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He sings, he strums, and he works at Best Buy. view!
www.youtube.com/bestbuy - Musician and Best Buy employee, Keith Parsons, rocks his Best Buy holiday campaign audition.
75 Comments
- rnelsonee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+33It currently costs $10,000 to send one pound of matter into space. America averages 4.5 lbs of trash every day per person. So it would cost $45,000 per person to send trash into space for one day, meaning it would cost over 1 quadrillion dollars to send America's trash for just one day into space.
(all figures are accurate - feel free to Google it) - TheBigBrother, on 10/12/2007, -4/+29Let's put all the garbage on a rocket and send it into space
- dotdan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+20Instead of sending bombs to other country, we can drop large amounts of trash on them.
- TheBigBrother, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Oh yeah, the non bloggified stuff:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-oceans-series,0,7842752.special - rzurad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Not to worry. By October 21st 2015, we will have Mr. Fusion, and he will...
Wait...what?...
[cue Doc Brown expression]You mean we're out of gas? - benhocking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12First hit on google:
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Trashing-Oceans-Plastic4nov02.htm
Quote:
"In Moore’s latest voyage to the garbage patch, he got a close-up view of what happens when life meets floating garbage. The Alguita’s crew found plastic trash bobbing in a thick line from horizon to horizon—everything from tiny particles to 5-inch-thick towing lines, Japanese traffic cones, and yellow quart bottles of American crankcase oil. “We followed the debris for more than a mile, and we never found the end of it,” Moore told U.S. News by satellite phone. The research team had stumbled across what oceanographers call a Langmuir cell, a wind-driven circulation pattern where two masses of water are pushed together, forcing some of the water to sink where they meet; anything that floats stays on the surface."
They've surveyed this area and taken numerous random samples. Estimated net weight of the plastic: 3 million tons. You won't find it on Google Earth because although there's a lot of plastic out there, it's density is not that high. 3 million tons divided by an area the size of Texas = 6x10^9 pounds / 7.48816612 × 10^12 square feet or 8 x 10^-4. I.e., there's about one thousandth of a pound of plastic per square foot. Of course, plastic is fairly light, so this gibes with the statement that they can see plastic everywhere they look - it's just not one big pile of plastic or anything. - pkkid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Did you even take time to watch the video and let them explain & 'show' you the evidence? It is pretty disturbing if you actually watch the videos.
Looking at the cover of a book does not mean you read it. - sweetnuts4sale, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15futurama style...
- lcarsdeveloper, on 10/22/2007, -0/+9Approximate coordinates for “Eastern Garbage Patch” (EGP)
Pers.com C. Moore, Agalita Marine Research Foundation
30º N to 42º N; 155 Wº to 135º W
It's just that Google Earth hasn't got an images of this area, that's why you can't see anything. - kingkilr, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Try google earth?
- Crass22, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9is there any non-heavily flash driven images. id like to see an aerial footage of this mass dump
- treelovinhippie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8They don't own satellites... yet.
- lordjafar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9DOUBT.
can someone slap this person - dustedbunny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Instead of taking that lame picture, why wasn't someone saving that poor turtle?
:( - cjdaniel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7When we get a space elevator, maybe. Right now it's much too costly by weight to send trash into space.
- flipside3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Now that's something I'd like to see on Google Earth!
- ninjagamer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I remember my 8th grade Civics teacher lecturing the class about the amount of trash the world produces is too much. Long story short someone suggested we send it to the sun. I don't think it would be that hard? Just design a high altitude plane uses a separating mechanism that shoots the waste containers into space via rockets?
Note I don't plan on working for NASA. - elastikos, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10God damn, mother nature doesn't need more reasons to spank us earthlings!
- otheruser, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Perhaps the size is correct, but the density exaggerated.
- lcarsdeveloper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I hadn't realised Google owned satellites, I was under the impression they just bought satellite images from other organisations and loaded them into their software, which is why some areas are high quality and some are low...
- Elephant789, on 10/12/2007, -7/+12I dought this. I can't find it on google earth. Almost twice the size of texas?
- SPLASTiK, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11Reminds me... I watched the Penn and Teller *****! episodes yesterday on Recycling and one on Environmental Activists and Hysteria. Interesting stuff...
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=7734998370503499886&q=penn+teller+recycling
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-4480559399263937213&q=penn+teller+environment - wacki, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9"Penn and Teller *****! "
Man, that show was full of crap. They put the "tobacco doesn't cause cancer" lawyers from the heartland institute and "CO2 it's not pollution, it life" lawyers from CEI and CATO vs freshman hippies. I mean come on that's not even a fair match. Maybe they should make those same lawyers debate the guys at NASA, NOAA, WHOI, etc. Those lawyers would get slaughtered. As for the "global cooling" stuff the CATO guy talked about, well.... it's a lie.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
And that guy from CATO has been informed of this. - treelovinhippie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Dude... a ***** load of biodiversity, evolution and all sorts of other stuff can change in "65 million years" (or even 100 years).
Long term is: if we keep ***** up the Earth, we're ***** too.
Sure even if we manage to pollute Earth to a point where it's basically impossible to live here, give it a couple of million years and new species of plants and animals will popup... just means the human race has to either adapt to live in a ***** hole or develop the technology to move an entire species to a new habitable planet. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Assuming we find a solution to our energy crisis, we can convert trash into plasma and problem solved. They already do this on a small scale but it needs lots of energy.
- pauljaroszewski, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I was under the impression that land fills make up a teeny-tiny percentage of available land in North America...wtf?
- benhocking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It's from both sides of the Pacific. You can tell which side of the Pacific it's from by its decay. Plastic from our side takes longer to get to the gyre, so it's more broken down into plastic strands. Plastic from the Asian side is more intact. (It doesn't degrade into normal chemicals, however. It just degrades into stringier plastic.)
- benhocking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4According to the articles I've read, the areal density of the plastic is between 0.0005 and 0.001 pounds per square feet (for total mass of about 3 million tons). Even if Google Earth had excellent resolution in this area, I suspect you still wouldn't be able to see it.
- themarq, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4New Jersey is bigger than Texas now?
- benhocking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If by density being exaggerated, you mean the picture in the linked article exaggerates the density, I agree. Here's a web-site with more information:
http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Moore-Trashed-PacificNov03.htm
Here's a quote from that website:
"I did a quick calculation, estimating the debris at half a pound for every hundred square meters of sea surface. Multiplied by the circular area defined by our roughly thousand-mile course through the gyre, the weight of the debris was about 3 million tons, comparable to a year's deposition at Puente Hills, Los Angeles's largest landfill. I resolved to return someday to test my alarming estimate."
Here's another set of calculations (that I just did):
100 square meters is about 1000 square feet (1076.39104, but 100 was an estimate anyway)
0.5 pounds / 1000 square feet = 0.0005 pounds per square foot.
Note: This disagrees slightly with my previous estimate of about 0.0008 pounds per square feet, but I was using "size of Texas" as my area for that one.
Now, 0.0005 pounds per square feet might seem mighty sparse, but over an area the size of Texas that's about 2 million tons of plastic! (Another article I read said 3 million tons of plastic, so I'm sure there's quite a margin of error here. Perhaps the "quick calculation" mentioned above was a little low.) - greenamp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Guys he wasn't serious. It was a Futurama reference.
- kurtu5, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Yeah *****, but where? Do their images resolve this part of the ocean or is it simply a cute picture of a dolphin with the text, "image data not availabe at this resolution"?
/You know! Its just ocean, who wants to look at it? -- Googel Exex, 2002 shareh holder meeting, Uranus City, Mars. - B0jangles, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I'm going to swim out and stick a flag in it!
- benhocking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3What do you mean it's not true? Do you mean that your gut tells you it's not true? This is very well documented!
- L0t3k, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'd be happy if they'd just skim it onto barges and landfill it... if only to get it out of the water.
- brad3378, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Although I see a photo of a deal whale, I'm mighty skeptical of the claim of this being the size of Texas. The article is quite vague, and I'd like to see more evidence before drawing a conclusion. Anybody have more info?
- szembek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Exactly. Completely worthless without pics. (other than a turtle caught in a net). The author did have this to say:
"Update: I wasn’t able to find a good picture of the Garbage Patch itself, instead falling back on the visual consequences to marine wildlife seen above. As for maps, Google Earth seems to focus on undersea geography instead of surface events." - Justice101, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Not to fear, Carbon Nanotubes will save us!
- idonthack, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Pics? Evidence?
- kurtu5, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3NIMBY!
- shosterman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Inaccurate...
"The largest dump in the world isn't outside New York or London."
New Jersey anyone? - emorphien, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2afaik they do make up a pretty tiny %
Doesn't make them any better as neighbors. - spoid_, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Last I heard, Larry and Sergey are fighting over the furnishings over the Google satellite. Larry wants a king size bed in his room. Ah, to be rich.
- Cruise4, on 03/04/2008, -0/+2Yeah... like prove its true first!
- bluerpk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I am not so sure it is a great idea even if if it were possible. If we take out enough mass from the Earth, which sure is possible if we send all our garbage into space, then the gravitational pull of the Earth would reduce. This would mean that we could start moving closer to the Sun. Even a small difference in the distance between the Earth and the Sun would be disastrous making the earth uninhabitable, like Venus.
- benhocking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Reducing the mass of the Earth (even by half, which isn't possible, of course) would have no measurable impact on our orbit around the sun (unless you're worried about the direction we fire the mass). If enough mass was lost, it would cause the Moon's orbit to get larger, but even for that to happen, we'd have to shoot an awful lot of mass into the depths of outer space.
- matyre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Man, This is seriously just ***** disgusting, We need to get our ***** acts together and do something about stuff like this.
- szembek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Good point!
- szembek, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Just an update.. the only google image search result is a picture of this douchebag!
http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGGL_enUS177&q=Eastern%20Garbage%20Patch&sa=N&tab=wi - Goldfishbutt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Google Earth does not seem to have much imagery in the Oceans. However, you can use the Google Earth layer "DG Coverage" (it's towards the bottom of the list under "Layers" on the left) to find high res imagery from Digtal Globe, a satellite imagery reseller that provides data to Google. This layer links to imagery that Google does not always seem to include (probably because it's too cloudy or in the middle of the ocean, etc.) in addition to the stuff Google does show from DG.
To view this imagery:
a) Download Vestal Design's kmz file illustrating the Garbage Patch situation to act as reference. [ http://www.vestaldesign.com/maps/Altered_Oceans_Part_4_of_5.kmz ]
b) Turn on the "DG Coverage" layer and start exploring your area of interest. (you gotta zoom in quite a bit before the DG boxes outlining where the imagery is show up.)
c) Find a box and zoom in until you see a blue "i" appear in the middle of the box. Note: lighter colored boxes have higher cloud cover than darker colored ones (which means less ground detail). Differences in color correspond with different years the photo was taken.
d) Click on the "i". The pop-up balloon will give you information such as date, catalog id (if you wanted to purchase this image in high res), cloud cover, etc. Click "Preview" to see a lower res version of this image plus even more information about it in a web page.
I think I found a tile which looks like it may have some white specks floating around but this could be poor photo quality just as easily as it could be trash. I guess we'll have to wait to look at the high res photo to know for sure. [ http://archive.digitalglobe.com/archive/showBrowse.php?catID=101001000197DB05 ] -
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