DanLin.net

I guess this is now an official move in the democratic party rule book:

- If you lose a presidential election to George W. Bush, You must write a book about the environment

Because that’s exactly what former presidential candidate John Kerry did. Oh yeah, and don’t forget Al “I own the biggest house in Nashville” Gore. Why not. It worked well for Al. I have not read this book but is it just me or was Kerry not particularly known for his environmental views? I am sure he does care but this just reeks as a me too move by the Massachusetts senator. I suppose if he wants to make another run at this in 4 or 8 years, he’d better start now so he has enough time to start a speaking tour and maybe ink a Hollywood deal in time for 2012 (just in case people don’t buy into the Hilary/Obama ticket).

If I was John Kerry, I would make sure I’ve done everything I can to make sure the world’s biggest food company, which happens to be owned by his co-author/wife Teresa Heinz’s family, is as green as corporately possible…

This is what I want to know. Why is myspace STILL the king of social networks? I can understand when there weren’t too many choices but is that still the case today? Just today I got over a dozen SPAM bulletin messages on my myspace bulletin board in my account. They are all from people I know who would not participate in this kind of solicitation. For example, I know my wife’s cousin who’s currently serving in the Navy in Florida is not really trying to get me to click to a site from myspace to claim a year worth of free pizza.

Neither is my friend Rodrigo inviting me to a HUGE myspace party by linking to a fake myspace profile to request the address where the HREF actually points to an IP address in Hong Kong.

Are all these people’s accounts compromised? Is it the handy work of the Colorado spammer Richter (as discussed on RB #50) ? Whatever it is, its not looking pretty right now. If myspace doesn’t find a real (non-litigious) way of dealing with the spam issue, it is just another reason for people to stop using it and jump to the next best thing. Whatever that is.

I keep hearing from people talking about the rising in sea level is caused by the polar ice melting away due to global warming. I am actually fairly certain that the earth is gradually getting warmer. This post isn’t really about that though. Without getting into the politics of the subject matter, I just want to explain to some people who seem to have forgotten their high school physics when they talk about the rising sea levels.

Everyone hopefully knows that H2O can exist in all 3 states. Gas, liquid and solid. As it transforms from one state to another, it’s density changes because the molecules become closer or farther from each other. Some of you may also remember that when water is in the solid state the density is less than the same amount of water in liquid form. That is why ice floats in water. If you don’t believe me, just make some ice cubes if your ice cube tray in the freezer and see the surface rise as it changes from liquid to solid.

The other physical attribute of floating ice is, floating anything for that matter, is displaces the exact same volume as the weight of the ice cube when you replace that space with the surrounding water. That sounds absolutely confusing actually. Even to me. So let me try to explain with an example for those who didn’t catch that.

If you have a 1ft x 1ft x 1ft cube bucket that can hold that exact same amount of liquid H2O, its volume is 1 cubed. When it is frozen, the volume will be slightly larger than that. When you drop that block of ice into a tub of water without and wait for the water to become perfectly still again, you will note that the amount of ice above the surface of the water is the exact same amount it expanded when it changed from liquid to solid.

OK, if that makes sense to you, then you can imagine that block of ice will begin to melt. As the ice melts and the resulting liquid H2O merges with the surrounding water, you will not notice any amount of rise in the water level in the bucket. That is exactly like the polar ice caps as they begin to melt due to the temperature increase.

It is not physically possible to have rising sea levels that are due to the floating ice bergs melting at the poles.

There. I said it. If you want to argue about global warming I suggest you go to another blog. This post is just here to tell all the idiots who are crying about how the rising sea levels are going to kill us and how we will all be under water because of it one day. I will give you that there may be a lot of melting ice that is not merely floating and could potentially introduce a visible rise as it slides from land to sea. I do not know the exact ratios of how much of those kinds of ice there are versus the other at the poles. But at the very least, people need to stop running around thinking that when all the floating ice bergs melt we are going to be riding around in jetskis, growing gills on the sides of our necks and battling a gang of derelics refered to only as the ’smokers’.

(For 99.9% of the people in the world who didn’t watch the movie Waterworld, that last sentence was a not-so-clever attempt of taking a shot at Kevin Costner…)