Oddities, curiousities and strangness in history

you folks were driving me crazy with the creepy photo, but if you have a laptop the screen angle and such can make it impossible to see. So for those who couldn't find it, I did some enhancement.

I think it's a her, not a him.

Love those goats- I posted of a vid of them ages ago- might even have been on the old forum- just amazing how they can support themselves on the tiniest of ledges and outcrops.

I did a little more careful enhancement and got a nasty shock. Shouldn't have been surprised in retrospect....

Primmy had merely confused my calming lozenges and happy tablets with my back pain syrup and my sleeping pills ----- I thought I was at a pillow-fight convention!

Excellent presentation on the BBC news site about the deepest parts of th eocean- nicely put together and very interesting.

Hope it works elsewhere too.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17013285

This is from my local newspaper this week- I couldnt be bothere copying it all out so just scanned it- but the page was too big so had to do it in two chunks plus a seperate scan for the pic of the kingmaking stone and I've a few pics of my own to add at the end.
I have mentioned this place several times before on here but this is new info to me (if it turns out there is anything in it of course!)



The King-making Stone with its footprint the King sttod in during the ceremony.


This is a view of Dunnad as you approach it.


And this is looking back out the entrance- you have to imagine it not overgrown and with wooden pallisades on top of the stone work- adding anything up to 3-4 metres or more on top in height.


A reconstruction of a later stage in Dunnads history.



There are several carvings on rocks and the nearby standing stones (there are more in the glen Dunnan is than anywhere else in the world) and those most enigmatic of Celtic signs the spirals (whose meaning are still the field of guesswork). All images have been enhanced to make the designs easier to see. From experience I can say the best way to see them clearly frist hand is to pour water over them.






My own view on the spiral designs is that they are related to time.

This might be worth digging out, it seems more logical to me that the stories came from some kind of historical setting and were remembered through oral history and then embeliished. (And as a fort that certainly could be considered a round table )

Friend and I are digging into our Arthurian lore, looking for hints to places or events that might also fit this region then we are going to go look for them- so if we find the Crystal Cave with Merlin in it I'll let you know! And if I find Excalibur you'll hear about that on the news when I declare myself rightful King!

Global Warming Could Make Humans Hobbit-Sized

http://www.ksee24.com/news/local/Global-Warming-Could-Make-Humans-Hobbit-Sized-141094963.html

From todays Sun- UFo mystery or secret aircraft testing?

A UFO expert told yesterday of his fears that a photo showing an unearthly spacecraft shadowed by military jets over PERTHSHIRE was shredded by government officials.
Former Ministry of Defence investigator Nick Pope described the snap, taken over the village of Calvine, as "compelling" evidence of alien contact.
He had it mounted on his office wall before it was removed by bosses — who later denied it had ever existed.
Mr Pope — who ran the MoD's UFO project from 1991 to 1994 — was adamant that tests confirmed the drmatic image, from 1990, was NOT counterfeit.
He said: "It was easily the most compelling UFO photo I've ever seen.
"It went to the technical specialists at the Defence Intelligence Staff and elsewhere. The results of the analysis were this was a real thing — not a faked photo.
"It was a diamond shaped metallic craft about 25m in diameter and there seemed to be military jets in the background. It wasn't clear whether they were escorting it or even chasing it.
"I had a copy on my office wall when I was at the UFO project."
He told how the picture — showing a craft similar to the UFO in 1950s sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still — was removed by a senior colleague.
Mr Pope said: "He took it down and locked it in a drawer as he didn't think we should be displaying something like that."
When MoD chiefs declassified UFO files, Mr Pope said he tried to retrieve the image, but was told: "We have no record of where this went."

"UFo mystery or secret aircraft testing?"

No doubt that it was an UFO since nobody could (or wanted to) identify it, but question is if it is a earthly or extra-terrestrial UFO.

Ghost in an Aussie supermarket throwing a tube of sweets about? Persoannly I rekon ghost is pretty far down the list of likely reasons but interesting phenomenum none the less.

UFo over South Korea? Assuming its not fake I'd go with military drone given the location.



For some reason however Aliens love Mexico City!

Dinosaurs’ farting influenced global warming, study suggests,

Reuters
from the National Post, Canada, News, May 7th 2012.


WASHINGTON — In a major new climate finding, researchers have calculated that dinosaur flatulence could have put enough methane into the atmosphere to warm the planet during the hot, wet Mesozoic era.

Like gigantic, long-necked, prehistoric cows, sauropod dinosaurs roamed widely around the Earth 150 million years ago, scientists reported in the journal Current Biology on Monday.

And just like big cows, their plant digestion was aided by methane-producing microbes.

“A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,” researcher Dave Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University said in a statement.

“Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources – both natural and man-made – put together,” Wilkinson said.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with as much as 25 times the climate-warming potential as carbon dioxide.

This gas is enough of a factor in modern global warming that scientists have worked to figure out how much methane is emitted by cows, sheep and other plant-eating animals.

The inquiry raised questions about whether the same thing could have happened in the distant past.

Wilkinson and co-author Graeme Ruxton of the University of St. Andrews worked with methane expert Euan Nisbet at the University of London to make an educated guess about the degree to which gaseous emissions from sauropods could have warmed the atmosphere.
Calculating methane emissions from modern animals depends only on the total mass of the animals in question. A mid-sized sauropod probably weighed about 44,000 pounds, and there were a few dozen of them per square mile (kilometer), the researchers found.

They reckoned that global methane emissions from sauropods were about 520 million tons per year, comparable to all modern methane emissions. Unlike emissions of carbon dioxide, which come from natural sources but also from the burning of fossil fuels, methane emissions have decreased substantially since the start of the Industrial Revolution some 150 years ago.

Before the fossil-fuel intensive Industrial Revolution took off, methane emissions were roughly 200 million tons annually; modern ruminants, including cows, goats, giraffes and other animals, emit between 50 million and 100 million tons of methane a year.

My question about this is how do they know the actual density of dinosaurs at any one time?

Maybe they guess the density from fossil records. take one area and extrapolate the whole surface areas from that? Also types of plant fossils found, if a certain species thrives in warmer temperatures, it probably means farting dinos. and of course if Wilmer Flintstone complained of frizzy hair, humidity is probably at work.

But not everything that dies turns into a fossil, and some places are better for fossil formation than others. They may be estimating from vegetation mass or something, but some places have little biomass but lots of big animals (bison on the great plains) while other places have loads of biomass but very few large animals (some forests, etc). And they'd have to get the vegetation mass from somewhere. I just can't figure what approach they are taking.

and there were a few dozen of them per square mile (kilometer), the researchers found.

It looks to me like the reporter didn't understand what he was writing. A few is ridiculously vague for a calculation, and the sq. mi. is about 2.6 times the size of the sq. km.

If we assume 2 dozen dinosaurs persq. km. that's about one dino per 10 acres.

A typical size pasture for a single cow goes from 1 acre, for prime managed pasture, to over 100 acres in scrub rangeland. Not that much different, but depending on a lot of variables.

Also, Im curious if they're suggesting that the decline in methane with the industrial revolution was in some way related to reduced farting

Mammoth clone

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/13/woolly-mammoth-clone-russia-south-korea_n_1341430.html?ref=green&ir=Green&utm_source=scribol.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=scribol.com

UFO over Manchester, a flying Christmas Tree!

I reckon either the Doctor sorted it out or it was a drunk Manchurian on a hang-glider with glow sticks!

I think it was a radio controlled flying Christmas tree.

Must of been one of these then Mrs Figg.