New Study: Global Warming Caused by Sun

A recent study published in the Global Warming Experts publication revealed the true cause of global warming. The global community has been making efforts to lower greenhouse gases for the past decade, yet the temperature rise in earth’s atmosphere is only partially caused by greenhouse gases. GWE scientists believe that the main cause of global warming is actually the heat emanating from the Sun, a giant star at the center of our solar system. Its effect is so prevalent in fact, that most scientists believe that if it were not for the subsistence of the Sun, global warming would not exist at all.

“You know, I know it sounds extremely notorious, but it is my firm conviction that the Sun is at the heart of the matter. The Sun is brighter than eighty-five percent of all stars in the galaxy, and its temperature is just off the charts. I can’t believe we didn’t see this before. It was right there in front of us,” said Dr. Lichtenstein of Cornell University, who was one of the main researchers in the project, “Planet earth is in the direct path of the sun’s rays. It is inevitable that the Sun is going to heat up the planet. It’s been doing this every day for the past five billion years. You know that warm feeling you get on Saturday morning after sleeping in, and there is bright yellow glow in the room when you wake up? That’s the Sun’s effect. Amazing, I know.”

The controversial result of the study is causing a lot of conflict within the scientific community, but scientists and environmental organizations are slowly catching on to the truth of the findings.

The study involved charting the temperature of planets far away from the Sun and comparing them with the temperature of the Earth. Four planets were observed in total, with Pluto being the control specimen, since Pluto has been reclassified as a minor-planet and is the least affected by the Sun’s rays. Each planet’s exact distance from the Sun was calculated and factored in with the temperature measurements, gauged by satellite receivers.

Researchers found that the sun’s heat and light is directly related to the surface temperature. Though greenhouse gases do play a role in trapping atmospheric heat on earth, the temperature would not rise in the first place if it were not for the sunlight piercing through the sky. Many earthlings have been negatively affected by the extreme heat, especially in dry, arid areas where the elderly and health-fragile have been dropping like flies from heat stroke. Common symptoms of being hit by sunlight include a warm feeling on the surface of the skin, constricted pupils, and squinted eyes. More severe cases experience dizziness, headache, and weakness. Lower life forms including flora and fauna seem to generally thrive under sunlight, but wither and die after prolonged exposure without break.

“If we don’t do something to remedy this now,” Lichtenstein added, “there will be dire consequences. People are going to continue dying from heat stroke and drowning from melting glaciers and tsunamis. The only way to get rid of this persistent problem once and for all is by destroying the Sun. Sure, the Sun is good for some things sometimes, like photosynthesis and vitamin D, but it’s not worth tolerating if the earth is going to eventually go up in flames and become incapable of supporting human life.”

A few fellow researchers and scientists have proposed more conservative methods to battle the sun, including a giant mirror the size of Canada that will reflect sunlight from the earth back into outer space. World renowned architects have already begun working closely with GWE scientists to design such a tarp.

Lichtenstein said that he is not opposed to trying such an approach: “As a scientist, I am very open-minded to other people’s ideas. Since the Sun is over three hundred thousand times the size of the earth, I have my doubts about being able to create a machine in time that could effectively destroy it. Starting out small is a good idea, so that while the Mirror-Tarp is protecting human life from extinction, we may in the mean time have more time to develop the Solar-Destructo machine.”

Lalala. Since people seem to be discussing school:
Here is what I am doing this semester.

• Class 1: 961 Philosophy Seminar--Concepts of God

• Class 2: English 217--American Literature

• Class 3: English 510--Select British Poets

• Class 4: English 302--Intermediate Poetry Workshop

• Class 5: English 301--Intermediate Fiction Workshop

• Madison Review: I read, review, and mostly reject poetry submissions to this magazine with the rest of the funny literary staff. I also get one credit as independent study. This is an unpaid job.
  

• Career Peer at the Exploration Center for Majors and Careers: A paying job. Rather meaningless. But I get to do research about various career paths and majors. So Jia, if you read this, maybe my "major-researching" would be useful for that Wiki project. Other than that, I do creative projects with graphics and make appointments for people.

• TA at East High School: Right now this is lame. I had to stamp books, which made my brain turn to rubber. Later on, I'm expecting to work at the Writing Center tutoring English students. I also assist teachers with menial tasks.

• Applying to MFA programs: I'm too scared to talk about this. I wasn't even expecting to graduate early until last semester. Must slave away at portfolio.

• GRE: I need to study more. I take it next week. Dread looms.
  

• Daily Cardinal: I draw graphics for the paper. But I wasn't able to put in enough time to make it good. Shame grows in my heart.

• Cornucopia: I volunteer as a creative writing teacher at this transitional housing place called PorchLight. I teach recovering mental patients and alcoholics and things like that. It's cute to see what they write.

I have grown fond of posting here, even though my readership is about two people. I like the satisfaction of seeing my posts according to the new layout, with all its gray and dreary glory. I should be in bed, or studying, but here I am indulging in myself.

This has been a murderous week so far. I have killed probably more than ten things, the largest of which was a sandy spider on the ceiling above my bed. I used my philosophy book to smash it, and then slid the book back and forth to ensure complete annihilation. In no way do I enjoy smiting innocent creatures, but I did not want to eat a spider in my sleep or get bitten by one. I also had to swat multiple fruit flies and one large mosquito, the corpse of which was on my wall for several days until a housemate removed it. The spider corpse, about the size of a nickel, is still stuck to the ceiling. May they all rest in peace.

Here is an appropriate seasonal poem by Spencer Reece, a new inspiration in my life:

Autumn Song

The muscular sky of Minnesota is more than I can fathom,
    full of salmon colored promises of just how expansive love can be
at a time like this where the growing slow hunger of fall hushes
    and sounds in the footsteps of squirrels whirling like dervishes
and in the slopping slough-sound of mad cows crazy in love.
    The human being naked in love is lovelier in the autumn dusk
than on a summer's day. Most blowhards lead you to believe

romance hangs itself most astoundingly in the summertime,
    but I am here to say fall is lovelier still for falling in love,
for a love that stills the heart, that rustles our dust with good new --
    when the maple sweats and saps at the corners of his mouth
and when the oack shakes his leaves like a thousand horseshoes
    is the time my heart bangs with barn-joy and I breathe in the subtle
approbation of death coming as I recognize the Byzantine look

of trees emptying themselves of themselves. The leaves fall
    like leaflets in a relentless war and the architecture of skeletons
becomes more and more apparent and the water wavers, the water cracks
    and everwhere this upturned look, the look of one last kiss,
and on such a night as this, I feel dignity, I feel survival; in the nude
    descent of the earth shedding its sweat, its passion, my breath,
my shimmering cargo, is eager to dawn and break free from its hold.

I found an interesting site claiming that it has real fresh coffee... while all other coffees are stale. I'm not sure if it's a hoax, but I'm curious to try some:

Oh I am sorry. What did I do? Ever since putting The Coffee Fool online, I have been beaten regularly by customers for cluing them into the secret on 'fresh' coffee.

Why?

Because they can no longer stand the taste of coffee they get at work, gas stations, even... coffee stores - in a world of stale coffee, they are ruined on our fresh.

So if you happen to be a newbie to The Coffee Fool and want to keep your coffee innocence intact - look away. Otherwise, here comes the knowledge (read as sales pitch) that may very well ruin you too.

Nearly all of the coffee out there is stale. The good news is that stale coffee is drinkable if you've never had truly fresh coffee. The bad news is that once you've tasted truly fresh coffee, you'll be forever hooked. It will make you giddy every time you go to make a pot. Tingle right down to your toes. Reverberate around your head like a funky aura. That's because coffee, just a few days out of the roaster, is nature's most flavorful drink - more complex than even wine - containing well over 900 flavor compounds to dance on your taste buds. But after a few weeks, you'd be lucky to see half that number.

How do you know if coffee is stale? Simple test: If it's bitter or flat, it's too late. Coffee is actually known by connoisseurs as a 'sweet' beverage. But shush... you're not supposed to know that. And who doesn't want you to know? Coffee companies who make their living on convenience. And yes, believing that freshness is as simple as 'burping' air out of a coffee container, is convenient. Truly fresh coffee is a pain because you have to order it frequently.

I could go on and on about how we only roast the world's finest Arabica beans in an unhurried, old-fashioned way to unlock the beans maximum flavor and aroma etc... etc... but who has time for that? So I will leave you instead with our simple guarantee - the best, freshest coffee you've ever tasted or your money back.

http://www.coffeefool.com/?Click=12316&gclid=CIq5nMGsv44CFRcbWAodomeKTA

Rejected Facebook User Friends 100 Students

SIOUX FALLS--Sam Ong, a rejected Facebook user, courageously friended one hundred students from Augustana College after being defriended by fellow Facebook user Amy King.

"Six days ago, I remember walking into my dorm room and turning on my computer to check my Facebook account. Everything was normal, and I had one new message and two new wall posts, but I noticed that my friend count had changed. I had 57 friends seven days ago, that was last Wednesday, but on Thursday my friend count was 56," Ong said, "I had to go through my entire friends list to figure out who defriended me. It took a while because I didn't have all 57 memorized, but I discovered who it was after reading all 102 of my wall posts and coming across a wall post from Amy King, who was in my Business Ethics class last spring. I realized that I did not see Amy King in my friends list."

Ong said he tried his best to keep his composure. His friends list had been slowly augmenting since January, and had never shown a dip in numbers before. The defriending occurred four days after he adventitiously ran into King at a random frat party.

Not everyone he encountered at the party defriended him. Steve Poole, whom Ong bludgeoned on the head with an empty beer bottle, is still his Facebook friend.

Ong said, "Truthfully, I tried to be very nice to Amy when I saw her at the frathouse. I complimented her on her hairdo, even though it looked like road-kill. Because I hadn't seen her since that ethics class during sophomore year, I made a point of asking what classes she's taking these days. I genuinely thought of her as a friend and never even tried to come on to her or demean her as a woman in any way."

"I don't understand why she would defriend me," Ong added, "I thought we had a real connection. We both like Star Wars and cheese sticks, which we ate at the party before playing beer pong."

The loss of a Facebook friend prompted Ong to rethink his life and priorities. Ong had not friended anyone on his own account since July 7^th, and he mentioned that his friend count was starting to show signs of plateauing.

Facebook experts called Ong's proceeding efforts to friend one hundred students a "friending surge," which usually occurs at the beginning of freshman year at college and throughout the first three months. Transfer students also go through friending surges when starting out at a new university. One expert said Ong's case is a unique phenomenon since he is a junior and not a transfer student. Similar cases have been reported only a dozen times in the Sioux Falls area, which contains several thousand Facebook users.

"Even though I was deeply hurt by that action, I knew I had to stay strong. Just because one person defriends you doesn't mean that you've lost all hope. My motto is, 'if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.' I lost a Facebook friend, but I knew there are hundreds more out there just waiting to be friended. I started friending a few other people I've met recently to get my count back up, and eventually moved to friending people I've never even met. It takes guts to reach out to strangers like that, you know."

Twenty students have already friended Ong back, but it will be unclear how many friends total he will gain until all one hundred respond, which he says may take up to a month.

Ong said, "After about a month, I consider the ones who have neither rejected nor friended me back as rejections. It's just easier that way."

_______

Yes, it has been a long time. I guess I don't use LJ because not many people I know use it... (haha, or maybe I just don't know enough people, which is probably the real reason!) Hence, not many people will read it. I hope I'm not too old for this.
So it has been almost a year since my last post about my bike accident. And I got this funny Elephant Autumn theme for the LJ, which is why I felt compelled to post. I don't have much to say. Big, significant news? No. Naftali and I broke up last week. He doesn't have LiveJournal, so I can type his name. I feel pretty disillusioned about dating and amour right now. But here is a poem I like by a Chinese American poet. It's about hair. To me, the dead cells sprouting from people's heads and bodies are pretty significant things. Humans are passionate about hair. I love hair quite a bit myself. I love the way it feels, and I remember what the hair of people I've loved feel like. It's a wonderful word too, one I like to use in writing poetry, rich in symbolism and potential imagery.

A nice poem by Li Young Lee:


Dreaming Of Hair

Ivy ties the cellar door
in autumn, in summer morning glory
wraps the ribs of a mouse.
Love binds me to the one
whose hair I've found in my mouth,
whose sleeping head I kiss,
wondering is it death?
beauty? this dark
star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head.

My love's hair is autumn hair, there
the sun ripens.
My fingers harvest the dark
vegtable of her body.
In the morning I remove it
from my tongue and
sleep again.

Hair spills
through my dream, sprouts
from my stomach, thickens my heart,
and tangles from the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb.
Hair ascends the tree
of my childhood--the willow
I climbed
one bare foot and hand at a time,
feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing
my father plead from his window, _Don't fall!_

In my dream I fly
past summers and moths,
to the thistle
caught in my mother's hair, the purple one
I touched and bled for,
to myself at three, sleeping
beside her, waking with her hair in my mouth.

Along a slippery twine of her black hair
my mother ties ko-tze knots for me:
fish and lion heads, chrysanthemum buds, the heads
of Chinamen, black-haired and frowning.

Li-En, my brother, frowns when he sleeps.
I push back his hair, stroke his brow.
His hairline is our father's, three peaks pointing down.

What sprouts from the body
and touches the body?
What filters sunlight
and drinks moonlight?
Where have I misplaced my heart?
What stops wheels and great machines?
What tangles in the bough
and snaps the loom?

Out of the grave
my father's hair
bursts. A strand
pierces my left sole, shoots
up bone, past ribs,
to the broken heart it stiches,
then down,
swirling in the stomach, in the groin, and down,
through the right foot.

What binds me to this earth?
What remembers the dead
and grows towards them?

I'm tired of thinking.
I long to taste the world with a kiss.
I long to fly into hair with kisses and weeping,
remembering an afternoon
when, kissing my sleeping father, I saw for the first time
behind the thick swirl of his black hair,
the mole of wisdom,
a lone planet spinning slowly.

Sometimes my love is melancholy
and I hold her head in my hands.
Sometimes I recall our hair grows after death.
Then, I must grab handfuls
of her hair, and, I tell you, there
are apples, walnuts, ships sailing, ships docking, and men
taking off their boots, their hearts breaking,
not knowing
which they love more, the water, or
their women's hair, sprouting from the head, rushing toward the feet.

I cried and stuff and it was stupid. But I was thinking about how cruelly ironic life is. I get into an accident when I most needed to avoid one, and I wasn't wearing a helmet the one time I needed it. I start learning and finally realize what a relationship should be based on, and then I have no way of having the relationship. It's like a school saying "Well, you got F's for two years majoring in Math. We see that you are getting A's this term in your new major, but we can't let you come here anymore because of those Fs." Why do I find things when I'm not looking for them, and lose them when I need them? Why, whenever I get over one thing, something happens and I have to recover again. I'm always recovering from some stupid accident, (not all of them physical). Why doesn't it matter how genuinely I believe in something. Why doesn't it matter how genuinely I want something. I feel better when I don't care, when I don't pay attention. When I pretend the scar isn't bleeding on my chin like a squished worm.