For anyone planning on traveling to the South Pole region of Titan, take note: Titan: A Rainy Season Ahead?
Rain seems to have been plentiful at Titan’s south pole. A new analysis of Cassini imagery compares the region in recent times with what it was about a year earlier, noting new features in areas many scientists believe to be lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. Adding to the conjecture is the fact that extensive cloud systems covered the region during this period, evidence for a large rainstorm amid changing seasons. All this comes from the almost global surface map Cassini’s Imaging Science Subsystem has been acquiring since April of 2004.
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The images on the left (unlabeled at top and labeled at bottom) were acquired July 3, 2004. Those on the right were taken June 6, 2005. In the 2005 images, new dark areas are visible and have been circled in the labeled version. The very bright features are clouds in the lower atmosphere (the troposphere). Titan’s clouds behave similarly to those on Earth, changing rapidly on timescales of hours and appearing in different places from day to day. During the year that elapsed between these two observations, clouds were frequently observed at Titan’s south pole by observers on Earth and by Cassini’s imaging science subsystem.
Occasionally, I am amazed that we now know stuff like this....
Other topic: this NYT article [link] is getting a lot of play on Jezebel and Gawker and stuff. But an NPR blogger wonders if it's fake? [link] I dunno, I feel like I;ve observed some girls when I worked at the Looniversity who were genuinely that shallow and crazy.
I think the blog is a PR ploy, but the group & the women are real. I see women like that here, too.
If it weren't noted that the baby video is time-lapse, I'd have assumed that the mat on the floor was the baby equivalent of the kitty crack pad.
Yeah, I think that blog is recently made up and those women are playing it up, but of course there are women like that -- that's why the ones playing get press, because it seems so likely. But the women who are actually consoling each other like that aren't reaching out to the NYTimes.
Wow, Dakota Fanning looks great.
It's also quite typical of the NYT to make a "movement" out of the behavior of a small number of extremely privileged people.
It's also quite typical of the NYT to make a "movement" out of the behavior of a small number of extremely privileged people.
One or more of whom possibly went to college with the reporter. Or her roommate.
Tools. The technical name for those whiney faux hurt idiots.
Look at what teh Gayz and teh atheists have made the Boy Scouts do!
Scout councils defend logging of their lands
(01-29) 20:11 PST -- For nearly a century, the Boy Scouts of America have proudly described themselves as campside conservationists, good stewards of the land.
"The Boy Scouts were green before it was cool to be green," said national spokesman Deron Smith.
But in recent decades, local Boy Scout councils around the nation have ordered clear-cutting or other high-impact logging on tens of thousands of acres of forestland they own, often in a quest for a different kind of green: cash.
A Hearst Newspapers investigation has found dozens of cases in which the scouts ordered the logging of prime woodlands or sold them to big timber interests and developers, turning quick money instead of seeking ways to save the trees.
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In some cases, councils have sought revenues from logging or land sales to make up for funding lost because of the organization's controversial bans on gays and atheists.
"The Boy Scouts had to suffer the consequences for sticking by their moral values," said Eugene Grant, president of the Portland, Ore., Cascade Pacific Council's board of directors. "There's no question" that the Scouts' anti-gay, anti-atheist stance has cost the organization money, he said. As a result, he said, "every council has looked at ways to generate funds ... and logging is one of them."
Oh well.
