Swiss hockey team bests NHL's Blackhawks

Some serious over acheiving by the top Swiss club.

Zurich's ZSC Lions may have roared into history with a 2-1 upset over the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday, but coach Sean Simpson says the big winner is Swiss ice hockey.

The match at Zurich's Hallenstadion marked the first time a Swiss side has bested a team from the National Hockey League (NHL). It also ended European hockey's 18-year losing streak to NHL teams.

[...]

The Blackhawks had not lost to a European team since 1991. [....]

Hopp Schwiez!

Mathematics confirms conservatives are racist, and Carter was right

Yes, fellow conservatives, it's true. By opposing Obama's policies, we are showing our true racist colors. Know how I know? Through the power of lower order math.

See, it's like this: Obama won in 2008 with 53% of the vote, which means that 47% voted against him. Those 47% were, to a first approximation, conservatives. Now we learn that about 56% of the population opposes Obama's proposal to overhaul healthcare, which is intended to be his legacy legislation.

In addition, Jimmy Carter has thoughtfully informed us that "an overwhelming portion" of that opposition "is based on the fact that he is a black man."

I looked up the standard mathematical definition for "overwhelming portion" (turns out it's 84%), and multiplied it by the 56% of folks opposed to Obama's heathcare reform, and amazingly enough, it comes out to 47%! Which is the exact percentage of conservative racist bastards who voted against Obama!

QED: Conservative = racist.

UPDATE: Apparently, conservative racism is spreading to the world, as these examples of opposition to Obama demonstrate:

[...] European nations have refused to send significant numbers of new troops to aid the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan. Few countries have agreed to accept detainees held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Scottish officials ignored Obama's plea to keep the Lockerbie bomber in prison, and U.S. efforts to head off a coup in Honduras were ineffective. North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons, Iran may be doing so, and Middle East leaders have rebuffed Obama's efforts at peacemaking. [....]

Case for abiogenic origin of petroleum strengthened

A non-biologic origin for petroleum -- things like natural gas and crude oil -- has long been pushed by a dedicated fringe of geologists and geochemists, most of them from the old USSR, where the idea was first forcelfully expounded in the 1950s.

Western oil professionals mostly scoffed at the idea. After all, nearly all the petroleum ever found had been found operating under the assumption that what went into the oil had once been alive and had lived in certain environmental areas (such as shallow seas).

Now there is a new paper -- in Nature Geoscience (abstract) no less -- that claims to have discovered how the non-biological origin (abiogenic) of petroleum occurs. Apart from advancing an esoteric argument, what this means is that petroleum need not be a finite resource. Should the experiment be able to predict where petroleum is found, we will have practically unlimited amounts of oil and natural gas.

From Science Daily:

[...] Together with two research colleagues, Vladimir Kutcherov has simulated the process involving pressure and heat that occurs naturally in the inner layers of the earth, the process that generates hydrocarbon, the primary component in oil and natural gas.

According to Vladimir Kutcherov, the findings are a clear indication that the oil supply is not about to end, which researchers and experts in the field have long feared.

He adds that there is no way that fossil oil, with the help of gravity or other forces, could have seeped down to a depth of 10.5 kilometers in the state of Texas, for example, which is rich in oil deposits. As Vladimir Kutcherov sees it, this is further proof, alongside his own research findings, of the genesis of these energy sources – that they can be created in other ways than via fossils. This has long been a matter of lively discussion among scientists. [....]

If true, this upends a century of what geologists -- myself included -- have been taught about how petroleum is formed and where it should be found. This would be an unbelievable scientific breakthrough.

Which is sort of why I don't see it panning out. It's one thing to determine that petroleum is capable of being formed under the crust of the Earth, but quite another to use that knowledge to find abiogenic oil. The biligenic theory of petroleum formation has explained very well how and where oil is created and found.