meggo

gracias! i think i'll think about going to that. you?

jay do you know where i can find other farina tourdates? on his website i could only find dates for last year.... thx! edit: aha! answered my own question: jambase!

maybe the d_rawk and i will stop by too, since it's just a block away!

my dad sent me this article this morning, provides a bit of a counterpoint... i haven't read through it all yet. An Inconvenient Truth meets a few facts S. Fred Singer, Special to The Windsor Star Published: Monday, April 02, 2007 Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth has met its match: a devastating documentary recently shown on British television, which has also been viewed by millions of people on the Internet. In spite of its flamboyant title, The Great Global Warming Swindle is based on sound science by recording the statements of real climate scientists, including me. An Inconvenient Truth mainly records a politician. The scientific arguments presented in The Great Global Warming Swindle can be stated quite briefly. First, there is no proof at all that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from human activities, such as the generation of energy from the burning of fuels. Observations in ice cores show that temperature increases have preceded -- not resulted from -- increases in CO2 by hundreds of years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans is an important source of the rise in atmospheric CO2. As the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapour is far, far more important than CO2, yet not well handled by climate models -- and, in any case, not within our control. Greenhouse models also cannot account for the observed cooling of much of the past century (1940-1975), nor for the observed patterns of warming -- what we call the "fingerprints." For example, the Antarctic is cooling while models predict warming. And where the models call for the middle atmosphere to warm faster than the surface, the observations show the exact opposite. THE BEST EVIDENCE But the best evidence we have supports natural causes -- changes in cloudiness linked to regular variations in solar activity. Thus the current warming is likely part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that's been traced back almost a million years. It accounts for the Medieval Warm Period around 1100 AD, when the Vikings were able to settle Greenland and grow crops, and the Little Ice Age, from about 1400 to 1850 AD, which brought severe winters and cold summers to Europe, with failed harvests, starvation, disease and general misery. Attempts have been made to claim that the current warming is "unusual"; a spurious analysis of tree rings and other proxy data tried to deny the existence of these historic climate swings; but this so-called "hockey-stick" result, that earth temperatures have been constant until recent decades, has now been thoroughly discredited. Second, if the cause of warming is mostly natural, then there is little we can do about it. We can't influence the inconstant Sun, the likely origin of most climate variability. None of the schemes of mitigation currently bandied about will do any good; they are all irrelevant, useless, and wildly expensive: - Control of CO2 emissions, whether by rationing or by elaborate cap-and-trade schemes - Uneconomic "alternative" energy, such as ethanol and the impractical "hydrogen economy" - Massive installations of wind turbines and solar collectors - Proposed projects for the sequestration of CO2 from smokestacks or even from the atmosphere Ironically, all of these schemes would be ineffective even if CO2 were responsible for the observed warming trend -- unless we could persuade every nation, including China, to cut fuel use by 80 percent! Finally, no one can show that a warmer climate would produce negative impacts overall. The much-feared rise in sea levels does not seem to depend on short-term temperature changes, as the rate of sea-level increases has been steady since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. In fact, many economists argue that the opposite is more likely -- that warming produces a net benefit, that it increases incomes and standards of living. All agree that a colder climate would be bad. So why would the present climate be the optimum? Surely, the chances for this must be vanishingly small, and the history of past climate warmings bear this out. MAIN MESSAGE But the main message of The Great Global Warming Swindle is much broader. Why should we devote our scarce resources to what is essentially a non-problem, and ignore the real problems the world faces: hunger, disease, denial of human rights -- not to mention the threats of terrorism and nuclear wars? And are we really prepared to deal with natural disasters; pandemics that can wipe out most of the human race, or even the impact of an asteroid, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs? Yet politicians and the elites throughout much of the world prefer to toy with and devote our limited resources to fashionable issues, rather than concentrate on real ones. Just consider the scary predictions emanating from supposedly responsible world figures: The chief scientist of Britain's Labor Party tells us that unless we insulate our houses and use more efficient light bulbs, the Antarctic will be the only habitable continent by 2100, with a few surviving breeding couples propagating the human race. Seriously. I imagine that in the not-too-distant future, all of the hype will have died down, particularly if the climate should decide to cool -- as it did during much of the past century; we should take note here that it has not warmed since 1998. Future generations will look back on the current madness and wonder what it was all about. They will have movies like An Inconvenient Truth and documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle to remind them. S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and research fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. (www.independent.org). He served as the founding director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and was vice-chairman of the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere. He is the author of Hot Talk, Cold Science, and his most recent book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, is on the New York Times bestseller list. © The Windsor Star 2007

you can get melatonin at shoppers.

thanks stephen and NFTT! sorry i didn't have a chance to say hi after, my ride was leavin'. did you happen to bring a GNU cd with you??

happy birthday brad!!

happy birthday mary, hope you had a great day!

yeah wild oats!

in!

thanks doods! besides some upset tummies, the trip couldn't have gone better. check out some more photos here!

and the crazy neighbour!

the spades and john henry's were my favourites last year!

we had the masala dosa from ceylonta last week. it was good! love that place

i went to azteca once with my students. i would pretty much agree with Adam. our food wasn't awesome but they were serving us a fixed menu for about 20 people, so i would cut them a bit of slack. i prefer ahora

FYI - this movie is playing at the bytowne in ottawa tonight and tomorrow [wednesday and thursday].

since you're on the subject, hola from guatemala! we are going to make tortillas tonight. woohoo!

oh no!! that is really sad. they were so nice there and the food was awesome. cute little restaurant too. bummer!!

i had a roommate have sex with a smelly man in my bed while i was away for a few days. i found his undies under my bed. EW.

we were looking at that the other day. does it have a coffee taste??

i feel for the kid too, absolutely. i don't care much for her response, but that school is blatantly using a double standard and i think they need to take a hard look at what exactly they are trying to achieve with their code of conduct. the article does focus more on the "gay" comment, but i think most people will be able to recognize that the remarks made to the girl are equally hurtful and unacceptable. so - i think we are actually mostly in agreement here. thank goodness and now i have a journal article for my grade 10s this week! thanks hamilton.

mmm.. we had yellow curry from tuk tuk's on thursday. it was deeeeee-lish!

yep - i get your point, and i will say again that i agree that there is a larger picture of just getting people not to act like assholes, in general. but as dr evil mouse pointed out earlier in the thread - "I don't think one issue outweighs the other, though. The fact that "gay" is used in a derogatory sense without many people batting an eye - or even seeing them throw up resistance to recognising it as an issue worth raising - is a good indicator of what people who do identify as gay have to deal with a lot of the time. And the fact, too, that Mormons still have to put up with overt razzing after achieving the level of success they have - and remember, Joseph Smith was killed by an angry mob - speaks volumes about our inability to deal with difference." i think these need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, i.e., you do not let it go when you hear someone, especially a young person, using a word in this manner. if you're lucky, maybe you can help drive home that bigger picture that you speak of. if you're not lucky, at least you know that you tried and did not simply let it slide because you're so damn tired of going thru that argument again. ya know?

okay i am going to try not to overboard post in this thread because i have beaten this horse to goddamn death... birdy i definitely agree that the attitude is a huge problem. definitely. that being said - i think that, at the stage that we're at right now - the words are also a problem. maybe [hopefully] someday 'gay' will just mean happy, and 'faggots' will just mean the bundle of sticks you use as kindling, and so on and so forth. but right now, those words are so often being used to mean something negative - i really don't see how you can ignore that. i mean i know you're not ignoring it, but... you say it is us [people] who give words meaning, and meanings will change according to the society they're used in. fair enough. so - this is the meaning we've given them. referring both to homosexual people AND any random thing that we don't like - rules, songs, people, etc. this is gay, that is gay, the whole fucking world is gay. awesome. so if we're to get away from this negative connotation, how do we do that? i don't think the answer is in using them over and over so as to desensitize people. i'm not suggesting that this is what you're saying, but how do you answer that? have i completely missed the bus? or am i reading your posts more or less accurately..? i know from reading the other posts that i will get nowhere here. but, i am a glutton for punishment, or something. horse = dead & beaten. X 10

a-fuckin'-men