6-2-06 through 6-17-06, yes i am ridiculously behind

I am pro-Abortion,
but i strongly support and respect the way the pro-Lifers get their message out



Quality Mother and Son time




The most beautiful women in the world would be made out of mirrors

The first thing i saw when i trespassed on this construction site














Prospect Ave
North Ave.

Better than you can imagine




6's


Cat in Window
Same Cat in Same Window
When you have a chance to make something, you might as well try to make it beautiful


Cranes, Planes, but no Automobiles

O O O O O








I'd love to see a women try to urinate like this, no seriously


The result of cutting rusty's hair for 3.5 hours with my hands and a Fiskars
Dusty (Diamond) Fan


my kind of guy

Contusion

I have been laying down with my feet up a lot lately, unfortunately not by choice. Last Monday i had a league game of Ultimate Frisbee, our team had been kicking ass all year, until last Monday that is, the score was 11 to 1, we were losing, as a result the effort level dropped proportionately with each point they scored. i went to make a cut and started sprinting cause i had my guy off balance and i knew i could easily get to the open space, so did he, his idea of defense was to jump in my way and get in a basketball pick position. He braced himself as my left leg drove into his knee, his knee hit just above my knee at the base of my quadricep. It hurt; i yelled "foul", i rarely yell foul usually i just mutter "foul". i hobbled to the sideline as i could feel my leg, specifically my knee and thigh, swell and burn. i tried to find the coldest water bottle or object i could find, i settled for a mildly cool water bottle. At this time i was sitting on my right foot, with my left leg outstretched, i decided to stand, as i stood my right leg cramped up suddenly and severely, unfortunately my foot and leg were at a weird angle and as my right leg straightened suddenly i heard 3 or 4 loud cracks or pops come form the back of my knee, where my hamstring connects to the knee in the back. I felt an even sharper pain as my right leg locked straight and quickly swelled. i immediately forgot about my left leg as my right leg hurt more and both legs were locked straight so i was stuck standing, then my vision started blurring, becoming fuzzy, and psychedelic. I could feel i was about to black out, but i remember really loving the way things looked, and enjoying the psychedelic nature of what i saw, i fought the tunnel vision, and kept standing, i am pretty sure i must have been wobbling, but no one seemed to noticed. Also didn't want to fall cause i didn't want to hurt either leg more than they already hurt. Eventually someone came over, and said i didn't look to good, i asked for some water, and once i started drinking i could feel the water hydrate me and make my vision clear again. Thankfully, the game ended shortly there after and some teammates helped me to my car and i drove home, i could still move my right foot up and down and so i could drive, but each bump certainly hurt a little bit. i finally got home, crashed on the couch put three pillows under my knees and an ice pack on each leg. Since then whenever i have been home i have spent most of my time on my back with my legs elevated with an ice pack on one leg and an ACE bandage on the other. The R.I.C.E method really is amazing. While at work i had 2 knee braces that i switched back and forth throughout the day, and i hobbled around slowly only if i absolutely had to. It really sucks walking/hobbling around when injured, i walked like a real gimp or retard (Sorry Veronica i am not trying to offend they are simply the most descriptive words i could think of for the way i walked). i hobbled pretty oddly because with my left leg it was very swollen and stiff and since it was a contusion to the quadricep, i think, i couldn't straighten or lift the left leg up. And with the right leg i could straighten it but i couldn't bring it back very far since i strained my hamstring tendons, i think, so it was more of an awkward waddle. By the way i am using the past tense because my legs are really feeling a lot better tonight, and i am walking a lot better, the contusion on my left leg seems better, but the bottom of my hamstring and knee still feel weird and tight. And now that i am sure you are bored hearing about my legs i will more on to another story.

This one happened on July 3rd, i love fireworks, and enjoy seeing them as much as possible since you can only see them over a few days in the beginning of July. So i was heading down to the lakefront to watch the Big Bang, i knew i didn't want to watch them with a bunch of people in a normal location so i had the idea to go to this construction site by the East Pointe Marketplace, on the corner of Van Buren and Ogden. So i got their and hopped the fence i made my way through the building which will be a parking structure as well as condos, i wandered through the building and found my way toward the roof. Just as i was about to get to the roof and have a great view, i heard, "HEY YOU, STOP." i turned and saw a construction worker coming toward me, i did not stop, rather i started running. Apparently, a bunch of the construction workers had stayed after work, to view the fireworks from the same location i wanted to. i am not sure why but the construction workers really wanted to catch me, and they started chasing me, i was able to outrun the first guy, but unfortunately i did not know the building very well and they did, there also must have been an elevator cause several times guys were waiting for me at lower levels. Fortunately, i was faster than all of them and able to outrun them but there were definitely some close calls, and it was definitely awesomely invigorating and fun. Eventually i was able to get to the first level after about 10 minutes of hide and seek, and hop over the fence. Unfortunately, i didn't have a good view of the fireworks, but i did have a lot more fun.

a lunch hour walk around downtown

a Day in DC

"Quit taking so many Photos and play Golf", lovingly said my father.

Obligatory Dandelion Photo

Global Warming

While i often don't search out discussions about political topics, especially with people my age, i do enjoy them to a certain degree, and the new Al Gore movie has caused increased discussion about Gloabl Warming. Most people my age apparently only hear that global warming is going to kill us all, and it is a great moral dilemma, and that i must be deaf if i hadn't heard this and dumb if i didn't believe it whole heartedly. Well last night i read a good op-ed from the Wall Street Journal by Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. I feel the article does a good job describing the multitude of misconceptions surrounding global warming.
..............................................................................................................................
Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.
BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.

Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."

That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.

The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."

So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.

The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.

Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.

A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.

A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.

The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.

Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597