Antarctic Sea Ice Growing Despite Global Warming

I know, I know, the earth is heating up, the polar ice caps are disappearing, the seas are rising, Miami & New Yawk are gonna be under water in half a century or so, but wait! Here's a new report out that says the sea ice coverage around Antarctica over the weekend just marked a record high, with the ice surrounding the continent measuring at 2.07 million square kilometers, according to an environmentalist and author who says the ice there has actually been increasing since 1979 despite continued warnings of global warming.

The new record was posted for the first time by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s online record, The Cryosphere Today, early Sunday morning. It's not apparent if the record actually occurred on Friday or Saturday, says Harold Ambler on his blog, Talking About the Weather. Ambler is a journalist and author of the book "Don't Sell Your Coat: Surprising Truths About Climate Change." 

"The previous record anomaly for Southern Hemisphere sea ice area was 1.840 million square kilometers and occurred on December 20, 2007," said Ambler. Meanwhile, he pointed out, global sea ice area on Sunday was standing at 0.991 million square kilometers above average, a figure he arrived at by adding anomalies for the North and South hemispheres.

While early models predicted the sea ice would decrease because of global warming, other models are showing that the opposite is happening around Antarctica, where sea ice growth is increasing. "A freshening of the waters surrounding the southernmost continent as well as the strengthening of the winds circling it were both theorized as explanations for the steady growth of Antarctica’s sea ice during the period of satellite measurement," said Ambler. 

However, he pointed out that climatologists have discounted the importance and growth of the Antarctic sea ice. According to Walt Meier, formerly of the National Snow and Ice Data Center and currently of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, most of the Antarctic sea ice does not survive between years, and it's less significant to the Earth's climate than is the ice around the Arctic.

Meanwhile, Ambler said that the growth of the Antarctic sea ice is providing "a public relations problem, at a minimum, for those warning of global warming’s menace." During the past 18 months, global sea ice "has seen its most robust 18-month period of the last 13 years, maintaining, on average, a positive anomaly for an 18-month period for the first time since 2001," he wrote. In addition, Ambler said, the South Pole's temperature has been dropping over the past 40 years.

Confused yet? Yeah, me too.

Protesters Launch Blimp Above New NSA Center

The NSA has this new facility out in Utah that cost you, the taxpayer, ONE AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS. Ouch! What they are supposed to do with it, I don't know, since most of their mass surveillance programs are under question after a Mr. E. Snowden (now in Russia) started talking about their escapades. Anyway, the place is pretty big, around a million-square-feet. That's about six times the size of a Wal-Mart Superstore (179,000 sq. ft.). 

Well, nobody is going shopping at NSA, but the place has attracted something else, a massive 135-foot Greenpeace blimp that's now hovering about 1,000 feet directly over the center, with a big arrow and the words NSA ILLEGAL SPYING BELOW printed on its side for everybody to see for miles and miles.

I know you're laughing to tears right now so this is where you can have a short moment of silence ....

Activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched the gigantic thermal airship early Friday morning to protest the agency’s mass surveillance programs and to announce the launch of Stand Against Spying, a website that rates members of Congress on their support or opposition to NSA reform.

“We thought it would be fun to fly an airship around the Utah data center, which in many ways epitomizes the NSA’s collect-it-all strategy,” says Rainey Reitman, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We wanted to have a way to symbolize that our movement is getting quite confrontational with NSA surveillance in a visceral way.”

The protesters launched the blimp, which is named the AE Bates after a longtime Greenpeace volunteer, at 6 a.m. to capitalize on calm weather.

The stunt was timed, Reitman says, to approximately a year after the political debate on NSA spying began. “Many members of congress have acted as roadblocks or sat on the sidelines of this debate,” she says. “The time had come for us to be very honest with the general public about those who have and haven’t called for NSA reform.”

Greenpeace became involved in the project as a plaintiff in a lawsuit the EFF filed against the NSA last year, which accused the agency of intimidating activists with its mass phone metadata collection programs. Their blimp has made earlier appearances to protest coal-fired power plants in North Carolina, overfishing in the pacific northwest, and the Koch brothers in Southern California. Reitman says they can rest assured the blimp isn't a menacing new surveillance technique. “The only people we’re surveilling with this airship is the NSA.”

By the way, in case you're interested, the Stand Against Spying URL is https://standagainstspying.org/

The Drones are Coming!

They're coming, they're coming! Yes, whether we like it or not, the drones are coming. Possibly to our back yard, or onto the roof, through a window, or who knows where? According to the Washington Post, more than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, a record of calamity that exposes the potential dangers of throwing open American skies to drone traffic.

Now, commercial drone flights are set to become a widespread reality in the United States, starting next year, under a 2012 law passed by Congress. Drone flights by law enforcement agencies and the military, which already occur on a limited basis, are projected to surge too.

Military drones have slammed into homes, farms, runways, highways, waterways and, in one case, an Air Force C-130 Hercules transport plane in midair. No one has died in a drone accident, but this is just the beginning. “All I saw were tents, and I was afraid that I had killed someone,” Air Force Maj. Richard Wageman told investigators after an accident in November 2008, when he lost control of a Predator that plowed into a U.S. base in Afghanistan. “I felt numb, and I am certain that a few cuss words came out of my mouth.”

Pent-up demand to buy and fly remotely controlled aircraft in the States is enormous. Law enforcement agencies, which already own a small number of camera-equipped drones, are projected to purchase thousands more; police departments covet them as an inexpensive tool to provide bird’s-eye surveillance for up to 24 hours straight.

Businesses see profitable possibilities for drones, to tend crops, move cargo, inspect real estate or film Hollywood movies. Journalists have applied for drone licenses to cover the news. Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos wants his company to use autonomous drones to deliver small packages to customers’ doorsteps. 

Public opposition has centered on civil-liberties concerns, such as the morality and legality of using drones to spy on people in their back yards. There has been scant scrutiny of the safety record of remotely controlled aircraft. A report released June 5 by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that there were “serious unanswered questions” about how to safely integrate civilian drones into the national airspace, calling it a “critical, cross cutting challenge.”

Serious, unanswered questions indeed. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Chinese Now Invading the U.S. with Jobs

My how times have changed. It hasn't been very long since everybody was griping about American jobs being taken away by them foreigners, remember? Well guess what? Jobs are coming back. And where from? Of all places, China! Yup.

Take for example Wilcox County, Alabama. They have the state's highest unemployment rate, lots of long abandoned textile mills and furniture plants. In short, Wilcox County desperately needs jobs. And now they're coming, and from a most unlikely place: Henan Province, China, 7,600 miles away. Henan's Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group opened a plant in the town just last month. It will employ more than 300 in a county known less for job opportunities than for lakes filled with bass, pine forests rich with wild turkey and boar and muddy roads best negotiated in four-wheel-drive trucks. "Jobs that pay $15 an hour are few and far between," says Dottie Gaston, an official in nearby Thomasville.

And what's happening in Pine Hill is starting to happen across America. After decades of siphoning jobs from the United States, China is creating some. Chinese companies invested a record $14 billion in the United States last year, according to the Rhodium Group research firm. Collectively, they employ more than 70,000 Americans, up from virtually none a decade ago.

Powerful forces — narrowing wage gaps, tumbling U.S. energy prices, the vagaries of currency markets — are pulling Chinese companies across the Pacific. Mayors and economic development officials have lined up to welcome Chinese investors. Southern states, touting low labor and land costs, have been especially aggressive. "Get off the plane and the mayor is waiting for you," says Hong Kong billionaire Ronnie Chan.

Among other Chinese projects in the United States that are creating jobs: In Moraine, Ohio, Chinese glassmaker Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co. is taking over a plant that General Motors abandoned in 2008 and creating at least 800 jobs. The site puts Fuyao within four hours' drive of auto plants in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. In Lancaster County, South Carolina, Chinese textile manufacturer Keer Group is investing $218 million in a plant to make industrial yarn and will employ 500. South Carolina nudged the deal along with a $4 million grant. In Gregory, Texas, Tianjin Pipe is investing over $1 billion in a factory that makes pipes for oil and gas drillers. The company expects to begin production late this year or early in 2015. It will have 50 to 70 employees by the end of this year and 400 to 500 by the end of 2017.

The United States and China have long maintained a lop-sided relationship: China makes things. America buys them. The U.S. trade deficit in goods with China last year hit a record $318 billion. And for three decades, numerous U.S. manufacturers have moved operations to China.

The flow is at least starting to move the other way. One reason is that in the past decade, the cost of labor, adjusted for productivity gains, has surged 187 percent at Chinese factories, compared with just 27 percent in the United States, according to Boston Consulting Group. Those rising costs have cut China's competitive edge. In 2004, manufacturing cost 14 percent less in China than in the United States; that advantage has narrowed to 5 percent. If the trend toward higher wages, energy costs and a higher currency continues, Boston Consulting predicts, U.S. manufacturing will be less expensive than China's by 2018.

Alabama and other Southern states have followed the example of South Carolina, which nabbed the first Chinese plant in America 14 years ago when appliance giant Haier built a refrigerator plant in Camden. John Ling, who runs South Carolina's Shanghai office, has an empty factory he's pitching to Chinese firms. It's been shuttered for four years — since the former owners closed it and moved the jobs to China. "We will see more and more Chinese projects coming," Ling says. "It's at the very beginning."

Protesters Launch Blimp Above New NSA Center

The NSA has this new facility out in Utah that cost you, the taxpayer, ONE AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS. Ouch! What they are supposed to do with it, I don't know, since most of their mass surveillance programs are under question after Mr. E. Snowden (now in Russia) started talking about their escapades. Anyway, the place is pretty big, around a million-square-feet. That's about six times the size of a Wal-Mart Superstore (179,000 sq. ft.). Well, nobody is going shopping at NSA, but the place has attracted something else, a massive 135-foot blimp that's now hovering about 1,000 feet directly over the center, with the letters NSA printed on its side.

I know you're laughing to tears right now so this is where you can have a short moment of silence ....

Activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched the gigantic thermal airship early Friday morning to protest the agency’s mass surveillance programs and to announce the launch of Stand Against Spying, a website that rates members of Congress on their support or opposition to NSA reform. The full message on the blimp reads “NSA: Illegal Spying Below” along with an arrow pointing downward and the Stand Against Spying URL.

“We thought it would be fun to fly an airship around the Utah data center, which in many ways epitomizes the NSA’s collect-it-all strategy,” says Rainey Reitman, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We wanted to have a way to symbolize that our movement is getting quite confrontational with NSA surveillance in a visceral way.”

The protesters launched the blimp, which is owned by Greenpeace and named the AE Bates after a longtime Greenpeace volunteer, at 6 a.m. to capitalize on calm weather.

The stunt was timed, Reitman says, to approximately a year after the political debate on NSA spying began. “Many members of congress have acted as roadblocks or sat on the sidelines of this debate,” she says. “The time had come for us to be very honest with the general public about those who have and haven’t called for NSA reform.”

Greenpeace became involved in the project as a plaintiff in a lawsuit the EFF filed against the NSA last year, which accused the agency of intimidating activists with its mass phone metadata collection programs. Their blimp has made earlier appearances to protest coal-fired power plants in North Carolina, overfishing in the pacific northwest, and the Koch brothers in Southern California.

Reitman says they can rest assured the blimp isn't a menacing new surveillance technique. “The only people we’re surveilling with this airship is the NSA.” Let's give 'em a hearty Ha Ha Ha!

Russian Police Short Skirts Banned

Ah, man, this is terrible. Just when things started getting interesting, the Moscow Times reports that the Russian Interior Ministry has launched a crackdown on modifications to uniforms after concerns over female officers shortening their skirts. Russian authorities decided to ban short skirts and other uniform modifications, amid concerns over rising police hemlines. The new rules, which also prohibit officers from wearing wrinkled items, and combining their uniforms with civilian clothing, follow a decree from Sergei Gerasimov, the deputy interior minister.

According to the Izvestia newspaper, Gerasimov said: "When you meet people, the first thing you see is their clothing, and for a police officer fulfilling his duties, it is crucial to have a tidy and neat appearance. From time to time, we have seen instances of officers improperly wearing their uniforms. … Heads [of departments] must pay more attention to the appearance of their subordinates."

The striking image above purporting to show radical uniform modifications in the town of Yekaterinburg appeared on Twitter, but was met with claims it was fake as they appeared to show officers in high heels. (Who cares, I used it anyway!)

Mikhail Pashkin, chairman of the coordination council of the police officers' union, told the Moscow Times that he saw no reason to complain over the shortening of skirts. "Perhaps the girls want to get married, " he said.

EPA Employees: No Pooping In The Hallway!

Yes, your government is certainly a pride to behold. It seems federal employees at the EPA in Denver have been instructed to stop defecating in the hallways. Huh? I'm sure Deputy Regional Administrator Howard Cantor was thrilled to tears to send an email out to employees describing the "several" inappropriate bathroom "incidents" that had taken place in the building, including a description of "an individual placing feces in the hallway" outside the restroom. 

"Management is taking this situation very seriously and will take whatever actions are necessary to identify and prosecute these individuals," Cantor wrote in his email, asking any employee with knowledge of the individual's identity to notify management.

Of course, this is a government agency, right? So, instead of leaving the matter to an email and moving on, EPA management had to consult with a workplace violence specialist, John Nicoletti, who called the behavior "very dangerous" and (horrors!) warned that the perpetrators would "probably escalate" their behavior, according to GovExec. God knows how many committees and sub-committees they probably formed just to study the problem.

EPA spokesman Richard Mylott added that Nicoletti’s expertise was sought in an effort to maintain a "safe workplace" in a statement to GovExec Wednesday. "EPA cannot comment on ongoing personnel matters. EPA's actions in response to recent workplace issues have been deliberate and have focused on ensuring a safe work environment for our employees," Mylott said. "Our brief consultation with Dr. Nicoletti on this matter, a resource who regularly provides our office with training and expertise on workplace issues, reflects our commitment to securing a safe workplace."

The EPA has been plagued with a range of cases involving employee misconduct over the last several months, including one ethics violation involving a political appointee accepting travel gifts from lobbyists. Another investigation revealed an employee receiving pay despite having moved to a retirement home, where the employee was allegedly not employed, one or two years earlier.

In May, another EPA employee was investigated for downloading 7,000 porn files on his work computer and viewing them two to six hours a day. The same month, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee accused the EPA of sustaining a system riddled with high-ranking fraud and "criminal conduct,” costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

As of March, EPA’s Office of Inspector General was investigating 78 open integrity cases -- five involving political appointees –- according to the OIG’s employee misconduct report released twice a year. "This is truly a broken agency," committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said in May.

Louisiana Man Mouth-feeds Marshmallows to Gators

This has got to be something to see. There's a tourist stop on a swamp boat tour in south Louisiana where the guide jumps into the water to feed chicken and marshmallows to alligators. At one point the guide actually puts a marshmallow in his mouth and lets one of the gators snatch it away.

The scene was captured on video by a guy from Ht. Helens, Oregon, Stacy Hicks, who visited the area in May. "When he jumped in I was a little scared, more for him than us though," Hicks said. "I am surprised at the attention this video has gotten. I just thought that this was a thing that happens all the time on the tours."

The video has now been shared more than 100,000 times on Facebook. It also has attracted attention of local and state wildlife officials. There is no state law prohibiting luring and feeding of alligators, but it's against local law in Jefferson Parish, where the Airboat Adventures tour company is based.

No charges had been filed as of Tuesday. Legal or not, wildlife officials say the video shows the unidentified guide took a risk. "There is no taming an alligator," said Aleutia Scott, a supervising ranger at Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve. The preserve includes the swamps in Jefferson Parish, just outside New Orleans.

Scott said alligators are "eating machines," and a big one has massive force in its jaws. The alligators in the video appear to be about 5 feet long, indicating they are still growing, Scott said. Alligators are roughly a foot in length at birth and at full maturity, females can reach lengths of 8 to 10 feet and males 12 to 14 feet, she said.

"This is not a zoo. This is a natural habitat," she said. "The animals need to be doing their normal things. Feeding. Foraging. Reproducing. And we, as humans, don't want to interrupt that."

SF Says NO to Charging for Your Parking Space

San Francisco has a problem. Somebody has come up with a mobile app that lets drivers know when a parking space is going to become available. Say you've somehow managed to find a parking space, which apparently is pretty special out there, and you've finished with your business and are getting ready to drive away. Ummm, you say, what if I could tell everybody driving around that my space is going to become available, and then charge them to have it? Great idea, eh?

Well, San Francisco's city attorney decided it wasn't such a good idea, and issued a cease-and-desist demand Monday to the mobile app called Monkey Parking, which does exactly what we were talking about - it allows people to auction public parking spaces that they're using to other nearby drivers.

In a letter to Paolo Dobrowolny, the CEO of the Rome, Italy-based tech startup, city attorney Dennis Herrera cited a provision in San Francisco's police code that prohibits people and companies from buying, selling or leasing public on-street parking and mandates fees of up to $300 for drivers who violate the law.

Herrera's warning to Monkey Parking is the latest attempt by city government officials and state lawmakers nationwide trying to figure out how to regulate Web-based businesses that offer shared parking, transportation and housing services using mobile applications. Among the more popular ridesharing services are Uber and Lyft, and popular housing apps include Airbnb.

The Monkey Parking app allows drivers to get an often elusive parking spot and sell it for $5, $10, even $20, and then wait until the buyer arrives to take their place.

Herrera has given its creators until July 11 to shut down operations in San Francisco or possibly face a lawsuit under California's Unfair Competition Law. Herrera added that besides the violations, Monkey Parking's app encourages drivers to unsafely use their mobile devices and engage in online parking bidding wars while behind the wheel.

Dobrowolny said in an email Monday that he is talking with his legal staff and didn't immediately have a specific comment about the letter.

"As a general principle, we believe that a new company providing value to people should be regulated and not banned," Dobrowolny wrote. "This applies also to companies like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft that are continuously facing difficulties while delivering something that makes users happy. Regulation is fundamental in driving innovation, while banning is just stopping it."

The city attorney's warning to Monkey Parking comes about a month after his office started investigating the startup, which began its San Francisco operations in April.

"Technology has given rise to many laudable innovations in how we live and work -- and Monkey Parking is not one of them. It's illegal, it puts drivers on the hook for $300 fines, and it creates a predatory private market for public parking spaces that San Franciscans will not tolerate," Herrera said in a written statement. "People are free to rent out their own private driveways and garage spaces should they choose to do so. But we will not abide businesses that hold hostage on-street public parking spots for their own private profit."

Parking in San Francisco has long been known as a driver's worst nightmare. A recent San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency parking census reported that the city has 440,000 parking spots available -- but only 275,000 of those are street parking.

Herrera's letter to Monkey Parking also asked Apple Inc. to immediately remove Monkey Parking from its app store. Apple did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

San Francisco-based technology expert Charles Belle, who runs the Startup Policy Lab, whose objective is to connect the startup community with policymakers and government, believes the issue between Monkey Parking and the city attorney is a great example of the need to create more forums for the two entities to engage.

"Companies need to be familiar with local laws, but threatened legal actions, such as cease-and-desist letters, only divert attention away from the opportunity to rethink how the community can use technology to improve government services," said Belle, who's a former executive director the Privacy and Technology Project at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

Two other tech companies, Sweetch and ParkModo, which Herrera said also violates city and state laws, will receive similar cease-and-desist warnings later this week. Sweetch co-founder Hamza Ouazzani Chahdi, whose $5-per-parking-spot swapping app was also warned to cease and desist, said Monday the goal is just to reduce congestion, which creates pollution and other problems.

"We don't understand why they want to shut us down. We are trying to solve the huge parking problem, which is not only bad for drivers but for all the city," he said.

Dallas Police Screw Up - Prisoners Set Free

Blame it on the software. It seems the Dallas Police Department went live with some new software last June 1st that replaced a system that was about 30 years old. Well, it seems the software was a wee bit too complicated for most of the officers. After they struggled with it for about three days or so, some prisoners remembered that Texas law requires the department to file cases within three days or prisoners being held there have to be set free, no matter what the crime or how bad it might have been.

So, something like 20 jail inmates, including a number of people charged with violent crimes, had to be set free. "The law is real simple," Judge Rick Magnis from the 283rd Judicial District Court says. "The Constitution in America says you can't hold people without charges."

A Dallas police media relations staffer said the department had no further comment beyond what the Dallas Police Chief David Brown said in an interview this week with a local reporter. "We expected that there would be a significant learning curve," Brown said. One problem is that officers using the system didn't get trained recently enough and may have forgotten how to use the software properly, he said. Also, some officers didn't take the training that was made available, he added. "It was a voluntary thing to get familiar with it, and some didn't take advantage of that." 

Dallas PD's legacy system "was outdated, antiquated, not easily worked on, but it was familiar," Brown said. "This is a new system and very unfamiliar." While the mishaps can partly be attributed to user error, the software is also running slowly and needs to be sped up, Brown said. "We let the vendor know that."

I'm sure all that is really consoling to the victims of the criminals that were set free and are now roaming the streets of Dallas with smiles on their faces from ear to ear because of their extraordinary good fortune.

Florida Man Loses Case to Marry His Computer

We are sad to report that Chris Sevier has lost the case he filed to marry his Apple computer. It seems Mr. Servier purchased an Apple computer several months ago and found out, apparently much too late, that it didn't have the proper filters to block out pornography. Further, he says he was not provided with any warning by Apple that pornography was highly addictive. Over time, he claims, he began preferring sex with his computer over sex with real women and subsequently 'fell in love' with the machine.

OK, this is where it gets even weirder. Mr. Servier became aware of a Federal Gay Marriage Case, James Domer Brenner et al., v. Rick Scott, which challenges Florida's refusal to recognize gay marriages that are performed legally elsewhere. Mr. Servier filed a motion to intervene in the case on behalf of "other minority sexual orientation groups." He says in the filing, "sexual orientation" never existed as a classification until President Obama came along to advance his "social agenda to make America a 'gay nation.' In the 24-page document, Mr. Sevier says that if gay couples "have the right to marry their object of sexual desire, even if they lack corresponding sexual parts, then I should have the right to marry my preferred sexual object." Which is? "My porn filled Apple computer," according to Sevier's filing.

Sevier said he wanted to make the courts "put up or shut up" on the equal protection argument upon which the push for gay marriage is based. Fortunately, the federal judge manning the gay marriage case has tossed out Sevier's motion. "Chris Sevier has moved to intervene, apparently asserting he wishes to marry his computer," Judge Robert Hinkle wrote in an April 24 ruling. "Perhaps the motion is satirical. Or perhaps it is only removed from reality. Either way, the motion has no place in this lawsuit."

I guess the only option left for Mr. Sevier and his beloved is to lay low and try not to get arrested for having illicit relations with Miss Apple.

Solar City to Build One-Gigawatt Plant in N.Y.

The future-thinking guy who brought us the Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, has another company you might not have heard of by the name of Solar City, in San Mateo, California. Solar City is one of the top solar panel installation companies in the U.S., and they have just acquired a company called Silevo, which makes solar panels that are said to achieve unheard of electrical output at low cost. Using Silevo technology, Solar City plans to build a manufacturing plant in upstate New York with a one gigawatt per year capacity. But this will only be the beginning, as they intend to build even more manufacturing plants in the future with several higher orders of magnitude capacity. The goal appears to be for the company to become the biggest manufacturer of solar panels in the world.

Given that there seems to be excess solar panel supplier capacity today, this may seem counter-intuitive to some who follow the solar industry. But what Solar City says is that the panels being made today have low efficiency and cost too much. The future, they say, is that industry must start making solar panels that provide higher output at lower cost in order to meet the massive volume of affordable, high efficiency panels needed in order to provide unsubsidized solar power to the world and outcompete the fossil fuel grid power simply that is destroying our planet.

According to Musk, SolarCity was founded to accelerate mass adoption of sustainable energy. The sun, that highly convenient and free fusion reactor in the sky, radiates more energy to the Earth in a few hours than the entire human population consumes from all sources in a year. This means that solar panels, paired with batteries to enable power at night, can produce several orders of magnitude more electricity than is consumed by the entirety of human civilization.

Even if the solar industry were only to generate 40 percent of the world’s electricity with photovoltaics by 2040, that would mean installing more than 400 GW of solar capacity per year for the next 25 years. Musk says, "We absolutely believe that solar power can and will become the world’s predominant source of energy within our lifetimes, but there are obviously a lot of panels that have to be manufactured and installed in order for that to happen. The plans we are announcing today, while substantial compared to current industry, are small in that context."

Chinese-Built Cars Coming to the U.S.

Volvo cars have been around since 1927 and they have always been regarded as a quality-made product of Sweden. The main company is still there, but they sold the car division to Ford back in 1999. Ford had some financial difficulties in the mid-late 2000's (along with everybody else) and in 2010 they sold Volvo to Geely, one of China's largest car manufacturers. Now they're making Chinese-built Volvos, and in 2015 they plan to export a brand new Chinese-made sedan, the S60L, to the U.S.

To date, there haven't been Chinese-built cars in the U.S. If Volvo manages to convince buyers that its cars built in China are just as good as those currently built in Europe, it will save on production costs and help buffer against exchange rate fluctuations. The reason is that the dollar and the Chinese yuan have, historically, had a more stable relationship than the euro and the dollar.

Volvo has two plants in China and they should be able to achieve full capacity of about 250,000 vehicles a year by about 2018. However, the ultimate question is whether consumers in the U.S. will be able to tell the difference between Chinese-built cars and European-built cars. It seems we shall soon see if they can, thanks to Volvo.

6 Stupid Ways Facebook Ruins Your Life

People who spend hours every day on Facebook, the social networking site, are more likely to get divorced than those who don't use it, finds a new study in Computers in Human Behavior. 

1. It could be that people in crappy relationships are just more likely to spend time avoiding their spouses by posting statuses and liking photos, says study coauthor Sebastián Valenzuela, Ph.D., of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. On the other hand, Facebook exposes you to old flings and new mates, makes sneaking around on your wife easier to hide, and also leads to addictive behaviors—all of which won't do your marriage any favors, Valenzuela adds. Like the old “guns don’t kill people . . . people kill people” line, you can't blame all your problems on Mark Zuckerberg. 

2. But a broken marriage isn't the only bad thing researchers have linked to Facebook use. It saps your motivation to give back. “Liking” or showing support for charity organizations on Facebook lowers the odds that you'll donate your time or money to those causes, finds research from the University of British Columbia. Your public thumbs-up satisfies your desire to look charitable in front of others and makes you feel good about yourself, which wipes out your motivation to volunteer time or cash, the researchers say.  

3. And it crushes your mood. The more time you spend on Facebook, the more your attitude sours, shows a study from Austria. You probably realize that staring at profiles and pictures isn't a very productive use of your time. And the recognition that you've wasted a big chunk of your day on something meaningless clouds your mood, the researchers explain. 

4. Plus, it makes you dumb. After looking at their own Facebook pages for 5 minutes, people took 15 percent longer to answer simple math questions. That's because your profile inflates your ego, which undercuts your brain’s motivation to perform, say the researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

5. And, it renders your life unsatisfying. The more you surf, the less satisfied you feel about life in general, indicates a study from the University of Michigan. It’s inevitable that some of your friends will be posting about the fun, interesting stuff they're doing. And contrasting your own boring life to theirs—something Facebook basically forces you to do—could explain these negative consequences, the authors say.  

6. And finally, it leaves you lonely. Scanning your friends’ profiles increases feelings of social exclusion and “invisibility,” finds research from Australia. Because you’re observing your buddies but not interacting with them, you feel cut off or left out, the study suggests. (The good news: If you actively post things—pics, updates—and your pals respond to your posts, these bad feelings go away, the study shows.)

All of this was compiled by Mark Heid from MensHealth Magazine, so please don't blame me. Use Twitter instead. Thanks!

$700,000 Home on Cliff Destroyed

Wanna build your dream home on a cliff overlooking a really nice lake? You might want to think twice, especially if it's a cliff overlooking Lake Whitney in Texas, about 55 miles south of Fort Worth.

Robert and Denise Webb bought the 4,000-square-foot home back in 2012 when it was only 5 years old, and they planned to leave it to their grandchildren. However, a few weeks ago they started noticing large cracks in the walls. An inspection by local officials revealed chunks of both the cliff and the home were falling into Lake Whitney. The house was condemned and the Webbs removed their personal items and relocated.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was called in and they recommended three options for removing the home from the site before it fell into the lake. The first option was to wrap the home with a large net and then try to pull it away from the edge of the 75-foot cliff, so that the debris could be safely removed from the site. That option was determined not to be feasible, leading engineers to consider the second option — burning the home to the ground. Officials did consider a third option: Letting Mother Nature eventually claim the home through landslides. That would have involved the expense of removing debris from the lake which made it the most expensive option.

So, the other day at about 10 a.m. workers could be seen bringing three bales of hay into the garage along with a gallon of gasoline. They then began breaking out windows and partially knocking holes in some walls to help the fire spread. The hay was then saturated with the gas and scattered around the inside of the garage before being lit at about 11:45 a.m. After only a few minutes, flames had overtaken the garage and smoke was visibly spewing from the eaves. An hour after the fire was started, most of the home had been consumed by the fire. Spectators in dozens of boats witnessed the demolition from a safe distance.

"You know, that's my life there that we're watching fall off," Robert Webb said the day before the demolition. Geologists and inspectors had told them before they purchased the land that the property was perfectly stable, "and so we bought it in good faith," Webb said. "It's really tough, that house was special and I don't even know why it was so special but it was special to me," Denise Webb said.

"You hear about landslides happening in California," said Kari Poole, who lives in nearby Whitney. "But not in Texas. Not on Lake Whitney. Not where you live."

Mickey D Dead Last in New Fast Food Survey

There's an annual survey out today that ranks how satisfied customers are with restaurants they visit, and in the fast-food category, our old friend McDonald's has come in dead last. The people who do the survey, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), is an independent national measure of customer satisfaction with the quality of products and services available to household consumers in the United States. Each year, 70,000 customers are surveyed about the products and services they use the most. Here are the latest rankings along with last year's figures:

According to the survey, Americans ate out an average of four meals per week in 2013. This is a 60% increase since the end of the Great Recession. Consumers are more likely to spend on dining out as the economy improves, and higher levels of customer satisfaction help as well, with full-service restaurants gaining 1.2% to an ACSI score of 82 on a 100-point scale. (During eight years of ACSI measurement, the industry’s customer satisfaction has never fallen below 80.)

This year’s small gain is driven by improvement in smaller chains and restaurants, which make up the bulk of the sit-down industry. The largest chains fall somewhat below the industry average and there is considerable variation from top to bottom. Darden’s Olive Garden brand and Outback Steakhouse (-1%) tie for the top spot at 80. Despite Darden’s efforts to update Olive Garden’s menus and restaurants, diner satisfaction is down 4% from a year ago, accompanied by flagging sales. Here are the scores for full-service chain restaurants: 

Among the major fast food chains, pizza dominates the category, with all four of the largest pizza makers surpassing the other operators for customer satisfaction. Papa John’s (unchanged) and Pizza Hut (+3%) share the top spot at 82, with Little Caesar (-2%) and Domino’s Pizza (-1%) not far behind with scores of 80. The combination of high-quality food, convenience, and price keeps customer satisfaction with pizza chains strong. While the four big pizza chains overall saw little decline over the past year, the same cannot be said for sandwich makers and other types of fast food. Subway falls out of the top spot after a 6% drop to an ACSI score of 78 and ties Wendy’s (-1%). A notch below, several chains bunch together, including an unchanged Burger King at 76. Starbucks falls 5% to 76, followed closely by coffee rival Dunkin’ Donuts at 75 (-6%). After surging to an all-time high in 2013, KFC plunges 9% to an ACSI score of 74, showing the biggest decline among all restaurants—either fast food or full-service. While KFC is by far the largest of the chicken chains, it has struggled with increased competition from smaller chains like Chick-fil-A and Popeye’s. Over the past five years, KFC has closed 600 stores. Like KFC, fellow Yum! Brands chain Taco Bell is weakening, down 3% to 72. Thus far, Taco Bell’s effort to refresh its menu with a line of breakfast items has not resonated well with customers. McDonald’s also dips 3% to 71 and continues to occupy the bottom of the industry.

Smartphones May Be Affecting Male Sperm Counts

Been carrying that expensive smartphone around in your pants pocket? You might want to move it somewhere else, according to a new study in England. Recent studies show that over the past few years, male infertility is on the rise, and Fiona Mathews at the University of Exeter, in England, and her colleagues decided to investigate what role cell phones might play in that trend. In their new research, they analyzed 10 previous studies, seven of which involved the study of sperm motility, concentration and viability in the lab, and three that included male patients at fertility clinics. Overall, among the 1,492 samples, exposure-to-cell-phone EMR lowered sperm motility by 8%, and viability by 9%.

Previous studies suggested several ways that the magnetic fields might be wreaking havoc on sperm — they could be generating DNA damage by promoting more unstable oxygen compounds, or because most men carry their phones in their pants pockets, the fields, which can cause up to a 2.3°C temperature increase on the skin, could be raising the temperature of the testes enough to suppress and interfere with normal sperm production.

Exactly how much the cell phones are contributing to lower-quality sperm isn’t clear yet — the researchers note that how long the phones are kept in pockets, as well as how much EMR the phones emit (most are legally required to stay below 2.0 W/kg) are also important things to consider when figuring out an individual’s risk. But the lab-dish studies do show that sperm are affected by the exposure, and that provides enough reason to investigate the possibility that cell phones may be contributing to lower-quality sperm and potentially some cases of infertility. More good reason to keep cell phones away from your body when you’re not using them — easier in theory than in practice, however.

Even while the debate over whether cell phones cause cancer rages on, researchers are starting to explore other potentially harmful effects that the ubiquitous devices may have on our health. Because they emit low-level electromagnetic radiation (EMR), it’s possible that they can disturb normal cell functions and even sleep.

Ford & Heinz to Make Cars From Ketchup

When they make ketchup there's stuff left over that they used to throw away made up mostly of tomato skins and tomato fibre. Now they've figured out that this yucky goop can be processed into bioplastic material, so Ford and Heinz revealed this week the launch of a new project that aims to find out if those bioplastics could be used in making parts for cars and other vehicles. 

Each year, Heinz processes more than two million tons of tomatoes for its ketchup, but is invariably left with peels, stems, and seeds that cannot be used in the production process. However, separately the company has been working with Ford as part of a coalition of firms that also includes Coca-Cola, Nike and Proctor & Gamble to develop 100 percent plant-based plastics that eliminate the use of oil.

Now the fruits of their labor are starting to pay off and the two companies have agreed to examine if waste tomatoes could provide a sustainable feedstock for bioplastic production. If the project proves successful, Ford believes that tomato-based plastic could be used to make wiring brackets in a vehicle or the storage bin that drivers use to hold coins and other small objects.

"We are delighted that the technology has been validated," said Vidhu Nagpal, associate director, packaging R&D for Heinz, revealing the research had already delivered some promising results. "Although we are in the very early stages of research, and many questions remain, we are excited about the possibilities this could produce for both Heinz and Ford, and the advancement of sustainable 100 per cent plant-based plastics."

$50 Million Painting Given Free to Britain's National Trust

Back in the 1960's an art collector by the name of Harold Samuel, of Essex, England, who was a Dutch and Flemish art collector. bought a painting of Rembrandt that was supposed to have been done by one of his students. He hung it on his wall and enjoyed it until his death in 1987. His wife, Edna Nedis, kept the painting until she died in 2008, and then the painting went to their estate. 

When the executors of the estate started cleaning house, the trust forbid the painting to be sold, so they donated it to Britain's National Trust. Since the trust has to report the value of everything they have, they sent the painting off to a Rembrandt specialist, Dr. Ernst van de Wetering, to see what it was worth. He fiddled with it awhile, and had technicians remove several layers of varnish to analyze the artist's signature. "The signature and date of 1635, inscribed both on the front and back of the panel, had been considered problematic in previous assessments as it was thought that the style and composition was much more akin to [Rembrandt's] style slightly later in his career," Christine Slottvedd Kimbriel of the Hamilton Kerr Institute told reporters. "But the cross-section analysis left no reason to doubt that the inscription was added at the time of execution of the painting." The varnish stripping also enabled the researchers to see the painting's true colors. "The varnish was so yellow that it was difficult to see how beautifully the portrait had been painted," David Taylor, painting and sculpture curator at The National Trust, said. "Now you can really see all the flesh tones and other colours, as well as the way in which the paint has been handled - it's now much easier to appreciate it as a Rembrandt." 

Finally, an X-ray photography and infrared refrectography showed compositional changes in keeping with Rembrandt's own work habits. "Changes to the outline of the figure, carried out at a late stage and without much care to perfectly match the surrounding paint, were also present," Ms. Kimbriel said. "Such alterations are present in many of Rembrandt’s own works, suggesting a dynamic process of painting typical of Rembrandt."


The painting was reportedly created in 1635 when Rembrandt was 29. Now that it has been authenticated, the formerly almost worthless painting that was given away by the Samuel estate has been conservatively estimated at 30 million pounds or about $50 million.

Bank ATM Hacked by 14-Year-Olds

Think stealing money from banks is hard? Think again. A couple of 14-year-olds in Canada have hacked into a Bank of Montreal ATM machine and gained access to all of the customer accounts. Matthew Hewlett and Caleb Turon, both 9th grade students, found an old ATM operators manual online that showed how to get into the machine's operator mode. On Wednesday, during their school lunch hour, they went to the closest ATM and got access in a couple of minutes. 

They went to the bank and told them about it and nobody believed them. OK, Hewlett says, "I asked them: 'Is it all right for us to get proof?' The bank rep said 'Yeah, sure, but you'll never be able to get anything out of it.' So, Hewlett continues, "So we both went back to the ATM and I got into the operator mode again. Then I started printing off documentation like how much money is currently in the machine, how many withdrawals have happened that day, how much it's made off surcharges. Then I found a way to change the surcharge amount, so I changed the surcharge amount to one cent." As further proof, Hewlett playfully changed the ATM's greeting from "Welcome to the BMO ATM" to "Go away. This ATM has been hacked." 

They then returned to the bank with six printed documents. This time, the bank staff took them seriously. "They brought the branch manager out to talk to us," he said. "He was quite concerned and said he would have to contact head security." Hewlett and Turon had a concern of their own -- they were late getting back to school. So Turon asked for a note on BMO letterhead explaining their tardiness. His request was granted by the bank's financial services coordinator. "Please excuse Mr. Caleb Turon and Matthew Hewlett for being late during their lunch hour due to assisting BMO with security," the note began. Not surprisingly, the note raised eyebrows when it was presented back at the school.

Woman Charged For Filming Cops Wins Settlement

Carla Gericke was in her car following a friend to his house one night in Weare, New Hampshire when police pulled the guy she was following over for a traffic violation. She stopped too about 30 feet away and pulled out her cell phone so she could record everything. She couldn't get the camera to work so she put it back in her car. The police thought she had broken the law by trying to film the stop and demanded the phone. She refused to tell them where it was, and also declined to provide her license and registration. So they arrested her on "wiretapping" charges, involving disobeying a police officer, obstructing a government official, and "unlawful interception of oral communications." 

Although she was never brought to trial, she filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging that her arrest constituted "retaliatory prosecution in breach of her constitutional rights." The case went to the First US Circuit Court of Appeals and they said she was right. The court ruled that Gericke "was exercising a clearly established First Amendment right when she attempted to film the traffic stop in the absence of a police order to stop filming or leave the area." 

That decision allowed her lawsuit against the department to proceed and the department, without admitting wrongdoing, decided to settle the matter out of court this past Thursday. How much you ask? The department agreed to pay her a total of $57,000 to settle the case. 

Her attorney speculated that the award would deter future police "retaliation." Attorney Seth Hipple said, “This settlement helps to make it clear that government agencies that choose to retaliate against videographers will pay for their retaliation in dollars and cents. We are confident that this settlement will help to make arrests of videographers a thing of the past."

Early Filth Makes a Healthier Baby

If you want a healthy baby, you gotta roll him or her around in a little dirt. And while you're at it, be sure to expose them to some cat dander, regular old household bacteria and possibly even some rodent and roach allergens. Yep, all that may help protect infants against future allergies and wheezing, at least according to a new study from Johns Hopkins.

For decades, parents have shielded infants from bacteria and other possible triggers for illness, allergies and asthma. But say it isn't so. "It was the opposite of what we expected,” said Dr. Robert Wood, chief of the division of allergy and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and co-author of the study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. “We’re not promoting bringing rodents and cockroaches into the home, but this data does suggest that being too clean may not be good.”

The new findings may help explain some contradictions in research on the so-called hygiene hypothesis, which suggested that kids growing up in a super clean environment were more likely to develop allergies. “This doesn't completely resolve the controversy, but it does add a big piece of the puzzle,” said Dr. Jonathan Spergel, a professor of pediatrics and chief of allergy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The hygiene hypothesis was developed after researchers noticed that farm kids were less likely to have allergies. Dirty environments, experts suggested, might be protective. The hypothesis seemed to explain why developed countries had skyrocketing rates of allergies and asthma. “We’re not promoting bringing rodents and cockroaches into the home, but this data does suggest that being too clean may not be good.”

The theory “is that as we clean up our environment, our immune system moves away from being geared toward fighting bacteria and parasites,” said Dr. Maria Garcia Lloret, an assistant clinical professor of pediatric allergy and immunology at the Mattel Children’s Hospital at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It then has nothing to do and starts to react against things that are normally not harmful, like dust mites, or cat dander or cockroaches or peanuts.”

A chink in the hygiene hypothesis seemed to be the high rates of allergy and asthma in inner-city environments. But the new study may help explain the contradictions by showing that early exposure is crucial. “It’s all about being exposed to the right bacteria at the right time,” Spergel said.

Wood and his colleagues followed 467 newborns for three years, screening them for allergies annually and testing the dust in the houses where they lived for allergens and bacteria. To the researchers’ surprise, kids who were exposed before their first birthday to mouse and cat dander along with cockroach droppings had lower rates of allergies and wheezing by age 3, compared to those who were not exposed so early on. In fact, wheezing was three times as common among children who had less exposure to those allergens early in life.

The protective effect of early exposure to allergens was amplified if the home also contained a wide variety of bacteria. The reason may be that “a lot of immune system development that may lead someone down the path to allergies and asthma may be set down early in life,” Wood said.

Researchers aren't ready to try to translate the new findings into practical advice for parents. But, Lloret said, we now know that “strict avoidance of allergens from the beginning does not protect you, and early exposure in the right context may make the difference between disease and tolerance. You could say that this is the downside of cleanliness.”

The new findings may upend advice experts have been giving to parents on the topic of pets and newborns. “Twenty years ago we used to tell parents to get the cats and dogs out of the house,” Wood said. “This shows that the younger the child is when you get a pet, the better.”

Does Your Mattress Really Gain Weight?

Whatever you've read or heard about mattresses gaining weight ten years after you've owned or so is probably true. Yes, just think about it. Mattresses really do gain weight over time as they absorb dead skin, colonies of dust mites (which feed on dead skin), oil and moisture from you and whoever else lies there and sleeps in your bed. (Yecch!) And, I hesitate to ask, has anybody actually studied the additional heft? Are mattresses getting close to breaking bed frames with their bulk? Well, probably not, but the idea is ... gross!

"To the best of my knowledge, there is no scientific answer to the mattress weight and dust mite query," says Glen Needham, an entomologist at Ohio State University. "I've heard that mattresses double in weight every 8 years or so, but I'm not aware of any scientific study that backs this up," says Karin Mahoney, a spokesperson with the International Sleep Products Association. She adds that it's well known that beds, in general, are a prime habitat for dust mites where one third of their nasty and brutish life occurs.

According to materials published by Ohio State University, a typical used mattress may have 100,000 to 10 million mites inside. (Oh, Double Yecch!) Ten percent of the weight of a two-year-old pillow can be composed of dead mites and their droppings. (!!!) Mites prefer warm, moist surroundings such as the inside of a mattress when someone is on it. One of their favorite foods is dead skin, and people shed about one fifth of an ounce of the stuff every week, some of which surely ends up flaking into your mattress.

So with all those mites and dead skin, the mattress is bound to be heavier than a new one. Are you ready yet to buy a new bed?

Yes? Call 1-800- XXX-XXXX ... 

(Just kidding!) ... 

(Sorry!!!) ...

(Yecch!!!) ...

Man Drives 1,700 Miles Next to Dead Woman

You gotta be kidding! A guy from Detroit was so determined to get from Arizona to Michigan that he refused to stop and contact authorities after the woman sitting next to him died. The man, 62, has not yet been charged and authorities were awaiting toxicology results from an autopsy performed on the body of the 31-year-old woman who died. 

Police said the man and his 92-year-old mother spend their winters in Arizona and were returning to Michigan with a 31-year-old woman with whom the man said he had been having a romantic relationship. When officers arrived Tuesday at his son's home in Warren, just north of Detroit, the man was weeping on the curb and his mother was in her wheelchair in the back of the van. The dead woman's corpse was in the front passenger seat wearing a seatbelt and sunglasses. "She obviously had been dead for at least 24 hours in screeching heat," said Warren Police Commissioner Jere Green. Police did not release the names of the man or the dead woman.

Their 1,700 mile journey began Sunday in the Phoenix area after the woman checked herself out of a mental health facility there. At some point the woman, who had a history of substance abuse problems, may have taken oxycodone, Green said. "They stopped in Flagstaff and she went in to use the bathroom," Green said. "We're guessing she might have overdosed." Green said the driver later tried to wake her but discovered her body was cold and presumed that she had died. He did an Internet search on his cellphone and later told police he read something about having 48 hours to take a corpse to a medical examiner or morgue, so he figured he had plenty of time to continue driving back to Michigan.

Someone at the mental health facility in Arizona apparently called the woman's cellphone to check on her. "It's a courtesy call," Green said. "He answers and said, 'She can't talk. ... She's dead.'" The caller told him to immediately contact police, but he didn't and later told investigators he was afraid police would arrest them and seize his van. The man gave police explanations for his actions, "which made sense to him," Green said. But "was he committing a crime or was it stupidity?"

Female Hurricanes More Deadly Than Male?

There's a new study out that makes the rather strange claim that hurricanes with women's names are inherently more dangerous than ones named after men. This is of course utterly ridiculous, but facts are facts, ma'am. The prestigious National Academy of Sciences has put out a study stating this is true because people don’t take them as seriously. They analysed hurricane data all the way back to 1950, when all hurricanes had female names (they only started getting male names on alternate years in 1979). 

This probably also matters because hurricanes, on average, have been getting less deadly over time. “It could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male names,” says Jeff Lazo, a social scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Hurricane Sandy pretty much messed everything up. If you ignore Sandy, then male-named hurricanes have caused more deaths than female ones. Harold Brooks of NOAA has performed a similar analysis on this data (removing Sandy) with similar results. The authors conclude: "Although our findings do not definitively establish the processes involved, the phenomenon we identified could be viewed as a hazardous form of implicit sexism. Other investigators, however, question that conclusion, which they say is based on too little data to give a complete picture.

To complicate matters even further, here's just one more thought. According to Wikipedia, the name, "Sandy" is a unisex name (not male or female); the male version can be a diminutive of "Alexander," "Alasdair," "Sandipan", "Sanford," or "Santiago," while the female version is a diminutive for "Sandra" or less commonly "Alexandra" and "Cassandra". So it's probably a wash.

The End Is Near For Fish

For three billion people around the planet, seafood is a critical portion of the daily diet. And that's the problem. There are too many people consuming too much fish and there isn't enough to go around. The ones we like to eat are vanishing from the oceans. This can’t last. The oceans are stretched, and certain fish species are approaching depletion. Leading scientists project that if we continue to fish this way, without allowing our oceans time to recover, our oceans could become virtual deserts by 2050. That’s just 36 years from now. Given that demand for seafood – along with the world’s population – is rising, don’t be surprised if this window closes even faster. Make your peace with fish, because it may not last much longer.

The Census of Marine Life concluded in 2010 that 90 percent of the large fish are gone, primarily because of overfishing. This includes many of the fish we love to eat, like Atlantic salmon, tuna, halibut, swordfish, Atlantic cod. If we don’t allow for proper recovery, these fish risk total extinction.

The answer is fish farming, or aquaculture as it's called. The oceans can’t physically keep up with the rising demand for fish, so we need farming to grow. By 2022, the output of fish from aquaculture must be 35 percent higher than current levels. The global aquaculture market is expected to jump from $135 billion today to $195 billion by 2019, with the added benefit of more jobs and economic growth.

If we want to continue enjoying seafood, two things must happen: First, the ocean must be allowed to regenerate. This means fishing moratoriums, especially on certain species that are on the brink of extinction, and better management of fisheries.  And second, we must supplement wild catch with healthy, sustainably farmed fish. As early as 2015, farming is expected to surpass fisheries as the main producer of fish. But to safeguard the planet against some of the worst practices we've seen in other meat industries – such as overuse of antibiotics, water contamination and clear cutting of forests (or, in this case, mangroves and other habitats) – it must be done in an environmentally sound manner.

Atari E.T. Cartridges Headed to Smithsonian

Back in 1982 there was a company by the name of Atari and they made a lot of really good video games. That same year there was a blockbuster movie called E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and Atari got the rights to make a game based on the movie. However, in order to get the game to retail store shelves in time for the upcoming 1982 Christmas season, they had to have it created in only 6 weeks. Normally games like this required between 6 months and a year to develop, so 6 weeks was an awfully short time. But they got it done anyway. And, guess what? The game was really really bad. Reviewers called it one of the worst video games ever released, and it wound up being one of the biggest commercial failures in video gaming history. The game's commercial failure and resulting effects on Atari are frequently cited as a contributing factor to the video game industry crash of 1983.

Atari manufactured somewhere around 4 million of the games. However, once word got out about how bad the game was, returns started coming back and its believed about 3.5 million were shipped back to the company. So, what did Atari do with them? They decided to have a mass burial. Somewhere between ten and twenty semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, consoles, and computers were crushed and buried in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. 

And all was forgotten. But the story of the buried cartridges remained. Some said it was an urban legend. But a Canadian documentary film company believed otherwise, and last April they asked the Alamogordo City Commission to let them dig through the landfill to see if they could find any remains of E.T. or the other games that were supposed to be there. And, on May 28, 2013, they struck paydirt. 

The news caught almost everybody by surprise. And all of a sudden a treasure trove of 30 year old Atari games is in high demand by lots of people including collectors. So, after a long pit stop in the New Mexico desert, E.T. is finally heading home, but strangely it seems that home just might be the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, among other places. A total of 1,377 games were found, and surprisingly, E.T. was not the most popular title unearthed. Only 171 copies of the game were found, compared to 190 copies of Centipede. Other popular games dug up included 116 Defenders, 59 Missile Commands, 99 Warlords, and 53 Asteroids. In total, 60 different game titles came out of the landfill, but there's likely still much more underground. A consultant involved in the dig reported to city leaders that there could be nearly 800,000 more cartridges still buried in the landfill.

About 500 of the excavated games are being set aside for museums, including the Smithsonian, and 100 will be given to the companies producing the film, leaving about 700 for the city to sell, possibly via a public auction. The commission plans to meet June 10 to decide how to go about selling the cartridges. They might even set a few aside for New Mexico residents at a discounted rate.

NSA is Collecting Your Images

Millions of faces are being collected directly off the Internet by the NSA through its global surveillance operations so they can use them in sophisticated facial recognition programs. Yep, all those images you've put in emails and on Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and everywhere else about your vacation and that party you went to back in '02 are being put together by new NSA software that revolutionizes the way they find intelligence targets around the world.

It seems the spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years. The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential.” While once focused on written and oral communications, the NSA now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other potential intelligence targets, like you and me.

It is not clear how many people around the world might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the NSA’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.

Outside experts say the State Department has what could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd. The NSA, though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.

“The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition” research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.” 

Laura Donohue, the director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,” she said. And our Congress has largely ignored the issue. “Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data,” said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.

The agency’s use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the NSA and its British counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users. The agency intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries.

The NSA can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location. In one case, there is documentation of the agency taking vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in 2011, and then matching their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time.

Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”