OMG, some dood hates Lyn!... well,
find the article about actual sea-level data
from tidal stations, yourself, mister Nice-guy.
http://21stcenturysciencetech.com/ar...wa/tanawa.html
What Is a Torquetum?
The torquetum, an analogue computer, can tell us, without long and
tedious calculation, at any time of the night when planets or the Moon
are visible, what their angular distance is from the Sun, or from the
first point of Aries, and/or from some bright star in their vicinity.
It can also tell us how much they are above or below the ecliptic.

This would give us a fairly quick way to construct an almanac, with
enough data to predict at least lunar eclipses, as well as
occultations of bright stars or planets by the Moon—the which dramatic
events ought to confirm the longitude readings obtained by using the
torquetum to measure lunar distance.
—Rick Sanders

* * * 148940000 *km^2 Earth land area
* * * 510072000 *km^2 Earth sea area
* * * 14000000 *km^2 Antarctica area
* * * 1.6 *km Ice height
* * * 22400000 *km^3 Antarctica Ice volume
* * * 0.043915369 *km vol/area= height
* * * 43.91536881 *meters ** 1000
* * * 0.002 *metres 2 mm/year
* * * 21957.68441 *years

thus:
I dug into your wikilink, Sue;
the upshot is that there is only practiceably "patial vacuum,"
with all kinds of waffling about "free space;"
particularly laudable is:
Scientists working in optical communications tend to use free space to
refer to a medium with an unobstructed line of sight (often air,
sometimes space). See Free-space optical communication and the What is
Free Space Optical Communications?.

The United States Patent Office defines free space in a number of
ways. For radio and radar applications the definition is "space where
the movement of energy in any direction is substantially unimpeded,
such as the atmosphere, the ocean, or the earth" (Glossary in US
Patent Class 342, Class Notes).[40]

Another US Patent Office interpretation is Subclass 310: Communication
over free space, where the definition is "a medium which is not a wire
or a waveguide".[41]

thus:
now, not only can we easily aver that "that Shakespeare
wrote that Shakespeare," but we can also wonder
about his death at fifty-three, after dining
with a manslaughterer, Ben Johnson. anyway, if
you really want to get into WS's politics,
find the cover-article *Campaigner* magazine,
"Why the British hate Shakespeare" -- if you can do so,
at http://www.wlym.com/drupal/campaigners.

thus:
the whole *problem* is the diagramming,
which is just a 2D phase-space, and cartooned
into a "2+1" phase-space with "pants," sketched
on paper. you simply do not need the pants,
the lightcones they're made with, and
the paradoxes of "looping in time" because
of a silly diagram, wherein "time becomes comensurate
with space" saith-Minkowski-then-he-died.

as for capNtrade, if Waxman's bill passes,
you won't be able to do *any* physics,
that isn't "junkyard physics."

thus:
you are assuming that "gravitons" "go faster"
than "photons," which is three things that have
never been seen. Young proved that all properties
of light is wave-ish, save for the yet-to-fbe-ound photo-
electrical effect, the instrumental artifact that save Newton's balls
o'light for British academe. well, even if
any large thing could be accelerated to so close
to teh speed of light-propagation (which used to be known
as "retarded," since being found not instantaneous) is "space"
-- which is no-where "a" vacuum --
it'd create a shockwave of any light that it was emmitting,
per Gauss's hydrodynamic shockwaves (and, after all,
this is all in the field of "magnetohydrodynamics,"
not "vacuum energy dynamics").

thus:
what ever it says, Shapiro's last book is just a polemic;
his real "proof" is _1599_;
the fans of de Vere are hopelessly stuck-up --
especially if they went to Harry Potter PS#1.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=htt...timesonline.co.....

--Light: A History!
http://wlym.com