Where does Denmark get off in claiming the North Pole?

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark aims to claim the North Pole and hunt for oil in high Arctic regions that may become more accessible because of global warming, the Science Ministry said Monday.

It said Denmark would send an expedition to try to prove the seabed beneath the Pole was a natural continuation of Greenland, the world’s biggest island and a Danish territory whose northern tip is just 450 miles from the Pole.

Denmark expects that this will give it access to new resources of oil and natural gas outweighing the $25 million that they have earmarked for the search.

I didn’t think that anybody could own the North Pole. Apparently Denmark’s claim rests on a U.N. convention allowing coastal nations to claim rights to offshore seabed resources. Countries that ratify it have 10 years to prove they have a fair claim to the offshore territory and its resources.

But they have to prove that it’s a valid claim, first. Other claimants include Russia, Canada, Norway, and of course the USA. Samantha Smith, director of the WWF environmental group’s Arctic Program, suggests that it would be a good idea for nations around the Arctic to sign a treaty to regulate access to oil, fisheries and possible new shipping lanes through the Arctic as the ice retreats because of global warming.

All of this begs the questions: Doesn’t Santa Claus have a prior claim to the North Pole? Where will Santa go if Denmark builds a drilling platform on top of his workshop? Will toy production and shipping be disrupted? There might be a pretty sad Christmas if Denmarks claim is upheld as valid.

SpaceShipOne has won the Ansari $10,000,000 X-Prize for the first commercially viable manned spacecraft!

MOJAVE, Calif. (Reuters) – SpaceShipOne, the world’s first privately funded manned spacecraft, on Monday reached space for the second time in less than a week to win a $10 million prize designed to spur commercial space travel.

The stubby, three-seat rocket plane hurtled to a height of 368,000 feet traveling at more than three times the speed of sound to reach space on the last of two flights required to win the Ansari X Prize.

“We are proud to announce that SpaceShipOne has made two flights to 100 kilometers (62 miles) and has won the Ansari X Prize,” Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize announced to reporters at Mojave airport.

Congratulations to Paul Allen, Burt Rutan, Brian Binnie, everyone at Mojave Aerospace Ventures, and anyone else who was involved in this historic flight. Welcome to the real space age!

Now, where’s the hotel that Richard Branson promised? He better get a move on if he plans to open in 2007!

Psycho actress Janet Leigh passed away last night at the age of 77. She died peacefully, with her daughters Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis and her husband Robert Brandt by her side.

Mostly remembered for the shower scene in Psycho, Leigh also appeared in films such as The Manchurian Candidate (that’s the original version, not the remake), Bye, Bye Birdy and A Touch Of Evil.

I mostly remember her for that shower scene, also. After seeing that as an impessionable child, it was years before I would take a shower without the bathroom door firmly locked.

I like flexible, semi-liquid layouts. But Microsoft makes it tough because IE5+ does not conform to CSS standards.

I’ve managed to handle the problems so far by having two and three column layouts with a header but no footer. Then I decided that having a footer would be oh, so cool. And that’s where I ran into problems.

This doesn’t seem so tough, really. A header, then three columns, then a footer. The three columns together should be the same width as the header and footer. The footer should be at the bottom of the longest column, whichever that is. The presentation should be source ordered — that is, the first section in the source should be in the middle column. No tables — all CSS. Looks good in all modern browsers. OK…

This is not rocket science, if one wants a fixed-width layout. Something like 50% of web surfers use a resolution of 800×600, and something approaching 50% use a resolution greater than that. Only a very tiny percentage use anything smaller. I like 1024×768, myself. But if I design a fixed-width page for 1024×768, then people using 800×600 can’t see the whole page without scrolling horizontally. On the other hand, if I design for 800×600, then anyone using higher than that ends up with a bunch of white space. That isn’t all that bad with a two-column layout, but with three columns it makes the middle column mighty narrow.

Lizard, Mirage and Moon are examples of fixed-width layouts. They look best at 1024×768. Below that, the horizontal scroll bar is necessary to see the right-hand column. Above that, there’s white space to either side.

Black and White and Mommymonster dot com are completely liquid. B&W does better at liquidity than MM. Below 1024×768, some parts of MM – notably the calendar and the drop-down box – break because the side columns become too narrow for their contents.

The most common solution to this last problem is to have the side columns fixed-width and the middle column liquid.

No problem, right? Well… I want my layout to become smaller than the header and footer if the resolution is narrower than the header width. But, if the user has a resolution larger than the header, I want the columns to stay under the header and above the footer, and have white space added to the sides. Again no problem. I simply use the max-width property on the main wrapper div that encloses all of the columns and the min-width property on the side columns, while having the middle column width property a percentage.

That works great. In every browser except IE5+. Along with various other quirks and bugs, IE does not support max- or min-width, or max- or min-height.

There are various ways to “fix” this. After trying several of them out, and after much thought, I decided to go with a hack that uses IE’s ability to parse a javascript expression imbedded in a CSS property, like so:

#maindiv {
width: expression(document.body.clientWidth > 1000? “1000px”: “100%” );
}

What this says is that, if the width of the browser window is greater than 1000px, set the width of maindiv (that’s the wrapper) to 1000px. Otherwise, set it to 100% of the browser window.

The problem with this hack is that it means that the CSS no longer validates. I believe in writing valid code, so this bothers me. But I’m consoling myself with the fact that at least it is a browser-specific hack to fix a browser-specific problem. Hopefully with the next release of IE, Microsoft will get around to fixing their box model problems and support all of CSS2.

Kerry’s debate experience showed last night. If only he had more than one expression. I kept wondering how much botox, exactly, has come his way.

On the other hand, Bush looked, as my coffee lady Kathy put it, “like a baby with a bad case of gas.”

Seriously, though, I did think that Kerry came out ahead. Kerry came out slugging and kept the pressure on while still managing to respond to accusations of indecisiveness. Bush started out strong, but by the end of the first 30 minutes he was starting to stumble over his words and kept repeating the same scripted responses. There were times when he appeared to competely lose his train of thought.

Kerry had the best zinger of the night:

You can be decisive and still be wrong

He went on to say that, if you are wrong, you need to own that and correct your course. This is a point that Bush does not seem to understand.

I did think that Kerry missed an opportunity at one point late in the debate. Both candidates were asked to clarify if they agreed on the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Bush responded, “In the hands of terrorists.” I thought that Kerry’s response would have been stronger had he pointed out that this is a fundamental difference between he and Bush, as Kerry does not limit the danger to only terrorists.

In other news, John Eisenhower has changed his registration from Republican to Independent and will vote for Kerry. Eisenhower, the son of Dwight D. and a lifelong Republican, says that, rather than his own views changing, the GOP has left its own values behind. The article is an interesting read!