Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, October 8, 2009

The Ring of Fire and The North Pacific Gyre

By John Ballard



Been thinking about recent seismic activity resulting in tsunamis and flooding around the Pacific Ring of Fire.
Sea levels are rising at the rate of a centimeter every five years.
Question: How much weight does one centimeter add to the weight of the Pacific Ocean?
By the way, the amount of garbage out there is now bigger than Texas. A hundred million tons and growing, maybe?
All that added weight might be enough to disturb the ring of fire, no?
Just wondering...
Here's a fun video for your viewing pleasure.





?000?

When I was learning about wine one of the principles involved has to do with alcohol content as related to the amount of sugar. Yeast is a living organism that consumes sugar and creates alcohol as a waste product.

But one of the principles of life is that no organism can live in its own waste. That's why humans die in closed spaces when all the oxygen is replaced by Carbon Dioxide.

And that's why some wines are sweet and others are called dry. In the case of dry wines the yeast runs out of sugar and dies of starvation. But in the case of sweet wines the yeast is killed when a toxic level of alcohol is reached before all the sugar is gone, leaving enough sugar to make the wine sweet. (The word dry indicates the wine is not sweet but not necessarily sour or bitter either. It's simply not sweet.)

Sweet wines tend to have a bit higher alcohol content -- twelve to fourteen percent -- because yeast can survive past the starvation level before waste eventually kills off the colony.

I wonder how much waste humanity can survive before it reaches toxicity?

Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and tsunamis may be Nature's way of complaining.



2 comments:

  1. The weight of the ocean as no impact on seismic activity. Melting glaciers can have an impact on the areas where they are melting- less weight. The strength on lunar tides are thought to have an effect especially when the sun and the moon are lined up on the same side of the earth. But in the ring of fire - it's mostly just what happen there.

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  2. Thanks. I feel all better.
    Now about that garbage...

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