Louis_J_Sheehan

Instead of getting through security by submitting to pat downs at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, travelers can now choose a more hands-off approach: walking through a full-body screening machine that can peer right through a person’s outfit.

The device was originally created by engineer Doug McMakin and his team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a means of virtually frisking terrorists. The technology uses radio waves to produce 3-D scans of passengers’ bodies, the same way radar captures images of planets’ surfaces. As passengers stand still with their hands up, two rotating antennas send out radio waves. The waves bounce off the skin and are collected by a receiver. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/

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Metals, plastics, and liquids between the skin and the receiver show up in images that are sent to security officials in another room.

McMakin’s system has already made a splash with another crowd: clothing retailers. Machines have been placed at Fashion Bug stores and outlets around the country. The screener, named Intellifit, rests inside a virtual dressing room, a seven-foot-diameter circular enclosure placed in the middle of the store. The device allows customers to get instant printouts of their jeans sizes. Before we see more of this technology—in the mall or at security centers—the companies using it may want to alleviate worries from privacy advocates. “Those images reveal not only our private body parts but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags,” Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union says.

McMakin responds that he has no issue with being scanned by the system. He is working on weapons detectors as automatic and accurate as metal detectors. That way, the only thing flashing will be the red and green lights on the screening machine.

Will switching from fossil fuels to biofuels really reduce greenhouse gases? We take a close look at two big, controversial studies that examine carbon emissions from the ecosystems torn down to produce biofuels.

Throughout the Amazonian rain forest and the savanna of Brazil, enormous swaths of land are being converted to farms for growing soybeans and sugarcane—all for use in creating biofuels. The tropical rain forest and peatland of Indonesia and Malaysia and the grasslands of the United States are also being converted to biofuel crops. It is a disturbing trend, says Joseph Fargione, regional science director at the Nature Conservancy, who conducted the first of the two studies examined here. With his colleagues Fargione took a close look at how the areas being transformed into farmland have acted as carbon dioxide storage systems. Trees, grass, and other flora take in the gas, Fargione says, incorporating the carbon into their structures. But when the land is converted for agriculture, the plants are cut down, burned, or processed, and the stored carbon is eventually released back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. Using numbers from nearly 50 previous studies, Fargione’s team calculated the amount of carbon stored in these landscapes and the up-front carbon cost for each acre of land converted to produce biofuels.

In the second study, Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University, looked at a future scenario in which the United States substantially increases its production of corn-based ethanol, a move that would decrease domestic crops for food and feedstock. These feed crops have to be grown somewhere, however, and the worldwide land conversions necessary to make up for lost U.S. crops would release carbon dioxide. To show the effect of such changes, Searchinger and his colleagues simulated the worldwide land-use changes necessary to offset the production of 56 billion liters of ethanol in the United States (the amount of ethanol projected to be processed in 2016, based on current tax credits and conservative estimates of oil prices). http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/

Louis J. Sheehan
Using an economic model created at Iowa State University, the researchers projected how much land farmers around the world would have to convert to feed-crop production, and where they would do it. From this the researchers were able to estimate the total greenhouse emissions due to land conversion.

Both studies found that changes in land use related to biofuel production would be a significant source of greenhouse gases in the future. Fargione reported that, overall, biofuels would cause higher total emissions for tens to hundreds of years. Some ecosystems had surprisingly high emissions—grasslands in the United States converted to corn farms would increase carbon dioxide for 93 years.

Searchinger’s outlook is bleaker: He estimates that the rise in corn-based ethanol production in the United States would increase greenhouse gases, relative to what our current, fossil-fuel-based economy produces, for 167 years.

“Any biofuel that causes clearing of natural ecosystems is likely to increase global warming,” Fargione says. But not all bio–fuels are alike. For one, sugarcane ethanol, produced in Brazil, stands out to both researchers as the most efficient source studied, in terms of emissions. As long as there is land conversion, though, biofuels do not diminish carbon dioxide emissions. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
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http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com/Biofuels made from sources that do not require land conversion, such as corn stover (the parts of corn plants left over after the ears are harvested), animal waste, damaged trees, algae, and food waste are promising alternatives.

• Plants and soils contain almost three times as much carbon as the atmosphere.
• About 20 percent of total current carbon emissions comes from land-use change.
• In 2004, 74 million acres of U.S. land were devoted to corn for livestock feed as well as food crops. By 2016 about 43 percent of that area will be used to harvest corn for ethanol.
• 27 percent of new palm oil plantations in Indonesia are created on land that began as tropical rain forest; 1.5 percent of these lands are being deforested each year.
• In 2006 the United States produced 250 million gallons of biodiesel. Total production capacity is already 1.4 billion gallons a year and is expected to more than double with new plants and expansion of existing ones.
• 2006 ethanol capacity was 4.4 billion gallons, with an expected increase of 2.1 billion gallons with current construction and expansion projects.
• U.S. gasoline consumption is 389 million gallons per day, or about 142 billion gallons per year.

Bruce Dale, a biofuels researcher at Michigan State University, says there is a huge amount of uncertainty when basing predictions on an inherently complex economic model. Additionally, he asserts that the United States should not be responsible for “anything but its own environmental profile” and that to take into account world land changes is unreasonable. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
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Nathanael Greene of the Natural Resources Defense Council responds that it is appropriate to incorporate economic models into life-cycle emissions analyses such as these. In contrast to Dale, he says that land-use changes in other nations should not be left out of calculations of biofuel impacts, since such indirect effects are commonly incorporated into environmental regulations.

Using agricultural waste rather than actual agriculture to create biofuels removes the need for land conversion—much of the stuff is just lying around—and produces more fuel than corn:

In the case of corn stover (the leaves and stalks remaining in the field after corn is harvested), 250 million dry tons are produced each year and are rarely utilized, other than to feed grazing cattle immediately after a harvest. Scientists believe that some stover should remain in the field to prevent soil erosion, but that still leaves about 40 to 50 percent to be used in making biofuels. An efficient way to break down cellulose into ethanol is necessary to reduce the cost of processing corn stover on a commercial scale. Last February, the Department of Energy selected six companies to receive funding towards building ethanol plants—scheduled to be operational within the next three years—that will utilize new technology for processing corn stover as well as other types of agricultural waste.

In contrast to corn stover, wood waste has limited potential due to the high cost associated with collection and transportation (in the case of wood left over from timber harvesting) and competing uses (in the case of mill residues, which are currently used for mulch, particle board, and to power other facilities).

Many farms have already developed methods of converting the billions of tons of animal waste produced each year into methane for electrical and heat energy; beginning in March, 1,200 households in California will be powered by cow manure. Still, using animal waste to create biofuels is not yet feasible on the national level because transporting it is unrealistic. It’s in areas where there are lots of cattle (and the large amounts of manure they inevitably give back to the world) that companies are best equipped to divert animal waste from contaminating the air (via methane, CO2, and ammonia gases) and water towards fueling ethanol production. http://www.soulcast.com/post/show/117748/move
Louis J Sheehan
One example is Panda Ethanol, which is building the largest biomass plant in the United States in Hereford, Texas, where it will use the waste of 3.5 million grazing cattle to fuel the production of approximately 115 million gallons of ethanol per year.

In the United States, 96 billion pounds of food is wasted each year and much of it ends up in landfills where it emits greenhouse gases. Through anaerobic digestion—the bacterial breakdown of organic materials—food waste can be converted into biofuel. In California, Onsite Power Systems, Inc. has begun commercial production of an anaerobic digester system that uses a special design to create the optimal environment for bacteria and ultimately more efficient and cost-effective conversion of food waste to biogases (hydrogen and methane). These biogases can be used in cars or to heat homes.

Algae may be the most promising biofuel. Not only does algae use carbon dioxide to grow (and could potentially use CO2 from power plants to create biofuel), but it can grow anywhere and does not require a large area to propagate. Some species are made of up to 50% of their body weight in oil which can be extracted and processed to create biodiesel. Currently, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is collaborating with Chevron to develop more cost-effective processes for growing and harvesting large quantities of the green fuel.

if you’re looking for a picture of how the Latin language evolved or a history of Rome with a difference, you should read Ostler’s Ad Infinitum - A Biography of Latin. Although there is an immense amount of material in its 382 pages, it is mostly easy to read and you can skip to sections that interest you. Even so, be sure to read the preface and the best section, Part I.

Although you could probably read it without any familiarity with non-English languages, you may find it hard to understand, so my recommendation is that you read it only if you ever studied Latin or the Romance languages.
Pros

* Thorough history of Latin and the Roman Empire
* Copious examples and details
* Provides welcome context for obscure and even somewhat familiar topics/names

Cons

* Sometimes confusing (see next)
* Uses technical linguistic concepts
* Seems to rush through towards the end especially compared with the start
* Requires some Latin, but why would you read it if you had none?

* Nicholas Ostler studied Greek, Latin, and more at Oxford and received his Ph.D. in linguistics at MIT under Noam Chomsky.
* The book is a Western Civ course focusing on the language — Latin and its daughters.
* Shows the effect of major events/movements, like Christianity, Islam, and the printing press, on Latin’s dominance.
* Appendix 1 explains Latin mottoes used as chapter titles. App. 2 lists Etruscan borrowings in Latin. Both are interesting.
* The 3rd appendix, sound change, has good information, but is hard to follow and could use actual modern language examples.

Ad Infinitum - A Biography of Latin, by Nicholas Ostler
Just as Rome came to dominate Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa, so the language of the Romans became universal. As Nicholas Ostler shows in Ad Infinitum - A Biography of Latin, the process was basically the same for politics as for language. Time passed; the originally Asian-based Christianity gained a foothold in the Empire, but still Latin remained dominant. Several factors led to the emergence of the Romance languages out of Latin, but still Latin was the lingua Franca. http://louis0j0sheehan.livejournal.com/15433.html
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Even when it lost out in most areas, it kept a toehold in botany, and even when Latin came to be associated with the oppressive bourgeosie and other elites, Latin endured, coming up in odd places, like the Internet, where there is a Latin version of Wikipedia, and in an even odder place, Finland (host of weekly Latin radio broadcasts), where neither Latin nor any Latinate language was ever the national language.

While this is the survey that Nicholas Ostler presents and embellishes with details from many disciplines, I was unclear about his conclusion. Yes Latin is used in certain limited places, like semantics (referring to categories of relationship and color), the Internet, and Finnish radio, but he also calls it a language that has survived 2500 years and is now a language of the past “sic transit gloria mundi ’so the glory of the world must pass.’” I find this mixed message confusing and/or depressing.

There’s no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help.

Here are a few questions about computers I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

Q: We are connected to Comcast cable and use no antennas. Will we need one of the government-subsidized converter boxes next February?

A: Not if you are using a cable set-top box, like the vast majority of cable customers. If you are one of the minority of cable households whose TVs use an internal cable tuner, you may need a converter box. To be sure, contact your cable company or TV manufacturer.

Q: In your laptop buying guide last week, you recommended buying a machine equipped for the “n” type Wi-Fi of wireless router. I was under the impression that this has not yet been standardized. Is that wrong?

A: The engineering committee that has been debating the standard for years has not yet completed its work, but the market has simply moved ahead on its own. This new, faster version of Wi-Fi is being built into routers, computers and other devices by nearly every major manufacturer. In my limited tests, I have found no compatibility problems, and it is backwards compatible with the older “g” and “b” standards.

Q: Is the Mac immune to viruses? If not, do you have a recommendation of the type of antivirus software one should procure and load onto a Mac?

A: No personal computer or personal computer operating system of which I am aware is “immune” to viruses, spyware or other malicious software. That includes the Macintosh and its operating system, Mac OS X Leopard. Hackers have demonstrated the ability to invade the Mac. However, there are only a handful of viruses or other malicious programs for the Macintosh that have successfully spread beyond the lab. And these have harmed only a small number of actual users.

Of the well over 100,000 known viruses, spyware programs and other malicious software applications that are about in public, all but this handful are written to run on Microsoft Windows, and cannot operate on the Macintosh OS. For that reason, I don’t believe Macintosh owners need security software, unless they install and run Windows on their computers. If they do run Windows, Mac owners are well advised to purchase and install Windows security software to protect the Windows portion of the machine.

Having said that, I do not mean that Mac owners should be blind to security threats that don’t involve viruses or spyware. http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=23334
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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Just like Windows users, Mac users can succumb to what is called “social engineering” — scams and schemes that operate via email and Web sites that are often authored by crooks but made to look official. So, like Windows users, they must be on their guard.

The Creative Energy Behind ADHD

While many viewers get emotional watching Ty Pennington deliver remodeled homes to deserving families on “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” his mom, Yvonne Pennington, cries for different reasons. After being told years ago that her unruly son was the worst kid in his school, she says, “my tears come from the joy, at how far he has come.”

That’s because Mr. Pennington has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Some 7.8% of children ages 4 to 17 have been told by a doctor or other health professional that they have or might have ADHD, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. The behavior disorder, which often causes children to struggle mightily in school and in life, can be “impairing,” says Mark Wolraich, lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ clinical guidelines on diagnosing ADHD.

Many frazzled parents of hyperactive kids are looking for the silver lining. Clearly, ADHD didn’t cripple such noteworthy sufferers as JetBlue founder David Neeleman or Kinko’s founder Paul Orfalea. How can you tell whether all that splintered energy will help your own child succeed? And how can you help channel all that mental voltage productively? As a parent of two children with ADHD, I’ve often wondered about these things. I asked a few famous ADHD sufferers and their parents for answers.

Look for the creativity. Mr. Neeleman’s family refused to regard his hyperactivity as an impairment. “We always thought ADD was a plus,” says his father, Gary, a retired media executive. He advises “looking at the kid as somebody who has a different way of looking at things, and maybe a more creative way.” Then, “put your arms around them and say, ‘Boy, you’re sure smart. You can handle this.’ “

Parental support couldn’t smooth out all the bumps for David. Through school, he says, “I just thought I was stupid.” Adolescence was a fog of watching “Gilligan’s Island” reruns. But as an adult, he was able to see opportunities others missed. He is credited with inventing electronic airline ticketing, he founded two airlines and is working on a third start-up in Brazil. He still has trouble sustaining a conversation for more than a few minutes, must delegate administrative tasks and ultimately got fired as JetBlue’s CEO after service foul-ups. But he continues to focus on new ideas. “If you’re doing something you love,” he says, “you’ll be the best.”

Similarly, retailing entrepreneur Cynthia Gerdes, who also has ADHD, was treated by her parents as “the creative one” in her family, she says. Ms. Gerdes was encouraged to express herself as a child. As an adult, she created a Minneapolis toy-store chain, Creative Kidstuff, that grew to $12 million in sales before she sold out last year.

Emphasize the positive. Ty Pennington says the negative messages from school can be overwhelming for a child with ADHD; “You’re constantly the one who is sent to the principal’s office, constantly in trouble.” Yvonne Pennington adds, “I thought I was the worst mother in the world.” Asked as a small child to work at his desk, Ty would “wear it” instead, she says, separating the chair from the desk, popping the connecting assembly over his shoulders, and running around the room screaming. “He was h- on wheels,” she sighs.

Both say life improved after Yvonne started using behavior-modification techniques to reward Ty when he did something right. Also, Ty says his life turned after he started medication in his teens and gained maturity and the freedom to develop his creativity. Now, as a TV host, he gets paid for the kind of behaviors that got him in trouble in school. And Yvonne, now an Atlanta psychologist, has a busy practice training others in “positive parenting.”

Never despair. Mr. Orfalea’s mother came home in tears after he was expelled from school for the fourth time; a school official told her he’d do well to become an unskilled laborer, says the Kinko’s founder, who also has dyslexia. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/
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But she didn’t allow it to shape her regard for Paul. “My mother had a good saying: ‘Look at your five fingers. All five are different for a reason. School wants to make you all the same,’ ” he says.

Her support instilled his faith in himself. When he got the idea, while waiting in line for a copy machine in college, to start his own copying business, he trusted it in the face of criticism from others. The company he opened in a storefront, named for his kinky red hair, later grew to the 1,200-store giant that was acquired in 2004 by FedEx.

The University of Bristol has a press release out yesterday reporting that a Sumerian clay tablet provides an account of an impact event at Köfels, Austria.

I call bullshit. Here’s why, starting with some background information.

Köfels does not have a crater; it has what looks like a giant landslide, about half a kilometer thick and five kilometers in diameter. In the mid 20th-century, the impact hypothesis was raised to explain the formation. Apparently there is a lot of glass in the formation, which some geologists think could have been formed when rock melted in the landslide, and others think is more plausibly from an impact. There’s no doubt that other impact events have created quite a bit of glass. The age of the Köfels glass has been measured using radiometric methods, so we know the glass was formed between 8,000 years to 16,000 years ago.

Perhaps the strongest evidence for an impact origin of the Köfels structure is the reported presence of planar deformation features in quartz taken from the site. PDFs, as they are called, are microscopic features of silicate (e.g., quartz, feldspar) grains, and they are basically very thin planes of glass arranged in parallel sets that have particular orientations with respect to the containing crystal’s structure. They are utterly diagnostic of impact events - no other geologic event can form them, not even highly energetic volcanic eruptions.

The presence of shocked quartz - quartz with PDFs - means that this quartz, at some time, was in the neighborhood of an impact event. If the big landslide-looking formation at Köfels was formed by impact, then the shocked quartz could have been formed then. Or it could be from an older impact, and was transported by later geologic events, such as huge landslides. The shocked quartz will survive a lot longer than an impact crater, given the way the Earth covers such structures up relatively quickly, so this may well have happened. However the shocked quartz got where it is found today, we know that it was formed when a meteoritic body impacted the ground. Shocked quartz does not form from a meteoritic airburst - a meteorite that explodes before impact - it requires a ground impact.

Science marches on, and the impact hypothesis to explain the origin of the Köfels formation fell out of favor as we discovered more and more about impacts. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ526811010
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The main problem was the lack of parallels between the Köfels features and other known astroblemes - namely, there is no crater at Köfels, and there darn well ought to be if there is 8-16 kiloyear-old glass and shocked quartz from an impact event at the site. Here’s a picture of a smaller impact that is five times that age:

Currently, the consensus of scientific opinion is that Köfels is not from an impact. It is not listed in the Earth Impact Database, not even as a possible impact site. Googling “Köfels impact” turns up a zillion outlets parroting the Bristol press release, but there’s almost nothing else about it on the net.

So, where does this Sumerian tablet come in?

The researchers say the tablet dates from 700 BCE, or about 3,000 years ago. They hypothesize it is a copy of an earlier work:

With modern computer programmes that can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers have established what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).

I happen to have some software that can do that. Starry Night, Skymap Pro, or Stellarium, among numerable others, can do the job. So this isn’t rocket science. Anyone know where I can get a high-quality photograph of the tablet that I can use to test their hypothesis from my own reseources?

But a better question might be:

Assuming that the original source is a “night notebook” of a Sumerian astronomer, why is it being copied by a scribe 2,423 years later? No reason is given for this remarkable act in the press release, at least. Already it sounds a little fishy to me.

The press release continues:

Half the tablet records planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night….

Wait a second. Do we really know that half the tablet records conditions “the same as any other night?” Because if we do, that means we have a bunch of other examples of this genre of tablet to compare this tablet to. And if so, that’s fine, but then why does the press release say this:

A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time.

They can either have their cake, or eat it: Either the tablet was mysterious and untranslated; or we can’t really know that this tablet is a typical nightly astronomical report of sky conditions, just like any other.

The problems continue:

…but the other half of the tablet records an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space. The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels.

Okay, I guess - something 500 kilometers away and 1 kilometer in diameter will be a tenth of a degree across, which is just about big enough to determine shape; and it could have been closer and still been in outside the atmosphere. http://www.myface.com/index.php?do=/public/account/submit/add-blog/added_3049/
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And it is possible to record a trajectory to better than a degree using naked-eye methods.

It is also possible to integrate a bunch of orbits that intersect with Köfels, and it is plausible to believe that some of those orbits might be consistent with the observation of a celestial object that is hypothesized to be recorded in this copy of a hypothesized tablet that existed 5,000 years ago, and it is plausible to believe that some of these orbits would have the object out of Earth’s atmosphere when it was observable over Sumeria.

But really, this is beginning to look a bit like a house of cards, yes? Let’s read on.

The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.

The bit about the Aten asteroids being resonant is just wrong. Many are resonant, some more strongly than others; but Aten asteroids are defined as those with a semi-major axis of less than one astronomical unit. An AU is, in lay terms, the average distance between the sun and the Earth. A semi-major axis is simply the distance of the long axis of an ellipse, divided by two. Almost all Atens have orbits that cross Earth’s orbit - in other words, most Atens get both closer to the sun than Earth, and farther away from it, depending on what part of its orbit it is in. That’s all - you don’t need the asteroid to be in a resonant orbit to be an Aten.

And a resonant orbit certainly doesn’t lead to a craterless impact, as I initially read the following as claiming:

This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater.

What??

This is just preposterous.

First, you’re going to find plenty of evidence of the impact at Gamskogel if this were true. Any impact significant enough to badly disrupt an asteroid-type impactor, which is what the researchers hypothesize, is going to take out a big chunk of the mountain, cause all sorts of fracturing, landslides, and other highly noticeable effects. The physics of impact are such that, if the impact were truly strong enough to liquify or vaporize a >1 km asteroid, the mountain would have been converted into a crater - much like we see countless times on the moon.

Test of hypothesis number one: Is there a huge crater on the mountain, or has the mountain been obliterated by a huge crater?

The impact of an asteroid with a mountain will result in the classical shock wave in the impact medium and create an ejecta blanket. If the impact hypothesis is true, we should see planar deformation features on the mountain and ejecta more or less symmetrically around it.

Test of hypothesis number two: Is there shocked quartz on the mountain?

Test of hypothesis number three: Is there an ejecta blanket around the mountain?

Next, why would an impactor become a fireball? We all know that meteors in the process of burning up are hot, but they are not, literally, fireballs2. The researchers claim that that an asteroidal-type meteorite, after clipping the mountain, was “not a solid object” - but why? And how? How do you get an asteroidal impactor hitting so solidly that it vaporized it, but so softly that it doesn’t shock quartz or create a crater?

Sorry, but you just can’t.

You don’t solve any problems by breaking up an impactor into a million pieces - it still impacts. So you end up with a bunch of smaller craters - the total energy is the same. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Here’s an example of either a binary impactor, or disrupted impactor, on the Earth:

Clearwater Lakes

and an example on the Moon:

Messier

Supposing you can disrupt a 1-km asteroid impactor into pieces no larger than molecular size. What happens then? You still get craters:

Microcrater

That’s a microcrater in glass, too small to be seen by eye.

Maybe the press release is saying that the low angle of impact, supposedly of only six degrees, would not result in the formation of a crater. But that’s wrong too. Highly oblique impacts - thought to be considerably shallower than 6° - produce elongated craters:

Elongate Crater

So, there’s gonna be a crater, or two, or a billion, no matter what you do to the impactor3. Just because the asteroid “clips” a mountaintop on its way to its final resting place doesn’t mean there will be no crater. There will be one, or many, period.

Test of hypothesis number four: Go find the crater(s).

Test of hypothesis number five: Go find fragments of the impactor. There will be some, even if the main impactor vaporizes.

Let’s read on:

Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.

“The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material – including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“

Ok, so there’s no crater because the impactor “wasn’t solid,” but there was enough ejecta - which only comes from craters - to kill people, and cover an area thousands of miles around, including northern Egypt and the Levant, where we should be able to go today and find - ummm, ejecta.

Test of hypothesis number six: Let’s go find ejecta, or evidence of widespread burns, in strata that we can date, using, e.g., pottery shards, to around 3100 BC in multiple archaeological digs in both Egypt and in the Levant. The strata should be iridium-enriched compared to terrestrial facies, ought to include shock products if the impact were powerful enough to spread material over that wide an area, and ought contain impact glass.

Ok, we’re done. Just to sum up, here’s why we can be pretty sure this press release promotes a wrong conclusion.

The researchers hypothesize:

* That Sumerians made regular celestial observations (probably true);
* One of them observed a large body very close to Earth before it had entered the atmosphere (very improbable - whereas seeing a very bright meteor is not only probable, but certain, if you keep looking)
* They recorded the trajectory to an accuracy of +/- one degree or less (plausible)
* The tablet they recorded this on was reproduced by a scribe 2,423 years later (possible, but why?)
* Even though apparently no other nights’ observations were similarly copied (why not? There would have been TONS of interesting stuff, and just as correlated with significant happenings on Earth - not by causation, but by coincidence) http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
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Louis J. Sheehan Esquire

* And this tablet has never been translated before (I’ll stipulate that this is true even though I don’t really know)
* Two researchers - one a space infrastructure engineer, the other a rocket engine engineer, and neither linguists - translated it (huh? how?)
* And the tablet records an impactor (maybe)
* even though the impact glass found at the site is 8,000 to 16,000 years old (not 5,000 years old as the hypothesis says)
* And the impactor was a >1 km Aten asteroid (seriously, people, it requires several hours or days of precise, modern astronomical observations to determine if an asteroid is an Aten - you need either triangulated observations over a short time, or observations over a longer period of time, to extract that kind of data from the observations they say the Sumerians recorded)
* And that impactor landed at Köfels (maybe, but you need triangulated observations of incoming impactors to really determine where and if a possible impactor landed, because you can’t tell celestial distances or radial velocities - motion toward or away from you - by just looking)
* But not before “clipping” a mountain (oh, come ON! can we say “ad hoc hypothesis?”)
* Which turned it into something other than a solid (I’ve heard of shock melting, but turning an entire 1 km impacting asteroid into a liquid with a glancing blow with a mountain is beyond the pale, and turning it all into gas would be even more ludicrous)
* Which then created no craters when it landed (it still should have)
* But which did distribute ejecta all over the eastern Mediterranean (you don’t get ejecta without a crater)
* Which ejecta has not been found anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean (ouch)

I’ll add one more thing: This “research” hasn’t cleared peer review - the authors are trying to sell a direct-to-paperback book for $25 (USD). The press release says it is being published by Alcin Academics, but I can’t find them on the web and I can’t find any other book they’ve published. A quick look at the Amazon page for the book shows that the real publisher is WritersPrintshop - a self-publishing company. I’m thinking if this were a plausible hypothesis supported in a well-written book, they’d have gotten a real publisher to release it.

I’m not buying it - the book or the zany hypothesis. If anyone wants to change my mind, send me a copy of the book, and I’ll read it and reconsider.

Oh - and one more thing: Shame, shame on you, PhysOrg for credulously running this ridiculous story but ignoring the asteroid names announced last week.

Sources for Köfels background information:

* Graham, Bevan and Hutchison, “Catalogue of Meteorites”, 4th Edition, (1985)
* Kurat, Richter; Meteoritics, vol.4, p.192, 1969
* Störzer et al.; Meteoritics, vol.6, p.319, 1971

Update: I’ve been pointed to some additional references regarding the Köfels formation, which somewhat changes what I’ve written above. First, shocked quartz, with PDFs, have not been found at Köfels as some have claimed; quartz with lamellar deformation features typical of tectonic processes were found instead. Also, the Köfels formation was not a single landslide, but a result of several landslides at different times. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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These are both further blows to the already discredited impact hypothesis for the origins of the Köfels formation, and casts even more doubt onto the conclusions that Sumerians observed a greater than 1 km wide Aten asteroid that impacted at Köfels.

It is a phone call that women dread. Something is not quite right on the mammogram: come back for another one. But don’t worry, the script goes, most repeat tests wind up normal.

Still, most women know someone who has breast cancer, and even the calmest, most rational minds may think the worst when summoned back to the clinic.

At many centers, these nerve-racking calls are on the rise, at least temporarily — the price of progress as more and more radiologists switch from traditional X-ray film to digital mammograms, in which the X-ray images are displayed on a computer monitor.

Problems can arise during the transition period, while doctors learn to interpret digital mammograms and compare them to patients’ previous X-ray films. Comparing past and present to look for changes is an essential part of reading mammograms. But the digital and film versions can sometimes be hard to reconcile, and radiologists who are retraining their eyes and minds may be more likely to play it safe by requesting additional X-rays — and sometimes ultrasound exams and even biopsies — in women who turn out not to have breast cancer.

Digital is growing fast. In the United States, 32 percent of mammography clinics now have at least one digital machine, up from only 10 percent two years ago. Eventually, film will be phased out.

The rush to digital is occurring in part because for certain women — younger ones and others with dense breast tissue — it is better than film at finding tumors. Digital is especially good at picking up tiny calcium deposits, or calcifications, which are sometimes — but by no means always — a sign of cancer. In the long run, radiologists say, digital technology will make mammograms more accurate for many women.

There have been no studies yet to measure what happens during the transition period, but many radiologists say they do find themselves calling more women back. About 35.8 million mammograms a year are done in the United States, including those for screening and follow-ups for problems. The National Cancer Institute recommends mammograms every year or two for most women over 40 (women at high risk may be advised to start earlier). Mammography is not perfect — it can miss tumors — but even its critics say it has helped to lower death rates from breast cancer, which is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women, after lung cancer.

There are about 178,000 new cases of breast cancer each year in the United States, and 40,000 deaths.

Of 10 radiologists interviewed for this article, eight said that during the transition from film to digital, recall rates went up in women who were ultimately found to have nothing wrong. Normally a recall rate of 10 percent or less is considered desirable. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com/
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But during the transition period at their clinics, the doctors estimated that callbacks of women who turned out to be healthy increased by a few percentage points to as many as 10. Only one radiologist reported no problems: Dr. Etta D. Pisano, a professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina.

“I don’t believe it,” Dr. Pisano said. “I question that there’s a problem with the transition.”

But Dr. Mary Mahoney, a professor of radiology and the director of breast imaging at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, said, “I am living through the pain of this transition period on a daily basis.”

Dr. Mahoney’s center recently opened an entirely digital clinic for breast cancer screening.

“Our whole group is kind of pulling our hair out some days,” she said. “You struggle and you struggle. It’s just so much harder. These are really experienced, qualified radiologists who are wringing their hands. It’s where the increase in callbacks and biopsies is coming into play. It happens every day. Many times we’re able to bring the woman back, do additional views and feel comfortable we can follow that area.”

Regarding the higher callback rates, Dr. Mahoney said: “I know it’s not a small thing, the anxiety. Patients are practically in tears because they’re so worried. But I think in the long run it’s going to be to everybody’s benefit.”

Dr. Margarita Zuley, the director of breast imaging at Magee-Women’s Hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said it could take six months to a year to learn to interpret the new images.

Lecturing in Manhattan recently about the transition to digital, Dr. Zuley told an audience of radiologists: “When you first start out, you may feel a little anxious and recall more patients because everything looks like a cancer to you. It’s O.K. Just bring the patients back. It’s part of the learning curve.”

Regarding higher recall rates during the transition, Dr. Zuley said: “Everybody sort of knows it, but it’s anecdotal. There are no numbers.”

Meanwhile, patients or their insurers are paying for the extra tests. Fees for mammograms vary around the country. A clinic in Manhattan recently billed an insurer $387 for a digital mammogram and then $336 for extra images of one breast — needed because of confusion between the old films and the new digital pictures — and was paid about half of those fees. Fees for film-based mammograms are usually $45 to $120 less.

Nancy Liber, a radiologic technologist at Dr. Mahoney’s center, was called back by her own colleagues at the center after her mammogram last month.

“I thought exactly what every woman does,” Ms. Liber said. “Immediately you panic and think, ‘Oh my gosh, what if something is really wrong?’ ”

She found herself worrying about what would happen if she became ill and unable to take care of her children. She did not even tell her husband what had happened until after the second test, which turned out normal. The concerns were due entirely to the difference between film and digital images. http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com/
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http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/Despite the stressful experience, Ms. Liber said that from what she had seen in her work, digital mammograms were the way to go.

“The inconvenience it may cause is worth it,” she said. But, she added, “I definitely know what these women are going through.”

Radiologists say one of digital’s advantages is that it lets them adjust features like contrast and magnification, and see things that were blurry or maybe even invisible on film. In the long run, doctors say, the increased clarity of digital mammograms may lead to fewer callbacks of healthy women — but it takes time to learn the ropes.

Dr. Constance D. Lehman, the director of breast imaging and a professor of radiology at the University of Washington, said she was not sure whether more women were called back during the transition. But describing the two technologies, she said, “In some areas it’s like comparing apples and oranges.”

When looking at a woman’s first digital image, Dr. Lehman said, radiologists must ask themselves whether a seeming change in the breast is truly new, or was it there all along but just not visible with earlier techniques.

Once a woman has had enough digital mammograms, the comparisons should be easier, radiologists say. But the first few may raise questions because when radiologists compare, they often go back to images from two or three years before. And in some clinics that have a mixture of film and digital machines, if a woman is switched between the two types from year to year, ambiguities may crop up again and again.

Many women do not know the difference between film and digital, or notice which is being used, and clinics may or may not inform them of potential problems during the changeover.

Digital mammography got a boost from a large study in 2005 that showed it was better than film at finding tumors in women under 50, or women of any age who had dense breasts, meaning a lot of glandular and connective tissue in proportion to fat.

A buzz grew around digital after the study. Some radiologists use the technology as a selling point, and others feel they must follow suit. Now there is such a demand for digital machines that there is a six-month wait for certain types, Dr. Zuley said, even though they cost $350,000 to $600,000, about three to five times as much as units that use film.

Dr. Leonard M. Glassman, who practices at Washington Radiology Associates, said that his practice in the Washington, D.C., area, which performs 85,000 mammograms a year, converted to digital about two years ago.

“There’s an increase in the rate of things you think are abnormal for about three months, and then you get used to it,” Dr. Glassman said. “You take more extra pictures, of things that six months later you would dismiss. http://louis7j7sheehan.blogspot.com/
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It happened probably 5 to 10 percent of the time right at the beginning, so it’s a significant amount, and then it tails off.”

When questions first arise, Dr. Glassman said, he does not warn women that the imaging may be the culprit because he cannot be sure what the problem is until he sees the second set of X-rays.

“At the end I tell patients, ‘You were a victim of technology,’ ” he said. “They give me a blank stare. I say: ‘Your last one was film; this one was digital. They look different, and we just didn’t know that.’ ”

Rising a million miles from the surface of the sun, the highest solar prominence ever recorded was observed by Mt. Wilson Observatory scientists on March 20, the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced. http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Reports of measurements made by Dr. Edison Pettit on photographs of the prominence indicate that a gigantic mass of erupting calcium and hydrogen gas rose nearly vertically from the sun that morning at speeds first of 40 miles per second, then 80 miles per second, and when last noted, 124 miles per second. Photographs of this eruption were taken by J.O. Hickox.

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