Creekside Chatter

We technology lovers are often faced with power outlet conundrums that kill our productivity, if not break our geeky hearts.

Rejoice, oh gadget junkies, for the power outlet of the future has come, hailing from True Power. It costs just under 10 bucks, and starts shipping in early 2010 (which is just a few short weeks away) — but you can pre-order now. So what makes this outlet so much greater than all the rest? Simple: two USB ports.

Now you can plug in USB-powered devices — think iPhones, iPods, PDAs and digital cameras — alongside your standard UCS powered devices. As Gizmodo puts it, the USB power outlet is a “no-brainer.”

See how much you know about the American Revolution by answering the following questions.

I got an 80.

The Netherlands is afire today over a Dutch study concluding Mount Kilimanjaro's snow melt — used as a symbol of AGW by Al Gore — is entirely natural.

Newspapers and news sites in the Netherlands today extensively broke the news of the findings of a research team led by Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damste — a leading molecular paleontologist at Utrecht University and winner of the prestigious Spinoza Prize — about the melting icecap of the Kilimanjaro, the African mountain that became a symbol of anthropogenic global warming.

Professor Sinninghe Damste’s research, as discussed on the site of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (DOSR) — a governmental body — shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was not the result of cold air but of large amounts of precipitation which fell at the beginning of the Holocene period, about 11,000 years ago.

The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The present melting is not the result of “environmental damage caused by man.”

Hosted by the St. Augustine Yacht Club, the 29th annual event will feature a nighttime parade of sailboats, trawlers, fishing boats and recreational boats aglitter with brilliant lighted displays ranging from patriotic to whimsical. Boat owners will try to out-dazzle the competition in a spirited contest featuring prizes in a variety of categories featuring boats from 15 to 85 feet in length.

The Regatta of Lights gets underway at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, December 12th, as the boats enter Matanzas Bay, pass the Castillo de San Marcos and sail single file for the Bridge of Lions.

The regatta will then circle the bay to allow spectators and regatta judges to appreciate the illuminated ingenuity of each contestant.

Looking for a great holiday desktop, or just some inspiration to create your own? Check out these freebies at DesignerDigitals.

Along with a hoard of emails, some source code for the computer climate models was also hacked and released to the public — and the source code is an unusable mess. It doesn’t take expertise in climatology to look at source code and determine that the code is garbage. There are many more geeks with software expertise than with climate expertise, and the geek community will go through every line of code and likely conclude that the computer models are so flawed that any conclusions drawn on them are without merit.

Despite the liberal tendencies of many geeks, I believe that the source code evidence will be insurmountable for most. Some will continue to cling to AGW because of a devotion to left-wing politics, but the majority ofgeeks will abandon their belief, and that abandonment by geeks will truly spell the end for AGW.

Still little mention of Climategate in the big media.

No matter what our climate czar may insist, climate science and Copenhagen are now under a giant cloud. In fact, as Hume implies, the situation is far more serious than that, because what has been revealed is what strange bedfellows science and politics are in this era. The relationship between politicians and scientists today is not entirely unlike the relationship between scientists and the clergy during the days of Galileo. And the politicians of today know about as much about the science as the bishops of Galileo’s time did, although our politicians are perfectly willing to exploit the science of which they are ignorant and the scientists too often perfectly willing to be complicit in their own exploitation

But in an era when we no longer think the world is flat, it’s time to have open, transparent science. It’s an absolute necessity if we are to have any confidence at all in the results – and in how we are spending the gigantic sums our leaders seem to demand of us.

Historic City News received a great holiday idea from John Reardon of St. Augustine.

When doing your Christmas cards this year, take one and send it to this address:

A Recovering American Soldier
c/o Walter Reed Army Medical Center
6900 Georgia Ave NW;
Washington, D.C. 20307

If all Historic City News readers would follow through on John’s idea, think how many cards these wonderful, special people would get.

Forget cranberry sauce, Plymouth Rock, and pilgrims. Think olives, garbanzo beans, and Spanish soldiers and sailors. The first Thanksgiving in our country took place in September 1565, when famed Spanish mariner Pedro Menéndez de Avilés along with 800 Spanish settlers celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving to commemorate the successful sea voyage and founding of the town of St. Augustine, which would go on to be the first and longest-lasting port within the present-day United States. As is often the norm, our country's history books and school rooms tend to forget our Spanish colonial roots, and we have ended up celebrating as our national holiday the Thanksgiving of the pilgrims which occurred some 56 years after St. Augustine's first Thanksgiving.