I’d say that members of the Bush Administration have shown a penchant for warrantless actions & language. Though, to use a possibly over-the-top word like “eco-terrorist” to describe often over-the-top political opponents might be at least symmetrical, and maybe even politically warranted.
But is it accurate? Do we confuse ourselves, cloud things we need to see clearly, to use the same word for eco-motivated arsonists etc, as we use for Al-Qaeda suicide bombers? Does the so-called “direct action” of activists, qualify as “terror”? Is the arson the only part of what they do, that might earn them the comparison & label? …cont'd »
People who set fire to things in the name of the environment could cool public attitudes toward their political namesake.
Today, March 6, 2008, Briana Waters has been found guilty of charges stemming from a high-profile arson at the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture. She denies the charges, but her protests are not convincing. She now has a 3-year old daughter, whose father is a fugative for his role in the same arson.
Briana’s toddler will be approaching puberty and Middle School, before she gets out of prison, at the best. In the case of Briana, the best case outcome seems a reasonable hope: she gives every appearance of being a nice, sensible person who will get along smoothly and make a positive impression with those she comes in contact with. Except, she has a prediliction for helping set buildings on fire … “beyond a reasonable doubt” … but still denies it. …cont'd »
On February 21, 2008, the federal U.S. Fish & Wildlife agency announced an official ruling to remove the wolf from the Endangered Species list, in the Rocky Mountain States. New rulings go into effect 30 days following announcement. This action will convey authority over wolf management back to the respective States (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming), which have plans to resume controlled hunting, possibly trapping, and even aerial and poison-bait population-reduction measures.
Environmentalist and animal-rights organizations oppose the hunting or trapping of wolves, whether they are endangered or not. They have announced intentions to take court action against the delisting. The Sierra Club asserts that because the new populations are both small and isolated, they are genetically vulnerable. Theoretically that may (or may not) be true, but the business of the Endanger Species Act is species that are endangered - not hypothetical speculations. …cont'd »
Back much before the start of the 20th Century, lawns were the prerogative of the elite. Regular people did not have lawns, and looked upon the idea as silly. Normally, the ‘yards’ of common folks’ homes were grazed, right up to the walls. The cow would often poke its head right in the kitchen window, for apple-peelings.
Lawns first became fashionable on the wealthy estates in England, about 500 years ago. They were very large at first (hundreds, even thousands of acres), and the scale was part of the attraction. The climate of England is near-ideal for grasses, and this adaptation is thought to have been a factor in their early success. The summers are cool & moist, so grass does not have to go dormant to survive drought & intense heat (as it must in more Continental zones), and the winters have little snow (which prevents light reaching it) or ice (which desiccates or ‘burns’ it). More & nicer kinds of grasses are seen, in such mild climates as England’s. …cont'd »
TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter, by Joe Tan, is available on its own homepage, on the author’s website.
This is my kind of spam filter. Subtle as a brick, fancy as a stick fence. There is little allure in a script like this, which uses very obvious tactics to do a chore that has a tendency to drift in rarified strata. …cont'd »
WordPress has a check-box in the Admin > Users > Your Profile panel, for the option, “Use the visual editor when writing”. The check-box is checked, by default. Out-of-the-box, WordPress users use this ‘visual editor’ to write posts, etc.
The visual editor is a separate javascript program called TinyMCE, which comes included with WordPress. I understand that for WP to serve the portion of the public they made blogging & websites practical for, it is important to have an editor that lets folks ‘just type’.
Still, I have had both problems & complaints with the TinyMCE editor, long-term. In one of my earliest posts, the editor broke while I was using it, and it has remained broken in exactly the same way ever since, across a good number of WP upgrades. There is evidently some glitch in perhaps the editor’s “config” file, resulting in a bizarre malformation of the code for images (and images being reduced to single pixels!), and this mess is carefully & faithfully preserved across upgrades. …cont'd »
In recent years, an increasing number of new varieties of hulless oats and hulless barley have become better-known and more widely-available. Versions of these grains that do not have strongly-attached hulls is an historic food-breakthrough, particularly in cool-temperate, short-season and northern districts where they grow better than wheat.
Oats, and even more so, barley have a tight hull which cannot be threshed off, like wheat and rye. This hull is very disagreeable in the mouth. It is prickly and finely-barbed so it moves - ‘crawls’ - steadily in one direction, and ‘digs in’. Barley cannot be cleaned of hulls even today, without severe damage to the grain. The common form of cooking-barley is called ‘pearled’, meaning that the outer part of the kernel where much of the nutrition resides, has been knocked-off in the process of removing the hull, leaving the whitish (pearly) inner starch-portion exposed. Large factories can cleanly hull oats, using highly specialized machines. …cont'd »
There are more than 20,000 polar bears, up from a fraction of that 50 years ago. It is thought that available habitat could support perhaps 2 or 3 times this number, and did so in previous historic eras. In sum, though, present populations are regarded as healthy, and not in danger.
However, the status of polar bears has seen new complications recently, in conjunction with dramatic reductions of the Arctic Ocean icepack. Bears have drowned in the ocean, trying to swim larger expanses of ice-free water than they could cross. Alarms have been sounded, that with ongoing climate change in the High Arctic, the polar bear population might decline.
High-profile initiatives have been launched to extend Endangered Species protections to polar bears, to reflect concerns that a continuation of climate changes in the Arctic might reduce the population. Since polar bears are holding their own well enough, the proposed protection is essentially of a prophylactic or preemptive nature. It is unusual to attempt to classify an animal this way, before there is evidence it is endangered. …cont'd »
From time to time we hear the old saw about politics being too important to leave to politicians, applied to science. In the case of politics, the issues are often understandable by anyone who pays attention, but with science, the matters at stake are often couched so that a long (and to many, severe) apprenticeship is necessary to understand.
From time to time, we therefore see the emergence of so-called ‘popular science writers’, or science ‘popularizers’. Usually, such writers are not very popular, so the term is a misnomer, even if somewhat popular.
Science-popularizers often speak to a quite-specific audience (who have a not-very-popular outlook), and these readers often have a high level of interest and a strong affinity for the topical material. Thus, though a popular-writer may not really rock the popular boat noticeably, they can be quite influential, by reaching & guiding a sizable special-interest audience, who in turn have the capacity to provide social momentum and visibility to otherwise-arcane scientific issues. …cont'd »
A gradual, mild warming trend has been taking place on Earth, for a couple centuries. Today, the dominant focus of attention is on how the human release of CO2 contributes to or outright causes that warming (by acting as a greenhouse material), and what measures would be appropriate & effective, to reduce human-modifications of the global climate.
There is a noticeable tendency among naturally-technical and natural-science types of individuals, upon reading a wide variety of explanations and opinions, to regard the question of why our climate is changing as more than just a little bit ‘up in the air’. Clearly, there is a low-intensity change-trend: but what is causing the trend to take place, is less clear in the minds of many.
Like some of the other non-professional ‘little scientist’, amateur-naturalist types of people out there, I long ago took the position, that it is relatively unimportant, whether human activity is behind the warming-trend, or whether it is a natural effect. The reason for taking this attitude is simple: Natural climate change does happen, and it has often been far more drastic than the changes that now concern us. And we are unprepared. …cont'd »