Balta1701

The President will also make recess appointments of 3 new members to the National Labor Relations Board. This is actually important...the Republicans had refused to consider any nominees to the board, and the board requires a 3 member minimum quorum to function. Starting this year, the NLRB would otherwise be shut down.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 04:46 PM) I know, it's just such a scary proposition. Does anyone know how his number compare to Viciedo's? Viciedo was 19 when we signed him, this guy is 25.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 03:47 PM) There we go. Perfect. Here is what I'm intrigued by. I am assuming that liquid rock flows and has about the same characteristics as any other liquid, chiefly it seeks it's own level. If that is true the molten rock would have been later uplifted to that shape. How would a liquid follow that contour? It doesn't. let's try an exercise. Take a sheet of paper and draw the profile of a hill across the middle of it. Now, hold that sheet of paper vertically. The top of that paper is the surface of the earth when the dike is emplaced. That part is where the eruption happened, like the fissure eruption I posted earlier. The paper itself in this case is the dike. A large, flat sheet, vertically and horizontally expansive. The hill I had you draw...that is the current surface of the earth. Everything above that hill has now been eroded. Everything below that hill still remains below your feet. The flow lines inside a moving dike are entirely upwards. They are moving upwards because of density and pressure gradients. There is no horizontal flow. Everything is moving upwards until the pressure gradient subsides or until things begin to move slowly enough that the dike freezes. If an upwelling dike reaches a level of neutral buoyancy, then it will slow and stall at that level. What will happen then is that the edges of the dike will begin to cool, while the center stays hot. The dikes edges pinch out,w hile th e center tends to melt rocks around it. The dike basically then movprhs into something spherical...like a magma chamber.

If the world actually happens to mean it, I'm glad I filled up my car 2 days ago, because taking 500k barrels of oil production off the market every day will mean one enormous price spike. That move would, of course, very likely cost the President the 2012 election.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 03:53 PM) I dunno about Welker...yes, it would be best for HIM to stay in NE, but that doesn't mean NE wants to pay him $10 million to stay there. It could be a situation where NE gets cocky and thinks they can just plug in Edelman and they tell Welker to take a hike unless he wants to play for less than market. If Denver wants to try Tebow for another season, they ought to dump piles of money on Welker.

QUOTE (WHarris1 @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 04:02 PM) I dunno about you but I'd be perfectly happy with Johnny Knox as a part of the WR corps so long as it's down a few rungs. Certainly we all hate having him in the role the Bears have had him, trying to pass him off as a 1/2 guy, but as a 3/4 sign me up My worry about this continues to be that the last I saw of Johnny Knox involved him being darn near ripped in half.

QUOTE (pittshoganerkoff @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 04:07 PM) Interesting thought here. If Floyd is not traded before this season is over and he has a Gavin-like year (solid, nothing spectacular), do the Sox look to re-sign him? What kid of money could he expect? Whether or not they resign him might not be up to him. It might depend a lot on what the other guys we jsut traded for do in the next year. If both Zach Stewart and Castro are knocking on the door of the rotation next year after good years in AAA, plus Axelrod and Sale have good years, then it starts seeming silly to hold onto him and block the other guys.

I think that's 2x as much as I'd be willing to even consider for a guy from the Cuban leagues.

Here's a good example image. The big flat thing is a several-meter wide dike, but note how it abruptly stops right when it gets to the current valley floor. There might be a fault there or the Dike might keep going underneath the valley...but the dike itself is only influencing the topography, not controlling it. The dike wraps up over the hill and comes back down the other side. The dike itself probably used to go upwards hundreds of meters from the current level, but everything above the current surface has been eroded away. The dike stands high because it is more resistant than the stuff around it, but clearly whatever it is that formed the valley floor is now the feature dominating the topography.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 09:54 AM) He is reassessing his campaign. I believe he is checking his major donors and seeing how far the money will last. he needs to stick around for a couple more primaries to set himself up as a serious VP candidate. It appears he's in at least through South Carolina.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 01:33 PM) Hurd barely played as a WR. He was behind Williams too this year. Call it whatever role you want, the guy had a roster spot, he was listed as a WR, and the Bears need 2. Edit: Unless Knox is 100% ready to go.

Ok, i get it now. What you are looking at are in fact volcanic dikes. Basically, they intrude along a single plane, rising up through the crust. When a volcanic dike reaches the surface, you get an eruption...and that eruption, ideally, is something like a fissure eruption. Something like the image below. You get an eruption along the line, and then lava flows away from that point. Now what you ought to have noticed if you're walking along just a vertical plane is that there's no lava flow anywhere. You're just walking along the feeder dike. That means, stratigraphically, the actual eruption had to happen somewhere above your head...maybe hundreds of meters above your head. Since those dikes were emplaced, there has been substantial erosion...of everything, not just the dikes, but of the rocks around them as well. That means the topography itself is being controlled by the erosive processes. The dikes can influence erosion, because they're more resistant, which is why you described them as stegosaurus plates...but whatever surrounds them is also being eroded, and stream paths and other structures can focus erosion in certain areas. The waviness then is a response to the rocks aroudn the dikes being eroded in different amounts.

QUOTE (elrockinMT @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 01:16 PM) So it was Carlos Quentin's fault? Maybe they competed because CQ was on the team? I think you might use the same argument to support Mark Buerhle being allowed to go, or maybe the trade of let's say PK? Bottom line is we were told if trades of players like CQ are made it will be for major league ready players. There are reports out there that these two are not really top prospects -0r at least not anymore. Maybe at one time, but not now. So if that is true then one must assume it was a salary dump to pay for Dunn, Peavy and Rios. I see, so your intangibles argument went out the window when someone pointed out that CQ's intangibles weren't enough to win the division the last 3 years.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 01:24 PM) I would think Bowe, Vincent Jackson and DeSean Jackson get franchised. What do you think your Bills do with Stevie Johnson? Colston, Lloyd, Manningham and Welker become FA's. The Bills have a mess on their hands, because Fred Jackson is also an unrestricted FA this offseason, and they can't tag both of them. VJax could well be tagged again this season, but this would be a 2nd year tag for him. He made $11.4 million on the tag this year, so next year's tag should be something like $13.7 million/1 year for him if they use it on him again.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 01:23 PM) 5th WR and special teams guy? Except on the Bears right now...the 5th WR is much more like the 3rd WR in the actual depth chart...because Knox has the "injury" thing, Hester is a returner, Sanzenbacher is really WR #6, and WR #2, Earl Bennett, doesn't have the best history with injuries. If Knox is actually back and 100%, he can get burn as the #3 Wr and probably be somewhat effective...but really, if you're honest about the injury situation in those Bears WR's, you want to add 2 WR's this offseason. Or at worst, a WR and a pass-catching TE. Something like that. One of them can be more of a gamble, maybe a Steve Smith or Braylon Edwards coming off an injury, that's acceptable if there's a higher flight guy thrown in also.

Here's the pre-extension, pre-franchise tag list of FA wide receivers. I don't know that Welker is the ideal fit for the Bears, who could really use a guy who pairs with a cannon-armed QB on the deep ball, IMO. Any of the other top options, other than LLoyd just from previous experience, would be an adequate fit and a large upgrade. Then there are a number of other guys on the list who could be targets to fill the "Sam Hurd with fewer drugs" role that the Bears also need to fill now.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 01:13 PM) I posted something to this effect a few hours ago...who would you suggest? What receivers become FA's and what ones become franchise-tagged?

Let me ask it this way. Hypothetically imagine that one of these dikes was running "north-south" perfectly. If you walked along the dike, you'd be moving up and down in elevation, but moving constantly in a single direction, along 1 vertically oriented plane...that part I can explain if that's the question...is it? The other possible thing you could be saying, if you tried to walk along the dike, and you started off north-south, at some points you'd be traveling more westerly, at some points you'd be traveling more easterly, but you'd average out to heading north/south, just with some waviness to the direction you're traveling... Is that what you're describing?

QUOTE (elrockinMT @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 01:06 PM) If you think my stance is "BS" as you label it my response to you is it takes a BS'er to know one. Stats can mean anything you want them to mean and can be used in anyway you want them to be used in an exchange. I personally think that some of the problems we have seen develop with this team over the years has a lot to do with the failure to consider the intangibles that certain players have brought to this team. Team chemistry-leadership-experience, but I bet there aren't any C.L.E. WAR's and BAR's for those. Great. So given the fact that the White Sox have severely underperformed for the past 3 years, when they've had a shot at the division all 3 years, and Carlos Quentin was on the team all 3 years, I judge that his intangibles were also hurting the team, and we're better off without him, using the logic of intangibles.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 11:15 AM) Is that kind of like Occidental versus Oriental mountain ranges? Don't know my Mexican geology all that well, but that at least sounds like a plausible comparison.

Did someone actually call them "Dikes"? The technical term for a "planar magmatic intrusion" which is also "Horizontal" is a "Sill". If they are actually "Dikes" and they're now horizontal, that would imply substantial rotation of the features, which could easily have folded them up.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 10:20 AM) Hopefully this will not make it more confusing If we looked at a topo map of the dikes they would be running across the lines, not parallel to them. All of the dikes were in the areas of rolling hills so the tops were at constantly changing elevations. I would have thought at some point there would be a "flat top" section. Erosion has taken away the other material from them at an almost constant level. So from the ground to the top of the dike that distance is fairly consistent, but the terrain is always through rolling hills never straight across a mesa. Still not getting a good idea on the meaning here.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 10:22 AM) Adding another one, and thank you . . . I've identified a couple of the ranges as being part of the Appalachians and some as part of the Rockies, how are ranges classified? If they both come so close together, why isn't this one large "U" shaped range? Age? Type of rock? Generally, this one is going to happen based on what is driving the uplift. If the rocks are being uplifted by compression from the East, they probably fit into the Appalachians; compression from the West would fit into the Rockies. There are age constraints here also; the uplifts happened at different times as well, so you can probably distinguish which mountain range things fit into based on age, but really, the dividing line is "one is driven by Europe and Africa smashing into North America", "One is driven by subduction along the west coast and various smaller things smashing in".

John McCain will endorse Mittens today in New Hampshire.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jan 4, 2012 -> 10:27 AM) That link details the numbers. Overall turnout for the GOP caucus was very slightly higher, but crossovers were higher and thus the actual number of Republicans turning out was lower. Ok, thanks, missede that detail (it's morning). Still, a decrease in the GOP turnout isn't a great sign for them.