Post written by Leo Babauta
I was sitting outside my new home yesterday (we just moved last week, and we love the new place), watching the world go by.
There were people in cars, in a hurry to get to their next appointment. There were birds flying by, insects just as busy as the people in cars, plants and weeds thriving in the humid Guam climate.
Inside the house, my children were also busy, as ever, making a mess of the house (which my wife and I would soon clean up), getting into things, their natural curiosity overpowering our previous pleas for them not to play with lotion or take things apart.
The sky was slightly overcast and there was a cool breeze, quite strong and pleasant actually.
It’s not often that most of us just sit quietly, and allow the world to pass us by.
Why not?
What is so important that it can’t wait until later? What email must be answered right this moment? Do we really need to read all those articles online, all those messages from others, all those newspapers and magazines? Do we need to have the television and radio and Internet on all the time?
Is life passing us by as we keep our minds super-busy? Are we missing out on the beautiful world around us as we constantly think about the future — what we need to do, our anxieties about what might happen — and the past — what we did wrong, what someone else did to us, what we said, what should have happened?
When was the last time you just sat, and observed? Why not do it today?
Of the 400 billion stars in our galaxy, only 12 are magnetars -- neutron stars possessed of a magnetic field a quadrillion times stronger than Earth's.It appears that the theory of a Magnetar was first established in 1992. Here's another good article, this one from 1998:
Make that 13. In an article published last Friday in Nature, researchers at NASA's Spitzer Science Space Center describe a newly-found magnetar called SGR 1900+14.
How big is a quadrillion, you ask? It's a million times a billion. As in, 1,000,000,000,000,000. Apply it to magnetic fields, and -- in the well-chosen words of this press release -- you get "extreme fields [that] stretch the very fabric of matter, contorting atoms into thin cigar-shaped structures."
Under that stress, the star's very crust can split open, temporarily releasing "over a thousand times more energy than all of the stars in a galaxy." That appears to have happened around SGR 1900+14; the break in the interstellar dust ring surrounding the star was likely caused by the flare shooting into space.
On March 5, 1979, gamma ray detectors on nine spacecraft across our solar system recorded an intense radiation spike. It was just 2/10th of a second long - with as much energy as the sun releases in 1,000 years - followed by a 200-second emission that showed a clear 8-second pulsation period (most SGR bursts release as much energy as the sun releases in one year). The position tied the burst to a supernova remnant known as N49 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
...
"We found that the pulsar was slowing down at a rate that suggested a magnetic field strength of about 800 trillion Gauss, a field strength similar to that for so called magnetars predicted by previous theoretical work," said Kouveliotou.By comparison, Earth's magnetic field is a mere 0.6 Gauss at the poles, and the best we can sustain in laboratories on the ground is 1 million Gauss - and that's in a small volume. Normal radio pulsars reach about 1 trillion to 5 trillion Gauss, strong but still short of a magnetar.
"If the field really is this strong," notes Kouveliotou, "then magnetism itself can keep the star hot - about 10 million degrees C (18 million deg. F) at the surface - and power the X-rays coming from its rotating surface."
N = 10 × 0.5 × 2 × 1 × 0.01 × 0.01 × 10,000 = 10So he suggested in 1960 that the estimated number of civilizations that currently exist in the Milky Way galaxy to be 10. Current estimates in this equation have been proposed as such:
N = 7 × 0.5 × 2 × 0.33 × 0.01 × 0.01 × 10,000 = 2.31Pretty interesting, and for me at least, this number seems to be really low... But then, I'm no scientist.
The basics are well-accepted. With 23 million square miles of surface area — 70 percent of the Earth — the ocean is the world’s biggest sunbather. The amount of heat it absorbs each day is equal to burning hundreds of billions of oil barrels. Tapping into even one-tenth of a percent of that energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says, would yield...Further down in the article:
...20 times as much electricity as the United States uses in a day.
In either case, OTEC offers something that few renewable resources can — baseload power. While wind and solar are known to be fickle, ocean thermal backers say it can provide hundreds of megawatts every minute of the day.
Over the past few years, a series of riots spread across what is patronizingly known as the Third World. Furious mobs have raged against skyrocketing food and energy prices, stagnating wages and unemployment in India, Senegal, Yemen, Indonesia, Morocco, Cameroon, Brazil, Panama, the Philippines, Egypt, Mexico and elsewhere.
For the most part, those living in wealthier countries took little notice. But now, with the global economy crashing down around us, people in even the wealthiest nations are mad as hell and reacting violently to what they view as an inadequate response to their tumbling economies.
Notably absent from the list of countries where the economic crunch is rending the social fabric is the good ole US of A, a state with the greatest level of economic inequality in the wealthy world.
Outside of a few scattered and quickly contained protests, the citizens of the U.S. -- a country born of revolution, but with an elite that's been terrified of that legacy since immediately after its founding -- have been calm, despite opinion polls showing that Americans are more dissatisfied with the direction in which the country has been headed since they began measuring such things.
It's a baffling disconnect, considering that real wages for all but the top 10 percent of the economic pile haven't increased in 35 years.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080110.html
Interesting article about making a "National Park" on ice.
