Absolutely Awesome - Check it out!

October 3, 2013.  Joe Lizura Blog update.  A very good friend of mine shared this on linkedin today and I wanted to pass it on . . although it's an ad from Intel, the story is really, really cool.  Here is the link:  http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/most-uplifting-ad-youll-see-today-about-15-year-olds-incredible-cancer-research-152827

It's being called the most uplifting ad you'll see - they also should have called it the most inspirational ad as well.  Here is a little bit of the back-story:

Jack Andraka, barely a teenager, decided to develop an early-detection test for pancreatic cancer after his uncle died from the disease. He asked 200 researchers and other experts for help. Only one, a doctor of oncology at Johns Hopkins, provided him with lab space to use after school. At age 15, Andraka succeeded in developing a test that is 168 times faster, 400 times more sensitive, and 26,000 times less expensive than the medical standard.

Intel tells Andraka's story in the ad below. What does a computer-chip manufacturer have to do with his invention? Not much, but Intel is the headlining sponsor—and has been since 1997—of the International Science and Engineering Fair, which gave Andraka its $75,000 grand prize for his work.

The spot, from Venables Bell & Partners (and director Britton Caillouette of Farm League, himself a bone-cancer survivor), is a little self-congratulatory on Intel's part. But it's clever, too. The ad, which proceeds in reverse chronology, might make you feel the same sort of skepticism about Andraka that his idea met—but then you'll feel like a fool when you realize how quite amazing his accomplishment is.

Joe Lizura
www.Joelizura.com

The passing of Tom Clancy

October 2, 2013.  It was very sad to learn today about the passing of Tom Clancy one of our time's best writers, who wrote with such great skill and detail that it made him a natural to have his novels turned into films watched by tens of millions of people all around the world.

Here is a little bit about him and his work from the Associated Press.

NEW YORK (AP) — Tom Clancy, whose high-tech, Cold War thrillers such as "The Hunt for Red October" and "Patriot Games" made him the most widely read and influential military novelist of his time, has died. He was 66.
Penguin Group (USA) announced that Clancy had died Tuesday in Baltimore. The publisher did not provide a cause of death.
Tall and thin, with round, sunken eyes that were often hidden by sunglasses, Clancy had said his dream had been simply to publish a book, hopefully a good one, so that he would be in the Library of Congress catalog. His dreams were answered many times over.
His novels were dependable best sellers, with his publisher estimating that worldwide sales top 100 million copies. Several, including "The Hunt for Red October," ''Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger," were later made into blockbuster movies, with another based on his desk-jockey CIA hero, "Jack Ryan," set for release on Christmas. Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck and Harrison Ford were among the actors who played Ryan on screen. The upcoming movie stars Chris Pine, Keira Knightly and Kevin Costner, with Kenneth Branagh directing.

 A political conservative who once referred to Ronald Reagan as "my president," Clancy broke through commercially during a tense period of the Cold War, and with the help of Reagan himself. In 1982, he began working on "The Hunt For Red October," basing it on a real incident in November 1975 with a Soviet missile frigate called the Storozhevoy. He sold the manuscript to the first publisher he tried, the Naval Institute Press, which had never bought original fiction.
In real life, the ship didn't defect, but in Clancy's book, published in 1984, the defection was a success. Someone thought enough of the book to give it to President Reagan as a Christmas gift. The president quipped at a dinner that he was losing sleep because he couldn't put the book down — a statement Clancy later said helped put him on the New York Times best-seller list.
Clancy was admired in the military community, and appeared — though he often denied it — to have the kind of access that enabled him to intricately describe anything from surveillance to the operations of a submarine. He often played off — and sometimes anticipated — world events, as in the pre-9/11 paranoid thriller "Debt of Honor," in which a jumbo jet destroys the U.S. Capitol during a joint meeting of Congress.
Earning million-dollar advances for his novels, he also wrote nonfiction works on the military and even ventured into video games, including the best-selling "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier," ''Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction" and "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent." His recent Jack Ryan novels were collaborations with Mark Greaney, including "Threat Vector" and a release scheduled for December, "Command Authority."
As of midday Wednesday, "Command Authority" ranked No. 40 on Amazon.com's best seller list.
Born in Baltimore on April 12, 1947 to a mailman and his wife, Clancy entered Loyola College as a physics major, but switched to English as a sophomore. He later said that he wasn't smart enough for the rigors of science, although he clearly mastered it well enough in his fiction.
Clancy stayed close to home. He resided in rural Calvert County, Md., and in 1993 he joined a group of investors led by Baltimore attorney Peter Angelos who bought the Baltimore Orioles from businessman Eli Jacobs. Clancy also attempted to bring a NFL team to Baltimore in 1993, but he later dropped out.

Tom Clancy will definitely be missed.  RIP.

Joe Lizura
www.joelizura.com
www.twitter.com/joelizura

The Strange Reality of Climate Change

Joe Lizura's Blog on October 1, 2013.  I saw a story today, and you'll see the link to it below, and it struck me a little more than most climate change stories I run across on a weekly basis.  For those


Joe Lizura in San Diego

who may know, as an actual Meteorologist, I tend to look at global climate change with a little more of a scientific viewpoint and a little less of an emotional viewpoint.   So to that end, let me just say that global climate change is definitely going on -- but then again it always has been.  Take for example the very ground I walk on every day in San Diego it's covered with Rocks -- round smooth rocks and when you get into the inland valleys, those smooth round rocks (about the size of a softballs) grow larger and larger until they are the size of small bolders and then larger and larger until they are big bolders.  the odd part about the boulders and the rocks is that they are smooth, very much like the kind that you would find at the bottom of a river.  So the question begs: How did about a million round river rocks wind up in San Diego?  Is it from the ocean from way back when this part of the continent was under water?  Nope -- true, it's where the sand came from and the shells that you can dig up in the inland valleys, but that's not where the rocks and boulders came from.  So where then?  The answer is a little surprising, it's from the end of the last Ice Age as this very southwestern part of the land mass is the farthest extreme expansion of the ice.  The rocks and boulders left everywhere are actually rocks and boulders that the ice sheets pushed for a thousand miles, making them smoother and smoother as they slowly got pushed and tumbled and pushed again by the moving ice sheets, until nature smoothed them out like they were forever in a river (which I guess a river of ice would qualify). 

So what's the point?  Just that climate change is ALWAYS going on, and in the scheme of hundreds of millions of years, our mankind is just a blip of a factor in creating or perhaps enhancing a climate change that has most likely been going on for ten thousand years.

That's why you'll never hear me argue that there isn't global climate change, because there is - there always has been - places like the Sahara Desert were once lush landscapes of vegetation and life but are now endless miles of nearly lifeless sand - not because ancient man did anything, but because it was a much longer scale climate change that mankind just happens to have found itself in the middle of. 

That doesn't mean that we aren't making it worse, or making it happen faster, because we are, we definitely are exasperating the problem and rather than waiting ten thousand years to feel the effects, we are likely to feel the effects in 50 years - that's pretty amazing.  So is this story below about what is happening in Alaska - check this out.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — An estimated 10,000 walrus unable to find sea ice over shallow Arctic Ocean water have come ashore on Alaska's northwest coast.
Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Friday photographed walrus packed onto a beach on a barrier island near Point Lay, an Inupiat Eskimo village 300 miles southwest of Barrow and 700 miles northwest of Anchorage.

 

The walrus have been coming to shore since mid-September. The large herd was spotted during NOAA's annual arctic marine mammal aerial survey, an effort conducted with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency that conducts offshore lease sales.

An estimated 2,000 to 4,000 walrus were photographed at the site Sept. 12. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that manages walrus, immediately took steps to prevent a stampede among the animals packed shoulder to shoulder on the rocky coastline. The agency works with villages to keep people and airplanes a safe distance from herds.

Young animals are especially vulnerable to stampedes triggered by a polar bear, a human hunter or a low-flying airplane. The carcasses of more than 130 mostly young walruses were counted after a stampede in September 2009 at Alaska's Icy Cape.

The gathering of walrus on shore is a phenomenon that has accompanied the loss of summer sea ice as the climate has warmed.
Pacific walrus spend winters in the Bering Sea. Females give birth on sea ice and use ice as a diving platform to reach snails, clams and worms on the shallow continental shelf.

As temperatures warm in summer, the edge of the sea ice recedes north. Females and their young ride the edge of the sea ice into the Chukchi Sea. However, in recent years, sea ice has receded north beyond continental shelf waters and into Arctic Ocean water 10,000 feet deep or more where walrus cannot dive to the bottom.

Walrus in large numbers were first spotted on the U.S. side of the Chukchi Sea in 2007. They returned in 2009, and in 2011, scientists estimated 30,000 walruses along one kilometer of beach near Point Lay.

Remnant ice kept walrus offshore in 2008 and again last year.
The goal of the marine mammals survey is to record the abundance of bowhead, gray, minke, fin and beluga whales plus other marine mammals in areas of potential oil and natural gas development, said NOAA Fisheries marine mammal scientist Megan Ferguson in an announcement.

"In addition to photographing the walrus haulout area, NOAA scientists documented more bowhead whales, including calves and feeding adults in the Beaufort Sea this summer compared to 2012," said Ferguson. "We are also seeing more gray whale calves in the Chukchi Sea than we have in recent years."

Environmental groups say the loss of sea ice due to climate warming is harming marine mammals and oil and gas development would add to their stress.


Well, as I said, global climate change goes on, with or without us, but with us it is going on at a rate that is unprecedented.  There's no doubt that we are going to see the changes in our lifetime - we already are, but I just don't think that we are going to like what we see.

Thanks for reading my blog!  Joe Lizura
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