Missing Mary Road

before

after

The pictures above are self explanatory and are taken on August 13th 2001 and August 18th 2010 respectively. Large images are also available, before and after.

The Indus River at Sukkur was at exceptionally high levels on August 18, 2010, when the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured the top false-color image. The upper image shows the Sukkur region on August 13, 2001. Water ranges from dark blue to silvery blue, and plant-covered land is red in the false-color image.

Sukkur is the hub of a crucial irrigation network that brings water to farms throughout the Sindh province. The dark blue canals surround the white-gray city of Sukkur in both images. In the bottom image, the Indus River extends over its banks across many kilometers. Near the city, the river seems to be held in check by the canals and associated structures.

The floods started in late July when intense monsoon rains fell over northern Pakistan. By mid-August, about one-fifth of Pakistan was flooded, affecting more than 15 million people.

Please find it in your hearts to donate some money for relief efforts here.

http://www.chowrangi.com/donation-links-and-relief-resources-for-pakistan-flood-victims.html

this guy had a worse weekend than you did.

26 of NASA’s legends, including Cernan, Armstrong, and Lovell have blasted Obama’s new space plan.

The United States entered into the challenge of space exploration under President Eisenhower’s first term, however, it was the Soviet Union who excelled in those early years.

Under the bold vision of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and with the overwhelming approval of the American people, we rapidly closed the gap in the final third; of the 20th century, and became the world leader in space exploration.
America’s space accomplishments earned the respect and admiration of the world. Science probes were unlocking the secrets of the cosmos; space technology was providing instantaneous worldwide communication; orbital sentinels were helping man understand the vagaries of nature.

Above all else, the people around the world were inspired by the human exploration of space and the expanding of man’s frontier. It suggested that what had been thought to be impossible was now within reach. Students were inspired to prepare themselves to be a part of this new age.

World leadership in space was not achieved easily. In the first half-century of the space age, our country made a significant financial investment, thousands of Americans dedicated themselves to the effort, and some gave their lives to achieve the dream of a nation.

In the latter part of the first half century of the space age, Americans and their international partners focused primarily on exploiting the near frontiers of space with the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.

As a result of the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, it was concluded that our space policy required a new strategic vision. Extensive studies and analysis led to this new mandate: meet our existing commitments, return to our exploration roots, return to the moon, and prepare to venture further outward to the asteroids and to Mars.
The program was named Constellation In the ensuing years, this plan was endorsed by two Presidents of different parties and approved by both Democratic and Republican congresses.

The Columbia Accident Board had given Nasa a number of recommendations fundamental to the Constellation architecture which were duly incorporated. The Ares rocket family was patterned after the Von Braun Modular concept so essential to the success of the Saturn 1B and the Saturn 5.

A number of components in the Ares 1 rocket would become the foundation of the very large heavy lift Ares V, thus reducing the total development costs substantially. After the Ares 1 becomes operational, the only major new components necessary for the Ares V would be the larger propellant tanks to support the heavy lift requirements.

The design and the production of the flight components and infrastructure to implement this vision was well underway. Detailed planning of all the major sectors of the program had begun. Enthusiasm within Nasa and throughout the country was very high.

When President Obama recently released his budget for Nasa, he proposed a slight increase in total funding, substantial research and technology development, an extension of the International Space Station operation until 2020, long range planning for a new but undefined heavy lift rocket and significant funding for the development of commercial access to low earth orbit

Although some of these proposals have merit, the accompanying decision to cancel the Constellation program, its Ares 1 and Ares V rockets, and the Orion spacecraft, is devastating.

America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz – at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future – until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves.

The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.

It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded.

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.

While the President’s plan envisages humans traveling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years.

Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity. America must decide if it wishes to remain a leader in space. If it does, we should institute a program which will give us the very best chance of achieving that goal.

Neil Armstrong
Commander, Apollo 11

James Lovell
Commander, Apollo 13

Eugene Cernan
Commander, Apollo 17

Chris Kraft
Johnson Space Center Past Director

Jack Lousma
Skylab 3, STS 3

Vance Brand
Apollo-Soyuz, STS-5, STS-41B, STS-35

Bob Crippen
STS-1, STS-7, STS-41C, STS-41G, Kennedy Space Center Past Director

Michael D. Griffin
Past NASA Administrator

Ed Gibson
Skylab 4

Jim Kennedy
Kennedy Space Center Past Director

Alan Bean
Apollo 12, Skylab 3

Alfred M. Worden
Apollo 15

Scott Carpenter
Mercury Astronaut

Glynn Lunney
Gemini-Apollo Flight Director

Jim McDivitt Gemini 4
Apollo 9 Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager

Gene Kranz
Gemini-Apollo Flight Director, NASA Mission Ops. Past Director

Joe Kerwin
Skylab 2

Fred Haise
Apollo 13, Shuttle Landing Tests

Gerald Carr
Skylab 4

Jake Garn
STS-51D, U.S. Senator

Charlie Duke
Apollo 16

Bruce McCandless
STS-41B, STS-31

Frank Borman
Gemini 7, Apollo 8

Paul Weitz
Skylab 2, STS-6

George Mueller
Past Associate Administrator For Manned Space Flight

Harrison Schmitt
Apollo 17, U.S. Senator

Dick Gordon
Gemini 11, Apollo 12

During the climactic men’s hockey game at the end of this winter’s Olympics, Toronto was united by a lot more than enthusiasm for sports. As this graph of the city’s water usage during the game clearly shows, Torontonians were also remarkably synchronized that night in the timing of their trips to the washroom, with massive spikes in water consumption to coincide with each intermission in play and a huge dip in usage following Sidney Crosby’s winning goal. This was almost certainly due to toilets, citywide, flushing, and not flushing, in unison. Bladders were straining together all over Toronto.

Similar graphs showing water usage in Edmonton and Winnipeg have already made the news?but this graph, from Toronto Water, our city’s water-supply agency, is the first evidence specifically in Toronto.

Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple. Don’t matter much to me anymore though since I’ve moved to Mint. Try it for yourself.

Excellent commentary from The Register:

As the smoke clears following the case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the failed Christmas Day “underpants bomber” of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 fame, there are just three simple points for us Westerners to take away.

First: It is completely impossible to prevent terrorists from attacking airliners.

Second: This does not matter. There is no need for greater efforts on security.

Third: A terrorist set fire to his own trousers, suffering eyewateringly painful burns to what Australian cricket commentators sometimes refer to as the “groinal area”, and nobody seems to be laughing. What’s wrong with us?

If you get excited about the prospect of really, really fast broadband Internet service, here’s a statistic that will make heart race. Or your blood boil. Or both.

Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.

The cable modem needed for that speed costs about $60, compared with about $30 for the current generation.

By contrast, Verizon is spending an average of $817 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another $716 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes

New Jersey police detained 68-year old American music star Bob Dylan recently, after a young officer failed to recognize him. A disheveled Dylan was wearing a hoodie, wandering around in the rain looking at a house for sale. The 24-year-old female officer was responding to a phone call from the occupants of a home that had a “For Sale” sign on it. The residents were called in with a report of an “eccentric-looking old man” in their yard

“We got a call for a suspicious person,” Buble said. “It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded. By that time he was walking down the street. I asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood and he said he was looking at a house for sale.”

“I asked him what his name was and he said, ‘Bob Dylan,’ Buble said. “Now, I’veseen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

“So I said, ‘OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?’ He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I’m really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was. We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something,” Buble said.

happy independence to ya’ll. read all about how it happened here. hope it was worth it.

Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached $10 trillion, or 1013 dollars. The crisis was resolved by squeezing another digit into the space occupied by the dollar sign. Now a new clock is on order, with room for growth; it won’t fill up until the debt reaches a quadrillion (1015) dollars.

The incident of the Debt Clock brings to mind a comment made by Richard Feynman in the 1980s—back when mere billions still had the power to impress:

There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

The important point here is not that high finance is catching up with the sciences; it’s that the numbers we encounter everywhere in daily life are growing steadily larger. Computer technology is another area of rapid numeric inflation. Data storage capacity has gone from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, and the latest disk drives hold a terabyte (1012 bytes). In the world of supercomputers, the current state of the art is called petascale computing (1015 operations per second), and there is talk of a coming transition to exascale (1018). After that, we can await the arrival of zettascale (1021) and yottascale (1024) machines—and then we run out of prefixes!

It’s been bad for folks living in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, for some time. The monsoon season has failed to deliver the goods. Crops are dying. People are starving. Wells have run dry. Naturally, the God’s are to blame. So the men folk and farmers have resorted to Plan B: All the area’s unwed, single girls are plowing the fields naked. Will the sight of these lovely ladies (I’m sure a few are hot) doing manual labor in the buff be enough to embarrass the God’s and make it rain? Hard. Only time will tell.

Said one local official: “Villagers believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains.”

This naked plow tradition is not new, and has been practiced for years with coincidental results. Sometimes God’s send rain. Sometimes weathermen come to town and slap some sense into the townsfolk. But droughts are droughts and they suck. So desperate folks will try anything, no matter how crazy.

More than 500 employees of Keihin Electric Express Railway in Japan will be subject to “smile checks” every morning. Software will evaluate the quality of their grins, and alert them if they aren’t looking happy enough.

The smile-evaluating software takes a picture of Keihin employees every morning and assigns smile values to various parts of the face. It then adds those values and delivers a smile scan score. According to an article today in the Mainichi Daily News:

The device analyzes the facial characteristics of a person, including eye movements, lip curves and wrinkles, and rates a smile on a scale between 0 and 100 percent using a camera and computer.

For those with low scores, advice like “You still look too serious,” or “Lift up your mouth corners,” will be displayed on the screen.

Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it.

the pakistan cricket board has decided to remove shoaib akhtar from the 15 man squad for next month’s twenty 20 cricket championship for reasons best read yourself.

The PCB has withdrawn Shoaib Akhtar from the 15-man squad for next month’s World Twenty20, saying – in an unusually revealing statement – that he had been diagnosed with genital viral warts. Rao Iftikhar Anjum’s name has been sent to the ICC’s technical committee by the PCB as a replacement.

Shoaib’s participation had been in doubt after Intikhab Alam, Pakistan’s coach, said yesterday he hadn’t recovered sufficiently from a skin infection to play the three practice games the Pakistan squad is playing in Lahore.

“Shoaib Akhtar has been withdrawn from the World Twenty20 squad and Rao’s name has been sent to the ICC as a replacement,” a board spokesman said on Thursday.

The PCB’s unusually graphic press release said that a three-member medical panel appointed by the PCB had found that Shoaib was suffering from “genital viral warts and electrofulgration [a surgical procedure] was done on May 12, 2009.”

The panel added that “his wound though healing needs further care and treatment for another minimum ten days for the purpose of healing and to achieve skin cover. The Medical Board further recommended his re-assessment after 10 days.
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so drug testing in sport is fairly common now and getting stricter and stricter as years go by. so what do you think happened when a drug tester showed up at the belgian bodybuilding competition in brussells. all 20 of the participants ran off instead of peeing in a cup. can you imagine these giant men running off scared to pee in a cup. no shit sherlock, they didn’t get to be their size just by eating their greens and having their meat.

highlarious i say.

After 15 years of retreat, a huge sheet of ice is finally crumbling in Antarctica. The Wilkins is the eighth and largest ice shelf to fracture and fall apart in the last two decades along the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The pattern of breakup, where the ice remains stable for centuries or even millennia, then almost over night, shatters into millions of bits like broken glass, is foreshadowing the fate of our northern ice floating in the Arctic.