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On any given day, one or two volcanoes are erupting somewhere in the world. Stay alert!

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A volcanic Q&A.

The following questions were answered by expert volcanologist Dr. Stanley Williams

How long does it take for a volcano to cool?

Volcanoes usually have a life of many thousands of years. Once a volcano has begun to erupt, it usually takes about ten years before that particular eruption comes to an end. Sometimes the eruption lasts for hundreds of years.

How does a volcano build up the pressure to erupt?
The magma (molten rock) which is erupted from a volcano comes from deep inside the earth — usually from about 150 kilometers deep. The pressure there is enormous. The pressure forces the magma to rise through the crust of solid rocks, creating a volcanic eruption.

Do volcanoes spew ash or lava first?
Volcanoes release ash at the beginning of an eruption because the amount of gas is very high and it drives the explosions. After that time, the lava may come out but it usually has very little energy, so it is not very dangerous.

How can you tell if a volcanic eruption might occur?
Volcanoes that are approaching an eruption will usually have unusual earthquakes and emit very different gases. Some of the volcanoes even change shape — like the "bulge" of Mount St. Helens that moved toward Seattle at about four meters per day. Forecasting volcanoes is still very hard because we don't usually have the right measurements before it happens. In Mexico in 1993, we measured a really high release of sulfur dioxide, one of the volcanic gases, and warned the Mexican government of the possibility of an eruption. It finally erupted just before Christmas. Forecasting an eruption is the main reason for our research and it is really very difficult. What we need, as scientists, is more eruptions! We need more chances to test our ideas or hypotheses.

How many volcanoes erupt every day?
The Smithsonian Institution has the Global Volcanism Network and a monthly bulletin about eruptions. About 50 to 60 eruptions happen each month. Some volcanoes are in constant activity — Stromboli, Kilauea, or Sakurajima, for example. There are many examples of volcanoes which show some sign of renewed danger and then erupt within an hour, though more commonly, within one day. Most eruptions last hours but some continue for weeks and months.

How many times does the average volcano erupt each century?
I would say that the average volcano erupts about one time every 100 years, but that varies from one volcano to the next. My favorite, Masaya, has been very active every 25 years, but has not had any important eruptions for about 200 years.

At what speed does a volcano erupt?
There are many different speeds that we try to measure or estimate with erupting volcanoes. When volcanoes erupt explosively, they throw rocks at velocities of 200300 m/sec. After the initial eruption, the volcanoes may release a lava flow. The lava flow usually goes slowly — a few m/hour.

Can volcanoes blow up out the sides, rather than top?
Mount St. Helens is a good example of a volcano blowing out of the side. That is not an unusual thing.

What was the largest volcanic eruption?
Approximately 75,000 years ago, the volcano Toba, in Indonesia, had the largest volcanic eruption ever known.

What was the worst explosion in modern times?
The worst eruption was that of Tambora, in Indonesia. In 1815, this eruption killed about 90,000 people.

Where and when did the first volcano erupt?
The first volcanic eruption happened before the first human existed. The earth has had erupting volcanoes since just about the first years that it existed — about four and a half billion years ago. In fact, some of the best places for finding the fossils of ancient humans are in east Africa because they are buried in ashes of ancient volcanoes that erupted around them. Of course, the other planets in our solar system have erupting volcanoes on them, as well.

Mayon Volcano

Volcanoes are pretty amazing and scary. The earth does what it is going to do, and no amount of prayer is going to change that, IMHO.

Tens of thousands of people living within the danger zone of Mayon Volcano (top pic) in the Philippines were forced to evacuate to emergency shelters in mid-December 2009 as tremors, incandescent lava at the summit, and minor ash falls suggested a major eruption was on the way. On the evening of December 14, the local volcano observatory raised the alert level to Level 3, which means “magma is close to the crater and hazardous explosive eruption is imminent.”

This natural-color image of Mayon was captured on December 15, 2009, by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. A small plume of ash and/or steam is blowing west from the summit. Dark-colored lava flows from previous eruptions streak the flanks of the mountain.

NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.

Instrument:

EO-1 - ALI

Nichols: Reid gives up

And frankly, I am going to follow Harry Reid's lead for awhile. I am, once again, totally burned out on politics.

I am tired of being disappointed by the Democrats.

I am tired of being frustrated by so-called "moderates" and "centrists."

I am tired of reading about and hearing the absurdly hyperbolic, vituperative denunciations of Obama and the Democrats that unceasingly spew from the right.

I am tired of the single-minded obstructionism of the Right, and of the Democrats unwillingness or inability to counter it.

I am tired of Democrats continually trying to accomodate Republicans, especially considering that the Republicans extended no such bipartisan hand to Democrats under the mis-guidance of George W. Bush.

I am tired of being tired.

I realize that I am not really cut out for politics. Good thing!! I guess I am not a pragmatist either. I expect progress (now and then). I expect politicians to have ideals (and stick to them - and not just the Republicans). I am going to be an Independent from here on out, not that it really matters. There is simply no way I could ever be a Republican, and I am too embarrassed by and ashamed of the Democratic Party to be a Democrat. And the fringe parties are just that...too fringe.

This will likely be the last post on politics for a good while. You guys can have it. Time to turn attention inward for awhile, for a real change I can believe in. But who knows...I may change my mind....

Hope everyone has a safe and sane holiday. See ya.

A Sucker-Punched Harry Reid Throws in the Towel on Real Reform

by John Nichols

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is, famously, an ex-boxer.

Put an emphasis on "ex."

As the health-care debate made its way to the Senate, the chamber's top Democrat refused to take tactical steps that would have allowed for the passage of meaningful legislation with a majority vote.

No, no, no, Reid argued. He did not need to alter the filibuster rule that required 60 votes to act.

No, no, no, Reid argued. He did not need to consider using the budget reconciliation process that Republicans had employed to move controversial legislation when they were the majority party in the Senate.

No, no, no, Reid argued. He could use the power of persuasion to get the chamber's 58 Democrats, two independents and maybe even a few Republicans to vote for real reform.

Reid was convinced that he could wrangle the likes of Connecticut Independent Joe Lieberman and Nebraska Sort-of-Democrat Ben Nelson into a super-majority that would matter. And why not? He had protected Lieberman, in particular, when other Democratic senator's had questioned why an active campaigner for John McCain's 2008 Republican presidential run should enjoy the benefits of seniority and membership in the majority caucus.

Besides, Reid bet, he would have the muscular presidency of Barack Obama to help him get the job done.

Reid bet wrong.

Obama never really engaged with the health care debate, leaving the heavy lifting to Congressional leaders.

Lieberman and Nelson -- along with several quieter outliers within the Democratic caucus -- never bought into the idea that anything serious needed to be done to address the reckless profiteering of insurance companies that created a status quo where close to 45 million Americans were uninsured and another 45 million were under-insured.

And now, Reid has been forced to throw in the towel.

On Monday night, after meeting with members of his caucus, the majority leader was preparing to give in to public demands by Lieberman and Nelson that he drop the Medicare buy-in provision that had been proposed as a replacement to the government-run health insurance option favored by a clear majority of Americans.

So, as it stands now, Reid appears to be ready to try and pass a health-care "reform" bill that includes neither a public option or and expansion of Medicare to cover millions of uninsured Americans in the 55-to-64 age bracket.

In other words, the legislation Reid will try to get passed before Christmas is not health-care reform any longer, it is insurance reform.

And even that is giving the proposal more credit than is probably deserves. The legislation expands access to health care to millions of Americans. That's a good thing -- perhaps even good enough to merit the support of reformers who are determined to get more care to more Americans. But it does so by setting up a scheme that uses scant federal resources to dramatically enrich insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And it fails to establish the government-backed competition, in the form of a public option of Medicare expansion, that might have kept insurance companies in line.

Thus, at the very best, just half the goal of serious reform is met. More Americans will have health-care. But that progress will be purchased at enormous, and potentially unsustainable, cost to the taxpayers.

A gleeful Lieberman exclaimed Monday night that: "We're going to regulate the insurance companies and we're going to cut the costs. That's tremendous."

He was wrong on all three accounts.

Because of him -- or, more significantly, because the majority leader bent to him -- insurance companies are going to get a whole lot richer while costs skyrocket. That's not tremendous, unless you happen to be an insurance company CEO.

To believe otherwise would be to engage in the fantasy that says Harry Reid has managed this mess well.

He has not.

Reid got sucker punched. And real reform is down for the count.

The original item is here.

2010 CA vote on weed

Marijuana Legalization Will Be On California's 2010 Ballot
AlterNet

AlterNet has exclusively confirmed that the Tax Cannabis 2010 campaign in California has gathered the 650,000 signatures necessary to make it onto the November 2010 ballot.

The Tax & Regulate Cannabis 2010 campaign has just achieved a major victory in its efforts to legalize marijuana for all adults in California -- they have gathered the 650,000 signatures necessary for inclusion on the state's November ballot.

"This is the next step to sane cannabis policies and the end to the hypocrisy and unjust prohibition of cannabis," pot entrepreneur Richard Lee told me. He is a major sponsor of the Tax Cannabis initiative and the force -- and money -- behind Oaksterdam, the successful marijuana-friendly section of Oakland.

This win means that Californians will be the first in the nation to decide whether they believe marijuana ought be taxed and regulated for all adults over 21, much the same way alcohol is.

The drug reform movement's eyes will be on California next year, because many advocates believe that if the initiative passes, many other states could follow.

Support for marijuana legalization is at an all-time high, with polls ranging from 44 to 52 percent national support. In California, where marijuana has been legalized for medical use since 1996, 56 percent support legalization.

The original story is here.

Krugman - Disaster & Denial

The Republican Party is getting pretty absurd. Perhaps they should rename it the Republica-NO! Party. They are opposed to everything, unless, of course, a Republican president is in office. Then, whatever they want, they get. Two wars? Check. Massive deficits? Check. Huge tax cuts that are not offset anywhere? Check. They should just get it over with: let the Tea Partiers take over the Republican Party and spiral it down into irrelevancy.

Unfortunately, too many Democrats are too sensitive to Republica-NO! opinions. Lord knows why. When the tables are turned, Republicans will slam anything down the Dems throat with no objections. What a fucked-up situation.

Disaster and Denial
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 13, 2009

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers what they wanted.

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess.

But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable 2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.

And the bankers — liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions, large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Let’s hope so. For one thing is clear: if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it.

Original is here.

How to save the airlines

I'm all for it!

HOW TO SAVE THE AIRLINES?


Dump the male flight attendants. No one wanted them in the first place.


Replace all the female flight attendants with good-looking strippers! What the hell, they don't even serve food anymore, so what's the loss?




The strippers would at least triple the alcohol sales and get a 'party atmosphere' going in the cabin. And, of course, every businessman in this country would start flying again, hoping to see naked women.


Because of the tips, female flight attendants wouldn't need a salary, thus saving even more money. I suspect tips would be so good that we could charge the women for working the plane and have them kick back 20% of the tips, including lap dances and 'special services.'


Muslims would be afraid to get on the planes for fear of seeing naked women. Hijackings would come to a screeching halt, and the airline industry would see record revenues.


This is definitely a win-win situation if we handle it right -- a golden opportunity to turn a liability into an asset.


Why didn't Obama think of this? Why do I still have to do everything myself?


Sincerely,
Bill Clinton

Allow Gay Marriage?