Those are the best stuff - tha Left Overs !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It's Love, Love, Love --------etf ((SEE!!!!! I'DE FEX ALL THAT If I counold))
But, Darm it - I've already sent it.....................!
Big Grin
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Stradee
2
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Tue 13 Oct, 2009 10:33 pm
@ehBeth,
Thanksgiving leftovers are soooooooooooooooooo good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
preps pretty derned special too...
munchies
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sumac
1
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Wed 14 Oct, 2009 09:15 am
clicked. And a couple of good articles. The first is on lions, from today's NYT.
October 13, 2009, 9:30 pm
A Long, Melancholy Roar
(Being the third and final piece in a series about predators.)
On a recent evening at twilight, I was sitting on the grass in Regent’s Park " one of London’s most manicured public spaces " when I heard the fierce, melancholy sound of a lion’s roar.
I wasn’t dreaming: it was coming from the zoo. Listening to it, I began to reflect on predators " and us.
On returning home, I did some reading. I discovered that between 1990 and 2004, lions attacked 815 people in Tanzania, killing 563. Some of the victims were pulled out of bed during the night after lions forced their way inside huts. Between January 2000 and March 2004, crocodiles in Namibia attacked 35 people, killing 23. In the 34 months from January 2005 to October 2007, leopards in the Indian state of Kashmir attacked 18 people, killing 16. In the Sundarban swamps of Bangladesh, tigers killed at least 20 people last year. Dig around, and you can also find records of deaths from attacks by bears, cougars, sharks and a number of other wild beasts.
It’s hard to imagine how terrifying such a death must be. To be asleep in bed and to wake to hear a rustling sound, to see an animal leaping, to feel its breath on your face " think of the sweat, the panic, the contraction of your gut, the pounding of your heart, the gasping screams.
For many of our fellow creatures, such terrors are part of daily life: other animals exist in a world of threat that humans today rarely glimpse. These days, thankfully, we are not used to being hunted. Most of us are more likely to be struck by lightning than we are to die at the paws of a bear or the teeth of a shark. And so we spend little time in that dark, primeval place of alarm, fear, adrenaline and (perhaps) gory death. For us, death usually comes in other forms.
Riccardo Gangale/The Associated Press; Gianluigi Guercia/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images; Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times Are modern human fears misplaced?
Of our ancient enemies, microbes are now the most fearsome. Indeed, next to the figures for viruses and other infectious agents, deaths caused by predators are barely worth mentioning.
Just think: HIV/AIDS chalked up 2 million deaths across the planet in 2007 alone; tuberculosis was close behind, with more than 1,700,000. The year before, malaria escorted almost a million people to their graves. We should be far more scared of mosquitoes than we are of bears; but we’re not.
Why not? It’s hard to be sure, but my guess is that it has to do with the way our brains are wired up. Just as the moose fears the wolf and the chickadee the owl, we easily fear lions and bears because the connection between danger and the animal is clear and immediate. It is harder, I suspect, to evolve fear of a mosquito because the deadly fever it brings does not happen straight after the bite. Instead, there is a time delay of days, weeks or years. In fact, the connection between mosquito bites and malarial fever is so obscure that we weren’t sure of it until 1897. But our forebears have been making connections between predators and death for ages.
Although predators are not an important problem for most of us today, they surely were for our ancestors. Indeed, millions of years ago, fear of predators would have been one of the forces that caused our ancestors to evolve to live in groups. The seeds of our social lives were watered with blood and nurtured by the roar of the lion and the claw of the leopard.
More recently, however, it’s been the case that the mammal most likely to kill a human is: a human. Murder and war have long been more important causes of death for us than predatory wild animals.
You can see it in the landscape. In northern Romania, monasteries were fortified against marauding armies, and painted inside and out with scenes of martyrs being massacred. Further south, in Transylvania, the churches were fortified to withstand siege. In northern India, almost every town has a fort. Southern France is littered with the ruins of fortified castles and towns. In English forests, you can often find the remnants of iron-age defenses. All traces of peoples defending themselves from attack. We are our own most fearsome predator, and have been so for thousands of years.
Some other animals are also important predators of themselves. A lion has more to fear from another lion than it does from any other animal but us. Males taking over a pride routinely kill all the cubs they can find, and lions from neighboring territories sometimes kill each other. Chimpanzees kill each other at an alarming rate; and they are far more aggressive towards each other on a daily basis than we humans are.
But here’s the thing. Today, in many parts of the world, the human being most likely to cause your violent death is: you.
Yes. You are the person most likely to kill yourself violently and on purpose. Suicide rates have risen dramatically over the past 50 years. Worldwide, deaths from suicide now outnumber deaths from war and homicide together: the World Health Organization estimates that each year around one million people " predominantly men " kill themselves. The true number is probably higher, because for many countries there is no data. In some countries, suicide is now among the top ten causes of death. For the young, worldwide, it’s in the top five.
A huge effort has rightly been devoted to trying to understand the particular causes of suicide in different places " unemployment, drug addiction, relationship breakdown, intelligence, predisposing genes, what your mother ate while you were in the womb and so on.
But here’s another way to look at it. No other animal does this. Chimpanzees don’t hang themselves from trees, slit their wrists, set themselves alight, or otherwise destroy themselves. Suicide is an essentially human behavior. And it has reached unprecedented levels, especially among the young.
I’m not sure what this means. But it has made me think. We live in a way that no other animal has ever lived: our lifestyle is unprecedented in the history of the planet. Often, we like to congratulate ourselves on the cities we have built, the gadgets we can buy, the rockets we send to the moon. But perhaps we should not be so proud. Something about the way we live means that, for many of us, life comes to seem unbearable, a long, melancholy ache of despair.
A reprint of a February article about Darwin. From today's NYT.
February 12, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The Origin of Darwin
By OLIVIA JUDSON
London
MY fellow primates, 200 years ago today, Charles Darwin was born. Please join me in wishing him happy birthday!
Unlike many members of the human species, Darwin makes an easy hero. His achievements were prodigious; his science, meticulous. His work transformed our understanding of the planet and of ourselves.
At the same time, he was a humane, gentle, decent man, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend. Judging by his letters, he was also sometimes quite funny. He was, in other words, one of those rare beings, as likeable as he was impressive.
For example, after his marriage, Darwin worked at home, and his children (of the 10 he fathered, seven survived to adulthood) remembered playing in his study. Later, one of his sons recounted how, after an argument, his father came up to his room, sat on his bed, and apologized for losing his temper. And although often painted as a recluse, Darwin served as a local magistrate, meting out justice in his dining room.
Moreover, while many of his contemporaries approved of slavery, Darwin did not. He came from a family of ardent abolitionists, and he was revolted by what he saw in slave countries: “Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal .... It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”
He practiced a kind of ideal, dream-like science. He examined the minutiae of nature " shells of barnacles, pistils of flowers " but worked on grand themes. He corresponded with lofty men of learning, but also with farmers and pigeon breeders. He observed, questioned, experimented, constantly testing his ideas.
Could plants from the mainland colonize a newly formed island? If so, they would need a way to get there. Could they survive in the ocean? To find out, he immersed seeds in salt water for weeks, then planted them to see how many could sprout. He reported, for example, that “an asparagus plant with ripe berries floated for 23 days, when dried it floated for 85 days, and the seeds afterwards germinated.” The Atlantic current moved at 33 nautical miles a day; he figured that would take a seed more than 1,300 miles in 42 days. Yes, seeds could travel by sea.
He published important work on subjects as diverse as the biology of carnivorous plants, barnacles, earthworms and the formation of coral reefs. He wrote a travelogue, “The Voyage of the Beagle,” that was an immediate best seller and remains a classic of its kind. And as if that was not enough, he discovered two major forces in evolution " natural selection and sexual selection " and wrote three radical scientific masterpieces, “On the Origin of Species” (1859), “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” (1871) and “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872).
The “Origin,” of course, is what he is best known for. This volume, colossal in scope yet minutely detailed, laid the foundations of modern biology. Here, Darwin presented extensive and compelling evidence that all living beings " including humans " have evolved from a common ancestor, and that natural selection is the chief force driving evolutionary change. Sexual selection, he argued, was an additional force, responsible for spectacular features like the tail feathers of peacocks that are useless for (or even detrimental to) survival but essential for seduction.
Before the “Origin,” similarities and differences between species were mere curiosities; questions as to why a certain plant is succulent like a cactus or deciduous like a maple could be answered only, “Because.” Biology itself was nothing more than a vast exercise in catalog and description. After the “Origin,” all organisms became connected, part of the same, profoundly ancient, family tree. Similarities and differences became comprehensible and explicable. In short, Darwin gave us a framework for asking questions about the natural world, and about ourselves.
He was not right about everything. How could he have been? Famously, he didn’t know how genetics works; as for DNA " well, the structure of the molecule wasn’t discovered until 1953. So today’s view of evolution is much more nuanced than his. We have incorporated genetics, and expanded and refined our understanding of natural selection, and of the other forces in evolution.
But what is astonishing is how much Darwin did know, and how far he saw. His imagination told him, for example, that many female animals have a sense of beauty " that they like to mate with the most beautiful males. For this he was ridiculed. But we know that he was right. Still more impressive: he was not afraid to apply his ideas to humans. He thought that natural selection had operated on us, just as it had on fruit flies and centipedes.
As we delve into DNA sequences, we can see natural selection acting at the level of genes. Our genes hold evidence of our intimate associations with other beings, from cows to malaria parasites and grains. The latest research allows us to trace the genetic changes that differentiate us from our primate cousins, and shows that large parts of the human genome bear the stamp of evolution by means of natural selection.
I think Darwin would have been pleased. But not surprised.
Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side.
0 Replies
Stradee
2
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Wed 14 Oct, 2009 04:31 pm
@sumac,
"Warning" sign posted - we've a cougar prowling the neighborhood. Not unusual except the animal killed and took a goat. Why hunt when people offer wildlife unprotected food.
There will be, till the end of times, predator and prey. Wheather in the wilds of India or city streets.
Interesting article about how much loss of natural gas comes from the well site and how cheaply it can be fixed.
October 15, 2009
By Degrees
Curbing Climate Change by Sealing Gas Leaks
By ANDREW C. REVKIN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
To the naked eye, there was nothing to be seen at a natural gas well in eastern Texas but beige pipes and tanks baking in the sun.
But in the viewfinder of Terry Gosney’s infrared camera, three black plumes of gas gushed through leaks that were otherwise invisible.
“Holy smoke, it’s blowing like mad,” said Mr. Gosney, an environmental field coordinator for EnCana, the Canadian gas producer that operates the year-old well near Franklin, Tex. “It does look nasty.”
Within a few days the leaks had been sealed by workers.
Efforts like EnCana’s save energy and money. Yet they are also a cheap, effective way of blunting climate change that could potentially be replicated thousands of times over, from Wyoming to Siberia, energy experts say. Natural gas consists almost entirely of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas that scientists say accounts for as much as a third of the human contribution to global warming.
“This for me is an absolute no-brainer, even more so than putting in those compact fluorescent bulbs in your house,” said Al Armendariz, an engineer at Southern Methodist University who studies pollutants from oil and gas fields.
Acting quickly to stanch the loss of methane could substantially cut warming in the short run, even as countries tackle the tougher challenge of cutting the dominant greenhouse emission, carbon dioxide, studies by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest.
Unlike carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere a century or more once released, methane persists in the air for about 10 years. So aggressively reining in emissions now would mean that far less of the gas would be warming the earth in a decade or so.
Methane is also a valuable target because while it is far rarer and more fleeting than carbon dioxide, ton for ton, it traps 25 times as much heat, researchers say.
Yet while federal and international programs have encouraged companies to seek and curb methane emissions from gas and oil wells, pipelines and tanks, aggressive efforts like EnCana’s are still far from the industry norm.
As a result, some three trillion cubic feet of methane leak into the air every year, with Russia and the United States the leading sources, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s official estimate. (This amount has the warming power of emissions from over half the coal plants in the United States.) And government scientists and industry officials caution that the real figure is almost certainly higher.
Unless monitoring is greatly expanded, they say, such emissions could soar as global production of natural gas increases over the next few decades.
The Energy Department projects that gas production could rise nearly 50 percent over the next 20 years as companies race to discover and tap new sources. In the United States, 4,000 miles of new pipeline was laid last year alone.
But the industry has been largely resistant to an aggressive cleanup.
The Bush administration, which opposed mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, expanded an existing voluntary domestic program for capturing methane emissions and began a related international program " with both aimed at promoting profitable ways for businesses to cut methane emissions as a relatively easy first step to combat climate change.
In April the Obama administration signaled that it could adopt rules requiring the biggest American companies to report all of their greenhouse gas emissions. Oil and gas industry groups countered that the cost and complexity of dealing with some 700,000 wells were too great.
In September the E.P.A. announced that the obligatory reporting would begin in 2011 but that it excluded oil and gas operations, at least for the time being. (Agency officials say they plan to issue rules for oil and gas by late next year.)
Some scientists reject the industry arguments. “Further delay on finding and stopping such releases would be irresponsible, given the financial and environmental benefits,” said F. Sherwood Rowland, a Nobel laureate in chemistry at the University of California, Irvine.
Internationally, the amount of methane escaping from gas and oil operations can be only crudely gauged. But in 2006 the E.P.A. estimated that Russia, the world’s largest gas producer, ranked highest, with 427 billion cubic feet of methane escaping annually, followed by the United States at 346 billion, Ukraine at 225 billion and Mexico at 191 billion.
Reflecting the uncertainty in such estimates, Gazprom, Russia’s giant state gas monopoly, estimated its annual emissions at half that figure last year.
An E.P.A. review of methane emissions from gas wells in the United States strongly implies that all of these figures may be too low. In its analysis, the E.P.A. concluded that the amount emitted by routine operations at gas wells " not including leaks like those seen near Franklin " is 12 times the agency’s longtime estimate of nine billion cubic feet. In heat-trapping potential, that new estimate equals the carbon dioxide emitted annually by eight million cars.
In the routine operations, great yet invisible plumes of gas enter the atmosphere when new wells are activated, old wells are invigorated to boost gas flows and wells are purged of fluids by letting out cough-like bursts of gas.
In many gas fields, said Roger Fernandez, a senior methane expert at the E.P.A., fluid-clogged wells are still purged the old-fashioned way, by opening valves or using outdated equipment in ways that release a misty burst of gas directly into the air.
For the E.P.A. and environmental scientists, the challenge is convincing gas and oil producers here and abroad that efforts to avoid such releases often more than pay for themselves.
The use of infrared cameras is expanding as word spreads of the payoff in saved gas, said Ben Shepperd, executive vice president of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, which represents 1,200 companies in the oil and gas business around West Texas.
“We would like to see more people doing it,” he said. “People are very surprised when they shoot their equipment with these cameras and they see that there are releases in places they wouldn’t have expected.”
The benefits are there not only for gas producers but also for companies handling oil. Thousands of oil storage tanks emit plumes of methane and other gases, said Larry S. Richards, the president of Hy-Bon Engineering in Midland, Tex., which is using infrared cameras to survey storage tanks in 29 countries and sells systems that capture the gas.
A clearer view of the worst methane emissions could come next year, when Japan plans to start releasing data from Gosat, a satellite that began orbiting the Earth in January. It may be able to identify the top hot spots within a few miles.
That may increase pressure on countries with particularly large leaks.
As the biggest methane emitter, Russia has begun seeking high-tech solutions. In April, for example, Gazprom, the Russian Defense Ministry and an Israeli aerospace company began discussing the potential use of miniature remotely piloted helicopters to monitor pipelines for leaks.
But gadgets alone will not halt the vast exhalation of methane from Russia, environmentalists say. There is some hope that a successor to the 1997 Kyoto climate change pact will include more incentives for money to flow to Russian methane-reduction projects.
Western companies that have captured methane point out the money that is often to be made by doing so.
Starting around 2000, BP began introducing methane-catching techniques at 2,300 well sites in New Mexico. At well after well, gas that would have otherwise escaped now flows through meters that field crews affectionately call the “cash register.”
Among other actions, BP engineers have fine-tuned a system for purging fluids that can stop up wells. The process uses the pressure of gas in the well to periodically raise a plunger through the vertical well pipe. This removes the liquids but typically allows gas to escape.
The new computerized process, which BP calls smart automation, tracks well pressure and other conditions to more precisely time the plunger cycles in ways that avoid gas emissions. From 2000 to 2004, emissions from BP wells in the region dropped 50 percent, the company says. By 2007, they had essentially ended.
On average, installing the systems has cost about $11,000 per well, but they have returned three times that investment, said Reid Smith, an environmental adviser for BP working on the project.
“We spend a lot of money to get gas to the surface,” Mr. Smith said. “It makes a huge amount of sense to get all of it through the sales meter.”
Montana stops wolf hunting near Yellowstone
Nine kills in backcountry area leads to action by wildlife commissioners
BILLINGS, Mont. - Montana wildlife commissioners shut down gray wolf hunting Tuesday in backcountry adjacent to Yellowstone National Park after nine of the predators were killed there in recent weeks.
Commissioners, however, kept the statewide kill quota at 75, repeating their belief that the planned harvest would not hurt the overall population of the animals that were removed from the endangered species list in May.
Wolf hunts this fall in Montana and neighboring Idaho are the first in the lower 48 states since the species came off the list. The states have a combined 1,350 wolves.
Monday and Tuesday storms were bad - windy rain - a kazillion pine needles.
Rain, fog, and cold temps gave way to warm and sunny weather - with clean, fresh breezes filtering through open windows now. Who knows what the weather will be like in just a few hours.
Birthday call for sumac!
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ehBeth
3
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Thu 15 Oct, 2009 07:40 pm
@sumac,
clicked
clicked
clicked
Happy Birthday, dear Sargasso!
Set, the pack and I will be on a brief break with JoeBlow and Thomas. See you all on Sunday or Monday. Stay safe and comfortable.
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sumac
3
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Fri 16 Oct, 2009 08:44 am
Clicked, and thanks to all for the birthday greetings. Big double six for me. Feel no different than the day before.
EPA gearing up for overhaul of water regulations and enforement.
October 16, 2009
E.P.A. Vows Better Effort on Water
By CHARLES DUHIGG
The Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday that it would overhaul enforcement of the Clean Water Act, as lawmakers sharply criticized the agency’s decade-long lapses in punishing polluters.
At a daylong hearing before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said that agency officials “are falling short of this administration’s expectations for the effectiveness of our clean water enforcement programs.”
“The time is long overdue for E.P.A. to re-examine its approach to Clean Water Act enforcement,” said Ms. Jackson, who was confirmed to her position in January. She added that the agency would set strict benchmarks for state regulators, eventually compel companies to submit electronic pollution records so violations could be detected and punished more easily, and “develop more innovative approaches to target enforcement to the most serious violations and the most significant sources.”
One approach will probably include a series of enforcement actions against companies and municipalities that have violated the Clean Water Act, according to people with knowledge of the E.P.A.’s plans who were not authorized to speak publicly.
The agency has not settled on a list of potential targets, but is likely to focus on mining companies, large livestock farms, municipal wastewater treatment plants and construction companies that operate sites where polluted stormwater has run into nearby lakes and rivers.
“Going forward, if states are falling down on the job, we’re going to reverse the permits they’ve issued, and if they’re not enforcing the law, we’ll step in and do it ourselves,” said one agency official.
An E.P.A. spokeswoman declined to discuss possible actions.
The E.P.A. has come under scrutiny recently for not punishing tens of thousands of polluters over the last decade, and many of the lawmakers at the hearing on Thursday are longtime critics of the agency’s vigilance. In September, a New York Times investigation found that companies and other workplaces had violated the Clean Water Act more than 500,000 times in the last five years, but fewer than 3 percent of polluters had ever been fined or otherwise punished.
“Some states and E.P.A. regions have abysmal records of significant noncompliance,” said Representative James L. Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat and chairman of the hearing, citing The Times’s reports. “Administrator Jackson, I look to you to begin taking the management steps necessary to protect our water, our public health and our environment.”
Other lawmakers, primarily Republicans, were critical of recent E.P.A. actions that have delayed so-called mountaintop removal mining permits. The agency has argued that such mines pose a risk to local waterways.
Representatives of state environmental agencies defended their performances at the hearing. “States are doing a good job enforcing the provisions of the Clean Water Act and should be commended given the many constraints they work under,” said Tom Porta, a Nevada environmental official and president of the Association of State and Interstate Water Pollution Control Administrators. Those constraints include inadequate budgets for state regulators and an expanding number of polluters that must be policed.
But many lawmakers and other witnesses at the hearing were unsympathetic. Officials from the Government Accountability Office and the E.P.A.’s Office of the Inspector General testified about widespread inconsistencies in how the Clean Water Act was enforced, and said disorganization, a lack of reliable data and poor planning by state and federal regulators had stymied efforts to punish polluters.
One witness described the impact of those lapses. Judy Treml, of Wisconsin, told lawmakers that her 6-month-old daughter was hospitalized after drinking water that had become contaminated when a nearby farm covered its land with manure, which then seeped into her family’s well. One of the problems, lawmakers said, is that such pollution often goes unpunished or is outside the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.
“I just can’t imagine turning on your faucet and manure coming out,” said Representative Phil Hare, an Illinois Democrat. “We’ve got to fix this, and we’ve got to fix it quickly. It’s shameful that your family has to go through this.”
