Maybe a surprise meteor storm?

A meteor storm produces more than 1,000 meteors per hour. They are very rare, happening only a few times per century, but when they happen, they can change history. People think the world is ending. In the early 1800s, meteor storms on the east coast of the US produced more than 100,000 meteors per hour, many brighter than the full moon! This was described as silent lightning.

On September 1, 2007, the Earth will pass through a dense ribbon of material from Comet Kiess, producing the Aurigid meteor shower.

The peak will only last about 2 hours, with the true peak being much shorter, and the time can be off somewhat from the estimate since the location of the ribbon is not known precisely.

The west coast of the US, Alaska, and Hawaii are best placed to see the peak.

On the west coast, the peak should be visible at approximately 4:30 in the morning of Saturday, September 1.

Hawaii is even better positioned. The peak will be at 1:30 in the morning of Saturday, September 1.

See Figure 5.

http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/aurigids.html

Real celestial fireworks

Probably the best meteor shower of the year. The Perseids have been recorded for nearly 2,000 years. This year will be particularly favorable because there will be no moonlight to interfere.

On the evening of August 12, look for them overhead. The number of meteors you see will increase until dawn, so the later you look, the more you will see. After midnight, look toward the northeast.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/11jul_greatperseids.htm

The Sumidagawa fireworks began in 1732

One of the best fireworks displays in Tokyo. Like a two-hour finale! But is so crowded, it is scary. You cannot move on the street... if you are planning on going, ask someone who has been there. You will not believe the one million people packed along the Sumida River...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumidagawa_Fireworks_Festival

Why do fruits and vegetables taste crummy these days?

This is not just about peaches... it explains how agriculture has changed over the last century... and why suburbs are even more detrimental than you thought...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12125929

The World Now Eats (and Dies) Like Americans

This clip is only three minutes long. Worth seeing.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/10

A solar tower is completely different from what I thought

I though a solar tower for generating electricity was some incredibly hot awful thing in a desert that would produce really hot air and would suck you up the tower if you were not careful... Ha, ha. It is nothing like that at all. At least this one isn't. You will be surprised.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C-EvV90MeDY

Hans Rosling explains the state of the world

Two of the best talks at TED. Probably the best place to start.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92


http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/140

Greatest collection of liberal videos ever

If edge.org is the greatest salon the world has ever seen, here are the videos. Liberal, visionary, and optimistic. Exhilarating. A perfect antidote to all the nonsense, all the hate, all the destructive and unhelpful people.

www.ted.com

TED

Technology Entertainment Design (TED) annually brings together some of the world's greatest thinkers. Their lectures are available online for free. Sorta like a video edge.org.

http://www.ted.com

How to play a broken record

Suppose you have a very old recording that is so fragile it cannot be played without damaging it, and suppose it was actually broken. How could you play it?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11851842

The Big Question: Why are We Here?

Richard Dawkins explains in 23 minutes why we came to be, what our purpose is, and where we are going.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=13NPZ5Nv_fc

The quake was not so bad in Tokyo

There was a pretty big quake in Niigata, about 150 miles north of Tokyo. It was a strong 6 on the Japanese scale, which suggests there may be structural damage in Niigata.

The Japanese scale is a measure of actual shaking at the surface, so it is a better indicator of damage than magnitude. While magnitude does tell you how big a quake is, it does not tell you how deep it is. There are many quakes with magnitudes of 8 or even 9, but if they happen deep under the ground, the shaking at the surface may not be very bad.

Initial reports by the BBC made it sound as if a 6.6 quake happened in Tokyo. The shaking here was moderate, and some people in Tokyo said "What quake?"

Depending on how your software is set up, you can see a short video clip of some of the damage at

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy

The Rattleback

This is a really surprising toy. It seems to behave in a totally unexpected way when you spin it.

Go to www.newscientist.com

and search for rattleback.

There is a good video of it here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQMoZr_x7Q&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Enewscientist%2Ecom%2Fblog%2Fshortsharpscience%2F

The creation of artificial life

We just learned how to read DNA easily a decade ago. Now, it is routine and cheap and becoming cheaper by the day.

But just reading DNA still does not yield the ultimate prize: artificial organisms, constructed from inanimate pieces, designed for specific purposes.

That era has begun.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/28/nlife228.xml

Why people behave the way they do?

Have you ever noticed that people who don't know what they are doing are going gangbusters to do it? On the other hand, people who are well versed in the complexities of an issue have a hard time making a final decision and are not very confident that the decision is the best possible.

It is all summed up in this Darwin quote.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge...

Just three glasses of fruit or vegetable juice per week reduces risk of Alzheimer's by 76%!

Our food has become really distorted. We are now missing huge numbers of chemicals that had always been part of our diet. The distortion is so great that some people now eat nearly no fruits and vegetables, and fruits and vegetables used to make up the majority of our diet because there was nothing else to eat.

Here is a good example. Some people almost never drink fruit/vegetable juice. Other people drink three or more glasses per week. Hundreds of people were followed for 10 years, and those who drank three or more glasses per week were found to have had a 76% lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease!

We can expect to live to our 90s or more. By the age of 95, the risk of developing Alzheimer's is 50%.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?newsid=50938

Video clips show you how to do anything

Reading directions and trying to figure out how to do something can be really annoying. Suppose someone would just show you instead?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19638199/site/newsweek


videojug.com
Watch "Brushing Your Dog's Teeth", for example.

expertvillage.com
Watch "The Spoon Bending Trick Explained". Uri Geller. Ha!

Planny Aloha Make Mo Planny Aloha

Translation: Lots of generosity makes more generosity.

Ever wonder why some groups are cooperative and some groups are full of backstabbing dirty rats?

It turns out that even rats (real ones) can be taught to be cooperative, and they will continue to be cooperative as long as everyone else is.

However, if too many start cheating, the cooperation will stop.

This can lead to groups in which there is a lot of cooperation and groups of backstabbing dirty rats.

Since we can see this kind of behavior even in rats, we know that the roots of altruistic behavior go back many millions of years.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526115.100-rats-influenced-by-the-kindness-of-strangers.html

The First Emperor of China

Reenactment of the reign of the first Emperor of China.

Let us say he was not a nice man from a family that was not very nice... complete with substance abuse.

Wait until you see the computer graphics of what is under the mound!

Using the radar technique described in the documentary below, an enormous room 100 feet high has just been discovered above the Emperor's tomb.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/02/AR2007070200577.html


The documentary is in 9 parts of about 10 minutes each. You can go to Google, Video, and search for "The First Emperor The Man Who Made China" and choose "(Part 1)". If you click on the small rectangle below the picture at the right, the video should go full screen.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6143591406633956594&q=The+first+emperor+the+man+who+made+china&total=21&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=4

We eat insects every day

Bread, pasta, and many other foods contain substantial amounts of insects such as mites.

Figs are pollinated by small wasps.

In the 1980s, Nature had an entire episode on tropical figs, showing that many wasps died inside. The producers of Nature were no doubt "encouraged" at the end to have a disclaimer that said "The figs shown in this program are tropical figs and are not the figs grown for human consumption."

Of course this implied that the figs we eat do not have wasps in them.

Ha.

I bought some Fig Newtons, put a little of the filling under the microscope, and lo and behold: wasp parts everywhere.

You can probably see them with a hand lens.

A lie of omission.

The World Clock

The World Clock is fascinating. It gives running estimates of world population, the temperature of the Earth, species extinction, deaths, etc.

The numbers are, of course, estimates and depend on whose estimates are used, but the rates at which they tick by give a feeling of how fast things happen.

http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

The Sun is a variable star

All stars are variable in their energy outputs. Sometimes their outputs vary by a little, and sometimes by a lot.

The Sun is a variable star. Its output normally varies by about a tenth of a percent over several years, and it can sometimes suddenly become much brighter when a solar flare is aimed straight at the Earth.

Although we have managed to raise the amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere higher than they have been in 600,000 years (which sounds like a really really bad idea to me) by burning so much gas, oil, and coal, it seems the Sun may go through one of its low-output phases over the next decade or so, and give us some breathing room... Of course, if we keep burning fossil fuels as we have been and the concentrations of greenhouse gases go up even more during this lull, the problem will just be all the worse when the Sun brightens up again...

The June Solstice, June 21

Today, the northern hemisphere of the Earth is most tipped toward the Sun. It is the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere, and the first day of winter in the southern hemisphere. The northern hemisphere is receiving the most sunlight at this time of year, so it is warming up, even though we are actually farther from the Sun now than in our winter.

This day is often called the Summer Solstice, but since it is also the Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere, that can be confusing. Sky and Telescope therefore now refers to it as the "June Solstice" to avoid confusion.

The end of the control of knowledge as a commodity

A huge change is coming to the way information is accessed and used. Information is already essentially free and can be found on demand.

With free information, what will remain will be the eternal problems of what to look at, deciding what it means, and distinguishing what is likely to be true from what is not. That will still take a lifetime.

See "The End of the Commoditization of Knowledge" and at least read the first paragraph.

http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_4.html

Thought for today

FTD does not deliver across the River Styx.

40 ago, whites were allowed to marry nonwhites in the US

Sometimes the unfairness of the world is just breathtaking.

Richard and Mildred Loving were not allowed to marry in 1958 in Virginia by anti-miscegenation laws. They married in Washington DC where it was legal for them to do so. When they returned to Virginia, they were arrested and banished from the state.

Judge Leon Bazile wrote: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. ... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned their conviction and the Lovings were allowed to go home to Virginia.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10889047

Gilligan's Island Theme you have never heard

Unaired pilot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJZ5YZ4qmD0

Japanese Gardens

http://learn.bowdoin.edu/japanesegardens/gardens/intro/index.html

"Spontaneous" Human Combustion Really Does Happen!

Unfortunately, it is not like on the X-Files where people burst into flames. Darn. (Otherwise there would be quite a number of piles of ash here and there.)

When a person or animal with a sufficient amount of body fat is covered in clothing or cloth, and if the material is set alight under certain conditions, the material can act like a wick and the body will burn slowly over many hours. Sometimes only a leg is found with everything else reduced to ash.

Here are some picturs. WARNING: They are quite gruesome.

http://paranormal.about.com/library/blclassic_shc.htm


http://www.weird-websites.com/weird_news/spontaneous-human-combustion-death-weird-accidents-strange-tales.htm

http://www.castleofspirits.com/shc.html

And for a good summary, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick_effect

For a good laugh from old TV shows

Go to www.youtube.com

You can find lots of clips of TV shows you haven't seen or thought about in decades!

I had a great time with friends finding clips of Room 222, F Troop, Hollywood Squares, Mary Tyler Moore Show (including the episode voted the number one comedy episode of all time, Chuckles Bites the Dust)... and it is just the beginning... you can expect full episodes broadcast over the net in the near future, with commercials.

Bird of Paradise Dance

If you have never seen a bird of paradise display, it is incredible... you would think it was a robot or something...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEh-zclVo44

A search for El Dorado finds something far more valuable than gold

El Dorado was the fabled city of gold deep in the Amazon. It was reported once by Spanish explorers, but no trace of it was ever found...

Archaeologists looking for it recently found something beyond their wildest dreams... and a treasure far greater than gold...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2809044795781727003&q=bbc+el+dorado

Huge Comet Exploded Over Canada

About 12,900 years ago, many strange things seemed to have happened in North America, including the extinction of many mammals and the disappearance of many human cultures. The cause may have been the explosion of a comet over the Canadian ice shield.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn11909-did-a-comet-wipe-out-prehistoric-americans.html

The Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan reads aloud. Magnificent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

The Greatest Salon the World has Ever Seen

http://www.edge.org

Vitamin D reduces cancer risk by 60 percent

Many people are vitamin D deficient.

The best way to get vitamin D is to go out in the sun every day for say 10 minutes.

The second best way is to take a supplement.

This needs to be done daily because the vitamin D level drops off fast.

The Canadian Cancer Society is now recommending that all adults take a vitamin D supplement daily.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070608.wvitaminD08/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

Extraterrestrial Life!

The answer to The Question of the Ages.

We are on the verge of discovering extraterrestrial life. There will be evidence or will be confirmed as early as 2008, and within 10 years at most, I think.

NASA is launching a probe to land near the north polar ice cap on Mars. The Phoenix Mission probe will dig down under the ice and hopefully retrieve samples that show signs of life.

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/phoenix_water.html

Further in the future, sample return missions from Mars will probably return live bacteria, or at least fossil evidence of such bacteria.

But the discovery could come much sooner. Our ability to detect planets around other stars is increasing very quickly, and nearly 250 planets are now known outside our solar system. Our ability to analyze the light from such planets is increasing even faster, and some scientists have said they would not be surprised to detect light reflected by chlorophyll from one of these planets. Chlorophyll is only made by living cells. If we then look at the light from the planet and see that it has a nitrogen oxygen atmosphere like the Earth does, that would be nearly conclusive.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2096474,00.html

The Second of the Three Most Important Events of the 21st Century

I think the second of three of the most important events so far in the 21st century just happened a few days ago.

The first important event was Google becoming useful at the turn of the century
We have forgotten just how useless the internet was before we could find information. (I remember trying to guess website addresses because there was no good way to look them up!) The genius of Google is they realized that although computers do not understand the information, people looking for the information do, so every time a human looked up a particular search term, Google noted which items the human clicked on, and moved those choices up in the ranking. Now, after just a few years, Google searches in English produce really useful results almost every time for almost any topic.

The second important event was Google becoming useful in May 2007 for speakers of major languages other than English
Only about 5% of the people on Earth have English as their primary language.
Being native English speakers, we take for granted that most of the information on the internet is in English. We also take for granted that we have no problem guessing which search terms might be useful in finding the information we want and no problem in evaluating webpage summaries at a glance. For those for whom English is not the first language, imagine trying to guess what useful English search terms might be. Deciding which webpages to look at in a search is slow and wastes a lot of time since they cannot easily scan in English.

For native speakers of Arabic, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, this problem is more or less coming to an end.

Google now provides search pages in more than 10 major languages.

These search pages allow input of search terms in these languages, with automatic searching of equivalents in some other languages, including of course, English.

The search results are automatically translated from any of these languages into the language being used. (The rankings and translations are not very good yet, but hey, it just started yesterday! Once the search engine and translating software have learned, they will be much better. And it is not necessary for the translation of results to be perfect; they just have to be good enough for the searcher to get the gist of the information and to find relevant passages. Entire documents can be automatically translated by Google language tools in seconds into any major language, often to the point where you can guess what it says, or at least decide if you want to read the original.) It is still in testing, so not all the functions are currently available.

See this new tool at

http://translate.google.com/translate_s

So, instead of only 400 million native English speakers being able to easily search for information, now 3,000 million people can do so.


The third important event will be Google using artificial intelligence to look for patterns not apparent to humans in all the digital information that already exists or is being scanned in
Imagine doing research on a particular disease. There is no way you could read the thousands of papers on the subject in a reasonable amount of time, and what if there were relevant information outside the field that you wouldn't have even considered looking at? Within a few years Google will have ordered and associated the information so that you can find every mention in any information in digital form. Google could help you find terms which are often equivalent (such as "ischemia" and "heart attack" and their equivalents in major world languages). Google could then help you look for patterns no human could possibly find in a reasonable amount of time. Ultimately, Google will itself look for patterns that have escaped the attention of humans. This will accelerate research so much that I expect truly explosive advances by 2020.


The intellectual resources of the planet are about to go through the biggest leap ever, dwarfing anything that has come before. We could easily see advances equivalent to 10 times the 20th century by 2020.

And what will be left for humans? What is always left: those things that a machine cannot do. We understand concepts and can ask certain questions that computers will be unable to mimic for several decades. Our abilities are about to be magnified beyond our wildest dreams... and they had better be before the oil starts to run out...

High Fructose Corn Syrup

While it may be only part of the problem, I would guess consumption of a lot of high fructose corn syrup is not a good idea...

http://www.thehawaiichannel.com/health/13331929/detail.html

Arthritis could soon be a thing of the past

This is really amazing, and since my knees bother me sometimes, none too soon...

Note the line "one injection of a newly designed gene therapy relieved 100 percent of osteoarthritic pain"

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/uorm-egt052507.php

Amazing potential treatment for genetic diseases

Each cell in the body must make thousands of protein molecules to function properly. From start to finish, the protein molecules must be correct and complete.

Thousands of genetic diseases are caused by mutations that produce an erroneous stop signal in the production process of just one type of protein molecule in a cell. The cell needs to make the entire protein molecule, but comes to an erroneous sequence that tells it to stop prematurely, and so it makes just the beginning part of the protein molecule, which is useless. Since one type of protein molecule performs a specific job in a cell, that job is not done, resulting in disease.

Suppose there were a way to make the cell ignore the erroneous stop signal. The cell would then produce the complete protein molecule, and it could then do its specific job in the cell. The disease should theoretically be greatly relieved. And it seems that one drug may do just that for some fraction of thousands of genetic diseases!

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-04/uops-fdo041807.php

If you've never heard of Joost, I think you soon will

The inventors who made Skype (free or really cheap internet telephone calls) sold it to eBay for 2.6 billion dollars.

Their next project is Joost. TV shows, on demand, on your computer, for free with just a few commercials (certainly fewer commercials than you see on broadcast TV now).

If you don't have broadband, now is the time to get it.

If you don't have a computer that can handle video easily, you should consider that when you buy your next one. The internet has already transitioned into video, and video demands are only going to increase, so you have to buy your computer for the world of 2009, not 2007. You will find that a 20-inch iMac for 1,500 dollars is more than satisfactory and is in fact cheaper when you consider what it includes (like a built-in camera). Macintoshes are designed to handle video and run much cooler than many other computers.

www.joost.com

It is now in beta testing and is expected to be available soon.

I signed up a while ago and am now one of the testers. There are only a few hundred programs available during the testing, but you can expect tens of thousands in a year or so.

It is just amazing. The quality is comparable to what you would purchase on iTunes. When you click, it starts playing in just a few seconds in full screen mode. I have so far watched six episodes of various programs and only one had a glitch. For free. In Japan. Showtime! scifi and documentaries...

This kind of change is happening in broadcasting around the world. The BBC is planning on making one million hours of audio and video available online on demand. Some of it is available in the UK now, and the only thing blocking worldwide release is they have to figure out how to collect subscription fees or license broadcast outside the UK. Imagine. NHK and many other channels are planning on making their content available. In a few short years, nearly every program that still exists will be available online, for free or for a subscription, on demand.

Eating lots of bacon, ham, hot dogs, and coldcuts containing nitrite preservative

People who eat cured meats more than 14 times per month had a 78% higher risk of a developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease such as chronic bronchitis.

These kinds of lung diseases are very common as we age.

Even those who ate cured meats 5 to 13 times per month were found to have a 50% higher risk.


http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?alias=study-ties-cured-meats-to

The Mind of Leonardo Exhibit and the Annunciation at the Tokyo National Museum until June 17, 2007

There is a great exhibit of da Vinci's inventions and works at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno. The highlight is the earliest known painting attributed to Leonardo: Annunciation.

Go to the Heisei Hall and see Parts I and II of the inventions and works exhibit. At the end of Part II, there is a short film that will show you some of the secrets of the Annunciation.

Tickets are easiest to purchase at the ticket window just inside the Ueno Park Exit gate of JR Ueno Station or at the Museum itself. Tickets are for one day only, but are undated. When you enter the Heisei Hall exhibit, they will stamp the ticket with the date, and when you enter the Annunciation room in the Main Hall, they will tear off a stub. However, you can later reenter both exhibits on that day by showing the ticket.

I went early on Sunday morning, but this was a mistake. It was really crowded in the morning, but nearly empty just before closing.

This is what I suggest.
Have lunch somwhere.
Go to the museum after lunch.
Walk around the garden and see the other exhibits.
Go to the inventions and works exhibit, which will take about one hour (explanations in Japanese and English; audio guide in Japanese only).
Go to see the Annunciation in the last hour before closing. (There were only a few dozen people viewing the painting at the end of the day, whereas there were thousands in lines stretching all the way to the front gate in the morning! Closing times vary.)

Closed Mondays (but open Monday, April 30, until 20:00, or at least that's what the website says)
Tuesdays to Fridays 9:30 to 17:00
Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays 9:30 to 18:00
Golden Week special hours, April 27 to May 6, 9:30 to 20:00

YouTube video.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5H8-NuKuTcY


Information in English
http://www.tnm.jp/en/servlet/Con?pageId=A01&processId=02&event_id=3859

Information in Japanese
http://www.tnm.jp/jp/servlet/Con?pageId=A01&processId=02&event_id=3859

When will we have electric or electric plug-in hybrid

Great Science Friday show about future cars. It will take 20 years to replace the US auto fleet... even the most optimistic estimates anticipate the oil beginning to decline 20 years. I think the cheap oil will start to decline much sooner.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9428253

20 million stoves in the US are unstable and can tip over with just a push

20 million stoves in the US are so unstable that they can topple forward with a little weight on the open oven door. So far, more than 100 people have been burned, lost limbs, or been crushed to death. A very dangerous situation is a child standing on the open oven door. In another incident, a woman lost her balance and grabbed onto the stove for support, and the stove flipped over onto her and killed her.

The only video of this I can find is currently at CNN. It is absolutely shocking. The reporter pushes down on the open oven door, and the whole stove comes crashing forward! If there is hot food on the stovetop, you can imagine what will happen.

Go to: cnn.com

Click on: video

Search for: stove tip over


Here are some quotes from various sources.

“There have been more than 100 reported cases of death and injury from scalding and burns due to hot foods and liquids spilling from the stove top, and from the weight crushing anyone in the path of the tipping ranges,”

This design flaw has particularly affected children and the elderly. CPSC accident reports include cases of a 24-pound toddler who stood on an open oven door, tipping the range so that boiling chicken soup spilled over him, causing severe burns; a 3-year old who climbed onto the range door and was killed when the stove fell over on him; and an 88-year old woman who slipped as she was cleaning her range and grabbed the oven door for support – which caused the oven to flip over and crush her in her own kitchen with her upper body wedged into the hot oven in which she had just finished baking cookies.


And the solution is simple: Install brackets to hold the stove down. They cost less than a dollar. (And that should also help in case of an earthquake.) Even if you don't have children around often, you yourself could still lose your balance from time to time or slip... imagine leaning on the door while cleaning the oven or putting food in it...

You can see more info at

http://www.killerstoves.com/

Really try to see the CNN video... words just don't convey how easy it is to make a stove tip over.

Amazing octopus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQWxIrSRDQQ

The crows in Japan are annoying, but smart

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7329182515885554944

Cool 360 degree volumetric display

Amazing volumetric display lets you walk around it and appears to show video floating in midair.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YynD1BVaus

The weather is strange this year

The winter was unusually warm. The cherry trees were confused and started blooming early. Then it turned really cold again. Today, April 4, 2007, a huge high pressure system swept into Japan from Asia, bringing with it dust from the deserts in China and a lot of cold air. By 3:00 pm, it was dark like twilight, the sky was yellow-green, there was thunder and lightning... and there was snow and hail in downtown Tokyo!