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BBC News => How Warm is your Dinosaur

Dinosaurs were long considered to be cold-blooded reptiles.

More recently, some researchers have proposed that the extinct creatures actively regulated their body temperature like mammals.

A study in the journal Plos Biology now suggests this is not the case, but that bigger dinosaurs may have lost heat so slowly that they stayed warm anyway

Happiness is a warm dinosaur.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Dinosaur, Dinosaurs, Natural Sciences, Paleontology, Science

MSNBC => Physicist touches upon God and science

World-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God.

You see? Science and blinkered superstition can get along just fine, as long as you don’t question the church’s cash cow.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Commentary, Loonies, Science

TimesDispatch.com => Train stuck in time

Locomotive 231 may finally finish its long-delayed run, nearly 81 years after it was trapped under the rubble of a Church Hill tunnel cave-in.

How cool is this? (Unless you were on this train, that is.) 81 years ago this train is stuck in the collapse of a tunnel and now they might dig it out. Perhaps they’ll finally be able to deliver those old letters that were bound to be in the mail car?

Technorati Tags: Archaeology, Blog

I just haven’t had much time lately, so have I got a backlog of stuff… guess I’m going to post it in condensed form, otherwise, I’d be typing all month.

Technorati Tags: Blog

ABC News => Drunken Jackie Chan Disrupts Show

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but really, perhaps Jackie Chan needs to consider stopping drinking?

Jackie Chan disrupted a concert by Taiwanese singer-songwriter Jonathan Lee and exchanged insults with the audience, a news report said Tuesday.

Ming Pao Daily News quoted the 52-year-old action star as saying onstage that he was drunk.

Chan suddenly jumped on the stage Monday night and demanded a duet with Lee. He then tried to conduct the band but stopped and restarted the music several times, the newspaper reported.

Technorati Tags: Blog

We actually took the kids to Steele Indian School Park for the Fourth of July show this year.

For many years, the big fireworks show was held downtown, and, by coincidence, we have a friend who owns a house within a couple blocks, so every years we used to go to his front yard.

Then, a couple years ago, they moved the show to the new park, which is 2 miles from our house. We thought we’d get a great vantage point, but there’s just enough big trees in the way that, unless you get on the roof, it’s not very good.

Even though it is only two miles, of course, all the streets are closed off and it’s too darned hot to walk (especially with a 4 year-old and a 1 year-old in tow.) So, this year we drove to one of the designated park and rides where special shuttle buses were running for free to the park. The ride (up Central Avenue) wasn’t too bad. People had been arriving for hours and so there was just a small but steady stream of people looking to catch the shuttle.

The ride back was a nightmare.

Apparently there was a car accident right in the intersection of the one street that was allowed to cross Central. (How do you have an accident in an intersection crossing a closed road?!)

What that meant was, not only did you have everyone leaving the park all at once to catch the busses, but the busses couldn’t get from the parking lot to the park, so the streets just jammed with people waiting for the busses to arrive.

When we finally did get on the buses, they were absolutely standing room, rush hour Tokyo packed, and the ride back was taken in 6 foot increments. It wasn’t pleasant. One of the reasons it was so messed up was that the route travelled right down Central in the midst of the light rail construction. (You see, there really is a tie-in to the light rail in this post.)

Anyway, the upstart of this was that some dumb SOB, standing on the other end of the bus was complaining long and loud about the light rail. He’d clearly drank all the anti-light rail kool-aid and was talking out his ass. (In exactly the same way the anti-light rail people do.)

“Blah, blah, blah… the train only travels 15 mph… blah blah blah… no one will use it… blah blah blah.”

Unfortunately, since he was at the other end of the bus and I didn’t feel like shouting at him, I just gritted my teeth and let him ramble on.

In any case, to set the record straight, I suggest that you go to The Valley Metro Rail Page and read up about it yourself. (Of course, you can argue that their information will be – obviously – biased, but the facts aren’t too hard to check.)

Basically, the light rail can travel at 55mph; however, because it travels along city street in traffic, the train will be programmed to operated at the designated, legal speed limit for the street it is traveling along. Combine that with the fact that it makes limited stops (too few in my opinion, as they dropped a few stations in the planning phase) and the lights will be synchronized to allow it to pass means that it will travel at near the speed limit.

I realize that no one drives at the speed limit in this town, but it is unrealistic to argue that the train should “speed” down the streets, and, if you’ve every travelled those roads during high volume times, no one actually even approaches the speed limit, so the train should be a faster alternative.

His other gripe was that no one will ride it. Well, obviously, that remains to be seen. Considering how awful this city’s bus system is, I’d argue that no one would ever ride the bus, either, but they do. if I hop on even the earliest Indian School bus traveling towards Central, it’s standing room only until it reaches Central and then almost everyone gets off and hops on a Central bus. Those people will absolutely be riding the light rail when it is operational.

The light rail route doesn’t really go much of anywhere that I want to go, but I have to believe that the route chosen, while it may have been a compromise, covers some of the most heavily trafficked bus routes.

This morning, the Arizona Republic ran an article on the light rail showing some pictures of the construction process. I was very pleased to see that each car can hold 8 bicycles, and with 3 cars per train, that’s a 24 bicycle capacity. I quite like that, that makes it viable for me to bike the 1 mile to the nearest stop, then bike the 2 miles to my office from the stop near work.

One thing I don’t like from these pictures – those seats look just as awful as the seats on the Phoenix bus. Every time I return from Taiwan, where I ride the bus a lot, I think, “It’s not so bad riding a bus, I must do that more often.” But, once or twice on those horrible, narrow, plastic, butt-numbing buckets and I decide to go back to riding my car.

I suppose if they put upholstered seats in the busses, some fourth-grade reject jackass with a finger up his butt would cut them up and generally vandalize them.

Hmm, guess this post constitutes a rant, now.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Rant

This morning as I was driving to work, I had a revelation. Like all revelations, it’s probably just complete bunk, but it is mine nonetheless.

It ties up a couple of loose strands running through this season’s episodes of Doctor Who.

The first is Rose. Throughout this entire season she has presented with one inescapable fact: She and the Doctor live on vastly different timescales and that, sooner or later, if nothing else, time itself will ultimately separate them.

Time is Rose’s enemy, but Rose, by association with a Time Lord, has also seen that time isn’t necessarily the inexorable, unbendable force that she learned about in school. There’s one other thing about Rose – she’s feisty and determined.

But first, let’s look at the other loose end: The Face of Boe.

The Face popped up last year twice, once at the end of the Earth and once, at a much earlier time on Satellite 5. (The Face was mentioned as having given birth on one of the news feeds.)

This year the Face turned up on New Earth (still far, far in the future), and called to the Doctor, the other timeless, lonely wanderer. The Face was dying, but decided to hold on a little longer based on what it saw the Doctor do.

But the Face knew that it would meet the Doctor one more time and would pass along its message for him. The assumption has been that the Face would show up to die before the season was over to give the Doctor its message, but that doesn’t look likely given the story is set some 5 million years prior to the Face’s impending death.

In that episode, the Sister mentioned rumors that the Face could be an unimaginable age, and when confronted with the idea, the Face didn’t deny it, just agreed with the notion that it would be absurd.

I think in Doomsday we’re not going to see the death of the Face of Boe, but instead, we’re going to see its “birth.” That’s how it knew it would see the Doctor one more time. The future Doctor was present at its past birth.

Rose is the face of Boe.

Rose would do anything to be “immortal” so she could stay with the Doctor. Somehow, through some means (and, of course, not realizing what’s really going to happen to her) Rose does something that ultimately transforms her into the Face of Boe.

Pure speculation, of course.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Doctor Who