Germany To Give Up Nuclear Power for Coal

Plans to Spend Global Warming Money on Conversion from Nuclear to Coal

The plan was approved in the Bundesrat upper house, which represents Germany’s 16 regional states. The scheme had previously passed the Bundestag lower house with an overwhelming majority vote.

Germany had already taken action in the wake of the Japanese disaster by switching off their seven oldest reactors, and another reactor has been shut down for years due to technical problems. Now Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced plans to officially phase out the remaining nine reactors between 2015 and 2022. The decision, which has come faster than anyone predicted, is sure to find support in Germany where a large number of citizens oppose nuclear power due to the potentials risk involved. Thousands of anti-nuclear demonstrators marched in the streets after Fukushima demanding that the country switch to other sources of power.

This is so stupid on so many levels. If you're really concerned with anthropogenic global warming, you simply don't replace nuclear plants with coal-fired plants. I'm not even particularly worried about global warming, but I'd much rather live close to a nuke than a coal burner.  I had that choice and a made it.

Moreover, even with Fukushima, nuclear power is a far safer than coal-burning.  There have been no deaths from the Fukushima disaster.  It's a mess, but it's not a lethal mess.

Time for a Beer Break

OK, not a very good beer, but you have to admit they have fine advertisements.

You Were Saying?

The Flag Harbor Manatee

Reliable sources tell me a Manatee (technically a West Indian Manatee) showed up in Flag Harbor yesterday, and stayed a while to eat a few heads of cabbage provided by spectators and photographers.  I couldn't find it in the evening when I went out fishing (nope, nothing to report), before the storm hit.  Manatees tend not to move awfully fast, so I may get more chances.

If the photo turns up in the local papers, I'll post that.

It seems like every year one or two find their way into the Chesapeake.  I don't think they find it a very congenial environment.  Almost entirely herbivorous, the Chesapeake no longer has large beds of vegetation to graze on, although they may find enough to get by.

A previous post on Manatees.

National Academy of Sciences Warns EPA on Science

Get your science right or face irrelevance

A key EPA science adviser is warning that the agency must succeed in making its scientific research programs more transparent and sound in order to to bring credibility back to agency science, or EPA will risk increased scrutiny from House Republicans and industry that could prompt a “crisis.”

“You can’t fail this time,” Thomas Burke, associate dean of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who also chaired a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel on ways to improve EPA risk assessments, told EPA officials and other scientific advisers during a discussion on the agency’s new chemical safety research program June 30.

“The sleeping giant is that EPA science is on the rocks . . . if you fail, you become irrelevant, and that is kind of a crisis,” Burke told a joint meeting of EPA’s Science Advisory Board and EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC) charged with looking at the reorganization of the agency’s research programs.

Burke, who chaired a recent NAS panel that recommended a host of steps for EPA to improve its risk assessment process, pointed in particular to the agency’s risk assessment process, calling it EPA’s “Achilles heel.”

Of course, when you wield 10 billion bucks, you're unlikely to be irrelevant, whether your science is right or wrong.

Polygamists Demand Decriminalization of Plural Marriage

If Gays get Gay Marriage, Why Shouldn't Plurals get Bigamy?

Utah’s complicated history with polygamy will start a new chapter Wednesday when an attorney for a reality-show family files a lawsuit that could send the state’s ban on plural marriage to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Nationally-known constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said the lawsuit to be filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City will not call for plural marriages to be recognized by the state. Instead, it asks for polygamy between consenting adults like his clients, former Utahn Kody Brown and his wives, to no longer be considered a crime.

"We are only challenging the right of the state to prosecute people for their private relations and demanding equal treatment with other citizens in living their lives according to their own beliefs," Turley said in a press release. The Browns star in the TLC network show "Sister Wives." There is no word yet on whether they will appear in a press conference scheduled for Wednesday.

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said the country’s ongoing legal wrangling over same-sex marriage will necessarily grow to include plural marriage — quite possibly centered around this case...

I would think one wife is sufficient, but others may disagree.  Who is to gain say them?

The camel is at least half way into the tent by now anyway.  It might be easier to let it in, and then push it back out the front door.

Good News! - Alcohol Doesn't Really Kill Brain Cells

It just makes them stupid...

Interesting news for all you blackout drunks out there: Booze doesn't kill brain cells so much as interfere with brain receptors which can prevent memories from forming. Or so say researchers in the latest issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. “Alcohol isn’t damaging the cells in any way that we can detect,” senior investigator Charles F. Zorumski told ScienceBlog. “As a matter of fact, even at the high levels we used [in their experiment], we don’t see any changes in how the brain cells communicate. You still process information. You’re not anesthetized. You haven’t passed out. But you’re not forming new memories.”

 So much for the Cliff Claven theory of drinking...

"Well ya see, Norm, it's like this. A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine!

That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers."

A Couple New Ones From #2

Upload MP3s using free MP3 hosting from Tindeck.



Upload MP3s using free MP3 hosting from Tindeck.

House Rejects Light Bulb Freedom Bill

House turns out lights on Barton's bulb bill

The Better Use of Light Bulbs (BULB) Act, sponsored by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), failed on a 233-193 vote, with a two-thirds majority needed for passage.

The vote fell mostly along party lines, but five Democrats voted in favor of the bill and 10 Republicans voted against the bill. One Republican voted "present."

The bill would have repealed provisions in a 2007 energy law requiring that traditional incandescent light bulbs be 30 percent more energy-efficient starting in 2012.

Heaven forbid we should have the freedom to choose the light bulb we think is best for a particular application.  Americans are way too stupid to weigh the choices themselves and make a rationale decision; at least according to the democrats.

“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money,” Energy Secretary Chu said.

Coms Leave Crab Catch Talks

Commercial fishermen's group leaves crab management discussions, catch share opposition cited

A watermen's group has stopped participating in discussions on crab management with the group's head saying members oppose proposals for a catch-share system.

The Chesapeake Bay Commercial Fishermen's Association voted last month to pull out of the Blue Crab Industry Design Team formed in March. Other members include the Environmental Defense Fund and the state Department of Natural Resources.

Association president Gibby Dean says EDF has been pushing catch shares nationwide and continued to support the approach in the talks despite opposition in Maryland. Dean says he hopes to continue talks with the Department of Natural Resources.

Catch share systems set a harvest limit and divide that amount among fishermen, who can then catch, sell or lease their shares. Opponents say it gives an advantage to larger, non-local operations.

Catch shares have been the most successful fisheries strategy for protecting the stock ever invented.  By giving individual commercial fishermen the a fixed quota to hit, the incentive to catch their own limit, and not to exceed it, and to report fellow commercial fishermen who are cheating on their shares.  Watch a few episodes of "Deadliest Catch" to see how effectively the catch share work to keep the commercial fishermen accounting for their quota.  You can easily see why coms would rather have the current system where rules are set designed to restrict the catch to a particular amount, and the everyone fishes as hard as they can to get as much as they can, and hopefully, DNR won't shut them down until well after the desired total catch has been achieved.

New Gadget for Fishermen

FishEyes rod and reel shows you the fish before you catch them

When you cast a fishing lure out into the water and it goes beneath the surface, it enters a dark, mysterious world that you can only imagine. Perhaps that's overstating things a bit, but the fact is, you can't see where it is or what's around it. A fish finder can provide you with some basic information (if you're in a boat) but it doesn't actually show you what it looks like down there. That's where the FishEyes Rod and Reel with Underwater Video Camera comes in. Its built-in color LCD screen provides you with a live image of your lure, and any fish that happen to be near it.

Instead of traditional fishing line, FishEyes has 20 feet (6 meters) of combined analog video and power cable. This cable runs from the reel-mounted monitor to a small waterproof video camera, that is equipped with an LED light that can be remotely switched on or off. While it might be fun just to lower that camera into the water and watch its underwater adventure on the monitor, users can also add a fishing lure or an included bait basket on a short length of fishing line beneath it. They can then try to entice fish that they see near the lure, or not bother staying in areas where there are no fish.

This would be kind of fun, at least for a while.  Unfortunately, I probably lose terminal tackle at least once from every 100 casts (more when I'm fishing deep in the rocks at the power plant discharge).

Assuming I didn't lose it almost immediately, after a while, it would probably just end up in the same corner of the garage as my banjo minnow and helicopter lure collection.

Oh No! Bacon Prices on the Rise!

Bacon Prices Expected To Surge This Summer

Your bacon budget may go bust this summer if analysts' predictions come true. One indicator is pork belly prices, which have surged to $130 per 100 pounds and could top $150, which it reached last August. A factor contributing to bacon inflation is rising corn prices, which have caused hog farmers to pare their herds, making bacon cost $4.77 a pound in May.

Damn that gasohol, anyway. What will starving artists do with the price of materials going up? Or hostesses making arrangements for the table?

Will the price rise affect sausage too?  This could be a national calamity!




Stolen from Aces ONT.  If you're not reading it, well, I'll help.

Japanese Discover Invulverable Material...

Nagasaki

...Reserve it for Religious Shrines:

Honshu Tsunami

A torii (鳥居・鳥栖・鶏栖), lit. bird perch, English: /ˈtɔəri.iː/) is a traditional Japanese gate most commonly found at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine, where it symbolically marks the transition from the profane to the sacred. The presence of a torii at the entrance is usually the simplest way to identify Shinto shrines, and a small torii icon represents them on Japanese road maps. They are however a common sight at Japanese Buddhist temples too, where they stand at the entrance of the temple's own shrine, called chinjusha (鎮守社), tutelary god shrine) and usually very small.

I guess I stole this from Ted...

The Perils of Growing Your Own...

... Vegetables. Michigan Woman Threatened with Jail for Garden

A woman who put a vegetable garden in her front yard has been charged with a misdemeanor and could even be facing jail. Julie Bass, of Oak Park, Michigan, created the garden after her front yard was torn up to replace a sewer line.But a neighbour complained and called the city, who deemed it unsuitable.Every front yard in the area is grass.

Miss Bass's garden features five large planter boxes containing fresh basil, cabbage, carrots, tomatoes and cucumbers. The city sent out a code enforcement who gave her a warning. Miss Bass then received a ticket and now she's been charged with a misdemeanor.

Neither side is backing down and the case could be heading for a jury trial.

One of the cool things about the street where I grew up in Culver City, California, was a crazy old guy named Ray, who turned his whole lot, except for the shack he lived in, into a garden.  Front, back, sides, the whole thing.  We called it "Ray's Half Acre", although thinking back, I doubt it was an honest half acre.  My dad used to take me down and visit with Ray once in while.

When I was 12, we moved to a more upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles, Rancho Park.  We didn't have crazy old gardeners there, although some of the residents were equally odd, but in more discrete ways. 

Our current neighborhood is nice enough.  I'm pretty sure we wouldn't get in trouble for a garden in the front yard.  Loose chickens might get noticed (or eaten), and pigs would probably get us talked about.

Some Things You Just Have to Post

Kate Middleton's "Marilyn Moment"

ZZ Top -Tush
- Watch more Music Videos at Vodpod.

"It's All About Moderation"

Michelle Obama orders 1700 calorie burger lunch

Update:We made a mistake in our original calculations. The calorie-count for the first lady’s order was actually 1,700, not the 1,556 we originally reported. Our apologies.

First lady Michelle Obama ordered a whopper of a meal at the newly opened Washington diner Shake Shack during lunch on Monday.

A Washington Post journalist on the scene confirmed the first lady, who’s made a cause out of child nutrition, ordered a ShackBurger, fries, chocolate shake and a Diet Coke while the street and sidewalk in front of the usually-packed Shake Shack were closed by security during her visit.

According to nutritional information on Shake Shack’s Web site, the meal amounted to 1,700 calories.

Obama, who launched the “Let’s Move” campaign to combat childhood obesity last year, has previously admitted to having an “obsession with french fries,” which she says are fine to indulge in occasionally. “It’s all about moderation,” Obama told reporters.

Chocolate Shake and a Diet Coke?  Really?  Anyway, as I've said before, I don't really care what Michelle Obama eats or drinks, but I resent like hell being told what I'm supposed to eat and drink by anyone but my wife (and I resent her too, but not that  much...).

Wouldn't it be a marvelous thing if somebody conservative in the restaurant, tipsy from a sugar high, confronted her publicly, and tongue lashed her for her hypocrisy of using enough calories in one meal to provide a whole Sudanese village for a month, while downing their own 1500 calorie burger, shake and fries?

Oh right, they couldn't because the restaurant was closed to the public...

Massive Job Killing Tax Increases Planned...

...But it's OK, they're only for 2013 and beyond...

Maryland Seafood Company Promotes Size Regs on Asian Crabs

Male Asian Blue Crab - Portunus pelagicus

Rules aim to preserve Asian blue crabs

A Salisbury-based seafood company's partnership in a project to preserve crabs in Asian waters should guarantee quality crab-meat on every plate in America.

Handy International, born in Crisfield as the John T. Handy Co. more than a century ago, is partnering with a dozen other U.S. importers of crabmeat from Indonesia and the Philippines in a crab sustainability initiative designed to end the harvesting of undersized blue swimming crabs.

The importers don't want what happened to the blue crab population off and near Crisfield in the Chesapeake Bay to happen in southeast Asian waters, said Brendan Sweeny, director of operations at Handy.

The initiative is a sore reminder that importers no longer claim that the Somerset County waterman's hamlet of Crisfield as "The Crab Capital of the World."

"The Chesapeake Bay region is well known for its crab and is the birthplace of the swimming crab meat industry in the United States," said Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the NFI Crab Council. "Producers surrounding the Chesapeake Bay and other coastal regions continue to supply crab products to customers around the world."

But over the past 20 years, these crab products became so popular with consumers that the regional supply could not keep up with demand, Gibbons said. So a new industry was pioneered in the early 1990s around the blue swimming crab resource in Southeast Asia.

The importers who make up the membership of the Crab Council of the National Fisheries Institute have begun, July 1 to enforce a self-imposed restriction on the minimum catch size for crabs harvested in the Asian countries -- primary import markets for council members...

I'm still trying to figure out if this is an honest attempt to protect the Asian Blue Crab from over exploitation (would that they had been that proactive for the Blue Crab in the bay), or if this is an attempt to manipulate the market to get higher prices.  If its the former, the size is set too small.  The size limit in the US is 5 inches, and the limit is clearly not sufficient in itself to prevent overfishing.  The proposed number in Asia is a little over 3 inches (8 cm).  Given the poor enforcement in Asia, and the fact that China is a significant market for the crabs, it's unlikely to have the desired fisheries effects.

Meet the New Boss - Part Deux

Former Del. environmental secretary new head of Chesapeake Bay Program

Former Delaware environmental secretary Nicholas DiPasquale has been appointed director of the Chesapeake Bay Program, a federal-state agency formed to help restore and protect the bay.

DiPasquale left the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control in mid-2002, after nearly a decade with the agency and after serving as its top officer through some of the state's biggest environmental controversies, including a push to toughen pollution enforcement.

His administration also oversaw efforts to gain control of a troubled chemical plant and company that later collapsed into bankruptcy, becoming one of the region's most-costly federal Superfund cleanup sites...

DiPasquale, who had been serving as an environmental consultant and volunteer conservation group leader, takes the place of acting Director James Edward. He also worked as deputy secretary in the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, and as director of the Environmental Management Center for the Brandywine Conservancy in Chadds Ford, Pa.

A few months ago, I posted how EPA had just elevated a new Chesapeake Bay adviser.  Honestly, I can't see why we need both positions. The Bay Program hasn't accomplished that much since it was formed in 1983.  The Bay health, at best, has simply not gotten much worse since then.



But we probably will...

Autism Round Up

I've accumulated a few articles on autism that I think need some air.  Autism is serious problem for many families, and because it is so poorly understood, it generates a lot of guilt, angst and blame seeking by parents of affected children:

Non-genetic factors play surprisingly large role in determining autism

A new Stanford University School of Medicine study of twins suggests that non-genetic factors play an unexpectedly large role in determining autism risk, turning upside down recent assumptions about the cause of this common, disabling developmental disorder.

From prior studies of shared autism in twins, scientists had estimated that 90 percent of autism risk was attributable to genes and only 10 percent to non-genetic environmental factors. But the new study — the largest ever of twins in which at least one in each pair has autism — shows almost the opposite: It found that genes account for 38 percent of autism risk, with environmental factors explaining the remaining 62 percent.

However, skeptics of the study spoke up almost immediately, accusing the new group of representing advocacy groups, and misinterpreting their own results:

Autism experts skeptical of study linking disorder to environment

The LA Times points out that their calculations are subject to a wide margin of error and could be wrong, but the conclusions point to more research into environmental factors that may contribute to autism, including environmental toxins and chemicals--not coincidentally also factors that Autism Speaks had already concluded contribute to autism's cause before the recent study was performed.

"I think they're really on shaky ground to say that," Dr. Paul Law, director of the Interactive Autism Network at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, told the Times.

"Their data is so similar to everybody else's, and yet they come up with another conclusion," added Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at King's College London. "I don't know how this happened."

The degree of heritability of autism is one of the key questions of interest to parent seeking to assign blame.  A high degree of heritability puts the blame squarely on the parents. While they may have no control over their own genes, having them at fault leaves nothing left to blame.  On the other hand, a high degree of environmental control leaves ample room for any number of theories that could place the blame beyond the reach of the parents (like the discredited vaccine theory).

At it heart, this debate seems to be about the means and statistics of twin studies, a long used technique for determining the degree of heritability of traits.  This dispute should be readily soluble by having independent experts in statistics and genetics look at the raw data for the study.  This may be another case where peer review has failed.

Another article purports to have found a change in common in the brain at the molecular level among autism victims:

...a UCLA study is the first to reveal how the disorder makes its mark at the molecular level, resulting in an autistic brain that differs dramatically in structure from a healthy one. Published May 25 in the advance online edition of Nature, the findings provide new insight into how genes and proteins go awry in autism to alter the mind.

The discovery also identifies a new line of attack for researchers, who currently face a vast array of potential fronts for tackling the neurological disease and identifying its diverse causes. ...

"In a healthy brain, hundreds of genes behave differently from region to region, and the frontal and temporal lobes are easy to tell apart," Geschwind said. "We didn't see this in the autistic brain. Instead, the frontal lobe closely resembles the temporal lobe. Most of the features that normally distinguish the two regions had disappeared."

Two other clear-cut patterns emerged when the scientists compared the autistic and healthy brains. First, the autistic brain showed a drop in the levels of genes responsible for neuron function and communication. Second, the autistic brain displayed a jump in the levels of genes involved in immune function and inflammatory response.

"Several of the genes that cropped up in these shared patterns were previously linked to autism," said Geschwind. "By demonstrating that this pathology is passed from the genes to the RNA to the cellular proteins, we provide evidence that the common molecular changes in neuron function and communication are a cause, not an effect, of the disease."

I'm not sure I understand the ramifications of this one.  Are they proposing a chemical test for autism?  I don't see how this bears on the heritability of autism; the expression of genes could be a cause, but they could also be an affect of whatever process leads to autism.

Finally, one that I consider to be true crap:

Autism May Have Had Advantages in Humans' Hunter-Gatherer Past, Researcher Believes

The autism spectrum may represent not disease, but an ancient way of life for a minority of ancestral humans, said Jared Reser, a brain science researcher and doctoral candidate in the USC Psychology Department.

Some of the genes that contribute to autism may have been selected and maintained because they created beneficial behaviors in a solitary environment, amounting to an autism advantage, Reser said.

The "autism advantage," a relatively new perspective, contends that sometimes autism has compensating benefits, including increased abilities for spatial intelligence, concentration and memory. Although individuals with autism have trouble with social cognition, their other cognitive abilities are sometimes largely intact.

The paper looks at how autism's strengths may have played a role in evolution. Individuals on the autism spectrum would have had the mental tools to be self-sufficient foragers in environments marked by diminished social contact, Reser said.

The penchant for obsessive, repetitive activities would have been focused by hunger and thirst towards the learning and refinement of hunting and gathering skills.

I would rather imagine that autism is the result of imperfections and variations left over from the relatively rapid evolution of the human brain, over the past sever hundred thousand years.  Much like the appendix, and wisdom teeth which continue to plague mankind, it takes millions of years for evolution to craft a finely honed organ, and the human brain has simply evolved too rapidly to have achieved any level of perfection.  Therefore a fair number of random deficiencies make themselves apparent in the course of development.  After a few more million years of selective evolution, with autistic individuals having dramatically reduced opportunities to reproduce, I imagine the autism strikingly reduced, if not altogether eliminated.

Take It With a Grain of Salt

A major meta-analysis study looks at the relationship between salt consumption and heart problems.  They found that there was a slight mean positive relationship between salt in the diet and blood pressure, but could find no evidence that salt caused heart problems.

A controversial new study is questioning the oft-repeated connection between the consumption of too much salt and the development of cardiovascular disease. The meta-analysis, published online today in the American Journal of Hypertension, examined the results of seven clinical studies and found no solid proof that reducing salt consumption prevents heart conditions.

Furthermore, there is evidence that a low salt diet caused it's own problems which may offset the reductions in blood pressure:

Michael Alderman, an emeritus epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, believes the study adds to growing evidence that cutting salt does not help people who consume modest amounts of the stuff. Public policies aimed at forcing salt reductions are misguided and potentially dangerous, he says. Eating less salt may reduce blood pressure, which is beneficial for the heart, but it could also increase insulin resistance, triglyceride levels and sympathetic-nerve activity — all risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

In any event, it appears that the evidence for a negative health effect from dietary salt is quite weak and contradictory.  While government should not be foisting their food preferences on people for health reasons, they certainly should not be foisting them on us for no reason at all (except that they can).

Do Not Pass School, Go Directly to Jail

Teen faces felony, 8 year sentence for blow up doll prank

When 18-year-old Tyell Morton put a blow-up sex doll in a bathroom stall on the last day of school, he didn't expect school officials to call a bomb squad or that he'd be facing up to eight years in prison and a possible felony record.

Just when did the world go insane?

Scientists Teach Monkeys Money, Monkeys Invent Prostitution

Monkey Business 

...It is sometimes unclear, even to Chen himself, exactly what he is working on. When he and Santos, his psychologist collaborator, began to teach the Yale capuchins to use money, he had no pressing research theme. The essential idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it. The currency Chen settled on was a silver disc, one inch in diameter, with a hole in the middle -- ''kind of like Chinese money,'' he says. It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.

The monkeys learned how to gamble, and showed a human preference for bets with an apparent upside.  They tried counterfeiting the money with cucumber slices. They stole coins. And when a riot broke out, one enterprising female found a way to capitalize:

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

Well, it was pretty clear from ethology that monkeys were natural politicians. It seems with a little help from scientists they can become businessmen and businesswomen as well

Saving Valentina, the Humpbacked Whale

Normally, I'm not much of whale hugger.  Whales are nice enough, and I think they should be protected for the same reason oysters in Chesapeake Bay need to be protected; they are far below their level of maximum sustainable yield.  If they were really as smart and moral as us, they'd carry out a secret campaign to kill us and keep us off the sea whenever possible.  Maybe they are, and they're smart enough to pull it off...

Sisyphus the Dog

Same Old Same Old At The Beach

A typical summer's day at the beach, almost no wind or waves, the sky may be a bit bluer than most.  Humidity was up from yesterday, but not bad (yet), warm but not oppressive. 

About as far as we're going to go today.  After this point we'll have to duck through the brush, and it's just not worth it.

There were lot's of little fish in the shallows.  Do you see them?

Kids in the shallows too, while Dad reads his book in the shade of the beach umbrella.

The Kudzu is plotting it's slow advance across the beach.  It will grow up to a foot a day, but it never really takes over the whole beach because salt water shrivels it up, and the storm waves roll it back up the the cliff edge.

Does this mean I'll have good luck all day?  Maybe I should go buy a lottery ticket.  You think it will make my luck that good?

Anyway, this is how I found out about the new back on pennies.  It happened in 2010?  Shows how much attention I pay...

Oh mom, do I have to go on the leash? I promise I won't eat any loose kids!  But if they left their lunch on the ground...

Bugs!

A few pictures from the garden this afternoon, where the insects were hard at work:



 A couple of small Skipper Butterflies





 
Click images to enlarge





A dragonfly














A very tiny blue butterfly.  I really tried hard to get a good picture, but it was remarkably uncooperative.  It was only about the size of my pinky fingernail.

There were hosts of these bumblebees on the flower heads.  Fortunately, they seemed intent on getting pollen and nectar, and didn't seem to mind me hover close by one bit.

Iceland Prepares for "The Big One"

Katla Volcano - 14 earthquakes in 48 hours!

9 Jul 10 - Fourteen earthquakes have occurred below Iceland's Mýrdalsjökull glacier during the past 48 hours - one within the last 4 hours. Katla Volcano lies beneath the Mýrdalsjökull glacier.

Katla Volcano usually erupts every century, says Iceland's President Olafur Grimsson. and the last eruption was in 1918. "The time for Katla to erupt is coming close."

"I don't say if, but I say when Katla will erupt," Grimsson says. "We have been waiting for that eruption for several years."

"It can create, for a long period, extraordinary damage to modern advanced society."

Katla is one of the largest volcanoes in Iceland, a land built by volcanoes.  It has erupted 16 times since 900 AD, a rate of more than one per century, and with the last eruption in 1918, it would seem likely that it is due or overdue for one.  Katla is also a volcano of great explosive power, 4-6 on a scale of 8 for the logarithmic  Volcanic Explosivity Index.

Katla is geologically tied at the hip to its near neighbor Eyjafjallajökull  (it is also much easier to spell and pronounce).  In the past 1000 years, all three major eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull have been followed by eruptions of Katla.  As you may recall, Eyjafjallajökull erupted in April of 2010, causing local flooding, spreading ash, and disrupting European and trans-Atlantic air travel for several weeks.

A very recent report has ice melting under Katla's glacier, and causing flooding and road damage...

A glacial flood affected South Iceland last night, likely caused by draining of geothermal melt water from underneath the east side of the Myrdalsjokull glacier.

Scientists have been speculating that the glacial outburst may have been caused by a very small volcanic eruption; but no visual or seismic evidence to confirm that theory has yet come to light.

The flood peaked last night and engineers are already working on repairing damage to local roads. The sudden outburst knocked out a bridge on the Route 1 highway, leaving the road closed. Icelandic interior minister, Ogmundur Jonasson told reporters that fixing the road is his top priority and the Icelandic Roads Administration is already working to build a temporary replacement bridge. It is hoped the road will open again in the coming weeks.

...but that the earthquake activity was subsiding and that the activity was not sufficient to suggest a large eruption was occurring (yet...).

Flooding Follow Up - Government to Buy Out Flooded Farmers?

As we saw recently, there is reasonable suspicion that the US government, through the Army Corps of Engineers, is carrying out a campaign to flood the upper Mississippi drainage, to better restore the natural habitat, causing untold harm to farms and property.  But what good would that do if people just go out and plant their farms and rebuild their houses after the floods (as people have done since the the time of Noah).

Now word comes that the federal government may be offering to buy recently flooded farmland:

File this one under “Now It All Makes Sense”. A Missouri farming and ranching contact just got off a conference call wherein he was informed that the federal government is sending out letters to all of the flooded out farmers in the Missouri River flood plain and bottoms notifying them that the Army Corps of Engineers will offer to BUY THEIR LAND.

Intentionally flood massive acreage of highly productive farmground. Destroy people’s communities and homes. Catch them while they are desperate and afraid and then swoop in and buy the ground cheap. Those evil sons of bitches.

"Nice farm you've got there; it would be shame if anything happened to it..."

I'd like to see more evidence of this before I get too hot and bothered by it.  But that's an awful lot of farmland affected, and if any significant number of farmers were to take such an offer, it would add up to a whole lot of money, at time when we don't have all that  much extra to throw around.

Maybe they could wangle themselves an exemption from the Army Corps of Engineers manual, the way Blue States have gotten their exemptions from the Cross State Air Pollution Rules...

Thanks to Ted for sending me the link.

The Day After the Deluge at the Beach

Yesterday we had violent thunderstorms in the afternoon, due to the passage of a "cold" front, and over the course of 2 hours or less had over 2 inches of rain (according to our home rain gauge).  As is usually the case, the day after such a frontal passage, the air is cooled and drier (merely 79 or so), and the sky is blue.  You can see the Bay is muddy from the dirt washed in.

It's still a bit choppy, but this senior kayaker is out getting his exercise, despite the dirty water and the waves.

The first sign of Kudzu blossoms.  Kudzu has a lovely violet raceme, with many pea-like flowers, that open first at the bottom and then up the stalk of the inflorescence with time. The flowers have the smell of ripe grapes!

An interesting erosional feature I've never seen before.  Lots of water poured over the cliff edges yesterday, and caused erosion (hence the muddy water), but here, a trickle of muddy and sandy water came down the cliff face and deposited what looks like a giant drip sand castle.  Georgia kindly provides a reference scale.

Blackberries are starting to ripen.  However, of the five I picked and ate, only one was really sweet. Usually the birds get to the good ripe ones before humans.

A mother and daughter enjoy the waves despite the dirty water.

There were lots of Ospreys out today, flying back and forth, looking for food.  Hunting must have been tough with the chop and dirty water, I only saw one carrying a fish, and I didn't see any of them attempt a dive.

Betty Ford - RIP

Betty Ford , the accidental First Lady to an accidental President, died at age 93 yesterday.  Her second husband, Congressman Gerald Ford, succeeded to the Vice Presidency in 1973 with forced resignation of Spiro Agnew (for being a typically corrupt Maryland politician of the era) under the 25 Amendment.  He succeeded to the presidency after Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate Scandal, and is the only President never to have been elected either as President or Vice President.

Betty is best known for two things.  First her public battle with breast cancer at a time when cancer in general, and breast cancer in particular was a hush hush personal issue (people most commonly passed away after a "long illness"). This opened up the public discourse, and led to better diagnosis and treatment  Second, her personal battle with alcohol and prescription drugs, which led her to found the Betty Ford Centers.

In a time of intense partisanship, I don't believe I ever heard a bad word said about her.  A good life, well, if imperfectly, lived.  The world is a better place because of her.

British Met Office Admits 50% of Temperature Variation due to Sun

“We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year":

Buried way back in the article (which admits that the met office has had a tough time with long term forecast in the past, with special reference to the famous predicted  "barbecue summer" of 2009 which turn out to be a chilly, rainy bust), is this admission:

“We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year,” says Scaife. With solar physicists predicting a long-term reduction in the intensity of the solar cycle – and possibly its complete disappearance for a few decades, as happened during the so-called Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715 – this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming.

Moving beyond the next season, Met Office scientists are also working on annual and, particularly, decadal forecasts – the territory between weather and climate prediction. Business and government planners are used to working on timescales 10 years ahead, but horizons of 50 or more years, often discussed by climate change researchers, may be too long term.

I've posted on the effects of the solar cycle on weather/climate here,  here and here.  It's looking increasingly likely that the sun is entering a period of low solar activity, and that this is likely to have a cooling effect on earth's climate.  It's good to see the official bureaucracy of weather/climate predictions begin to acknowledge and utilize that relationship, however grudgingly.

Found at Watt's Up With That.

Is EPA Selling Environmental Indulgences for Votes?

EPA adds Texas to new emission rules, exempts Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia:

Unemployment is at 9.2% nationally, thanks in no small part to Obama’s failed policies, while Texas’ unemployment rate is more than a point lower than the national average. Texas has its own power grid, and was supposed to be left off the EPA’s new cross state emissions rule — but the Lone Star state got added anyway on Thursday. And Obama’s EPA administrator doesn’t care a bit about the people who are losing their jobs or will end up seeing their energy rates skyrocket because of this. She is just doing her boss’ bidding.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said those fears were exaggerated, particularly in Texas, where some already have moved to clean up their coal-fired plants.

Yes, Texas is already cleaning up its air on its own, and has been since the 1990s. So why the meddling? Politics.

“Texas has an ample range of cost-effective emission reduction options for complying with the requirements of this rule without threatening reliability or the continued operation of coal-burning units,” Jackson said.

CPS Energy last month announced it would shutter its two oldest and dirtiest coal plants by 2018, 13 years ahead of their planned retirement date, rather than spend upward of $550 million on new pollution-control equipment.

That’s going to cost jobs. This is politics disguised as science. Just take a look at the states the EPA decided to leave off the rule change.

The challenge from the new rule, known as the Cross State Air Pollution Rule, is that stricter limits take effect next year, giving power-plant owners little time to comply.

Texas was not included in the EPA’s draft rule related to sulfur dioxide cuts because EPA modeling had shown little downwind impact from Texas power plants on other states.

On Thursday, however, the EPA said Texas would be required to meet lower SO2 limits to avoid allowing the state to increase emissions.

Five states — Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, along with the District of Columbia — were dropped from the final EPA rule.

Three blue states and two swing states get left off, while Texas gets added even though the EPA’s own model shows little evidence that emissions from Texas impact other states at all. Nah, there’s no politics here.

Gov. Perry has issued a statement slamming the EPA’s decision, but it may be time to challenge Obama on these moves more directly.

Much like the exemptions to Obama care being issued to unions and companies friendly to the Obama administration. I guess onerous rules meant to clean up the environment are only meant to apply to ones political opponents, not your friends, and those you hope to court for the next election.  Whatever happened to equal protection under law, and shared sacrifice?  Sacrificed to political expediency.

More on the Cross State Emission Rules via Hot Air:

Thursday the EPA announced that they have finalized additional Clean Air Act provisions, collectively known as “The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule” to ostensibly “reduce air pollution and attain clean air standards,” by requiring coal companies in 27 states to slash emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide by 73 percent and 54 percent, respectively, from 2005 levels by 2014…

An analysis ACCCE released earlier this month by the National Economic Research Associates (NERA) used government data to examine the combined impacts of today’s rule and another EPA electricity regulation, the “Utility MACT” Rule. According to NERA’s examination, the EPA’s actions would cause a net job loss of over 1.4 million job-years by 2020.

Further, NERA found that electricity rates would increase over 23 percent in coal-reliant areas and that though the EPA might claim the regulations will create jobs, NERA predicted that for every job created four will be lost.

Rule 5 Saturday - Gwyneth Paltrow -"I'd Rather Smoke Crack..."

"... than eat cheese from a can" 

Well, she may have more experience with crack, but I know that if you're hungry enough, dry dog food looks pretty good.

The foodie, 38, was chatting about her cookbook at the
Roundhouse Studios for the iTunes festival on Tuesday when she revealed she’s banned her kids from McDonald’s.

That's pretty easy for a rich film star. Possibly a little more tempting for the average urban parent without the freedom of movement and choices that a lot of money brings. Or you could just feed them at home.

“I take them to Pizza Express because I think that’s much healthier,” she said. “Don’t tell them there are toys!”

Ah yes, I'm sure that's much better.  No empty calories in pizza!  Bread, cheese, meat?  Sounds like a burger.  Do you think her kids like anchovies on their pizza?

Sidestepping questions about her hubby, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Gwynnie, who says she can “eat any man under a table”, revealed plans to start a channel of cookery programmes on an iPhone app

Another fine thing I'm missing by only owning a stupid phone

– but you might wanna buy some plonk before giving her recipes a go.

Well, that sounds good, almost anything goes better with a little wine.

“I drink constantly while I’m cooking,” she says. “Wine, either colour.”

Did she really say color with a "u"?  Oh right, I'm quoting a British publication.  Once upon a time I published a paper in a British journal and they made me spell "Baltimore Harbor" with a "u" in harbor.  Horrors!

Ah yes, Stout; the perfect diet beer.  But then, it doesn't look like she has a weight problem.

America Prepares to Give Up Space

6 False Lessons Of The Space Shuttle

With the final flight of shuttle Atlantis sparking inspired debate over where NASA should go from here, PM contributor Rand Simberg warns against some of the conclusions that observers are drawing from 30 years of shuttle flights.

1. The Shuttle Proved That Reusable Launch Vehicles are Not Cost Effective

This is a pernicious myth‚ one that has driven NASA policy for years, since the failure of the X-33 program and through former NASA head Mike Griffin's policy of reverting to expendable systems with the now-canceled Constellation program. But the reality is that the shuttle taught us nothing about the cost of a properly designed, fully reusable launch system, because that's not what it was.

2. The Shuttle Proved That We Must Move Beyond Chemical Rockets

The perennial myth is that we simply can't cut the costs of going to space if we're still using rockets. If the most cost-effective rocket-propelled vehicle possible‚ the space shuttle‚ couldn't do it, the thinking goes, it must be time to give up on them. The flaw in this argument is that, as noted, the shuttle wasn't a very cost-effective rocket. And, people who make this argument assume that the high cost of rocketry is all of the fuel that is expended, but in fact fuel costs are typically only about 1 percent of the total operations cost for a rocket-based launcher.

3. The Shuttle Proved that Cargo and Passengers Should Travel on Different Vehicles

But this isn't a philosophy that we use with any other form of transportation. Every airliner carries both passengers and cargo, and even cargo transport flights have a flight crew. The real lesson isn't to separate crew and cargo, but to design the launch systems to be more reliable, because both crew and cargo are far too expensive to lose.

Read the rest.  I remember Sputnik, and the American response, the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions.  The US has had a presence in space almost continuously for most of my life.  And now we're backing down and looking inward. NASA isn't cheap, but it's not what's breaking the bank.

 Thanks to Ted for the cartoon.

The Limits of Free Will

A long article in the Atlantic about the brain, and it's effects on criminal activity.  It opens with a chilling story of Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper from 1966:

The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:

I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.

By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. The story of his rampage dominated national headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even stranger: in the early hours of the morning on the day of the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.

It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationa[l]ly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this …

Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had.

I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.

Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances.

The second story, of a pedophile, is even stranger..

The point of the article is that it is increasingly obvious that individual differences in the brain structure and function in people is important in determining their behavior, including criminal acts, and what appears to be free will may be less free than we imagine.

My view is to grant some truth to this, but to stress that for the large majority of evolution has equipped us with a mind that is capable of controlling most of our genetic behavioral predilections, except for the most basic of drives.  Evolution has been a powerful force shaping human behavior, and  that free will, and the ability to act independently in response to stimulus has a powerful selective force.

Still, the brain is stranger place than we can imagine.

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Do Polar Bears Growl with an Irish Brogue?

No! Don't tell me I'm Irish!

Polar bears have Irish ancestry, suggests DNA study

Twisted lines of ancestry seem to have intertwined two very different species: the water-loving polar bear and the forest-loving Irish brown bear. Despite being so different, the two seem to have found love: Meeting and breeding at least once during the last 120,000 years, the two species gave rise to the polar bears we know today.

"The Irish genetic sequences are much closer to the modern polar bear," said study researcher Daniel Bradley, of Trinity College Dublin. "As the climate has changed, what we are seeing is the tracking of that climatic change in the sequences in the bears." [Real or Fake? 8 Bizarre Hybrid Animals]

The researchers started by analyzing the DNA of brown bears from Ireland and comparing it with that of ancient and modern polar bears. They used samples from bear skeletons found in Irish and British caves. The oldest skeletons were 120,000 years old and the youngest were at least 3,000 years old, the latter having died shortly before the bears went extinct in the area.

Too much Jameson's?

It's pretty clear from genetic studies and the ability of Brown and Polar Bears to hybridize, that Polar Bears are likely a fairly recent (as geological things go) branch off the Brown Bear line.  An earlier study suggest that Polar Bears evolved from Brown Bears about 150,000 years ago, or fairly late in the Pleistocene epoch, the ice ages that started 2.59 million years ago, and probably continue to the present (Technically we live in the Holocene epoch, but that's likely just the warm high on one of the humps of a continuing series of cold cycles).  Having large portions of the earth frozen certainly selected for species adapted for the cold

So are Polar Bears really Irish?  For now, until somebody finds Brown Bear fossils even closer genetically to the Polar Bears somewhere else.

Maryland Pulls the Football on Chesapeake Bay Restoration Funding

Restoration Funding Drop Worries Official

One Worcester County Commissioner called out an area newspaper in a public meeting this on what he deems a misleading article on the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund.

Commissioner Virgil Shockley referenced an editorial in The Daily Times during a commission meeting Tuesday. The editorial praised the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) for the $355,000 granted to Wicomico County this year for restoration projects. The money will be used to replace failing septic systems in areas that have a critical impact on the Chesapeake Bay.

While Shockley acknowledged the goal of the program is a good one, he criticized the positive spin on what he considers a negative trend.

“Three years ago, there was five times more money [in the Restoration Fund],” said Shockley. “It [the editorial] completely leaves blank that they’ve cut funding by 80 percent.”

Really, they cut down the funding even though they've been collecting the essentially the same, or more money from the flush tax?  That doesn't seem right.  But, then I found the annual reports of the Chesapeake Bay REstoration Fund here, and after figuring out how to read them, I found in the 2011 report:

Septic Fund (MDE 60% for On-Site Disposal System upgrades except 22.4% in FY 2010)

 Meaning they cut the spending back from 60% of the fund previously to 22.4% in 2010, the remainder having been "loaned" to the general fund, which in turn, spent them on cover crops:

For FY 2010 only, the allocation was changed to 22.4% MDE and 77.6% MDA as part of the State Budget approval during the 2010 legislative session. The purpose of this temporary change was to transfer excess funds from the MDE septic system fund into the MDA cover crop fund.

And yes, they are looking to increase the flush tax fees so they have more to spend.

In the most recent Bay Restoration Fund Advisory Committee (BRFAC) annual report (January 2010),the committee identified five options to eliminate the funding shortfall. The financial impact of these options is summarized below:

a. Increase the Bay fee, which is currently $2.50 per month per Equivalent Dwelling Unit (EDU), or $30/yr per EDU. This option requires legislative approval.

Less for more...