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Bush’s NASA Silencer Resigns

Blue Marble

President Bush’s appointee at NASA, Geoorge C. Deutsch, resigned yesterday as growing controversy continues to surround his position. As mentioned previously, Deutsch was responsible for trying to gag NASA’s lead climatologist, James Hansen, from disclosing his research about global warming. Not only did he try to muzzle NASA’s scientists, he tried to tell them what to do. He demanded that the lead web designer of the organization put the word “theory” with every mention of the Big Bang. To no surprise, Deutsch believes in intelligent design.

So not only is this whipper-snapper telling our countries most brilliant scientists how to do their jobs, he did not even complete college! Even worse, he lied about it! From the NYTimes:

According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a “Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003.”

Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case.

“George Carlton Deutsch III did attend Texas A&M University but has not completed the requirements for a degree,” said an e-mail message from Rita Presley, assistant to the registrar at the university, responding to a query from The Times.

You’re doing a great job, Deutschie!

Dr. James Hansen does a great job of putting this all in perspective:

Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch’s credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue of political control of scientific information.

“He’s only a bit player,” Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. “The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That’s what I’m really concerned about.”

“On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed,” he said. “The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That’s the big issue here.”

Lost Papua Paradise Discovered

Golden Fronted Bowerbird

A team of research scientists exploring isolated jungles of Papua have discovered an untouched paradise They found dozens of new exotic species of insects, birds, and plants in their initial study and say they have barely scratched the surface. From LiveScience:

The team also found wildlife that were remarkably unafraid of humans during their rapid assessment survey of the Foja Mountains, which has more than two million acres of old growth tropical forest, Bruce Beehler, a co-leader of the monthlong trip, said in announcing the discoveries on Tuesday.

Two Long-Beaked Echidnas, a primitive egg-laying mammal, simply allowed scientists to pick them up and bring them back to their camp to be studied, he said.
…
“There was not a single trail, no sign of civilization, no sign of even local communities ever having been there,” said Beehler, adding that two headmen from the Kwerba and Papasena tribes, the customary landowners of the Foja Mountains, accompanied the expedition.

The area is so rich in diversity and teaming with life that they barely had to leave their base camp in order to conduct their research. Luckily, the error is protected from logging, but the growing timber demands from China and Japan worries the scientists. Check out their press release.

War Math

$440 Billion: Total bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (so far)
$100,000: Amount the Bush administration spends per minute in Iraq.
53%: Percentage of Americans who believe the administration “deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.”

(via ThinkProgress)

Hotlinking: Naughty Naughty

So, it seems as Leaving Only Footprints continues to get more and more popular, so does its images. Last month, I noticed that my visitor stats were kind of funky and discovered dozens of sites linking to just my pictures. This is called direct linking or hotlinking. Instead of hosting an image themselves, other websites and blogs simply link to the images on this site. This equates to stealing because hotlinkers use bandwidth paid for by other people. For example, in the previous month of January, I received thousands of direct links from MySpace.com sites. If the average image size used was 50KB, over 100MB of my bandwidth was stolen.

After doing a little research, I found this website that explains how to prevent other sites from hotlinking your images. Well, the good thing was that these other sites could no longer use my images. The bad news is that no one removed the now broken links to me on their sites so my stats are still getting messed up. Also, I noticed new people continue to hotlink to me even though the images are not showing up on their site. Not too bright.

So, I decided to follow in the footsteps of Switcheroo and Cockeyed.

Not only can I prevent my images from showing up on a hotlinker’s site, I can make any image I want show up on their site. With inspiration from Matt Kelley, J-Luv, and a poster inherited by Alicia, this is what I came up with:

Burt Reynolds Cosmo Holtinking

If they’re going to link to me, I might as well get some free advertisement with a little help from Burt Reynold’s and his famous Cosmo picture. Also, I hope that it encourages them to take down the links.

Check out what it looks like to this MySpace holtinker stealing my squirrel image before:

Hotlinking Example Before

After:

Hotlinking Example After

Check out these other sites. I took screen shots for a permanent memorial.

Spider-Man Official Forums: Before and After
MySpace Person 1: Before and After
MySpace Person 2: Before and After
MySpace Person 3: Before and After

AYDS: The Most Unfortunate Name Ever

AYDS

Diet pills from the 80’s. There’s nothing more I can say. Just watch.

AYDS: New Peanut Butter Flavor

AYDS: America

Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change

Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change

The UK government has just published a book that synthesizes all of the scientific findings presented at the 2005 Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” conference. Entitled “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change”, the book examines the real threat of global warming due to humanity and its future impacts. It focuses on three crucial questions:

1. For different levels of climate change what are the key impacts, for different regions and sectors, and for the world as a whole?

2. What would such levels of climate change imply in terms of greenhouse gas stabilisation concentrations and emission pathways required to achieve such levels?

3. What technological options are there for achieving stabilisation of greenhouse gases at different stabilisation concentrations in the atmosphere, taking into account costs and uncertainties?

Here is a short summary from Treehugger:

Currently, the atmosphere contains about 380 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas linked closest to climate change and the principal concern of scientists, compared to levels before the industrial revolution of about 275ppm. The European Union adopted a previous target of preventing a rise in global average temperature of more than two degrees Celsius, which, according to the book, might be too high — enough to trigger melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Above two degrees, says the report, the risks increase “very substantially”, with “potentially large numbers of extinctions” and “major increases in hunger and water shortage risks… particularly in developing countries”. The book concludes, therefore, that in order to have a good chance of achieving the EU’s two-degree target, levels need to be stabilized below 450 ppm.

In the foreword, Prime Minister Tony Blair writes: “It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialisation and economic growth from a world population that has increased six-fold in 200 years, is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable.”

The book is free and available for download. For more information on what you can personally do, check out Green-E and TerraPass.

Bush: Don’t Take Me Literally

Bush State of the Union

During Bush’s last State of the Union, he discussed our need to remove our dependence on foreign oil:

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology…

Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. (Applause.)

Apparently, what he said is not what he meant. From KR:

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.
…
“This was purely an example,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

What? Bush lie?

Failure of Bush’s Social Security Plan Gets Standing Ovation

Bush Social Security

For those of you who were unable to watch Bush’s State of the Union last Tuesday, our president was thrown off base when a large portion of congress applauded his statement on social security: “Congress did not act last year on my proposal.” From Think Progress:

When President Bush first launched his campaign to privatize Social Security last year, just 39 percent of Americans approved of how he was handling the issue. A year later, that number has dropped to 35 percent.

The sentiments of the majority of Americans was voiced last night when President Bush brought up his privatization plans. Bush’s statement that “Congress did not act last year on my proposal” was met with rousing, unexpected applause that clearly unnerved Bush.

Watch the video.

Zombie Cockroaches

Zombie Cockroach

Apparently, nature thought of Night of the Living Dead long before humans. The ampulex compressa wasp has the ability to control a cockroach by surgically cutting and injecting venom into the insect’s brain. From Corante:

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use sensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp’s burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon–which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

Maybe you should think twice before you help take out that wasp hive behind Aunt Bettie’s shed….

Exxon Profits Largest In Corporate History

Exxon Mobile Earnings

At the same time when Exxon Mobile is asking to be relieved of their $5 billion in damages for the 1989 Valdez oil spill, they just recorded the highest quarterly profit ever for a public company. Remember how it was supposed to be a bad quarter because of those pesky little hurricanes? Apparently, price gouging paid off. Check out those numbers:

$116 Million Per Day
$4.9 Million Per Hour
$1,347.37 Per Second

I wish I could make that kinda cash. Of course, I don’t wish that I was an unjust self-centered corporation. Check out ExxposeExxon.com for more info. (via ThinkProgress)