21-01-2005 20:37									#211
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I paid for dinner yesterday with a credit card and on the receipt under the 'tip' line there was a 'tsunami aid' line. wtf?

	21-01-2005 23:03									#212
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Ned, been off due to drug interactions, and of course I have to participate in a thread hi-jack. Actually, they can back-date using mutations in non-critical DNA areas, both mitochondrial and nuclear. Some people have challenged that analysis, looking at how instead multiple sources could result in the same type of drift. I haven't looked at the debate in over a decade, it is for the math geniuses who have an intuitive grasp of how statistical interactions work. I may be able to run stats for a thesis, but those folks and their arguments are such that I understand what they are arguing about, but I don't have a week free to try to understand the merits of the various debates that they can comprehend in hours, not weeks.

	22-01-2005 00:22									#213
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Hmmmm, Toba's still active. It has two extruded domes, and it is is seismically active.

	22-01-2005 05:13									#214
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quote: Back to DNA. Is there a way to calculate the timing of the so-called bottleneck by some other form of analysis that looks only to the human genome? For example, if we know humans arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago, we can measure the genetic diversity of Australian natives and determine, roughly, the rate of diversification of a population. We can then take the African population and calculate the date of the origin of our species using the Australian metric.

You can do that quite easily if everyone in a given population is descended from one female (for example we have a pretty good guess as to when "mitochondrial eve" existed). If a given founding population is larger then its possible but harder and some guess-work is involved. But yes, I believe the sort of genetic analysis that you're talking about has been done.

	23-01-2005 20:00									#215
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4 weeks after the disaster, one starts to wonder why this thread is topped.

	23-01-2005 21:09									#216
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Because if it wasn't... somebody would start a new thread on the topic, because it is still one of the big news stories

Usually I untop after the activity really dies down. I was going to do it after three days of no posts...

	24-01-2005 00:37									#217
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not much else to say about it.

The press seems to be moving on. I guess the inaguration diverted attention. I haven't seen a whole lot of news coverage about this anymore, aside from quick tidbits. Which is sad.

I remember reading an article about the top news guys complaining because it costs so much to cover a story like this. Flying all that equipment over there. Everything has to be satellite feed etc. Some places could only be reached by helicopter or boat.

	24-01-2005 00:51									#218
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Ugh. I looked up Toba. It is known as a "super volcano," although the eruption 73,000 years ago was not in that class. Its eruption 800k years ago was.

Toba erupts every 300k years or so. We are safe from it for the time being. However, the largest supervolcano known, Yellowstone, is overdue to erupt. And, it is showing a lot of "activity."

I find it interesting that Yellowstone first erupted 1.2 million years ago, about the time the ice ages began. Toba last eruption, 73,000 years ago, triggered the last ice age.

It might be time to invest in winter gear companies.

	24-01-2005 00:54									#219
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Ugh. I looked up Toba. It is known as a "super volcano," although the eruption 73,000 years ago was not in that class. Its eruption 800k years ago was. Toba erupts every 300k years or so. We are safe from it for the time being. However, the largest supervolcano known, Yellowstone, is overdue to erupt. And, it is showing a lot of "activity." I find it interesting that Yellowstone first erupted 1.2 million years ago, about the time the ice ages began. Toba last eruption, 73,000 years ago, triggered the last ice age. It might be time to invest in winter gear companies.

why I suport global warming . We are protecting ourselves when the next ice age comes.

	24-01-2005 04:18									#220
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quote: Originally posted by Dissident why I suport global warming . We are protecting ourselves when the next ice age comes.

Not if ice ages are triggered by massive volcanic eruptions. We then get the "nuclear winter" scenario. The earth goes into a deep freeze. It does not come out, as the ice and snow blanketing the Northern Hemisphere are enough to sustain the cold.

	24-01-2005 04:31									#221
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Not if ice ages are triggered by massive volcanic eruptions. We then get the "nuclear winter" scenario. The earth goes into a deep freeze. It does not come out, as the ice and snow blanketing the Northern Hemisphere are enough to sustain the cold.

I thought the nuclear winter theory was debunked. Temperatures just would not drop that much. A few degrees celcius at the most.

	24-01-2005 05:25									#222
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Ugh. I looked up Toba. It is known as a "super volcano," although the eruption 73,000 years ago was not in that class. Its eruption 800k years ago was. Toba erupts every 300k years or so. We are safe from it for the time being. However, the largest supervolcano known, Yellowstone, is overdue to erupt. And, it is showing a lot of "activity." I find it interesting that Yellowstone first erupted 1.2 million years ago, about the time the ice ages began. Toba last eruption, 73,000 years ago, triggered the last ice age. It might be time to invest in winter gear companies.

Well Yellowstone is big enough (pretty much the entire Yellowstone area is a giant caldera) that if it erupted you'd probably be too dead to collect on the investment.

	24-01-2005 09:38									#223
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Bosko, I live West of Yellowstone. Those to the East die.

Last edited by Ned on 24-01-2005 at 10:11

	24-01-2005 10:00									#224
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Bosko, I live West of Yellostone. Those to the East die.

great news.

	24-01-2005 10:17									#225
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Not only that, Dis, but the ice will not get this far South. We will still have the best climate in the world while New York lies under a mile high glacier.

Just a thought, if such an event happened, we might have to move our Eastern population South to Mexico as in the recent catastrophe movie. I hardly think, though, that the Mexicans will welcome the move, necessitating a short war.

In Europe, the people will have to move to Africa. I wonder how they would do that. Beg?

	24-01-2005 12:56									#226
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quote: In Europe, the people will have to move to Africa. I wonder how they would do that. Beg?

Nah, we would go American style and just take it.

	24-01-2005 23:02									#227
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Bosko, I live West of Yellowstone. Those to the East die.

You're forgetting the effect that all that dust in the atmosphere would have upon crops. You'd starve.

	24-01-2005 23:36									#228
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quote: Originally posted by chegitz guevara You're forgetting the effect that all that dust in the atmosphere would have upon crops. You'd starve.

True. But at least we'd have time to plan. Those in the East would be covered in several meters of volcanic dust ala Pompey. Only the cavedwellers will survive that.

	25-01-2005 05:27									#229
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I would just eat humans. I don't need food.

	25-01-2005 14:46									#230
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quote: Originally posted by alva quote: In Europe, the people will have to move to Africa. I wonder how they would do that. Beg? Nah, we would go American style and just take it.

alva, you're forgetting: the poor intellectually starved Eurocoms would have to wait for the scientifically advanced Murrkins to invent navigation and shipbuilding.

	25-01-2005 23:45									#231
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shouldn't this thread be topped? It will take years for them to rebuild from this.

	30-01-2005 01:58									#232
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OMG if Yellowstone erupted...........it might wake up Godzilla.

We will be in for some real trouble then.

	30-01-2005 23:12									#233
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It's been bugging me since it was posted earlier - I just couldn't remember the name. It came in a tall cylindrical clear bottle (it was dark brown due to the syrup) whose size I would not be reliable on due to context. I loved the stuff as a kid - it was Bosco that was the chocolate syrup you added to milk and ice cream. You could also use the bottle afterwards as an ersatz flask to mix methylene blue or copper sulfate to treat the tropical fish you were breeding when they got sick, and due to the shape you felt like a real chemist (though it was not as stable as a true flask).

Reference the genetic drift in humans - yes it's been measure quite accurately back I believe in the early nineties. However, the assumption was a single localized set of mutations with drift afterwards. Some other statisticians challenged that assumption, and showed that the current genetic variability could have occured if modern man arose multiple times from a geographically dispersed common ancerstor, i.e. Homo erectus or something quite close to them.

As I noted, both groups put out a convincing argument, and the statistics is the Ph.D. level stuff that lesser mortals like myself have to study for days or weeks just to comprehend what's been written, let alone the merits of the case. I don't know if further research settled the debate, or it became a greenhouse gases/global warming issue, where orthodoxy has prevailed due to acceptance but where the actual case has yet to be definitively proven.

Finally, the Nuclear Winter hypothesis was disproven. Sort of. It turns out you have a Nuclear Autumn, with a fairly substantial temperature drop and probable loss of all food crops for one, maybe two years depending on timing. That still kills most of the human race, and doesn't even look at the effects of the fall out on lung cancer rates, nor does it look at long term climate change and tipping points. At the time of that argument the computerized atmospheric models were quite primitive, and had substantially less computing power available. I don't know if anybody has revisited it in the last couple of years to get more accurate results.

	31-01-2005 00:41									#234
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would 1 to 2 years of crop failure really kill that many people? perhaps in the non industrialized third world countries. We have enough food storage, that I don't think it's that much a problem. We still have plenty of animal feed in storehouses, so we could keep the animals alive for a while. Though eventually most would have to be killed and frozen for later use.

	01-02-2005 01:07									#235
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Well, these supervolcanos seem to be linked with ice ages. So there must be something very valid about the nuclear winter scenario -- either that, or the supervolcanos do a lot more damage than several thousand nukes going off.

	01-02-2005 01:08									#236
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I'm more worried about Tsunami that can hit the east coast if that one mountain in the Canary Islands falls off...

	01-02-2005 01:30									#237
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quote: Originally posted by Japher I'm more worried about Tsunami that can hit the east coast if that one mountain in the Canary Islands falls off...

why? you live on the west coast.

	01-02-2005 01:34									#238
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Yeah, but then we'd have to be the ones giving all the aide... that would suck.. All the east coast prepy types washing up at our door steps!