Madame Butterfly

Ships Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    2,797

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Madame Butterfly

  2. Posted · Edited by Madame Butterfly

    My advice to you is to stop being available and making all the plans.

     

    Let them chase you, make them drive to see you, don't always be available on msn. Have a life outside of the "boys".

     

    And if they don't, than they weren't good enough for you anyway.

     

    Treat yourself with respect, act in a manner that commands respect, and they'll give it.

     

    As for the breaking up, yeah, dump him.

     

    Let him know why.

     

    You don't have to be angry, or mean while doing it, but he does need to know the truth.

     

    You may not be able to be friends, but in the end, you were the one that was treated poorly, and you stood up for yourself and your dignity but cutting this guy loose who was treating you poorly.

     

    You know you can hold your head high about it.

  9. Posted

    Can we at least misplace Data's stupid dancing avitar thing?  :blink:

     

    Who the heck is that guy anyway?

    353339[/snapback]

     

    I've been dying to say that question for ages :P :eek:

    353355[/snapback]

     

     

    It's from a movie called Napolean Dynamite.

     

    It's so "hip" that Bill Gates is using that weird dude now. :lol:

  10. Posted

    Updated: 12:10 PM EDT

    Decades of Heightened Hurricane Activity Predicted

    By JOHN J. LUMPKIN, AP

     

    WASHINGTON (Sept. 21) - Expect more hurricanes large and small in the next 10 to 20 years, the director of the federal National Hurricane Center said Tuesday.

     

    Max Mayfield told a congressional panel that he believes the Atlantic Ocean is in a cycle of increased hurricane activity that parallels an increase that started in the 1940s and ended in the 1960s.

     

    The ensuing lull lasted until 1995, then "it's like somebody threw a switch,'' Mayfield said. The number and power of hurricanes increased dramatically.

     

    Under questioning by members of the Senate Commerce subcommittee on disaster prevention and prediction, he shrugged off the notion that global warming played a role, saying instead it was a natural cycle in the Atlantic Ocean that fluctuates every 25 to 40 years.

     

    Mayfield predicted several more named tropical storms this year. The latest, Hurricane Rita, is the 17th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June through November. Since record-keeping started in 1851, the record is 21 tropical storms, in 1933.

     

    Mayfield also listed a number of cities and regions in addition to New Orleans he believes are "especially vulnerable'' to damage from a major hurricane: Houston and Galveston, Texas; Tampa; southern Florida and the Florida Keys; New York City and Long Island; and New England.

     

    "Katrina will not be the last major hurricane to hit a vulnerable area,'' he said.

     

    The center's predictions on Katrina's movements were more accurate than usual, but the storm grew more intense more quickly than expected as it moved through the Gulf of Mexico, he said. Three days before it made landfall on Aug. 29, computer models predicted it would hit near New Orleans.

     

    Asked to assess the nation's ability to track hurricanes, one expert before the panel said forecasters have grown better at predicting the path of a storm over a few days but lag in their ability to gauge its intensity, rainfall distribution and surge in water levels.

     

    Better sensors, computers and computer models of hurricane behavior can lead to improved forecasts, said Keith Blackwell of the Coast Weather Research Center at the University of South Alabama.

     

    Senators praised the National Hurricane Center's accurate prediction of Katrina's track, calling it one of the few things the government has done correctly in regards to the storm.

     

    "The people that did get out from the storm owe their lives to you and your people,'' said Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.

     

     

    09/21/05 01:02 EDT

  13. Posted

    Titan's long-sought sea revealed by radar

    10:39 17 September 2005

    NewScientist.com news service

    David L Chandler

     

     

     

     

    The first sea discovered on any surface other than Earth's may have been found on Saturn’s moon Titan.

     

    New radar images from the Cassini spacecraft, which made its eighth close approach to the moon on 7 September, have revealed what appears to be a very distinct shoreline, fed by meandering channels carved deeply in the surrounding terrain.

     

    The dark, flat region next to the bright shoreline "is the area where liquid or a wet surface has most likely been present, now or in the recent past", says Steve Wall, Cassini radar team deputy leader from NASA-JPL.

     

    And several long sinuous channels can be seen cutting through the bright region and ending at the shoreline, suggesting the existence of an Earth-like cycle of evaporation, rainfall and river systems to carry the liquid back to the sea. But instead of water, the liquid in this case is believed to be methane, kept liquid at Titan's -179°C surface temperature.

     

    Thick atmosphere

    Seas of liquid methane, perhaps mixed with other hydrocarbons, had long been expected on Titan, the second-largest moon in the solar system. It is also the only moon with a thick atmosphere - thicker than Earth's.

     

    Seas seemed necessary to explain the amount of methane seen in Titan's atmosphere. The fact that no clear evidence for such seas had been found was one of the big mysteries of the Cassini mission.

     

    "We've been looking for evidence of oceans or seas on Titan for some time," Wall says. The quest was one of the main goals of the four-year Cassini mission. The discovery of the new features suggests Titan may indeed have periodic episodes of methane rainfall.

     

    Ellen Stofan, another radar team scientist, says the network of bright channels indicate "that fluids, probably liquid hydrocarbons, have flowed across this region".

     

    Some of the channels extend more than 100 kilometres, says Larry Soderblom of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona. The channels appear to be of two different types, some long and deep with few tributaries, others forming denser networks. "Some of them may have been fed by springs, while others are more complicated networks that were likely filled by rainfall," Soderblom said.

     

    Earth analogue

    Titan’s abundance of hydrocarbons, thick atmosphere, and now evidence for the presence of large volumes of liquid, means it is considered a close analogue of the early Earth.

     

    It may even host some of the early complex chemistry that on Earth led to the first living organisms, but whose traces have long been obliterated here. Cassini project scientist Dennis Matson has called Titan a "time machine" for studying how the early Earth "evolved into a life-bearing planet".

     

    But exploring the new-found sea further will be tricky. Two coincidental glitches caused half of the data from the radar flyby to be lost. One glitch affected the spacecraft's data recording system, the other the receiving antenna in Goldstone, California, US.

     

    Even worse, the region will not fall within the radar's view on any of Cassini’s 37 remaining Titan approaches. However, all the data from Cassini's cameras and spectroscopes was saved and may reveal more details of the features.

     

    Cassini's next close flyby of Titan will take place on 26 October and will focus on the region where the Huygens landing probe hurtled down to Titan's surface in December 2004.

  14. Posted

    A Congress, Buried in Turkey's Sand

     

     

    By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

    Published: September 19, 2005

    PATARA, Turkey - Alexander the Great was here, and so was Saint Paul, on his way to Ephesus.

     

    Centuries later, the drafters of the American Constitution took the ancient Lycian League, which was based here, as an early example - in fact, it was history's earliest example - of the form of republican government they envisaged as well.

     

     

    The Lycian League was mentioned twice in the Federalist Papers, once by Alexander Hamilton, once by James Madison, so it could safely be said that it entered into the history of the formation of the United States.

     

    Now, after literally centuries of neglect, teams of Turkish and German archaeologists have been working under the hot sun of this small Mediterranean seacoast town, uncovering some of its treasures.

     

    Among them, liberated from the many hundreds of truckloads of sand that covered it, is the actual parliament building where the elected representatives of the Lycian League met. It has rows of stone seats arranged in a semicircle, like the chambers of the American Congress. Its stone-vaulted main entrances are intact, and so is the thronelike perch where the elected Lyciarch, the effective president of the League, sat.

     

    The discovery has excited the archaeologists, and some others as well.

     

    "It blew my mind to find out that the parliament building of the first federation in history, which served as an inspiration for the framers our own Constitution, was being excavated 15 minutes from my house on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey," said Stephen J. Solarz, the former congressman from Brooklyn.

     

    Like a few hundred other foreigners who are attracted to this relatively undiscovered spot of turquoise waters, rocky coves and cerulean skies, Mr. Solarz and his wife, Nina, built a house in town nearby and spend a couple of months of the year there. They have become informal patrons of the archaeological project, and hope to persuade the United States Congress to sponsor a celebration here in 2007, the 220th anniversary of the framing of the American Constitution.

     

    But other things make Patara important besides the inadvertent role it played in the creation of the United States. It is often said of Turkey that it has more Greek ruins than Greece. But Patara is a Greek ruin, a Roman one and a Byzantine one as well, which is what makes the site, buried in sand for centuries, an important newcomer to the Turkish archaeological scene, likely to take its place alongside Troy, Pergamon or Ephesus as one of the most important ones.

     

    "It's very exciting," said Fahri Isik, a professor of archaeology from Akdeniz University in Antalya who is in charge of the dig. In fact, Mr. Isik is hopeful that further excavations will not only increase knowledge of the Lycian League but also help illuminate what are often referred to as the "dark ages," of early Mediterranean history, the 12th to the 8th centuries B.C., about which very little is known.

     

    "It's nice to have beautiful buildings," he said, drinking mint tea a few hundred yards from the ancient Patara parliament, "but we hope that we'll be able to learn some new things as well."

     

    Mentioned in the "Iliad," Patara was a port city that was used by the Persians in the fifth century B.C. during the Persian Wars, written about by Thucydides. One of the archaeological expedition's major findings so far is the impressive ruins of an ancient lighthouse, which guided ships crossing the wine-dark sea to its harbor two millennia ago.

     

    The Lycian League itself had some 23 known city-states as members, which sent one, two or three representatives, depending on the city's size, to the newly uncovered parliament, or Bouleuterion, as it was called. Inscriptions uncovered at the site provide the names of the various Lyciarchs who sat in special seats about midway up the semicircular chamber.

     

    Later, it was a province in the Roman Empire. An inscription uncovered by archaeologists at the ruins of an immense granary, which has also been dug out of the sand in recent times, indicates that the Emperor Hadrian and his wife, Sabine, visited Patara in the spring of 131 A.D. It ceased being a federation in the fourth century A.D., when it was taken over by the Byzantines.

     

    "The whole of international life was here, both in the Roman times and in the time of the Lycian Federation," said Joachim Ganzert, a professor of Architecture History from Hanover University who, with a team of German students, worked all summer in Patara.

     

    "It will have a similar importance to Ephesus and Pergamon, but the work here has only been going on for 15 years," he said. "In Pergamon, they recently celebrated the 110th anniversary of the start of the excavation."

     

    Though Patara has been visited by archaeologists for 200 or more years, a serious, painstaking excavation of the site started only recently, partly because it is an especially difficult place, afflicted with shifting sands, vegetation that runs riot in the fall rainy season and water that seeps in from the nearby Mediterranean. Money is also needed, most urgently to preserve the many stone inscriptions that, no longer buried by sand, face the danger of erosion.

     

    But now trucks go to and from Patara, carrying sand away - 5,000 truckloads from the lighthouse alone - and cranes lift immense carved stone blocks out of the ruins so they can be labeled, studied and eventually put back into place in reconstructions of the ancient buildings.

     

    "You couldn't see anything here in the 1980's, only the tops of a few stones," Gül Isin, an archaeologist from Akdeniz University who serves as a sort of aide-de-camp to Mr. Isik. The town itself, with just a few modest guesthouses, is largely isolated from the package-tour hustle-bustle of the nearby Turkish coast, even though it is home to a pristine white-sand beach, itself a protected nesting ground for sea turtles.

     

    "But we've made a lot of progress," Ms. Isin said. An impressive necropolis, a Roman bath, a large semicircular theater, a broad main avenue leading to the agora, or market square, a Byzantine basilica (one of 22 churches that were once in Patara) and a fortified wall have been largely rescued from the sand and scrub brush so far.

     

    Of course, there is also the parliament building, linking this dusty place to the United States, 7,000 miles and 1,800 years into the future.

  18. Posted

    I know men who read fan fiction, I know men who write fan fiction.

     

    I think it depends on what type of book series you are talking about, because I think men write fan fiction more about Star Trek, than they would about Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings.

     

    I"ve read some fan fiction, LOTR based.

     

    You have to be very careful when you read because alot of it is just Mary Sue stories. Which basically means the authors are writing themselves into the story. All the first chapters I read that had the author joining the Fellowship were dumped. :lol: Meaning I could see the writing on the wall and there was nothing original about it.

     

    I'd say I found a handful that were worthwhile. I followed one story for two years because the author was so spectacular and could easily make a living writing her own original stories.

     

    There are a ton of them out there that are poorly written, but you have to give them credit, because at least they tried and took the bad reviews that came their way.

     

    As for slash, I don't think it's homosexual's reading it. I know a number of so called "straight" people that love it, and lesbians seem to like it too. Just like fantasy, sci fi, and romance, it's a different category, just one that's not typically the norm. You aren't going to find a section at the book store called "slash".

     

     

    Advice would be to get original with your story idea. make it multilayered. Don't make yourself the main character, and stay true to your idea. Don't add your friends as characters, and don't make a book written in good thought and language turn into Valley or Chav speak.

  22. Posted

    I didn't even see him perform. :yawn:

     

    I did see Trump in his overalls, singing off key. :hug:

     

    AOL is showing a clip of Shatner backstage going on and on about how sexy Candice Bergen is and wondering how she is.......:dude:

     

    He doesn't come right out and say it, but the implication is very strong. :) :nono:

  23. Posted

    Just finished ripping all of the crappy Norton security programs out of my PC and replacing them with MacAfee products.

     

    I'm through with Norton.

    Their too expensive, it's too hard to contact a tech with problems, and on my PC, Norton's products failed to deal with trojans,viruses,and other problems to my satisfaction.

     

    :nono:

    352838[/snapback]

     

     

    I find McAfee to be superior.

     

    My software detected a worm on an Australian site I used to post on, before the site managers did. By two days.

     

    It destroyed the site several times before they gave up.