As you gobble that fine food, be it steak, a frankfurter, roasted chicken, or an omelet, please, sit back relax. Put your feet up and stay a while. I will furnish the entertainment in the form of a film. Meatrix is fun, fascinating, and far from folly. This presentation is playful; the message profound.
You may recall the fairy tales you loved as a child. The plots varied, although all had elements of mystery. Adventures were abundant. Tots were often so engrossed in the tales, they barely noticed that the themes taught a life lesson. Meatrix is as the fables you once anxiously awaited and even asked others to read aloud to you.
“It seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled,” Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “It seems baffling that we don’t know where the oil is in the water column.”
The administration acknowledges that its scientific resources are stretched by the disaster, but contends that it is moving to get better information, including a more complete picture of the underwater plumes.
“We’re in the early stages of doing that, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding as of yet of where that oil is,” Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told Congress on Wednesday. “But we are devoting all possible resources to understanding where the oil is and what its impact might be.”
My sister-in-law, who knows that I am “Going Green”, sent me this article about the nutritional and practical uses for the consummate salad component, the cucumber. While I can attest ot some of the accuracy of the nutritional information, I have yet to try out cleaning the sink or eating cucumber slices to ward off a hangover. So for something amusing
WOW WHAT A LITTLE GEM THE CUCUMBER IS. I WILL LOOK AT IT DIFFERENTLY NOW.
1. Cucumbers contain most of the vitamins you need every day, just one cucumber contains Vitamin B1, Vitamin B2, Vitamin B3, Vitamin B5, Vitamin B6, Folic Acid, Vitamin C, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium and Zinc.
2. Feeling tired in the afternoon, put down the caffeinated soda and pick up a cucumber. Cucumbers are a good source of B Vitamins and Carbohydrates that can provide that quick pick-me-up that can last for hours.
3. Tired of your bathroom mirror fogging up after a shower? Try rubbing a cucumber slice along the mirror, it will eliminate the fog and provide a soothing, spa-like fragrance.
4. Are grubs and slugs ruining your planting beds? Place a few slices in a small pie tin and your garden will be free of pests all season long. The chemicals in the cucumber react with the aluminum to give off a scent undetectable to humans but drive garden pests crazy and make them flee the area.
BP has claimed that the new 4 inch Pipe inserted into the 21 Riser pipe is siphoning off 20% of the leaking oil. And then they updated that figure to 40% the next day.
Sounds good on the Morning News, but how did they get those numbers?
And those calcs ended up: roughly 4.4% of the larger [inner] area would be covered by the smaller [outer] area — BUT all that was just a Red Herring — it turns out due to this BP picture (and its large rubber gaskets)
Looks good on Paper. Could the insert pipe with its many rubber stoppers actually be blocking up to 40% of the leaking oil from the larger pipe?
Yet one wonders, where did that 40% number come from, especially since BP is not all that keen on measuring and monitoring?
Over the past few weeks since the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe has put the oceans and the environment at the center of our consciousness again, we’ve been hearing a lot about what the oil leak is doing to the Gulf of Mexico.
We need to end the hidden government subsidies for fossil fuels and make sure their true cost, including climate change, is built into them.
Moreover, we should be generating electricity from alternative sources or natural gas (of which we have a lot) and then moving to electric and hybrid automobiles. (Natural gas burns cleaner than petroleum or coal and is probably a necessary bridge fuel to the alternatives). Going to electric vehicles powered by natural gas, wind and solar plants would be cheaper than rebuilding all the gas stations in the country. Coal should be banned altogether and its use made a hanging crime.
And, we should be matching every penny of the cost of the Gulf clean-up with a huge government Manhattan project on solar energy.
The environmental and economic costs of the oil spill are enormous, but they are tiny compared to the costs of actually burning the oil and spilling more masses of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If you’re not alarmed about your future, it is because you have bought the cover-up of climate change, just as Obama bought a cover-up when he believed what he was told about the unlikelihood of oil spills from ocean platforms.
But something else which should probably be concerning us all is the condition our oceans are in, and have been in for many years, even prior to the oil gusher. We live in a much smaller and more fragile world than we tend to think we do, and our decades long mistreatment of our environment, our rivers, lakes and oceans, the dwindling fish and large ocean mammal populations are all very serious concerns.
Jeremy Jackson is the Ritter Professor of Oceanography and Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Painting pictures of changing marine environments, particularly coral reefs and the Isthmus of Panama, Jackson’s research captures the extreme environmental decline of the oceans that has accelerated in the past 200 years.
Jackson’s current work focuses on the future of the world’s oceans, given overfishing, habitat destruction and ocean warming, which have fundamentally changed marine ecosystems and led to “the rise of slime.” Although Jackson’s work describes grim circumstances, even garnering him the nickname Dr. Doom, he believes that successful management and conservation strategies can renew the ocean’s health.
In this 18 minute talk from TED.com, Professor Jackson lays out the shocking state of our ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse.
As you can see, I’ve gotten tired of just typing and complaining about this. That just didn’t seem to be enough, especially because BP is now collecting oil from the spill that it can sell, their stock is still traded, they’re still doing business. No, I wanted to do something else. So here’s an invitation to join me in creating a leaderless, spontaneous national boycott of BP.
Well, it isn’t exactly Alice’s Restaurant. Yet. But who knows what this can lead to.
Rancher George Ehmke said he was eager to be part of the wind project.
“Never dreamed we’d ever have anything like this out here,” Ehmke said. “We have been putting up with this wind all our life. We might as well make something off of it.”
There are 35 massive turbines now perched on his land. The blades spin almost constantly.
[…]
Old time ranchers had one use for the wind — to fill their stock ponds.
“Well we live in a changing world,” Ehmke said. “I’m just glad to see it. We’re using the wind for something besides pumping water.”
[…]
Ehmke said his payout from producing wind power will keep his family’s ranch profitable for the next generation.
“Yeah, I make money in my sleep I guess,” he said.
Cool, being a life-long Science fan, I have always liked Experiments …
But I generally prefer those of the ‘Controlled Experiment’ variety. Those fly-by-night Variety, like combining a jet of Hair Spray with a tiny Lighter flame, always left me a little frightened.
Funny, I’m starting to feel that way again …
As the oil gushes from the broken well head at the sea floor, Rader says it has the potential to contaminate each layer of the water column that, “directly exposes those animals to toxicity, at the surface including the very sensitive surface zones where not only sea turtles and marine mammals and sea birds can be oiled, but also where the highways for fish larvae exist. And then as it rains back into the abyss over a much wider area carrying toxicants back into the deep sea where ancient corals and other sensitive ecosystems exist.”
One response strategy has been to use dispersants or anti-freeze-like chemicals to break the oil up into smaller globules.
[…]
It is a choice, he says, between two bad options. While the chemicals may protect birds and other wildlife by dissipating the slick before it reaches shore, their toxicity in the Gulf could harm fish and other marine life.
Davidseth’s essay last night made me cry: “But BP’s not pouring oil directly on me, or my family, or my house, or my land.” (excellent essay, & he says it much better than me… my sentiments)
Yes, yes they are. They are pouring oil on us… My house, my beach, my land, my Gulf, my ocean, my planet. And yours too.
“We came to the beach just in case we can’t come next week or in the next 20 years…”
{Dad, family of 4}
The winds Sunday gusted to 25 mph, blowing from the Gulf toward the coast, but coming a bit from the east. That helped keep the huge oil slick from coming closer to Florida.
“Currently, there are no impacts to the state projected through Wednesday,” said Florida Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Amy Graham. “Florida continues to make preparations to safeguard the state’s shoreline.”
“We wait for summer so we can go to the beach,” {16 year old boy, Pensacola Florida}.
There used to be a day when the ‘Blame Game’ was just NOT an option. There used to be a time, WHEN Action was called for, Action was taken.
My oh my, how times have changed.
“The buck stops here” is a phrase that was popularized by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who kept a sign with that phrase on his desk in the Oval Office. (Footage from Jimmy Carter’s “Address to the Nation on Energy” shows the sign still on the desk during Carter’s administration.) The phrase refers to the fact that the President has to make the decisions and accept the ultimate responsibility for those decisions.
It’s time for a push to pass the first major national ecological protection legislation in decades.
We need swift action to prevent disasters, like the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by corporations that offload their huge financial, ecological and human costs on us.
