundown which involves sweating in a sauna, mega-vitamin and mineral dosages, extra oil, good nutrition, and adequate rest.
Scientologists also believe in reincarnation and the “truths” that can be learned through past lives. These experiences can affect the thetan positively or negatively. The main way the principles of Scientology can be applied is through “auditing” where the auditor helps a person examine certain areas of their life and get rid of any unwanted influences to heighten ability and awareness. A device called an E-Meter is also used in this process. It measures a person’s mental state and it helps the auditor locate areas of distress.
The aims of Scientology are “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights…”

Find out more about Scientology

IT security continues to lead the lists of IT managers’ technology concerns. In 2009, several long-standing security trends are continuing, while some new ones are rising to prominence. Here are the top 10 IT security trends for this year:

1. Data loss: The ever-increasing use of the Internet for sensitive business applications leads to a rise in data loss and theft. SaaS (Software as a Service) poses a significant security challenge because companies are adopting it rapidly, and it presents a channel by which hackers can gain access to corporate data. SaaS users must be concerned not only with their in-house security but also with the security measures taken by their Internet carriers and the SaaS provider.
Mobile computing and portable storage are another vector by which data can be lost or stolen. Today, sensitive corporate data and applications may be stored on laptops, PDAs, smart phones — even iPods. Thumb-sized flash drives and other highly portable storage media carry data from office to office and from office to home and back. Accidental losses and deliberate thefts are making news almost weekly.

2. Insider threats: The security challenges posed by employees who routinely bring work home and travel with sensitive data is on the rise as more employers offer flexible working arrangements. IT security managers are gradually extending their policies and procedures to cover non-office environments and are hardening the perimeter of the corporate network against insider threats. These threats may include viruses and other malware acquired by employee-owned IT equipment that connects to the corporate network. As the number and variety of such devices proliferate, IT security managers face greater complexity and resource expenses.
The recession puts greater pressure on employees’ personal finances, making them more vulnerable to bribes and independent decisions to steal and sell corporate secrets. No company can afford to rely on trust alone. Rigorous security and auditing procedures can help deter data theft.

3. Organized crime: The Information Security Forum, a UK consortium of large businesses and government agencies, is warning of a trend from random hacker attacks toward more targeted, purposeful industrial espionage and terrorism by organized criminal operations. These groups see online crime as highly lucrative and relatively low-risk.
Hackers who once probed and penetrated corporate IT security defenses for the challenge are now being hired to go after specific targets of information within companies of all sizes. Being small and relatively low-profile is no longer a hedge against cybercrime.
Keystroke loggers, phishing exploits and other malware typically introduced to corporate networks via the Internet are expected to increase throughout 2009.

4. Crime by software: White-collar crime such as fraud, insider trading and market manipulation will rise as the economic downturn drives more people to desperate measures. This sort of crime may be abetted by sophisticated software. For example, botnets of several thousand “enslaved” computers, taken over by downloaded malware, may be used to simultaneously steal small bits of money from many people’s bank accounts or credit cards. The illicit transactions are so tiny and numerous that it becomes nearly impossible to trace them all.

5. Endpoint security: Endpoint security will become more sophisticated as companies continue to focus on securing the perimeter of the corporate network. Anti-virus, firewall and other endpoint security applications will be popular upgrades this year. Regulatory and compliance issues will help drive the trend toward beefing up endpoint security.

6. Privacy protection: Greater emphasis on privacy protection will be driven primarily by legislation, but also by heightened concerns among customers and consumers. The new Administration is expected to place greater emphasis on information privacy than the previous one. Customers’ credit records will be protected to a greater extent, and companies that hold such data will be subject to greater scrutiny and compliance requirements.

7. Cloud security:2009 will be a boom year for managed security services. Many organizations, strapped for cash and staff, will turn to outside specialists to provide end-to-end, round-the-clock security services. Cloud computing vendors will also take the initiative to increase and heavily promote their security measures.

8. Virtualization security: As server and desktop virtualization proliferate, security issues such as role-based access control, virtual server identity management, virtual network security and reporting/auditing will come to the fore. Vendors including Citrix, Microsoft and VMware will roll out new products and  partnerships to address the growing security needs of the virtualized IT infrastructure.

9. Secure software: Most hackers target known vulnerabilities in popular software applications. 2009 will see a redoubling of software developers’ emphasis on designing code with fewer security vulnerabilities right out of the box. Security patches will be issued more frequently. Managing security updates will assume greater importance in every organization.

10. Ubiquitous encryption: Long an optional add-on, encryption is becoming a built-in feature of software and hardware systems. Tape drives now contain cryptographic engines, as do disk drives from Hitachi, Fujitus, Seagate and other vendors. Intel is expected to release its vPro chip set in 2009 that also supports on-board encryption. Multiple layers of encryption will become the norm in IT security schema, battening down the hatches but also demanding more enterprise-wide processing power.