6. november 2006

9/11 - flight patterns One of the big questions related to the terror attacks on 9/11-01 was the inability of the US Air Force to find and intercept the hijacked airliners before they hit their targets. This graphic showing regular air traffic over North America in a single day may well help seeing the problem. The count reaches close to 20,000 planes in the air simultanously. Once the hijackers turned off the planes' transponders, identifiying the flights would mean finding blips on the normal radar screen that wasn't on the responder list. In ten minutes or so. I touched on some of these issues in my Michael Meacher conspiracy debunk article, but in this case you can't beat a visualisation. Via JREF. 2:19:13 PM    comment []  trackback []

A man's world in Lebanon The high unemployment rate in Lebanon forces men to travel abroad for work, but the girls and women are left behind. The Lebanon girls are competing hard. The country's high rate of unemployment pushes the young men to seek work elsewhere, sometimes in Western countries like France and Canada, but mainly in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the other oil states on the Gulf. The women, inhibited by family pressures, are generally left behind. "The demographic reality is truly alarming," Khalaf said. "There are no jobs for university graduates, and with the boys leaving, the sex ratios are simply out of control. It is now almost five to one: five young girls for every young man. When men my sons' age come back to Lebanon, they can't keep the girls from leaping at them." For the men, who return with deep pockets and high spirits, the holiday welcome is gratifying. I can just imagine! 12:20:10 PM    comment []  trackback []

Dolphin with four fins A dolphin has been found with four fins. Japanese researchers said Sunday that a bottlenose dolphin captured last month has an extra set of fins that could be the remains of hind legs, a discovery that may provide further evidence that ocean-dwelling mammals once lived on land. Fishermen captured the four-finned dolphin alive off the coast of Wakayama prefecture (state) in western Japan on Oct. 28, and alerted the nearby Taiji Whaling Museum, according to museum director Katsuki Hayashi. Fossil remains show dolphins and whales were four-footed land animals about 50 million years ago and share the same common ancestor as hippos and deer. Scientists believe they later transitioned to an aquatic lifestyle and their hind limbs disappeared. This is very interesting, and it is nice to have solid theories further confirmed, but it is pretty self-evident that since mammals originated on land, all marine mammals evolved from land animals. Much stronger evidence actually have existed for a century or so that the ancestors of modern whales had legs, namely throwbacks or atavisms. Complete hind limbs have been found inside captured whales, demonstrating conclusively that the DNA of whales contain specific instructions for now useless limbs, and that occasionally these actually develop in the phenotype as useless hind legs inside the body of a modern whale. This would not be the case unless ancestors of whales had working hind limbs. I wonder if the scientists or whoever wrote the press release have exaggerated the importance of this discovery for added publicity. It is surely an interesting find, but the land ancestry of whales was not something that needed much further evidence. 12:39:14 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.12.2006; 09:17:58.