One for the Dinosaur Watchers.

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I saw this at Pharyngula’s Botanical Wednesday, and what a cool guide! Not just for us dinosaur watchers, but all of us golf course lawn haters, too. Just input your zip code, and Audubon pops up with a list of native plants. Going through mine, I was doing much nodding, most everything on the list is a commonplace sight, and a healthy amount of the listed flora is on property, including a lot of things that have gone unidentified for years. I haven’t gone through everything though, that will be something of a chore, as my zip yielded 15 pages of native plants.

Audubon Native Plants Database.

The Norden – Police.

Holy shit, the contrast. Watch. Just watch. I want to live in Finland. Thanks to Ice Swimmer for this one! I was particularly impressed with the training, which shocked the LA cop. Not only the 3 years, but that they were being trained as part of the community, not as apart and elite, like is done here in uStates.

The Norden.

Oil Spills: Good for Everyone, Really!

CREDIT: AP Photo/Bill Haber

CREDIT: AP Photo/Bill Haber.

No one is going to be surprised by the duplicity of oil companies, or their constant attempt at spin. This time, though, they’ve not only taken the cake, they’ve tried to walk off with the whole party, too. Their new line is that oil spills are really good, for everyone. They stimulate the economy, they make jobs, and they help wildlife, oh my yes!

For the past few weeks, the Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC) has been holding hearings on the matter of a proposed oil-by-rail terminal that could be built in Vancouver, Washington. If approved, it would be the largest oil-by-rail facility in the country, handling some 360,000 barrels of crude oil, shipped by train, every single day. It would also greatly increase the number of oil trains that pass through Washington, adding a total of 155 trains, per week, to the state’s railroads.

[…]

But according to witnesses that testified before the EFSEC on behalf of Vancouver Energy — the joint venture between Tesoro Corp. and Savage Cos. and the entity behind the Tesoro-Savage terminal proposal — oil spills might not actually be that bad for the environment.

“The Draft Environmental Impact Statement identifies many economic impacts arising from an accident associated with Project operations, but fails to recognize economic activity that would be generated by spill response,” Todd Schatzki, vice president of Analysis Group — a consulting group that released an economic report on the terminal commissioned by Tesoro Savage — wrote in pre-filed testimony. “When a spill occurs, new economic activity occurs to clean-up contaminated areas, remediate affected properties, and supply equipment for cleanup activities. Anecdotal evidence from recent spills suggests that such activity can be potentially large.”

Schatzki’s pre-filed testimony also includes references to both the Santa Barbara and BP oil spills’ role as job creating events. He notes that the Santa Barbara oil spill created some 700 temporary jobs to help with cleanup, while the BP spill created short term jobs for 25,000 workers. Schatzki does not mention that BP has paid individuals and businesses more than $10 billion to make up for economic losses caused by the spill. Nor does he mention that California’s Economic Forecast Director predicted that the 2015 Santa Barbara oil spill would cost the county 155 jobs and $74 million in economic activity.

For the Columbia River region, the impacts of an oil spill could be equally economically devastating — a report from the Washington Attorney General’s office found that an oil spill could cost more than $170 million in environmental damages.

[…]

In testimony given on July 7, another Tesoro-Savage-associated witness, Gregory Challenger, argued that oil spills could actually have benefits for fish and wildlife. Challenger, who worked with Vancouver Energy to analyze potential impacts and responses in the event of a worst-case discharge at the facility and along the rail line, told the committee that when oil spills cause the closure of certain fisheries or hunting seasons, it’s the animals that benefit.

“An oil spill is not a good thing. A fishery closure is a good thing. If you don’t kill half a million fish and they all swim upstream and spawn, that’s more fish than were estimated affected as adults,” Challenger said during his testimony. “The responsible party is not going to get credit for that, by the way.”

To prove his point, Challenger cited National Marine Fisheries Service data that showed that 2011, the year after the BP oil spill, had been a record year for seafood catch in the Gulf of Mexico. And while that’s true, Shiva Polefka, policy analyst for the Center for American Progress’s Ocean Policy program, cautioned against trying to make sweeping statements for how all ecosystems would respond to an oil spill. Following the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, researchers discovered that crude oil had soaked into the rocky beaches near the spill site, emitting toxic compounds for years that had long-term adverse impacts on salmon and herring populations.

“Does cutting fishing effort benefit fish? Absolutely,” Polefka said. “Enough to mitigate the horrible effects of large oil spills in every case? Absolutely not.”

During his testimony, Challenger also brought up the Athos 1 oil spill, which sent 264,000 gallons of crude oil into the Delaware River in 2004. The spill, Challenger said, took place during duck hunting season, and forced an early closure for recreational hunting in the area.

“There were an estimate of 3,000 birds affected by the oil, and 13,000 birds not shot by hunters not shot by hunters, because of the closed season,” he said. “We don’t get any credit for that, but it’s hard to deny that it’s good for birds to not be shot.”

According to NOAA, seabirds are especially vulnerable to oil spills, because of the way that oil affects their usually-waterproof feathers — when those feathers become matted with oil, a seabird loses its ability to regulate its temperature. Often, it will try to preen itself to remove the oil, which only forces the oil into its internal organs, causing problems like diarrhea, kidney and liver damage, and anemia. Oil can also enter into a seabird’s lungs, leading to respiratory problems.

The full story is at Think Progress. So, there we have it. Oil spills are great! Why, they help everyone. This is such blatant bullshit, I’m rather stunned they are even trying this ploy.

Republic of Cliven Bundy.

Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, speaks at an event Friday, April 10, 2015, in Bunkerville, Nev.  Credit: AP Photo/John Locher.

Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, speaks at an event Friday, April 10, 2015, in Bunkerville, Nev.
Credit: AP Photo/John Locher.

Cliven Bundy may be in jail, but he still has friends in Congress.

The U.S. House of Representatives next week is expected to vote on a proposal that would exempt 48 counties, primarily in the West, from the law that has been used for more than 100 years to protect archaeologically, culturally, and naturally significant resources in the United States, including the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty.

The counties that would be exempted from the Antiquities Act of 1906 cover more than 250,000 square miles — an area nearly the size of Texas. The amendment, which was authored by Rep. Stewart (R-UT) and Rep. Gosar (R-AZ), appears to have two main purposes.

First, it would block the efforts of local communities in Maine, Utah, Arizona, and elsewhere which have been asking President Obama to establish new national monuments in their states.

In southern Utah, for example, the president would not be able to respond to the requests of tribal nations that he protect the Bears Ears area, which is a hotbed of grave robbing, looting, and desecration of sacred sites. It would also prevent the president from protecting Gold Butte in Nevada, where Cliven Bundy illegally grazed his cows for decades, as a national monument.

Though Rep. Gosar argues that the bill prevents local voices from being ignored, in both of the above cases there is strong local support for these national monuments. Seventy-one percent of Utah voters declared their support for a Bears Ears monument and the same percentage of Nevadans support the protection of Gold Butte.

The bill would also block a grassroots call to protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining, the expansion of which would fall in Rep. Gosar’s district. The petition to protect the area has recently reached more than half a million signatures.

Second, the Stewart-Gosar amendment would make a major concession to the demands of scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy and his followers who argue that the U.S. government should have no authority over national public lands in the West. Bundy and his sons Ammon and Ryan were arrested and indicted in February for their involvement in armed standoffs with federal law enforcement officials in Nevada and Oregon.

Jesus Christ. Anymore, you have to stay buried in your news media of choice just to know what evil the conservative asshole party is up to day by day. This is awful. I haven’t read enough yet to know if there are ways to fight this, but if I find them, I’ll post.

Full story here.

Photographing the Radioactive Past.

Jeremy Bolen.

Jeremy Bolen.

Bolen’s featured works at Newspace include a series named after Vieques, an island belonging to Puerto Rico that was used for weapons testing by the United States between when the US bought about two-thirds of the island 1941 and when the military left the island in 2003.

According to Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, “More than 80 million pounds of chemical weapons, bombs and ammunition were dropped on the eastern portion of the island for a good part of the 20th century. Its soil still harbors bullets filled with radioactive depleted uranium and unexploded bombs.” In 2010, about 7,000 residents of the island jointly sued the US Navy claiming that military operations on the island were the cause of Vieques’ higher-than-average rate of cancer, along with a slew of other long-term medical issues. A Puerto Rican Federal District Court dismissed the lawsuit, and the US First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal in 2012 due to the Navy’s right to sovereign immunity.

Bolen went to Vieques—though not to the restricted-access area on the eastern side of the island—and buried some of his film in the soil before it was exposed to visible light. He later dug the film back up and developed it, finding chromatic irregularities in the resulting prints. The artist’s prints are accented by bits of dirt (occasionally painted or gilded), and accompanied by a photo of the location where he buried his film, hung behind swatches of window screen.

For Bolen, adding the dirt to his irradiated film elucidates the “tension between the visible and the invisible,” that comes with living at these sites, as many in Vieques still do.

Full story here.

Cool Stuff Friday

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Are you on Instagram? Check out Nihongo Flashcards, and learn Japanese. Via Spoon & Tamago. Also, I just have to mention these fabulous Seppuku sweets, which you can only get if you’re in Japan, specifically, Tokyo.

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Visit the Kickstarter for a great project, Umi Hashi.

Need to feel a bit ethereal for a while? Check out these watercolour butterfly temporary tattoos:

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For Dinosaur Watchers, a beautiful poster of Birds of North America:

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Fireflies!

Photo by Yu Hashimoto.

Photo by Yu Hashimoto.

 

Photo by soranopa.

Photo by soranopa.

…But for a select group of photographers in Japan, Summer signals the arrival of fireflies. And for very short periods – typically May and June, from around 7 to 9pm – these photographers set off to secret locations all around Japan, hoping to capture the magical insects that light up the night.

One thing that makes these photographs so magical is that they capture views that the naked eye is simply incapable of seeing. The photographs are typically composites, meaning that they combine anywhere from 10 to 200 of the exact same frame. That’s why it can look like swarms of thousands of fireflies have invaded the forest, when in reality it’s much less. But that’s not to discount these photographs, which require insider knowledge, equipment, skill and patience.

Fireflies live for only about 10 days and they’re extremely sensitive. They react negatively to any form of light and pollution, making finding them half the battle. Here, we present to you some a selection of our favorites from the 2016 summer season.

When it comes to magical things, little beats the magic of fireflies. See all the magic at Spoon & Tamago.

California: Vaccine Mandate.

Shutterstock.

Shutterstock.

With California’s strict vaccine mandate now in place, opponents are fighting to overturn the law in court.

The new law, which took effect Friday, bars parents from citing religion or other personal beliefs as reasons to not vaccinate their kids. SB 277 is one of the toughest mandatory vaccination laws in the country and drew many protesters when it was debated in Sacramento.

A group of parents and the nonprofit Education 4 All filed a suit Friday to overturn the law in U.S. District Court in San Diego. The suit claims that the law violates California children’s right to an education under the state’s constitution.

“SB 277 has made second-class citizens out of children who for very compelling reasons are not vaccinated according to the CDC schedule,” the plaintiffs’ attorney, Robert T. Moxley, said in a statement. “We are hoping the court will grant us an injunction while the judicial process takes place to see if this law is constitutional, which it most certainly does not seem to be.”

[…]

About 80,000 California students claim personal belief exemptions for vaccines annually.

First, good for you, California! It’s about damn time this ‘religious belief / personal belief’ crap was tossed out. No surprise that anti-vaxxers are fighting this mandate, but on the basis of violating a child’s right to an education? How does that work, when it is a parent’s refusal to vaccinate which bars a child from a public school? Your child doesn’t go to school in a vacuum, there are a whole lot of other children and their health at stake, and no, you don’t get to count on all the other kids being vaccinated as an okay for your little snowflake to run about in a possibly contagious state. I’m not all that comfortable with home-schooled kids not being vaccinated, because again, those kids aren’t in a magic bubble, never coming into contact with others. I was vaccinated, but I got nailed by chickenpox anyway. It was much milder and shorter lived than it would have been minus the vaccination, and it was not at all fun. I just don’t understand how any parent would be willing to see their child with such an illness.

I was also gobsmacked by the 80,000 personal belief exemption claims. Seriously? I know, in the scheme of the total population it’s not all that much, but in terms of a potential epidemic, it’s a huge number. I don’t have any personal reason to be concerned about these diseases anymore, but I am glad I’m not in SoCal anymore, either.

Via Raw Story.

Mikko Lagerstedt.

“Capturing emotion of places through photographs.” That’s the tagline on Mikko Lagerstedt’s website, and it is delivered with power and beauty.

Stillness of Night.

STILLNESS OF NIGHT

 

The Whole Universe Surrenders

THE WHOLE UNIVERSE SURRENDERS

 

PATHWAY

PATHWAY

Spending an entire evening under the stars in near pitch darkness, photographer Mikko Lagerstedt captures spectacular landscapes of frozen tundra and misty mornings of Iceland and his native Finland. With a camera mounted on a tripod he takes a multitude of exposures as the light gradually changes. Certain elements are then stitched together digitally and enhanced with Photoshop and Lightroom—a process he candidly shares in tutorials and presets he sells on his website and blog. The resulting images are a result of hours of photography, editing, and a keen sense of color and composition to create heavily modified images that are almost hyper-realistic.

Mikko Lagerstedt’s galleries are to be lost in, gazing with wonder, awe, and near heartache from the sheer beauty of this planet of ours. To say the emotion of the landscapes is well captured is a complete understatement.

Via Colossal Art.

Celestial Guidance.

From Lofty:

I went for a bike ride today and stopped for lunch at a park bench in the weak sun. Imagine my surprise when I glanced at the GPS display and saw it had been replaced by a rainbow noodliness! I knew immediately what deity had sent the message, that old reprobate Yahweh only sends monochrome daubings of beardie weirdies these days. Anyway I managed to capture the message just before it faded from view. My new found guidance led me to spot one of the few flowering eucalypts out at the moment, and a fallen floret became my mascot for the day.

Click for full size.

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© Lofty. All rights reserved.

Cool Stuff Friday

An enchanted forest! Oh, what a wondrous thing it would be to walk this forest. I love things that can make me feel like a small child, completely lost in wonder, and I had that moment a time or two just watching the video.

Stock up on breadcrumbs and magic beans: inspired by folklore and fairy tales, Foresta Lumina is an illuminated, spellbinding night trail created by new media and entertainment studio Moment Factory. Transforming Parc de la Gorge in Coaticook Canyon, Canada, into a multi-sensory installation, the dark forest becomes the canvas for an immersive public exhibition. Step into this mesmerizing environment in our new documentary, above, and join us on our private tour of the magical woodland—we just hope you’re well enough versed in The Brothers Grimm to find your way out.

Open through October 11th, the semi-permanent installation is a supernatural symbiosis of varying arts media, set along the route of one stunning pathway. As visitors enter Foresta Lumina, they’re brought on a mile-plus-long journey wherein light art, video mapping, architectural installation, and more fuse within one seamless environment. Split into seven sections, each folk tale and character arc is represented by a unique multimedia effect.

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Full Story at The Creators Project.

Cleaning the Plastic Ocean.

Boyan Slat wants to start the largest ocean clean up ever with the help of nets and ocean currents. He began testing his prototype this month.

Boyan Slat wants to start the largest ocean clean up ever with the help of nets and ocean currents. He began testing his prototype this month.

Boyan Slat was just 16 when he realized he wanted to rid the oceans of plastic. It all happened after he dove into the problem in the most literal way while snorkeling in Greece and finding more drifting plastic than fish swimming.

“I thought, that’s a real problem. How can we come up with a solution for that?” Slat recalled during an interview with ThinkProgress.

Indeed, the problem is real and large. Around eight million metric tons of plastic waste enter the oceans every year, according to a 2015 study. In addition, recent research found so-called garbage patches in every major ocean. Plastic is so pervasive that it’s been found in sea ice, and also inside 50 percent of all species of seabirds, 66 percent of all species of marine mammals, and all species of sea turtles.

Once back in his native Netherlands, Slat delved into the topic as people told him that cleaning up the ocean was impossible. Still, Slat, a young inventor who by then already held the world record for most high-pressure rockets simultaneously launched, persisted until he found what he was looking for.

“I saw this animation where they used computer models to show that plastic actually moves” through ocean currents, Slat, now 21, said. “And then I thought, why should you move through the ocean if the ocean can move through you.”

Slat, chief executive officer of The Ocean Clean Up, has taken his eureka moment and turned it into a collection system based on floating barriers attached to the sea bed that use the ocean’s energy to gather plastic waste. After obtaining over $2 million through crowdfunding and more from Dutch government financing, Slat unveiled the first prototype last week in the North Sea, just off the coast of Netherlands.

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I am so impressed, I just don’t have words. This is so very important. There is much more at Think Progress.