Starship Asterisk*

A link to this article ... http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090916/ap_on_sc/us_sci_rocky_planet ... showed up in my Yahoo News headlines a week ago, and there I first saw the image used as today's APOD. The only trouble was that the article makes it sound like ESO announced the discovery of CoRoT-7b Sep...

The bananas are simply creases in the hood which has been tightened over the face to keep out blowing sand. The saucers are the sun near the horizon and a small cloud above.

A theory about chimps or anything else could be a scientific theory or not, depending on the phrasing. Does it specify a rule that can be tested? Your chimp theory includes the word "could", so it's not so much a statement of a rule that "always" applies. So, unlike what I descri...

Disprovability applies to scientific theories. A scientific theory states that a phenomenon always follows one or more rules, or it proposes a mechanism for a phenomenon that is reflected in one or more rules that are always followed, or it specifies attributes of a phenomenon that are defined by on...

Your gut has all the answers. Use your flashlight.

Having a blatantly incorrect view is often characterized as having one's head in a specific location that provides zero visibility. Such a position can only be achieved through difficult unnatural contortion. The medical term for the debilitating condition that produces the required contortion is cr...

Everyone knows I'm really apodman, and therefore my vote shouldn't count, but the offending individual is so irritating that I'm going to vote anyway. The fact that he suffers from CRI wins him no sympathy. It seems that Sputnick/mopedtothemoon/IPRider/aristarchusinexile and Beratis/Kesla/Redjac are...

Try your math again. The problem is that both regions stated are in square kilometers which only refers to surface area and not volume or cubic meters. I divided area (ocean) by area (ice shelf) to get a dimensionless ratio. I multiplied this dimensionless ratio by height (sea level rise) to obtain...

... we COULD have a discussion on the merits of global warming, but then APOD would still not be the right venue. Compare the activity in this thread with the lack of activity in this slightly more appropriate venue (in the Café). You gotta have your discussion where the participants participate, e...

If the Ross Ice Shelf is lost, then the entire ecosystem that depends on dark cold water underneath an ice sheet is totally disrupted. The collapse of Larsen B has revealed a thriving ecosystem 800 m (half a mile) below the sea. "Despite near freezing and sunless conditions, a community of cla...

Maybe you can explain why the planet warmed up in the middle ages? Many are better qualified than I to try to answer this one, but I'll provide this link anyway since a lot has been written on the subject: http://www.google.com/search?q=medieval+warm+period Maybe someone can summarize, but I'm bett...

BMAONE23 wrote:Were your figures refering to the total area (volume) of the ocean or the total surface area of the ocean?

Surface area.

If one makes the assumption that the Ross Ice Shelf melted in its entirety, along with the balance of the other Ice Shelves in Antarctica, then a total of 1,183,590 sq. Km's of ice would melt. Using Rocky's figure for the total area of the oceans and dividing by the total area of the ice shelves in...

geckzilla wrote:Your use of quotation marks confuses me.

Easily explained.

I essentially agree with what you said.

The first four terms are in quotes because I used them loosely and don't care to defend them.

The term "scientific documentaries" is in quotes because IMO they are really neither.

Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to. Everything from increased kittens, the fires in California, to children dying in Africa and the collapse of civilization as we know it have been attributed to this phenomenon. This is the most unscientific part about it. ... The fact i...

Most readers hereabouts know that the Wikipedia is a convenient reference used for its breadth and accessibility, not an authoritative one. Information can often be verified by authoritative sources that are not available for linking, whereas a Wikipedia article containing the same information is ea...

jlfonz wrote:I'm done here.

Don't give up now. You're this week's entertainment.

poles of other planets in our solar system are sharing the same percentages of polar melting Warming planets ? Mars, Jupiter, Pluto and even triton, a moon of Neptune have had "coincidental" warming cycles. Mars is planet number one. Jupiter has nothing solid at the poles to melt. Pluto, ...

http://images.google.com/images?q=antarctic+ice+loss http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/images/AntarcticaIceShelves.jpg The picture above shows the Ross Ice Shelf as having an area of about 473,000 square kilometers. The area of Earth's oceans is about 361,000,000 square kilometers. That makes...

Years of listening to quacks with flimsy evidence alternately predicting the next ice age and catastrophic greenhouse effect led many of us to view all such claims with cynicism. But quackery has been replaced by better science and more measurements. It is time to take the modern view of global warm...

jlfonz wrote:... a temperate climate in Greenland ...

Please explain how you tell local climate variation from global climate variation.

jlfonz wrote:... other planets in our solar system are sharing the same percentages of polar melting ...

Other planets? Please name two.

Chris Peterson wrote:... showing melting ice ...

Tomorrow's picture: paint drying

verkle wrote:I am saddened to see APOD put out a politically tainted topic today.

In the quest to introduce everyone in the world to APOD, controversy casts a wider net.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090215.html Scientists are watching the much-larger Ross Ice Shelf, which, if it fully collapses, could cause global sea levels to rise five meters over the next few hundred years. Is "collapse" a way to describe a slow (over the next few hundred years) d...

By what miracle of science do the photographer and camera both appear in the frame?