Posts tagged concrete
McDonald Carpet One in Boulder
Aug 20th
Jann Scott’s Home and Garden TV Special visits, McDonald Carpet One Floor and Home in Boulder and we learn from owner Scott McDonald about their locally owned full fledged flooring business. Scott walks us through all the new products that go on your floor including carpet, wool, laminates, wood flooring, tiles, rugs, and new innovations in vinyl and bamboo flooring.
Find out more about McDonald Carpet One and featured videos on our retail page here.
Solar eruption could be like an attack on the Earth
Dec 9th
points up need for society to prepare
A massive ejection of material from the sun initially traveling at over 7 million miles per hour that narrowly missed Earth last year is an event solar scientists hope will open the eyes of policymakers regarding the impacts and mitigation of severe space weather, says a University of Colorado Boulder professor.
The coronal mass ejection, or CME, event was likely more powerful than the famous Carrington storm of 1859, when the sun blasted Earth’s atmosphere hard enough twice to light up the sky from the North Pole to Central America and allowed New Englanders to read their newspapers at night by aurora light, said CU-Boulder Professor Daniel Baker. Had it hit Earth, the July 2012 event likely would have created a technological disaster by short-circuiting satellites, power grids, ground communication equipment and even threatening the health of astronauts and aircraft crews, he said.
CMEs are part of solar storms and can send billions of tons of solar particles in the form of gas bubbles and magnetic fields off the sun’s surface and into space. The storm events essentially peel Earth’s magnetic field like an onion, allowing energetic solar wind particles to stream down the field lines to hit the atmosphere over the poles.
Fortunately, the 2012 solar explosion occurred on the far side of the rotating sun just a week after that area was pointed toward Earth, said Baker, a solar scientist and the director of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. But NASA’s STEREO-A, satellite that was flying ahead of the Earth as the planet orbited the sun, captured the event, including the intensity of the solar wind, the interplanetary magnetic field and a rain of solar energetic particles into space.
“My space weather colleagues believe that until we have an event that slams Earth and causes complete mayhem, policymakers are not going to pay attention,” he said. “The message we are trying to convey is that we made direct measurements of the 2012 event and saw the full consequences without going through a direct hit on our planet.”
Baker will give a presentation on the subject at the 46th Annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union held in San Francisco Dec. 9 to Dec. 13.
While typical coronal mass ejections from the sun take two or three days to reach Earth, the 2012 event traveled from the sun’s surface to Earth in just 18 hours. “The speed of this event was as fast or faster than anything that has been seen in the modern space age,” said Baker. The event not only had the most powerful CME ever recorded, but it would have triggered one of the strongest geomagnetic storms and the highest density of particle fluctuation ever seen in a typical solar cycle, which last roughly 11 years.
“We have proposed that the 2012 event be adopted as the best estimate of the worst case space weather scenario,” said Baker, who chaired a 2008 National Research Council committee that produced a report titled Severe Space Weather Events – Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts. “We argue that this extreme event should be immediately employed by the space weather community to model severe space weather effects on technological systems such as the electrical power grid.
“I liken it to war games — since we have the information about the event, let’s play it through our various models and see what happens,” Baker said. “If we do this, we would be a significant step closer to providing policymakers with real-world, concrete kinds of information that can be used to explore what would happen to various technologies on Earth and in orbit rather than waiting to be clobbered by a direct hit.”
Even though it occurred about 150 years ago, the Carrington storm was memorable from a natural beauty standpoint as well as its technological impacts, he said. The event disrupted telegraph communications — the Internet of the Victorian Age — around the world, sparking fires at telegraph offices that caused several deaths, he said.
A 1989 geomagnetic storm caused by a CME from a solar storm in March 1989 resulted in the collapse of Hydro-Quebec’s electricity transmission system, causing 6 million people to lose power for at least nine hours, said Baker. The auroras from the event could be seen as far south as Texas and Florida.
“The Carrington storm and the 2012 event show that extreme space weather events can happen even during a modest solar cycle like the one presently underway,” said Baker. “Rather than wait and pick up the pieces, we ought to take lessons from these events to prepare ourselves for inevitable future solar storms.”
CU media release.
Stranger approaches provoke police warning
Oct 1st
Recently, parents have reported that a male in a white SUV has approached children and at least one adult in a large geographic area in Boulder, which includes the area of the 2200 block of Balsam, the 400 block of Highland and the 2000 block of Alpine Avenue.
No one has been able to provide a concrete description of the SUV or the possible suspect, and the people approached are both males and females from 7-to-20 years old. One of those who reported being contacted by the male says she was offered a ride and ran away. Others say a white SUV approached them but that the person driving it didn’t speak to them. An adult who noticed a white SUV told police that a man was sleeping inside it.
Descriptions of the suspect vary; police were told he was 30-to-60 years old; that he had white hair or salt-and-pepper hair and that he had a full beard or was clean-shaven; that he wore glasses and that he didn’t wear glasses. The SUV descriptions differ as well.
Neighbors shared an informational email in an effort to inform each other about the incidents, and detectives have investigated all the reports.
Police offer some tips for keeping kids safe:
- Tell your kids to walk with others and stay in well-lit areas
- Always supervise younger children, even in groups
- Tell your kids to never, ever get into a car with a stranger
- Let your child know you will never send an unknown adult to pick them up – ever
- If a stranger does approach your child, your child should RUN, YELL and REPORT the stranger to a trusted adult. It’s not appropriate for adults to approach children.
Here are some ploys strangers may use:
- Asks for help finding a lost pet
- Invites the child to a car to see a new puppy
- Offers candy, toys or food
- Asks for directions
- Offers a ride
Police remind people to call 9-1-1 if they are in a situation which they feel is unsafe, or if they notice a situation involving someone else.
The Boulder Police Department will keep the public apprised of any developments or public safety issues which arise.
— CITY–
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