catbirdseat

So that's how they end up wounding themselves and collecting Purple Hearts. Admittedly, kind of shitty to besmerch any veteran's wounds, but, ...it was just sitting there waiting to get knocked. The way he put it was that the US/S. Viet forces didn't move at night at all. If it moved it was VC- blast it.

We had a great time. We were even treated to a serenade by hundreds of dairy cows. Mooooo!!!

Just about, give or take a million years. We are actually past due for another extinction event. It will be interesting to see whether we exterminate ourselves before the next asterioid hits.

No one knows for sure, but it appears the earth gets bombarded by asteroids or comets about ever 62-65 million years. It could be that our sun has an unseen and distant companion (brown dwarf) star that periodically dislodges massive comets from the Oort Cloud. There is no agreement among scientists that I know of. Others think it is volcanic activity on a huge scale, but why should volcanic activity be so regular?

Every 62 million years we have a mass extinction. So is it any wonder that biodiversity drops at the same time?

What a coincidence! I am donating blood to the Red Cross this afternoon. O-positive makes me in demand.

Mumia seems to have been in a pensive mood when he died. He reminds me of this Thinker:

Dryad used a solar charger for her Nepal trip and had good luck with it. She relied exclusively on the solar charger for several months.

Actually it was very hard to get this guy to talk about it. All he would say was that typically they would anchor on some canal or river with lights out and stay up all night waiting to shoot at anything that moved. Being to scared to sleep when your body tells you you should be sleeping- that's got to mess with your head.

So Snugtop, do you have chronic insomnia or just occasional? I used to know a guy who was a former Viet Nam patrol boat crew member. The stuff he saw gave him insomnia for the rest of his life.

Cold fusion was bunk in 1989, and you know what? It's still bunk today.

Wrong thread, Jon. Move to the Misconceptions thread.

The ratings are stiff compared to Vantage, but not compared to Index, or so they say. If you go to Royal Columns, be sure to get your Wildlife Access parking sticker. The way I go is I-90, I-82 to Yakima and then take 410 to Naches then 12 to the Tieton. Weather is usually better than Leavenworth but worse than Vantage, but not always. Windy Corner Campground is a place to car camp, but there is a free place I can tell you about if you want.

So a flying windmill is tethered to the ground. It is essentially a kite (hey check it out Marie). So can you always count on there being wind at 15,000 ft to keep the thing aloft without power? You'd have to feed it power whenever the wind dies, or it would fall out of the sky.

Creationism and Science are what can be termed "orthogonal", that is literally at right angles to one another. One can't really refute or disprove the other. They are in different planes, and different spaces. Scientists don't try to say that Creationism is wrong because science has nothing to say about something that is not a theory. There is no experiment that a scientist could devise that would disprove creationist ideas. On the other hand there are creationists, and I am not referring to all creastionists, just some, who seek to overturn scientific theories using poorly researched or misguided arguments. Scientists would be content to leave Creationists to their domain as long as Creationists leave Scientists to their domain. Teach Creationism in church and teach Science (and Evolution) in Science class. Don't try to comingle the two and confuse one for the other. I don't have any problem with people who espouse Creationist ideas as long as they stay on their own turf.

It's kind of hard to compare Alex and Fred. Fred never climbed 5.13, but then Alex never had nearly as many first ascents as Fred. Both are truly great climbers.

By teaching Creationism or its more palatable cousin Intelligent Design in schools, we are cutting off a large pool of potential scientists. Some of the kids with religious tendencies (and simple minds) will embrace ID and will be lost to the world as potenial researchers and science and our understanding of nature and the world will suffer. Creationism and ID only have old texts and imagination as their laboratory. Science has the world itself. The story of "creation" is out there buried in the earth and our very cells, just waiting to be told to the scientist clever enough to seek out and interpret what he finds.

I don't buy the Creationists idea that life is too complex to explain via natural phenomena. That's just a big cop out. It is like saying because something is difficult, why try, you won't succeed? Just because every question hasn't been answered doesn't mean that an entire theory should be tossed out. A theory stands as long as it is the best TESTABLE theory around. Creationist "theory" isn't a theory because there is nothing about it that is subject to scientific inquiry.

If it were not for a concrete barrier at the five or six mile mark, you could drive it all the way to at least Three O'Clock Rock trailhead (Eightmile Trail). We did that stretch on bicycles and while the road is quite rough, I could see no justification for keeping it closed.

The Columbia River flows upstream for periods of time when the tide is acting on it, but that is a special case and only affects the portion nearest the ocean.

The foot of slack allows you to tie an overhand loop to the bight of the slack rope and clip it to your harness, so you don't lose it, and then to untie it from the fallen climber. Pull it through the top anchors. Rethread through new anchor you just built. Tie the rope to the fallen climber. Untie overhand and let excess rope drop. Down climb taut rope + slack rope (backup), cleaning pro as you go. Now lower fallen leader.

A gold star to the skinny goof off kid in the back row!

Given that we men have half as many chromosomes as women does that make us half-evil? Considering that all of your mitochondria come from your mother, does that make evil too, or only when you breathe?

Let me guess, were you, or was she from the Midwest or the South. Many rivers do flow south. There is a name for that, where you make a generalized rule from a specialized case. What is it?

I was reading a book about Yellowstone Park and environs called Hawks Rest. There was a part where the author shared a campfire with a backpacker who also happened to be a whitewater rafting guide. The guy, instead of telling him about what he liked about white water rafting, rather surprised him by talking about his clients. He said several times a week, clients would ask him if the river took the rafts back to the put-in point, as though the river flowed in some sort of loop. The guide had to explain to otherwise intelligent people that rivers flow in only one direction- down hill- under the force of gravity. Let's assume for a minute that the guide wasn't laying a bunch of hooey on the author. Have you met other people with big huge misconceptions about how the world works?