Monday, August 10, 2009

Round circles optical illusion


The pattern made by the black and the white boxes is that of four round nested circles.
They are NOT arranged in a spiral.
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5-year-old Boy Rescues Dad

A Swedish father who couldn't swim was saved by his five-year-old son at an outdoor swimming pool in Falun in central Sweden on Sunday.
Dan Hed, who had never learned to swim, accidentally ended up in deep water where he couldn't touch the bottom and started to panic. He struggled to keep his head above water and started to sink. Then his five-year-old son Pontus jumped in the water and took hold of his father by his neck. The father was then able to hold onto a staircase and climb out of the water, reported Falu-Kuriren newspaper. "He swam out to me with his armbands and saw that I was panicking. It was really only about 10-20 seconds but it is a really long time when you can't swim. Afterwards he told me I really shouldn't be out where it's deep," the father told the newspaper. Hed said that he hadn't really realized that his son had saved him until he talked to his wife. "I am really proud of him," he said. The father has never learned to swim because he was born with a split eardrum and must avoid getting water in his ear. He told the newspaper he might now learn how to swim anyway.
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AND they called it puppy love...

This adorable Chihuahua pup was born with a perfect heart-shaped patch on his side — just like his older brother.
The cute youngster — named Lovekun by its owner — was born in a litter of four this week.
Brotherly love ... Lovekun with older sibling Heartkun
But Lovekun was the only pooch born with the distinctive heart marking — just as his older brother Heartkun was two years ago.
The cuddly pair posed for photos today at a pet shop in Odate, northern Japan.
Thrilled owner and breeder Emiko Sakurada said they were the only two puppies born with the marking out of the thousands she has bred.


Global Warming Cloud Ships

The cloud ships that could cancel out effects of global warming this century for £5.3bn.
Special ships that create clouds by spraying seawater into the air could be the most cost effective way of tackling climate change, new research has found.
The technique, known as marine cloud whitening, would create clouds above the Pacific Ocean that would have a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight away from Earth.
A wind-powered fleet of nearly 2,000 ships would criss-cross the sea, sucking up sea water and spraying it upwards through tall funnels.
'When you spray saltwater into the air, you create nuclei that cloud condenses around, creating bigger and whiter clouds, thus bouncing more sunlight back into space,' said David Young from the think-tank that commissioned the study.
 
Lonely as a cloud:
A flotilla of 1,900 ships would cruise the Pacific creating clouds to reduce ocean warming
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The paper by Professor Eric Bickel and Lee Lane looked into the costs of potential climate engineering projects. It was commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center that advises governments how to spend aid money.
It found that cloud whitening would effectively wipe out the effects of climate change this century for no more than £5.3billion. This is a fraction of the £150billion that leading nations are considering to spend cutting CO2 emissions each year.
It is also more than 25 times cheaper than the £140billion cost of developing the alternative of stratospheric aerial insertion. This scheme would mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes by creating a hazy layer of particles like soot, which would scatter and absorb sunlight creating a cooling effect for at least a year.
The final suggestion considered was the plan to deploy tiny sunshades into space to shield Earth from some of the Sun's rays. However, this was discounted due to its astronomical cost of £236trillion.
The authors also compared the overall cost of the schemes with the cost benefits that reducing temperatures would have. These would include the human costs on health, impact on different industries such as agriculture and tourism and the effect of flooding.
They found every £1 spent on stratospheric aerosols would reap £15 of benefits, however every £1 spent on cloud whitening would bring £2,000 of benefits.
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BOB'S Family

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