Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Stories below the fold

Wired article on NASA's Gravity Dilemma. shampp

Space is beautiful...but deadly.

--------------------------------------

WHAuden quietly helped many people in need...and recognized the furies within.

Auden stated a view like Arendt’s as early as 1939, in his poem “Herman Melville”:
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
He later quoted Simone Weil’s pensée on the same theme, written around the same time: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”


article from NYRev of books via Firstthingsblog.

-------------------------
Head Lice from Hell...

conditioner may help you get rid of the nits more easily, or maybe not.

Ruby has the "headlice from hell" problem, because every time she visits her cousin in Manila, she comes back with new beasties...and needs treatment: special shampoo and then the maid combing through her hair to remove the eggs attached to hair shafts.

Makes one realize where the phrase "nit picker" comes from.

--------------------------------------

To quote from the Graduate: PLASTICS.

MomJones explains why there is so little hype about plastic pollution. One of my pet peeves. Plastic bags and bottles here are just thrown into the open ditches, clogging and contaminating the ground water, and contributing to floods. But are they also making people fat and diabetic?


Yet I actually worry more about light bulbs:
According to the EPA’s website, for every bulb disposed of improperly in a landfill, there will be 6,000 gallons of groundwater pollution. Walmart alone has sold hundreds of millions of them already, and most consumers do not know how to handle a dead or broken bulb. The fact is that burned out CFL bulbs are considered Toxic Hazardous Waste.


the newfangled ones simply don't last very long, and I suspect in future years we will find mercury contamination in the ground water etc. because  no one disposes them properly.

Plastics may make one fat, but mercury kills....

I should add: we now have garbage pickup. Even the Palenke now dumps their garbage in a designated vacant lot for the trucks to pick it up.

Our personal trash is pisked up by a little man with a large cart who picks up the garbage every day or two. I presume someone pays him but sometimes I give him 20 pesos as a thank you gift.

This means less smelly garbage from food and less smell. Also less smoke from trash fires, and means we only have to dispose of large items by ourselves (i.e. tree limbs and branches)

--------------------------------
 related item: The film Noah is being pushed in the UK as an "environmental" film. And so they banned plastic water bottles on the set, making one actress claim she ended up dehydrated.

Uh, ever hear of canteens True, most of them nowadays are also plasstic, but you can also buy one made of stainless steel....

When our NatGuard unit practiced in the desert, one of my jobs was to make sure everyone had a canteen full of water, and drank a quart every hour, to prevent heat exhaustion and dehydration.

That is why "water decontamination specialists" are so important, and they often are the first ones called out for local disasters or war. :

Maybe they should have had Pauley Shore's advice on this one.
  • Shore did his water treatment training at Fort Lee, Virginia. He actually went through the training to better understand the job. The water treatment training in the movie was also filmed at Fort Lee.

--------------------------------------

Snake one gator zero...uh oh:

Snake bursts after gobbling gator.

An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.

The serious part of this: the damn python could kill a child. It is an outside invader, bought by someone who wanted an "exotic" snake and then thrown away to fend on it's own, and now busy gobbling up native wildlife.

NPR reports that there are 150 thousand of these snakes in the Everglades...

And the state has made it legal to hunt them to try to get their numbers under control.


No comments: