Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/316278499?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, June 30, 2013
How hot is it in the western US? Real hot
The heat wave gripping the western U.S. is one of the worst in years, with desert locations in the Southwest seeing temperatures approach 120 degrees. To give some perspective, here are five facts about the punishing nature of the heat.
DEATH VALLEY
The desert valley in California will see temperatures approach 130 degrees. The hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth occurred in Death Valley with a reading of 134 degrees, almost 100 years ago to the day in 1913. The park is dotted with locations such as Furnace Creek and Dante's View, and officials are urging people to exercise extreme caution. But sweltering heat is often a big draw for visitors to Death Valley National Park ? especially tourists from Europe ? with hotels already booked solid during the hotter months of July and August.
BE CAREFUL
As if temperatures nearing 120 degrees weren't bad enough, it's even hotter inside cars and on concrete and asphalt roads and sidewalks. It can get to 200 degrees on asphalt during peak summer temperatures, presenting all sorts of hazards. Drivers should keep pets and children out of locked cars, and a person who suffers a fall on a sidewalk or a street could end up in the burn unit.
PETS
It's common in cities like Phoenix to see pet owners place booties on the paws of their dogs to keep the animals from burning on the blazing heat of streets and sidewalks. As a result, pet owners are urged to walk their dogs during morning and evening hours to protect them from the heat.
AIRLINES
Bigger jetliners can handle temperatures around 126 and 127 degrees, but airlines are closely monitoring the conditions and smaller planes may have flights delayed. When the temperature gets real hot, the air becomes less dense and changes liftoff conditions.
NO ESCAPE
The easiest way to beat the heat in cities such as Phoenix is to flee the desert for higher-elevation mountain cities such as Flagstaff, Sedona and Prescott. But there won't be much of a break from during this hot spell. Flagstaff could approach the record Saturday of 97 degrees, and Sedona could be in the 110 range.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hot-western-us-real-hot-082737772.html
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How does one author / encode for Sony Ultra HD (4k)?
It's to be distributed on Sony's Video 4k Unlimited service (for their 4k player) in the
US and on a similar service in Japan. The person asking for it doesn't know the
specs ... so we're trying to figure it out :-)
?
It appears that the encode will be H.265 eventually ..
?
jeff
Source: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1244803
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Lady Gaga Gives Touching Speech, Performs at the Gay Pride Parade's Kick Off Rally
In her first public appearance since undergoing hip surgery, Lady Gaga attended the Gay Pride Parade kick off rally in N.Y.C. on June 28, 2013, giving a moving speech and a cappella rendition of the National Anthem
This article originally appeared on Usmagazine.com: Lady Gaga Gives Touching Speech, Performs at the Gay Pride Parade's Kick Off Rally
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Saturday, June 29, 2013
Nate Silver: Hillary Is the Strongest Non-Incumbent Ever (Atlantic Politics Channel)
The Weirdest Thing on the Internet Tonight: All Circles (NSFW)
Jeez, sink a spear into one alegorical elephant-man's chest cavity and the whole of human history is doomed to strife and pestillence. Great aim cro-moron.
Michael P. Heneghan directed this brain-bending claymation music video for Philly-based rock quintet, mewithoutYou, for the band's 5th studio album, Ten Stories.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-weirdest-thing-on-the-internet-tonight-all-circles-574533912
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Siri inventors now developing the voice assistant of the future
Bright Voice Assistant Software
SRI International, creator of Apple?s voice assistant Siri, is hard at work on a new intelligent assistant known as ?Bright? that could one day know what users want before they even ask for it. Google Now already attempts to do this using location data, Internet browsing history and more, however SRI International?s Bright project will be even more sophisticated. The software is currently being designed for cybersecurity and emergency response in order to aid IT professionals in preventing the spread of a computer virus, or even to help 911 operators send the proper assistance to the scene of an accident, but it could also one day come to consumer electronic devices as well.
[More from BGR: BlackBerry is back from the dead]
SRI International?s Grit Denker?described Bright?as a ?cognitive desktop? that ?really understands what you?re doing, and not just for you, but also in a collaborative setting for people,??MIT?s?Technology Review blog reported.
[More from BGR: In the fight to win over Windows haters, Windows 8.1?s new Start button is probably useless]
The technology currently utilizes three cameras that monitor what a person is looking at and then displays information in real-time. It then recognizes tasks, eye movements, finger touches and hand motions to determine what information is important. For example, if a person was to simply glance at a notification, Bright would hide it. But if he or she stares at it for an extended period of time, the system would move it directly into that person?s line of sight.
There is a long road ahead for the SRI team. The system is currently focused on connecting information using ?cognitive indexing? to try to predict what is important. The team still needs to build out Bright?s functionality, adding things such as the ability to predict interests and to automate tasks.
This article was originally published on BGR.com
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/siri-inventors-now-developing-voice-assistant-future-180029240.html
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Friday, June 28, 2013
Climate Change May Radically Transform Desert Bacteria
Climate change may transform the community of microbes that forms the crucial top layer of soil, known as a biocrust, in deserts throughout the United States, new research suggests.
The study, published today (June 27) in the journal Science, found that one type of bacteria dominates in warm climates, whereas another is more prevalent in cooler areas. Combined with climate models, the findings suggest that the cold-loving bacteria could completely disappear from their current habitats as the climate warms.
That disappearance, in turn, could have unpredictable ripple effects across the entire desert ecosystem, study researchers said, as the biocrusts are important resources for desert plants and help mitigate dust storms. [Photos: Mysterious World of Cryptobiotic Soils]
"For the first time, we have shown that the distribution of microbes is also prone to changes due to global warming," said study co-author Ferran Garcia-Pichel, a microbial ecologist at Arizona State University. "We simply don't know the consequences of this."
Ubiquitous organisms
Throughout the arid regions of the western United States, desert soil is permeated by a cryptic collection of photosynthetic organisms, including microbes, lichens and mosses. These mostly bacterial biocrusts anchor the soil, preventing sandstorms and erosion. They also play a critical role in cycling carbon and providing nitrogen in the soil, which feeds the growth of desert plants.
Yet these soils remained virtually unstudied by researchers.
To get a better picture of these cryptic species, Garcia-Pichel and his colleagues conducted a thorough survey of the microbial constituents in biocrusts at 23 sites throughout the western United States. They found that two species ? Microcoleus vaginatus and M. steenstrupii ? each dominated in different regions.
Hot and cold
M. vaginatus predominated in cooler deserts near the California-Oregon border and in Utah, whereas M. steenstrupii was the main bacteria in the scorching deserts of Arizona, New Mexico and California. The researchers looked at several potential causes for the difference in distribution, such as rainfall and soil composition, but found that temperature was the best predictor of which microbe thrived in each region.
To help confirm that this was the major driver behind the distribution, the team then took the bacteria back to the lab and cultured them at different temperatures. Sure enough, M. steenstrupii flourished in warmer conditions and was more tolerant to extreme heat, while the opposite was true for M. vaginatus.
Next, they looked at global warming models, which predicted that the desert regions in the United States would increase in temperature over the next 50 years. With this projected warming, M. vaginatus could completely disappear from the arid regions of the western United States, the researchers said.
The team realized "this is enough temperature to push one of them out of our map,'" Garcia-Pichel told LiveScience.
Unknown consequences
Unfortunately, so little is known about the mysterious M. steenstrupii that no one is sure how this change will impact desert ecosystems, said Jayne Belnap, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Moab, Utah, who was not involved in the study.
"These are the only game in town to prevent dust storms and erosion, so they're really, really critical parts of this ecosystem," Belnap told LiveScience. "Yet we've never asked the question, 'who's really in there, and what's going to happen there as things shift?'"
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter?and Google+.?Follow?LiveScience?@livescience,?Facebook?&?Google+. Original article on?LiveScience.com.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-may-radically-transform-desert-bacteria-141321579.html
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Thursday, June 27, 2013
Congress likely not 'mature enough' to deal with Voting Rights Act decision
Following the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act, NBC's Chuck Todd says he's a pessimist on Congress' ability to update the map that determines which states must get federal permission before they change their voting laws.
By Matthew DeLuca, Staff Writer, NBC News
Activists and organizers said that they would urge Congress and the president to act quickly after the Supreme Court struck down the formula in the Voting Rights Act that determined which jurisdictions were covered, presenting lawmakers with a challenge some watchers said they may not be ready for.
The 5 to 4 vote struck down a section of the?historic civil rights legislation?that determined which states, many of them with histories of racial discrimination, needed approval from the Department of Justice before changing voting laws.
President Obama said he was ?deeply disappointed? by the court?s decision in a statement released on Tuesday.
?I am calling on Congress to pass legislation to ensure every American has equal access to the polls,? Obama said. ?My administration will continue to do everything in its power to ensure a fair and equal voting process.?
NBC News Chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd said on MSNBC that Congress is not ?mature enough? to reach a speedy political solution.
Civil rights supporters react to the Supreme Court's decision to strike down a key portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on Tuesday.
?This is not a welcome decision, by any means,? a senior White House official said in reaction to the decision. ?But there is a theoretical path for Congress to update the statute in ways that would make it constitutional.?
?As a practical matter, that may be difficult to do given political dynamics,? the official told NBC News.
Removing the map determining which jurisdictions need pre-clearance of new voting laws rendered the Voting Rights Act effectively toothless, law professor Kenji Yoshino said on MSNBC. While lawmakers could draw up a new map, ?it?s not clear that this Congress is going to have the will to do that,? he said.
?I think what the court did today is stab the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its very heart,? Representative John Lewis said. ?It took us almost 100 years to get us where we are today, so will it take us another 100 years to fix it? I call upon my colleagues in the Congress to get it right, to fix it.?
Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, said that he looked forward to working with members of Congress after the court?s ruling.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called the Supreme Court?s ruling a ?significant setback that will put Congress to the test of whether we can move quickly and without partisanship.?
Republican Senator Jeff Duncan called the court?s ruling a ?win for fairness,? saying that he hoped it would ?end the practice of treating states differently and recognizes that we live in 2013, not the 1960s.?
?This is not an issue just for civil rights advocates, this is not an issue just for African Americans or Latinos, this is not just an issue for those in the South,? said Sherrilyn Ifill, director-counsel of the NAACP?s legal defense and educational fund. ?This is the American we have all come to expect and that we have all come to enjoy and be proud of, and the question for us is are we willing to fight for it.?
?We will not sit down, we will not be silent, we will not accept the evisceration of our rights, we will fight every step of the way to make sure that voting rights are available to every single American,? said Barbara Arnwine, president of the Lawyers? Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
?This is devastating,? civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton said on MSNBC. ?I think what we must do is really put pressure on Congress now to deal with this.?
?This is a devastating blow to those of us that need that protection, especially given the voter suppression schemes that we saw in 2012,? Sharpton said.
Politico Playbook: "Not yet six months into his second term, Barack Obama's presidency is in a dead zone," Politico's John Harris, Jake Sherman and Elizabeth Titus write. Harris joins Morning Joe to explain exactly why Obama currently has "less influence over his circumstances."
Sharpton said that voting rights were among the most important issues when Dr. Martin Luther King pushed for civil rights for black Americans in the 1960s.
?They just canceled the dream,? Sharpton said, ?and the children of the dream are not going to sit by and allow that to happen.?
Civil rights litigator Judith Browne Dianis said that while the face of racial discrimination in voting has changed over the years, there are still many states that have ?tried to roll back voting rights by making it harder to vote for people of color.?
?We know that discrimination still exists in those states. We know that discrimination also exists in other states,? Dianis said. ?We?re going to have to set the record straight.?
?We witnessed in the last election cycle numerous states, an orchestrated effort, forty states in fact, where legislation was introduced to suppress the vote,? said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.
?I think this is another opportunity from both sides of the Congress to demonstrate that this is not going to get caught up in partisan wrangling, obfuscation, and obstruction,? Morial said.
Rick Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, said that politicians concerned about voting rights might see leadership from the White House in the aftermath of the landmark ruling.
?I think there?s probably no body in political office today who understands these issues better than President Barack Obama,? Pildes said.
NBC News? Peter Alexander contributed to this report.
Related:
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Video: DPS: A-Rod grounded by Cashman
Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.
Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/21134540/vp/52317197#52317197
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Wednesday, June 26, 2013
This Wooden Bicycle Is Beautifully Impractical
There's a natural charm to cycling that allows you to feel at one with the environment that surrounds you?but if that's not enough, maybe you need this bike that's made from the environment that surrounds you.
There's no way around the fact that a wooden bicycle isn't as practical as its metallic brethren. Wood just isn't naturally suited to frame building: it doesn't weather as well, is bulky, and rides strangely. But this amalgam of wood and steel is a triumph of old-school design and craftsmanship, and its looks make up for the material's shortcomings.
There's a lot to lust over here, from the wooden handlebars to the neatly jointed head and seat tubes. But the best thing has to be those beautifully curved wooden mud guards, that hug the wheels just right. Pricing is as yet unconfirmed?expect it to be high?but the bikes will finally go on sale in September. [BSG Bikes via Behance via This Is Colossal]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-wooden-bicycle-is-beautifully-impractical-569331193
Nokia brings Augmented Reality to the employment market with JobLens
Once Sesame Street starts using Augmented Reality, you know the tech is no longer considered a niche affair. Strangely enough, however, we haven't actually seen an AR app that caters to job seekers, but Nokia's got that covered with JobLens -- an app we've tested at Nokia's UK-based Lumia 925 launch event last month. The program arrives on Lumia devices in the US and Canada today, utilizing the same LiveSight sight recognition tech previously seen in Here, and involving collaborative efforts with LinkedIn, Indeed, Zillow and Salary.com. In addition to gaining the benefit of visualizing exactly where you can find open positions around you, the app will help you create and submit resumes to push you in the right direction. There's still no word on when we can expect to see JobLens outside of North America, though we imagine it won't be too long. As a gentle reminder of how it all works, we've added our hands-on video after the break.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia
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Behind Snowden's Hong Kong exit: fear and persuasion
By James Pomfret and Greg Torode
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hunkered down in a small apartment in Hong Kong, Edward Snowden was running out of options.
The United States had charged him with felonies under the Espionage Act and demanded that Hong Kong authorities arrest him. His trio of high-powered local lawyers had warned the former U.S. spy agency contractor he might be stuck in legal limbo for years - and possibly detained - if he stayed put and requested asylum in the city-state of Hong Kong, where authorities answer to China's central government in Beijing.
Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor accused of leaking secrets of U.S. electronic surveillance, already had spent nearly two weeks in hiding. He ventured out rarely, and only at night, according to a portrait of Snowden's stay in Hong Kong from an interview with one of his lawyers - Albert Ho, a former chairman of Hong Kong's Democratic Party.
Over pizza and chicken wings with his lawyers on Friday, his 30th birthday, Snowden agreed he had no choice. He would flee, and seek protection from the U.S. justice system elsewhere. He bought a plane ticket for Saturday night.
But he hesitated, according to Ho, even with a message via a third party that Snowden should feel free to leave.
It took another day for Snowden to decide he had no choice but to get on a plane. On Sunday, he flew out of Hong Kong, bound for Moscow - and kicked off a global pursuit that continued to unfold, with as many twists and turns as a spy novel.
The mystery of Snowden's precise whereabouts continued on Monday. He appeared to have purchased a ticket for a flight from Moscow to Cuba, but someone else occupied his seat. However, before the plane left, a white van approached and police stood by as a man in a white shirt climbed the stairs. This man could not be identified by reporters watching in the transit area.
HOTEL TO PRIVATE FLAT
Snowden spent his first three weeks in Hong Kong in a five-star luxury hotel, the modernist Mira. He rarely left his room, hotel staff said, dining on room service. It was during this period that Snowden leaked his explosive revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency's international surveillance program to journalists from The Washington Post and Britain's Guardian newspaper.
The Guardian on June 9 posted a video of Snowden identifying himself as the source of the surveillance information.
Snowden checked out of the Mira on June 10, according to staff at the hotel, and moved into a private flat. He would move again, at least once, under cover of darkness, "very carefully so that no one would know," Ho said.
From these hiding places, Snowden appears to have conducted two parallel, but separate, negotiations for his future.
He spoke frequently with a team of three prominent Hong Kong lawyers who are well known for their work on human-rights campaigns. In addition to Ho, there was Jonathan Man, a colleague of Ho's at the firm of Ho, Tse, Wai & Partners; and Robert Tibbo.
Tibbo and Man previously had handled several controversial cases, including a bid to sue the Hong Kong government in 2004 for extraditing Libyan dissident Sami al-Saadi back to Tripoli, where Saadi says he was tortured.
"If I were looking for a Hong Kong lawyer who was ready to take on the government for a tough fight, (Tibbo) would definitely be one of the top three to four people I would pick," said Cosmo Beatson, the executive director of Vision First, a group helping asylum seekers in the city of more than 7 million people. Tibbo is a director of the group.
But even as he worked with his team of lawyers, Snowden also was working another angle. He had made contact with the team from WikiLeaks, the loose-knit global group committed to disclosing secrets.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told reporters Monday that his organization paid for Snowden's lodging in Hong Kong and his flight out. Assange said that Snowden was "bound for Ecuador," via Russia and perhaps other countries as well.
THE GETAWAY
Snowden went absent from his job as an NSA contractor in Hawaii saying he needed medical leave. The ease with which he slipped out of the country with classified secrets has become a huge embarrassment to the United States.
U.S. officials filed sealed criminal charges against Snowden on June 14. The next day, U.S. officials, under an extradition agreement, asked Hong Kong authorities to detain Snowden as a prelude to a formal request from the Americans to extradite Snowden.
Such a process is normally simple, but Hong Kong authorities - in what U.S. officials perceived as a sign that Beijing was involved - moved slowly and requested clarification on some of the paper work.
The Hong Kong government's statement that "the documents provided by the U.S. Government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law" was considered unusual, according to a prominent barrister and extradition expert in Hong Kong who declined to be identified.
The barrister suggested that officials seemed to be trying to stall the proceedings, perhaps mindful of Beijing's influence and public opinion in Hong Kong that appeared to be sympathetic to Snowden's effort to expose U.S. government surveillance.
"The reason given by the Hong Kong authorities about a problem with the documents seems surprising, because there's a very low threshold to clear," the barrister told Reuters.
Last Wednesday, on June 19, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder personally called Hong Kong Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen to plead for swift movement to detain Snowden.
The next day, Snowden asked Ho for a favor: Would he approach Hong Kong authorities to feel out their position on the U.S. extradition request? Most important, could Ho find out whether Hong Kong officials would try to stop Snowden if he fled the peninsula?
Ho didn't get a response to his queries. But Ho said that an undisclosed third party soon approached an associate of Snowden, claiming to have a message from the government: Snowden should feel free to leave.
Snowden wasn't sure whether the message was reliable or trustworthy, Ho said.
But on Sunday, his lawyer Man accompanied Snowden to the airport. Man was there, Ho said, "to ensure (Snowden's) safe departure, or if he were detained at the airport, we would apply for bail or habeas corpus to seek his immediate release from detention."
Snowden also was joined by a representative of WikiLeaks, Sarah Harrison. He presented his passport and his ticket at the Aeroflot counter and checked in without a hitch. Later on Sunday, an official source said the United States had revoked Snowden's passport.
With that, Snowden was off to Moscow. And the U.S. government's pursuit of him veered to a new venue, with new complications.
WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said the organization helped Snowden apply for asylum in Ecuador, Iceland and perhaps elsewhere.
As the hunt continued, WikiLeaks founder Assange told reporters that Snowden was safe, healthy and in contact with his legal team. "He is in a safe place," Assange said, "and his spirits are high."
(Writing by Stephanie Simon; Additional reporting by Stefanie McIntyre; Editing by David Lindsey and Tim Dobbyn)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/behind-snowdens-hong-kong-exit-fear-persuasion-210838848.html
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013
94 in Alaska? Weather extremes tied to jet stream
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The jet stream, the river of air high above Earth that generally dictates the weather, usually rushes rapidly from west to east in a mostly straight direction.
But lately it seems to be wobbling and weaving like a drunken driver, wreaking havoc as it goes.
The more the jet stream undulates north and south, the more changeable and extreme the weather.
The most recent example occurred in mid-June when some towns in Alaska hit record highs. McGrath, Alaska, recorded an all-time high of 94 degrees on June 17. A few weeks earlier, the same spot was 15 degrees, the coldest recorded for so late in the year.
You can blame the heat wave on a large northward bulge in the jet stream, Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis said.
Several scientists are blaming weather whiplash ? both high and low extremes ? on a jet stream that's not quite playing by its old rules. It's a relatively new phenomenon that experts are still trying to understand.
Some say it's related to global warming, but others say it's not.
Upside-down weather also happened in May: Early California wildfires fueled by heat contrasted with more than a foot of snow in Minnesota. Seattle was the hottest spot in the nation one day, and Maine and Edmonton, Canada, were warmer than Miami and Phoenix.
Consider these unusual occurrences over the past few years:
? The winter of 2011-12 seemed to disappear, with little snow and record warmth in March. That was followed by the winter of 2012-13 when nor'easters seemed to queue up to strike the same coastal areas repeatedly.
? Superstorm Sandy took an odd left turn in October from the Atlantic straight into New Jersey, something that happens once every 700 years or so.
? One 12-month period had a record number of tornadoes. That was followed by 12 months that set a record for lack of tornadoes.
And here is what federal weather officials call a "spring paradox": The U.S. had both an unusually large area of snow cover in March and April and a near-record low area of snow cover in May. The entire Northern Hemisphere had record snow coverage area in December but the third lowest snow extent for May.
"I've been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three years has done stuff I've never seen," said Jeff Masters, meteorology director at the private service Weather Underground. "The fact that the jet stream is unusual could be an indicator of something. I'm not saying we know what it is."
Rutgers' Francis is in the camp that thinks climate change is probably playing a role in this.
"It's been just a crazy fall and winter and spring all along, following a very abnormal sea ice condition in the Arctic," Francis said, noting that last year set a record low for summer sea ice in the Arctic. "It's possible what we're seeing in this unusual weather is all connected."
Other scientists don't make the sea ice and global warming connections that Francis does. They see random weather or long-term cycles at work. And even more scientists are taking a wait-and-see approach about this latest theory. It's far from a scientific consensus, but it is something that is being studied more often and getting a lot of scientific buzz.
"There are some viable hypotheses," Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh said. "We're going to need more evidence to fully test those hypotheses."
The jet stream, or more precisely the polar jet stream, is the one that affects the Northern Hemisphere. It dips down from Alaska, across the United States or Canada, then across the Atlantic and over Europe and "has everything to do with the weather we experience," Francis said.
It all starts with the difference between cold temperatures in the Arctic and warmer temperatures in the mid-latitudes, she explained. The bigger the temperature difference, the stronger the jet stream, the faster it moves and the straighter it flows. But as the northern polar regions warm two to three times faster than the rest of the world, augmented by unprecedented melting of Arctic sea ice and loss in snow cover, the temperature difference shrinks. Then the jet stream slows and undulates more.
The jet stream is about 14 percent slower in the fall now than in the 1990s, according to a recent study by Francis. And when it slows, it moves north-south instead of east-west, bringing more unusual weather, creating blocking patterns and cutoff lows that are associated with weird weather, the Rutgers scientist said.
Mike Halpert, the deputy director of NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, said that recently the jet stream seems to create weather patterns that get stuck, making dry spells into droughts and hot days into heat waves.
Take the past two winters. They were as different as can be, but both had unusual jet stream activity. Normally, the jet stream plunges southwest from western Washington state, sloping across to Alabama. Then it curves slightly out to sea around the Outer Banks, a swoop that's generally straight without dramatic bends.
During the mostly snowless winter of 2011-12 and the record warm March 2012, the jet stream instead formed a giant upside-down U, curving dramatically in the opposite direction. That trapped warm air over much of the Eastern U.S. A year later the jet stream was again unusual, this time with a sharp U-turn north. This trapped colder and snowier weather in places like Chicago and caused nor'easters in New England, Francis said.
But for true extremes, nothing beats tornadoes.
In 2011, the United States was hit over and over by killer twisters. From June 2010 to May 2011 the U.S. had a record number of substantial tornadoes, totaling 1,050. Then just a year later came a record tornado drought. From May 2012 to April 2013 there were only 217 tornadoes ? 30 fewer than the old record, said Harold Brooks, a meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. Brooks said both examples were related to unusual jet stream patterns.
Last fall, a dip in the jet stream over the United States and northward bulge of high pressure combined to pull Superstorm Sandy almost due west into New Jersey, Francis said. That track is so rare and nearly unprecedented that computer models indicate it would happen only once every 714 years, according to a new study by NASA and Columbia University scientists.
"Everyone would agree that we are in a pattern" of extremes, NOAA research meteorologist Martin Hoerling said. "We don't know how long it will stay in this pattern."
___
Online:
NOAA on the jet stream: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/global/jet.htm
Jennifer Francis study linking Arctic sea ice loss to jet stream changes: http://bit.ly/1aAFM5g
___
Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at http://twitter.com/borenbears
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/94-alaska-weather-extremes-tied-jet-stream-070623134.html
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20 Things You Have To Do This Summer
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Gurl.com:
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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/24/20-things-you-have-to-do-_n_3491692.html
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Monday, June 24, 2013
Flight to Cuba for which Snowden booked departs
MOSCOW (AP) ? A plane took off from Moscow Monday headed for Cuba, but the seat booked by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden was empty, and there was no sign of him elsewhere on board.
An Aeroflot representative who wouldn't give her name told The Associated Press that Snowden wasn't on flight SU150 to Havana. AP reporters on the flight couldn't see him.
The Interfax news agency also quoted an unidentified Russian security source in Moscow as saying that Snowden wasn't on the plane.
The airline said earlier Snowden registered for the flight using his U.S. passport, which American officials say has been annulled.
Snowden arrived in Moscow on Sunday from Hong Kong, where he had been hiding for several weeks to evade U.S. justice. Ecuador is considering Snowden's asylum application.
After spending a night in Moscow's airport, the former National Security Agency contractor ? and admitted leaker of state secrets ? had been expected to fly to Cuba and Venezuela en route to possible asylum in Ecuador.
Snowden, also a former CIA technician, fled Hong Kong to dodge U.S. efforts to extradite him on espionage charges. Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his government had received an asylum request, adding Monday that the decision "has to do with freedom of expression and with the security of citizens around the world." The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks also said it would help Snowden.
Ecuador has rejected the United States' previous efforts at cooperation, and has been helping WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange avoid prosecution by allowing him to stay at its embassy in London.
Snowden gave documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers disclosing U.S. surveillance programs that collect vast amounts of phone records and online data in the name of foreign intelligence, often sweeping up information on American citizens. Officials have the ability to collect phone and Internet information broadly but need a warrant to examine specific cases where they believe terrorism is involved.
Snowden had been in hiding for several weeks in Hong Kong, a former British colony with a high degree of autonomy from mainland China. The United States formally sought Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong to face espionage charges but was rebuffed; Hong Kong officials said the U.S. request did not fully comply with their laws.
The Justice Department rejected that claim, saying its request met all of the requirements of the extradition treaty between the U.S. and Hong Kong. During conversations last week, including a phone call Wednesday between Attorney General Eric Holder and Hong Kong Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen, Hong Kong officials never raised any issues regarding sufficiency of the U.S. request, a Justice representative said.
The United States was in touch through diplomatic and law enforcement channels with countries that Snowden could travel through or to, reminding them that Snowden is wanted on criminal charges and reiterating Washington's position that Snowden should only be permitted to travel back to the U.S., a State Department official said. Snowden's U.S. passport has been revoked.
U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the case.
Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said, "Given our intensified cooperation after the Boston marathon bombings and our history of working with Russia on law enforcement matters ? including returning numerous high-level criminals back to Russia at the request of the Russian government ? we expect the Russian government to look at all options available to expel Mr. Snowden back to the U.S. to face justice for the crimes with which he is charged."
Still, the United States is likely to have problems interrupting Snowden's passage. The United States does not have an extradition treaty with Russia, but does with Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador. Even with an extradition agreement though, any country could give Snowden a political exemption.
The likelihood that any of these countries would stop Snowden from traveling on to Ecuador seemed remote. While diplomatic tensions have thawed in recent years, Cuba and the United States are hardly allies after a half-century of distrust. Another country that could see Snowden pass through, Venezuela, could prove difficult, as well. Former President Hugo Chavez was a sworn enemy of the United States and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, earlier this year called President Barack Obama "grand chief of devils." The two countries do not exchange ambassadors.
Snowden's options aren't numerous, said Assange's lawyer, Michael Ratner.
"You have to have a country that's going to stand up to the United States," Ratner said. "You're not talking about a huge range of countries here."
It also wasn't clear Snowden was finished disclosing highly classified information.
Snowden has perhaps more than 200 sensitive documents, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
___
Associated Press White House Correspondent Julie Pace and Associated Press writers Philip Elliott, Matthew Lee and Frederic J. Frommer in Washington, Lynn Berry in Moscow, Kevin Chan in Hong Kong and Sylvia Hui in London contributed to this report.
___
Follow Philip Elliott on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/philip_elliott
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/flight-cuba-snowden-booked-departs-105616986.html
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Saturday, June 22, 2013
Julie Mehretu Paints Chaos With Chaos ? From Tahrir Square To Zuccotti Park
The Guardian:
Buildings, streets, and entire cities crash into one another. Countless urban details ? housing block windows, city maps ? overwhelm your field of vision. Black squiggles race across the surface surrounded by flashes of colour: a beam of yellow, a red parallelogram.
The world Julie Mehretu paints is bogglingly chaotic. Yet when I meet the American artist in her light-soaked workspace overlooking New York?s Hudson River (Martha Stewart has her office a few storeys below), the mood in the studio is the exact opposite: calm, collected, in total control. She is preparing for not one but two major solo exhibitions ? one in New York, one in London ? and a pair of assistants quietly help her apply the final painstaking touches to her latest paintings. Bird?s-eye views of cities in the Middle East are taped to the walls. The bookshelves groan with volumes on everything from French genre painting to Ethiopian history; her studio is as much a think tank as a laboratory. And Mehretu?s wife, the artist Jessica Rankin, has stopped by ? they?re preparing to leave town, and they have two sons? schedules to get in order.
Read the whole story at The Guardian
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Tesla's 90 second battery swaps will power EVs faster than gas pumps fill tanks
Tesla founder Elon Musk has mentioned battery swap service stations as an even faster alternative to charging for EV drivers, and tonight the company showed just how efficiently it can be done. In a demonstration at its design studio, it beat what it claims is the fastest gas pump in LA by exchanging a drained car battery pack for a fresh fully charged one in just 90 seconds. When the $500,000 stations start rolling out, owners will stay in the car the whole time then either swap the battery back for their original on a return trip, or get a bill for the difference. Of course, failed outfit Better Place proposed a similar service before it shut down, but Tesla is betting that it can make it work this time. The first service stations are coming to busy corridors, with some planned for I5 in California. Still need more proof? Elon Musk tweeted that video of the event will be available in "about an hour," so check back then.
Filed under: Transportation
Source: Tesla Motors (Twitter)
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Friday, June 21, 2013
Shipwreck not found, but explorers pressing on
FAIRPORT, Mich. (AP) ? After nearly a week of searching the muddy Lake Michigan bottom, a research team has failed to find the wreckage of a 17th century ship ? but leaders said Thursday they weren't giving up.
The mission to locate the Griffin, which was commanded by the French explorer Rene Robert Cavelier de la Salle and disappeared in 1679, was buoyed earlier this week as French underwater archaeologists inspected a wooden beam protruding 10.5 feet from the lake bed. They said it appeared to be a bowsprit ? a spur or pole that extends from a vessel's stem ? that was hundreds of years old.
But there was no ship below, only hard-packed claylike sediment extending to bedrock 20 feet down. The scientists and divers searched a wider area Thursday near Poverty Island, a few miles offshore of a remote section of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, with equipment that probes beneath the lake bed for signs of buried objects.
Again, no Griffin. With their permit from the state Department of Natural Resources to excavate the lake bottom about to expire and rough weather forecast, they didn't plan to return to the site Friday but said they might next week.
Ken Vrana, the project manager and one of four U.S. archaeologists participating in the expedition, said he expected the group would have no trouble getting a new or extended permit.
Team leader Steve Libert admitted there was growing frustration, but the retired intelligence analyst who has sought the Griffin for nearly three decades remains convinced the ship is there and said he had no intention of abandoning his quest. He discovered the timber ? which was loosened from the pit this week ? while diving in 2001.
"What other ship out here in the Great Lakes is 300 years old? There's only one that it could be," Libert said. "I'm extremely disappointed that we haven't found it yet ... but it's just a matter of time."
Vrana said the goal wasn't just to find the Griffin, but to determine whether the location was a shipwreck site.
"We have definitely found the component of a shipwreck," Vrana said. "It was not attached to any underlying hull, but that doesn't mean that 100 feet or even several hundred feet away there isn't a shipwreck. So, the search continues."
The team based its search location on both the timber and sub-bottom sound wave scans by an independent contractor that suggested a field of objects covering an area about the estimated size of the Griffin ? more than 40 feet long, 18 feet wide ? might lie just beneath the lake bed.
Turns out, the sonar readings apparently had picked up a thick layer of invasive quagga mussel shells and distinct layers of sediment, Vrana said.
"This is one time that science is just not working right," said Libert, who spent about $80,000 on the surveys and says he has pumped more than $1 million into the quest. "There's something wrong, either with the machinery or the interpretation or the way it was used."
Michigan's state archaeologist, Dean Anderson, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday he believed the expedition was worthwhile ? regardless whether the Griffin is found.
"This is the sort of investigation that really needed to happen ... to get an answer one way or another," Anderson said. "I would say it is leaning toward the indication that a vessel is not there. I just don't see any evidence that makes it look like there's a wreck."
The group submitted a proposal to Anderson on Thursday to remove the wooden beam and take it ashore for further study and eventual public display. It calls for wrapping the nearly 20-foot-long timber in protective cloth and taking it to a secure facility for treatment to prevent deterioration after possibly being submerged for centuries, Vrana said.
Anderson told the AP on Wednesday that recovering it would be "complicated and difficult." But Libert said leaving it could invite vandalism or theft.
"After everything we've been through, to take this piece and rebury it and have even the slightest chance of someone finding it ? I just don't want to take that risk," he said.
Vrana said the state archaeologist's office had agreed to take the proposal seriously and provide an answer next week.
The state claims jurisdiction over Michigan's Great Lakes bottomlands, including shipwrecks, although officials have acknowledged that if the Griffin is found, it will belong to France.
Libert, who battled the state in court for years seeking to be designated custodian of the Griffin, disputes its ownership of shipwrecks.
___
Follow John Flesher on Twitter at http://twitter.com/JohnFlesher
AP Correspondent John Flesher is embedded with members of the Great Lakes Exploration Group, which is searching for remains of the Griffin in northern Lake Michigan. He is filing periodic updates on the search progress.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/shipwreck-not-found-explorers-pressing-224511750.html
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Gandolfini mourned in NJ's 'Sopranos' towns
ELIZABETH, N.J. (AP) ? A bag of uncooked ziti in the driveway, a "reserved" sign at the ice cream parlor booth where the series abruptly ended, and a framed photo at a strip club were among the tributes paid to James Gandolfini in the northern New Jersey communities where his TV character Tony Soprano lived, loved and whacked people.
The star of the HBO series about a mob boss with anxiety issues and a midlife crisis died Wednesday night in Italy of an apparent heart attack.
In neighborhoods where "The Sopranos" was shot, Gandolfini was recalled Thursday with mixed emotions: a global star who made their communities famous, but sometimes at the expense of their reputations.
Vito Mazza, who was busily preparing for an Italian-American festival in Elizabeth this weekend, said the actor had local credibility.
"He was as Jersey as it gets, through and through," he said.
The "Sopranos" star was born and raised in New Jersey and attended Rutgers University. His character has become an indelible part of the state's global image, as much a part of New Jersey culture as tolled highways, smokestacks and crooked politicians.
Pete Canu, a limousine fleet owner who was sipping coffee in an Elizabeth butcher shop Thursday morning, said Tony Soprano was very realistic.
"He had frailties and failings; he was human, aside from all that gangster crap," Canu said. "A lot of people were offended by it. They say it makes it look like all Italian-Americans are mobsters, but people know we're not. We're just hardworking people who get up every day and do our jobs and provide for our families. It was just a TV show."
But the butcher shop's owner, John Sacco, said "The Sopranos" spread negative stereotypes about Italian-Americans far and wide.
He said when he went to a dentist in Florida and when he revealed he was from New Jersey, someone in the office said, "Oh, the place with all the mobsters!"
"It didn't show us in a real great light," he said.
At Satin Dolls, the real-life Lodi strip club that served as the fictional Bada Bing club in the show, employees put a framed photo of Gandolfini where he frequently sat, calling it "the boss's seat."
"It's like we lost a member of the family," spokesman Bill Pepe said. "Everybody is shocked."
Paul Pereira, of Lodi, stopped to put flowers on a sign in front of the club. He said the show gave a more nuanced picture of people involved in or somehow connected to the mob.
"It showed that these are real people, family people," Pereira said. "You notice that every episode ended with him with his family."
Thursday afternoon, a workman outside the club climbed a ladder and changed the club's marquee from "Bartenders Wanted" to "Thank You, Jimmy; Farewell Boss."
At Green Hill, the West Orange nursing home where scenes involving Tony's ailing mother were shot, executive director Toni Lynn Davis said the residents loved the show. Several even got hired as extras, and the show's payments helped buy a giant flat-screen TV on which they watched the show each week.
"They said it was their weekly vocabulary lesson," Davis said. "They learned all those new swear words."
She said the show has become part of the fabric of New Jersey.
"There are definitely parts of New Jersey that are very close to what was depicted," she said. "You can't go anywhere in New Jersey and not hear that the Sopranos was shot there. They went all over."
The house where Tony Soprano lived is in North Caldwell, and fans were stopping by to show their respects to Gandolfini. Michael Primamore, who lives nearby and whose family runs an auto repair business, left a bag of dried ziti next to the candles that sprouted in the driveway.
He said the show accurately reflected the experiences of his and other Italian-American families who settled in Newark before moving to the suburbs.
"The show was full of so many northern New Jersey Italian expressions, if you weren't raised in that world, you wouldn't get some parts of it," he said. "The show reached me on a personal level in so many ways."
Several North Caldwell residents recalled seeing and meeting cast members.
"They were great people, very personable," said Chris Masi, who said he met Gandolfini. "They would come up and give you a hug. They put us on the map. It meant a lot."
Fans also gathered at Holsten's, the Bloomfield ice cream parlor where the show's famous cut-to-black last scene was shot.
"I'm sad he died," said Fred O'Neil of Montclair, who, like Gandolfini, is 51. "I can't believe it. It makes me think of my own mortality."
Primamore said his reaction to Gandolfini's death was a lot like what Tony Soprano's would have been: "It's a tragedy. What are you gonna do?"
___
Associated Press writers David Porter in North Caldwell, N.J., Julio Cortez in Bloomfield, N.J., and Katie Zezima in West Orange, N.J. contributed to this report.
___
Wayne Parry can be reached at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gandolfini-mourned-njs-sopranos-towns-133116230.html
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