Doc Ruby wrote: » There are two kinds of EMP discharges as I recall, one is solely from high altitude nuclear weapon bursts, thats the lad that fries all electronics, laptops, computers, anything plugged into the grid or attached to a short wire. The other one is the solar flare type EMP, which gives you the aurora borealis. The last time there was a major event like that was back in 1859: That would be quite serious these days, although property damage would be minimal, it would just knock out the substations. Major power losses but once they replaced the fried components everything would go basically back to normal, so anywhere between a couple of hours to a few months for the affected areas.
Grizzly 45 wrote: » BTW dont be too reliant on valve and non micro circutry either.Apprently in the 1950s at the Bikini atoll H bomb tests,there was trouble with radio comms and radar back up as far as Hawaii!
Grizzly 45 wrote: » Guess it will depend on where it hits and what it is.If it is a solar flare there proably isnt thart much we can do about it.If it is an EMP bomb it depends where and when.Say in the UK region it could possibly knock out Ireland as well.
E1 The E1 pulse is the very fast component of nuclear EMP. The E1 component is a very brief but intense electromagnetic field that can quickly induce very high voltages in electrical conductors. The E1 component causes most of its damage by causing electrical breakdown voltages to be exceeded. E1 is the component that can destroy computers and communications equipment and it changes too quickly for ordinary lightning protectors to provide effective protection against it. One (1) high level nuclear burst: E3 The E3 component is very different from the other two major components of nuclear EMP. The E3 component of the pulse is a very slow pulse, lasting tens to hundreds of seconds, that is caused by the nuclear detonation heaving the Earth's magnetic field out of the way, followed by the restoration of the magnetic field to its natural place. The E3 component has similarities to a geomagnetic storm caused by a very severe solar flare. Like a geomagnetic storm, E3 can produce geomagnetically induced currents in long electrical conductors, which can then damage components such as power line transformers. Because of the similarity between solar-induced geomagnetic storms and nuclear E3, it has become common to refer to solar-induced geomagnetic storms as "solar EMP." At ground level, however, "solar EMP" is not known to produce an E1 or E2 component. ... These 2 MeV gamma rays will normally produce an E1 pulse near ground level at moderately high latitudes that peaks at about 50,000 volts per metre. This is a peak power density of 6.6 megawatts per square metre. The process of the gamma rays knocking electrons out of the atoms in the mid-stratosphere causes this region of the atmosphere to become an electrical conductor due to ionization, a process which blocks the production of further electromagnetic signals and causes the field strength to saturate at about 50,000 volts per metre. The strength of the E1 pulse depends upon the number and intensity of the gamma rays produced by the weapon and upon the rapidity of the gamma ray burst from the weapon. The strength of the E1 pulse is also somewhat dependent upon the altitude of the detonation. There are reports of "super-EMP" nuclear weapons that are able to overcome the 50,000 volt per metre limit by the very nearly instantaneous release of a burst of gamma radiation of much higher energy levels than are known to be produced by second generation nuclear weapons. The reality and possible construction details of these weapons are classified, and therefore cannot be confirmed by scientists in the open scientific literature.
baords dyslexic wrote: » Take a look at Doc Ruby's map above and imagine the EMP attack a few hundred miles out from the east or west coast instead of the center. Is that a direct attack on the US? Just trying to point out that an EMP attack could initially be made to look like an accident and even if the government that got hit knew exactly who had done it would they tell the general public straight away?
Tabnabs wrote: » Parts of Italy are currently experiencing food shortages and inflated prices due to a massive truck strike.http://www.euronews.net/2012/01/25/food-shortages-as-italian-truck-strike-bites/
Grizzly 45 wrote: » Bad news if this hits somplace that makes micro chips like silicon valley or wherever
Three mushroom pickers lost six nights in the rugged forest of southwest Oregon with no food considered eating their dog, and used the screen on their dead cellphone and the blade of a sheath knife to flash a signal at the helicopter pilot who found them. Dan Conne said Sunday from his hospital bed in Gold Beach that he and his wife and son spent the nights huddled in a hollow log with nothing to eat, and considered sacrificing their pit bull, Jesse, for food. "She's that good a dog, she'd have done it, too," Conne said. A volunteer helicopter pilot looking outside the search area Saturday spotted Dan and Belinda Conne, both 47, along with 25-year-old Michael, on the edge of a deep ravine in tall timber. They were about 10 miles northeast of the town of Gold Beach, roughly 330 miles south-southwest of Portland. "The wife had the Blackberry and I had the knife," Dan Conne told The Associated Press. "I kept flashing. The wife said, 'You're blinding them.' But I wanted to make sure they seen us. I wasn't taking no chance." The three had given up hope and thought they were going to die when rescuers came. "None of us thought we were coming out of there," he said. While lost, the cold and hungry family could see search helicopters and airplanes flying low and slow overhead, but they couldn't get the pilots' attention through the thick, coastal forest vegetation. When they were found, the Connes were just five football fields from a road, and a mile from their Jeep. The three were airlifted to a Gold Beach hospital, where they stayed overnight. Dan Conne hurt his back, and Belinda Conne had hypothermia, said Curry County Sheriff John Bishop. All three were hungry, and enjoyed potato soup and sandwiches at the hospital. Belinda and Dan Conne were discharged Sunday. Their son, who suffered frostbite, hypothermia and a sprained ankle, remained in the hospital for more treatment. The family was spotted by Jackson County Commissioner John Rachor, spending his first day searching for them in his own helicopter with Curry County Sheriff's Lt. John Ward. Rachor had been up two hours and decided to go outside the search area, heading uphill from where the family parked their Jeep, instead of down. "We couldn't find anything in the obvious places, so we decide to go to the not-obvious places," he said. "I kind of think outside the box on these things sometimes, and it pays off." Rachor is the same pilot who found a San Francisco family lost in a snowstorm in 2006 just 35 miles from where he found the Connes. In 2006, Rachor flew Kati Kim and her two young daughters to safety after spotting them near their car. James Kim died of hypothermia trying to hike out for help. On Saturday, Rachor saw a movement on the edge of a deep ravine in tall timber. A man in tan bib overalls was waving his arms. Ward marked the spot on his GPS and called the Coast Guard for a helicopter to winch the family out. He also called a nearby ground team to give them immediate aid, then flew back to Gold Beach for fuel. "The searchers were with us within 20 minutes of the first copter that found us," Dan Conne said. "There must have been nine or 10 of them. They just kept coming out of that brush. It was just a real happy feeling, 'cause we knew we wasn't going to die out there." The Coast Guard lifted Michael and Dan Conne out first, then returned for Belinda. The dog walked out with searchers. Dan Conne said the three got lost Jan. 29 after going back for a second load of hedgehog and black trumpet mushrooms, which they sell to a local buyer. It was Belinda's day off from her motel maid job. They left their four Chihuahua dogs at the fifth-wheel trailer at the campground where they live, and drove to first one spot, then returned for peanut-butter sandwiches and went to a new spot they were not familiar with. In the heat of the afternoon, they left their jackets at the end of a gravel road. Their last meal was a peanut-butter sandwich each on Jan. 29. When they didn't come home the first night, the camp host alerted authorities. Searchers hit the ground last Monday. Wednesday, searchers found the Connes' Jeep. The Connes spent the first night in rain, sheltering under a pile of brush. The second day, they built a lean-to, but it fell down. Michael Conne hiked uphill to try to see where they were, but returned cold, wet and with no better idea where they were. Trying to find their way out downhill, they discovered a hollow log they could all squeeze into, and they stayed there, covering the opening with bark and hiking downhill to a creek to fill plastic bags with water. When it rained, they tried to plug the leaks with bits of wood. "It was pretty tight in there," Dan Conne said. They were never able to start a fire, having no matches or lighters. "Every other time we been out there, every one of us had lighters, except this time," Dan Conne said. "Rubbing sticks together? That don't work. Slamming rocks together? Only on TV. "There was a lot of debating, back and forth, whether to stay or go. Mikey couldn't walk. If we had to leave him, that wasn't an option. Belinda was down. I could barely walk. We just didn't know which way to go."
bonniebede wrote: » Yep, it is amazing how quickly a situation can go from bad to worse. A friend of mine told me how a number of her school friends died walking in Wicklow when she was young. Sad to think how a couple of ounces of equipment in a small tin could be the difference between life and death.
baords dyslexic wrote: » Was just outside using a LED torch to shut our chickens in and got thinking how good LEDs were and how much better than filiment bulbs when it struck me that they might be f$$$ all use after an EMP attack. OK so I'll hang onto those old everyready power beams after all
Doc Ruby wrote: » I'm also not convinced that old style lightbulbs would fare any better. In 1962 the United States detonated a 1.4 Megaton nuclear device in the upper atmosphere 250 miles above the earth's surface in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about 900 miles from Hawaii. The EMP effects damaged about 300 street lights, and since this was the sixties, LEDs weren't in use.
Health authorities have admitted to overreacting to a health scare at Auckland Airport but say it's better to be safe than sorry. They swung into action after it was suspected dozens of Japanese students who had just landed had contracted the flu. While ambulance staff were ready for the worst, the students at the centre of the scare came through the arrival gates, wondering what all the fuss was about. Their flight, NZ90 from Tokyo, was halted on the tarmac just after 9am this morning with 73 of the Japanese homestay students onboard suspected of carrying an unknown strain of influenza. One passenger on the flight, David Turner from Wellington, said there were air staff everywhere, all wearing masks, "just sort of shepherding us to different places". Passengers like Turner were left wondering why authorities took two hours to board the plane when they were told two hours before landing there was an issue. A woman passenger said it was "just confusion" and nobody knew what was happening. She said paramedics were uncoordinated in the way they were checking passengers' temperatures and pulses. "The left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. It was a disaster," the woman said. Turner said even the captain kept coming on the intercom telling people how sorry he was that he had no idea what the situation was and when they could get off the plane. Turner said ground staff panicked when he told them he had "a bit of a cold" and he was put in a room where the sick students were brought. "I said 'I'm perfectly healthy, I've got a cold, I'm not going to be exposed to these guys.'" Turner said the sick students were then whisked to another room, but the whole situation was "a bit of a shambles". The Auckland Regional Public Health Service says it took time to deal with the alert. "It does take time and I know that can be frustrating. But it's important to get it right," said Dr Julia Peters of the Auckland Regional Public Health Service. The health service says passengers who were sitting in seats away from the student group were disembarked first and then assessed for signs of illness, provided with general health advice, and cleared to leave the airport and continue their journeys. Passengers travelling in the student group, or in seats close to this group, were separately assessed and approximately 40 students were found to have a mild respiratory illness with symptoms of coughs or runny noses, it said. None of the unwell passengers showed signs of influenza or had a feverish illness, and none required hospital assessment. These passengers were cleared to leave the airport at 12.38pm today, were provided with health advice and able to complete their journeys in New Zealand, the health service said. The man running the homestay trip, Stuart Cundy of Let's Homestay, told ONE News he understands only a few of the students showed visible flu like symptoms, and from that another passenger raised the alarm. "The whole group was actually vaccined back in November, leading into the Japanese winter. There's no influenza, there's no flu, and that's the official word from the authorities," Cundy said. The diagnosis was that a few boys in the group had mild viral illnesses - little more than the common cold. "In hindsight we overreacted to this. But that's much better than underreacting," said Dr Richard Hoskins of the Auckland Regional Public Health Service. Four hours after landing, the largely healthy students left for Tauranga, after what was an eventful start to their 10-day New Zealand holiday.
"In hindsight we overreacted to this. But that's much better than underreacting," said Dr Richard Hoskins of the Auckland Regional Public Health Service.
bonniebede wrote: » if something really nasty does come along, we haven't a hope in hell of containing it. ANd I guess its not if but when.
A small town in northern Spain has decided to reintroduce the old Spanish currency - the peseta - alongside the euro to give the local economy a lift. Shopkeepers in Mugardos want anyone with forgotten stashes of the old cash at home to come and spend it. It is nine years since the peseta was official currency in Spain. But Spain's economic crisis has forced some to be inventive. The hard times have seen thousands of businesses close and more than two million jobs go. Forgotten coins More than 60 shops in Mugardos, a small fishing town in Galicia on Spain's northern coast, are accepting the peseta again for all purchases, alongside the euro. It is an attempt to get cash registers ringing - and help lift the town out of a long and painful economic slump. Shopkeepers were sceptical at first, but they now say the scheme is a great success. People are travelling into Mugardos from outside just to spend the old currency they never got round to converting. One man visited the local hardware store this week with a 10,000-peseta note he had found at home, and had no idea what to do with. He is now the happy owner of a sandwich toaster. The euro was introduced here in January 2002. Spaniards then had another three months to exchange their old currency at any bank. That cash can still be converted today, but only at the Bank of Spain itself, and it says a staggering 1.7bn euros ($2.4bn) of cash is still unaccounted for - stashed, perhaps, then forgotten; piles of coins that slipped down the backs of sofas; or even big notes kept by collectors. That is the reserve the shopkeepers of Mugardos are hoping to tap and give a desperately needed boost to business. Still, the Bank of Spain estimates that almost half the country's millions of missing pesetas will never be recovered - despite their value. It believes many left the country long ago, in the purses and pockets of tourists.
Italy turns back culinary clock to ride out recession Italians facing a long, hard winter with less cash to spend in the supermarket owing to the economic crisis are being encouraged to rediscover the cheap, traditional recipes of their ancestors. Soups made with old bread and even pig's lungs are unlikely to appear on the menu of Michelin-starred Italian restaurants in London, New York or even Rome, but they are being touted as the nation's real cooking, made at a fraction of the price of many modern dishes. "Old recipes are a richness that Italy boasts, that were perfected during periods of poverty and are a way to come through the crisis eating well," said Carlo Petrini, the head of the slow food movement, which campaigns for traditional, sustainable foods. Petrini said the secret of Italy's low cost, old-style cuisine was the use of leftovers, from Tuscany's ribollita vegetable soup, made with stale bread, to le virtù – the virtues – a soup made in the town of Teramo with every winter vegetable left in the cupboard. "Nothing got wasted and the name of the soup is no coincidence. Young women once had to know how to make it before they got married," said Petrini. "Today food is a commodity. It needs its value back and to achieve that you cannot throw it away. Thanks to the crisis the young are rediscovering this and luckily their parents and grandparents are still around to teach them." In a roundup of nearly forgotten dishes, La Repubblica listed sbira soup, a Genoese speciality made with tripe, mushrooms, lard, bread, pine nuts and meat sauce that was favoured by policemen and prison guards and served as the traditional last meal to prisoners sentenced to death. Any talk of cutting out waste in Italian cooking inevitably revolves around making better use of the lesser known parts of animals including offal, which was a peasant staple for centuries, notably in Rome where prime cuts were reserved for the rich, leaving tripe as the city's signature dish. Arneo Nizzoli, 76, who runs a renowned restaurant in northern Italy near Mantua, said busloads of cookery students were now showing up to eat his maialata meals, where he uses as much of the pig as possible, from pig's lung soup to cotechino – a type of sausage – made with tongue, to pig's lard set with garlic, parsley and onion and spread over browned slices of polenta. "In this cold weather the TV is telling people to eat vegetables and fruit to resist. What is that about? What about lard?" he said. Pig's noses, cheek and feet, which all find use in Nizzoli's kitchen, cost half a euro a kilo, compared with over €20 for cured pig's ham or prosciutto. "Sometimes I feel like a culinary archaeologist, but doing it my way means spending less and raising fewer pigs," he said. "These dishes take hours to cook, but if people are out of work they may have that time." Nizzoli said children raised on plain plates of pasta with parmesan cheese were agog at his meals, particularly his risotto made with salami, although his son Dario admitted that sometimes diners were told they had eaten lung soup only after they had finished. Horsemeat was once fed to children as a key source of iron by Italian mothers but young customers were now reluctant to try his horse stew, which is slow cooked for hours, said Nizzoli. "Horses were traditionally eaten here when they died but kids today just aren't interested," he said. Recipes from Il Ristorante NizzoliHorse stew Three kg horse shoulder, two carrots, two onions, two celery stalks, four garlic segments, two spoonfuls of tomato paste, red wine, salt and pepper. Bind the meat with string or a roasting net, roll it in white flour and seal in oil until it browns. Finely chop and saute the vegetables in a separate pan, then add the meat, red wine, salt and pepper and cook for about three hours, adding water or stock when the liquid reduces. Blend the liquid and the vegetables, serve with the sliced meat and polenta or potato puree. Lung soup One pig's lung, a complete celery, one onion, grated Grana cheese, butter, oil, salt, pepper, 'Grattoni' type small pasta. Saute the onion with oil and butter, add the celery cut in large pieces with water, salt and pepper and some stock if wanted. Cook for half an hour. Separately wash then boil the lung in slightly salted water, mince when cooked and add to the vegetables. Add the pasta, cook and serve with a touch of grated cheese.
krissovo wrote: » ^^^^^^^ Anyone from Cork should know of the tasty dish "Skirts and Kidney". We have it at least once a month, last time I tried to buy the skirts I had to order it in and reserve as its getting popular again.
Two studies showing how scientists mutated the H5N1 bird flu virus into a form that could cause a deadly human pandemic will be published only after experts fully assess the risks, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday. Speaking after a high-level meeting of flu experts and U.S. security officials in Geneva, a WHO official said an deal had been reached in principle to keep details of the controversial work secret until deeper risk analyses could be carried out. HIGH FATALITY RATE The H5N1 virus, first detected in Hong Kong in 1997, is entrenched among poultry in many countries, mainly in Asia, but so far remains in a form that is hard for humans to catch. It is known to have infected nearly 600 people worldwide since 2003, killing half of them, a far higher death rate than the H1N1 swine flu which caused a flu pandemic in 2009/2010. Last year, two teams of scientists - one led by Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center and another led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin - said they had found that just a handful of mutations would allow H5N1 to spread like ordinary flu between mammals, and remain as deadly as it is now.
