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Greenland's Ice Sheet is Growing

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 19:05:30 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

A Norwegian-led team used the ERS data to measure elevation changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2003, finding recent growth in the interior sections estimated at around six centimetres per year during the study period.

The result is a mixed picture, with a net increase of 6.4 centimetres per year in the interior area above 1500 metres elevation. Below that altitude, the elevation-change rate is minus 2.0 cm per year, broadly matching reported thinning in the ice-sheet margins. The trend below 1500 metres however does not include the steeply-sloping marginal areas where current altimeter data are unusable.

The spatially averaged increase is 5.4 cm per year over the study area, when corrected for post-Ice Age uplift of the bedrock beneath the ice sheet. These results are remarkable because they are in contrast to previous scientific findings of balance in Greenland's high-elevation ice.

Tags: climate change, science, interesting, global warming

Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules of Writing Fiction

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:22:25 GMT

clipped by: glimbit

Clip Source: www.janeespenson.com

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-- Kurt Vonnegut

Tags: writing

Friday the 13th is not our lucky day

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 07:10:47 GMT

clipped by: egoldstein
clipper's remarks: Just wanted to explain to everyone what happened tonight.

Clip Source: clipmarks.wordpress.com

At around 9pm EST friday night we began to notice odd behavior on our servers. Shortly thereafter, our web site went down. It quickly became clear to us that this was a Denial of Service attack…meaning that someone was intentionally trying to take down the site. We have a very robust back-end, so we knew this had to be some massive attack to have this kind of affect. Well, it turns out that it was a distributed attack coming from many thousands of computers around the world that were all attacking the site simultaneously. Thankfully, we were able to isolate the source and begin to choke it off. This got the site back up and running.

I want to apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced by this. We don’t yet know who did this or why, but hopefully it is behind us.

Tags: clipmarks