Thursday, March 25, 2010

More from the wonderful world of wikipedia....


NASA photograph showing aircraft contrails and natural clouds. The temporary disappearance of contrails over North America due to plane groundings after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the resulting increase in diurnal temperature range gave empirical evidence of the effect of thin ice clouds at the Earth's surface.[26]

And....

From the Scott report of 1996 on Britain exporting arms to Iraq:

"The main objectives of governments are the implementation of their policies and the discomfiture of opposition; they do not submit with enthusiasm to the restraints of accountability … governments are little disposed to volunteer information that may expose them to criticism … The enforcement of accountability depends largely on the ability of Parliament to prise information from governments which are inclined to be defensively secretive where they are most vulnerable to challenge."

Mmmm, who would have thunk?


And....




Elves often appear as a dim, flattened, expanding glow around 400 km (250 miles) in diameter that lasts for, typically, just one millisecond.[16] They occur in the ionosphere 100 km (60 miles) above the ground over thunderstorms. Their color was a puzzle for some time, but is now believed to be a red hue. Elves were first recorded on another shuttle mission, this time recorded off French Guiana on October 7, 1990.
Elves is a frivolous acronym for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations from Electromagnetic Pulse Sources.[17] This refers to the process by which the light is generated; the excitation of nitrogen molecules due to electron collisions (the electrons possibly having been energized by the electromagnetic pulse caused by a discharge from an underlying thunderstorm).



2 comments:

Tess Kincaid said...

Elves. Perfect name.

I watched The Third Man last night and thought of you.

marc aurel said...

Dung, da dung, da dung, da dung...
The music still reverberates round my tiny brain. And that last shot that Carol Reed insisted on. (It's his voice as the sardonic world weary narrator at the beginning.