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One hundred years is old for a person, but not for a company. The metric system is over 200 years old. It is industry that makes the US continue using the imperial system, not people. People can adapt. Old machines cannot. The US made it through World War II relatively unscathed; most other industrialized nations did not. For those countries ravaged by WWII, the cost of post-war conversion to metric was small as there was little pre-war infrastructure that got in the way. The US was THE industrial might for a long time after WWII. There was no incentive to convert (the rest of the world still bought our manufactured goods), and a big disincentive to do so (conversion costs money and interrupts supply chains). A significant fraction of US manufacturers has quietly switched to the metric system over the last several years. For example, new cars are uniformly outfitted with metric parts regardless of brand or country of manufacture. So in a sense, we have gone metric. Purely domestic industries such as construction that are subject to few external pressures such as international competition and compliance with foreign regulations don't feel compelled to convert to the metric system. These industries will be the last to fall. I just replaced a kitchen faucet this weekend. It took me just a little time to replace my existing faucet with a brand new one because the new one matched the old in dimension and pipe threading. Easy job. It would have been a tough job if the only new faucets in the hardware store had metric threads.

To get back on topic, both the National Hurricane Center and the forecasters at Colorado State have recently downgraded their expectations for the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season. See this news release, for example.

The poll asked how this year would compare to last, which was a doozy and then some. I doubt we will fare worse than that. My answer would have been different had you asked for a comparison with the average year. NOAA predicts 13-16 named Atlantic storms this year, far above average but far fewer than last year's 27 named storms. Colorado State predicts 17 named storms this year. A heat wave far north of the tropics won't contribute much to hurricane intensity. Don't fall into the false premise that just because it is hot where you live that it is hot everywhere. The Gulf coast, for example, has been mild this summer. (Mild by Gulf coast standards, that is. You Yankees would still die of heat exhaustion.)

Simple behaviors such as plants growing toward light can be encoded in DNA. More complex behaviors such as stalking prey or using tools cannot be encoded in DNA. DNA has a lot of capacity, but not as much as a brain. Those complex behaviors must be acquired, not inherited. Complex behaviors appear to follow Baldwinian evolution, a blend between the discredited Lamarckian evolution and Darwinian evolution. Teaching non-inherited behaviors is the job of parents and the group. For example, lions give live playthings to their cubs so the cubs can learn to how to hunt and how to kill. Abandoned domestic cats often die of starvation because they have never been taught how to be a predator. An abandoned domestic cat has all of the morphological characteristics needed to be a predator and has the ability to learn how to be a predator, both acquired through Darwinian evolution. The cat starves to death because lacks the predatory behaviors that cannot be acquired through Darwinian evolution alone.

Interesting article. Also interesting is the author's "in your face" attitude toward creationists. The creationists can no longer be ignored. Sharks have been around for a lot longer than 175 million years. The oldest shark fossil is over 400 million years old: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/10/1001_031001_sharkfossil.html.