coquina

I've never noticed this, but do you suppose it could be a "primitive" (probably not exactly the right word) response - a check for what kind of pheromones the other person is emitting? Maybe a person who means us harm emits different pheromones than one who is friendly. Have you ever noticed a normally friendly dog take an instant dislike for some people? In my personal experience we had a very friendly dog who took an immediate dislike to a guy my daughter was dating. Tippy would have bit him if we hadn't locked her in the utility room. In retrospect, I wish I'd let her eat him alive. He turned out to be a stalker and a dope dealer. Since a dog's sense of smell is hundreds of times greater than a human's, I'm thinking he was emitting some kind of pheromone that she recognized as harmful.

My mother was born left handed and was forced to be right handed by the methods described above. She used both hands and feet to play the organ. When she was about 80 she had a severe stroke - the neurosurgeon told us he expected that she would not recover much movement to her left side. Within a week she was using both hands, and she made an almost complete recovery - she had to use a cane to walk because her right leg was weak. Her doctors were astounded. They came to the conclusion that because the had been forced to change hands, and because of her organ playing that required the use of both hands and both feet - her body had formed extra neural pathways. Because they existed they took over for the parts of her brain that was damaged. Hi everyone - I'm doing OK - working about 80 hours a week at 2 jobs and recovering from back surgery, so don't have much time to participate. Bettina - I cleaned out my mailbox.

The Science Channel - http://science.discovery.com/

I should have added that the name for that conglomeration of different rocks with assorted ages is called "impact breccia".

Hi All, Thought I would let you know about a very interesting project that is going on at the moment on the Delmarva Peninsula in southeast Virginia. This is a joint venture between ICDP (International Continental Scientific Drilling Program) and USGS. The core well is being drilled very near the center of the crater in Eyreville, VA. Here is a site where you can keep up with current progress: http://www.icdp-online.de/sites/chesapeake/news/news1.html I have visited the site twice. The first time I was there, on Oct 7, the were around 2,900 feet. I spoke with Lucy Edwards, USGS palynologist, and David Powars, one of the discoverers of the crater ( the latter is an old friend, I've known him since 2000, when cores were being drilled at Langley NASA). Lucy actually let me help her withdraw a core from the tube - the material was a cast of cretaceous redbed, and I was awed at being one of the two human beings to have ever laid eyes on that particular section of earth. They encountered drill problems a couple of days after I left, and had to redrill a section of the core. I returned on Oct 29th with my camera. They were drilling into a huge hunk of granite. That went on for several days, so I don't know how thick that particular chunk was. They are now into suevite, which is " a metamorphic rock formed by the impact shock of meteorites. It is best known from the German Ries crater. The best known Russian locality is the Popigay crater in north eastern Siberia. Suevite is a breccia. This means the rock consists of broken pieces of the original rock, together with high pressure metamorphic minerals like Shistovite, Coesite, Diamond and glass." From (http://maurice.strahlen.org/rocks.htm). I took pictures of many boxes of the cores. They hope to drill 2-1/2 meters deep, but Dave Powars told me he's afraid the funding will run out before they get that deep. I feel like passing the hat. Anyway - I'm recovering from back surgery, and haven't been able to drive, but I hope to visit the site at least once more before the drilling is completed. I'm attaching a picture I took that is from 2,840.35 to 2,846.95 feet. You can clearly see the "matrix", ( the tsunami slurry) and several clasts, including a beautiful chunk of cretaceous clay. I guess this attachment is pretty big, and I can remove it after everyone has seen it, but I wanted y'all to see the detail.

I got a lot closer to it than I'd like to. I woke up one morning and my husband was dead beside me. He'd been perfectly fine the night before, and when I woke up his eyes were open, his glasses were on, his legs were still crossed at the ankles but he was stone cold dead, and I didn't hear a thing. What that instilled in me is that none of us can know when the end will come, whether you die of disease, accident, or your plug gets pulled in the middle of the night, you will be gone. IMHO, its best to remember that life is not a dress rehersal. Even if you are young, you need to make the best of each day. .. and we all, especially the younger people here, need to remember that we are not immortal. It's a wonder I survived my teenage years, the way I used to drive. Think about it and take care so you will hang around to add a little part of you to the gene pool.

Been working 2 jobs and too busy to post for awhile. Had back surgery Thursday and am home recuperating. I think the surgery went well - sciatica is gone but incision is sore. Doc says no driving for 2 weeks - what's so bad about driving?

92 - my mom lived to be 95 and would still be here if she hadn't got a staph infection from the hospital.

Chances are most life on earth will be obliterated by a cosmic impact long before then. I guess whether humans are able to survive will depend on the size of the impactor and how much advance warning there is.

From accuweather: http://headlines.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?partner=accuweather&myadc=0&article=0 See the red line - it is just barely to the east of Yorktown. Our local weather man says if it crosses the OBX and stays over the sounds, it will not weaken and we will get the full brunt. Hopefully, it will not be over a cat 1 if it hits, but we took a direct hit from Isabel in 2003. Many low lying areas were flooded out, people are just getting out of FEMA trailers and into their homes. Literally thousands of trees were downed. The next question is, if it does hit, how much help are we going to be able to get with everyone down south? If I can keep my motorhome in a safe place - (it worked with Isabel, slideout rolled in and parked tight up against big building) I have a tank full of water, a tank full of propane, and a generator, and I will be in high cotton. I'm on high ground so flooding shouldn't be a problem. I expect I will be pretty busy the next couple of days - wish me luck.

I don't remember cravings, but I do remember aversions. My sense of smell was so acute that driving by a hamburger stand and smelling meat frying made me retch.

Just read this...

Just watched Joe Bastardi of Accuweather - he agrees with me - he thinks she will gather power and speed and hit between Savanna and the OBX as a Cat 2 or 3.

She's just spinning of FL right now, but historically, hurricanes that are where she is now in the fall, often head north over the Carolinas and then hit SE Virginia. The OBX (outer banks) usually takes the punch out of them - I think this will be one to watch. Thought I'd post here so we can keep track of what it does. Maybe we can also keep up with the preparedness. I am on the peninsula that is bounded on the north by the York River and on the south by the James River, the only suitable evacutation route is I64 through Richmond and it clogs up in a hurry. Anyway - there's no urgency right now - but anyone who is in the potential strike zone might stay in touch here, as we watch what develops.

Has anyone thought what would have happened if everyone in the city had tried to evacuate by automobile? As the poster above states, the roads were choked already. Suppose there had been ten times the cars trying to get out? They may have been trapped on the road when the storm hit. Then we would be reading about thousands of people drowning in their cars. I was stuck on a road once when we had a near miss by a hurricane, a twenty minute ride under usual conditions took 4 hours. I think New Orleans has very limited means of evacuation by road, because there is so much water around. When I posted the original thread about Katrina being a cat 5, I suggested that the military should have used troop transport planes to take out people who had no access to auto travel and several people said that wouldn't have worked. Yes, there were pictures of school buses flooded that could have been used - but if there were 100 buses that could hold about 30 people each, that's only 3,000 people. When you know you don't have enough transportation to take everyone, how do you decide who goes and who stays? I think the bottom line in this deal is that although papers had been published based on computer models about what would happen in NO - people didn't believe it. It was beyond their imagination. Therefore, no one, neither the local government, the federal government, or the residents had a real idea of the magnitude of the force with which they were dealing. We have had other cat 5 hurricanes, but none of them were as large as Katrina and spread major destruction so far. Also, as far as hurricanes go, people did not have a lot of warning on the severity of the storm, it had weakened to a tropical depression after it crossed Florida. People figured it would gain strength, but I doubt many would have predicted that it would have exploded into a CAT 5 so close to shore. Speaking about predictions - this wasn't a storm that developed way out in the ocean so people had weeks to study it - it developed right in the Bahamas, and headed straight for us. There was a picture of the storm posted here while it was in the gulf. The feeder bands reached all the way from the continental US to the Yucatan. People can usually escape the brunt of the storm by evacuating 50 or 60 miles inland. In the New Orleans area they needed to go over twice as far, and their only choice was to go west to stay out of the storm's path. As far as hurricanes go, it was THE PERFECT STORM. We need to study what happened, but with the idea of mitigating damage from future events rather than to try to pin the blame on someone for this one. Blame mother nature and get on with it.

I wonder if any of you have had empathetic responses to the situation in New Orleans? I feel sorry for those people, but I don't feel like them, and find it hard to imagine what it would like to lose everything, including members of one's family.

Don't talk to me about ovaries shriveling - mine went extinct about the same time as the Tasmanian Tiger. If time is running out for you, it ran out for me decades ago, and I won't accept that.

Butch didn't dance either. He had absolutely no sense of rhythm - if he tried to dance fast, he looked like there was something with fangs crawling up his leg heading for his nether regions. We slow danced, and I patted him on the shoulder because he couldn't hear the beat. Forget the car, get a BOAT. (Short for Break out another thousand...)

U.S. oil surges $4 to record above $70 on hurricane SINGAPORE (Reuters) - U.S. crude oil futures surged more than $4 in opening trade on Monday, hitting a new record high above $70 a barrel after Hurricane Katrina forced Gulf of Mexico producers to shut in more than a third of their output.

It may be oxygen or it may be what you have used to clean them with.

Regardless - the military does have planes that are equipped to handle large numbers of troops. It would be horrible if thousands of people were drowned like rats in a barrel.

They say there are tourists stranded in New Orleans because all airlines have canceled flights - why doesn't the gov't send those huge cargo planes in to get them out?

Katrina now has winds in excess of 160 mph. She will hit somewhere on the gulf coast - probability is high for New Orleans. Link to "The Weather Channel" http://www.weather.com/newscenter/tropical/ I suspect that this storm will ultimately affect a large part of the eastern US. I remember Camille...in case anyone has any doubt of what a Cat 5 can do.. http://www.geocities.com/hurricanene/hurricanecamille.htm http://www.angelfire.com/ms3/n5ycn/camille.html If you live in the strike zone, I hope you've already left the area. Maybe we can use this thread to keep in touch with one another as the storm progresses.

So feel free to post the European version of same.