Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Loving triple digit weather? Are you out of your mind?

LOL...no cause there's still the feel of Fall in the air, plus, leafs are beginning to change color on some of the trees.

Google's havin' a birthday...lets all sing for Chrome

yeah, Stradee and sumac, I loved the West Coast --- It's a great place to live and play. No matter the weather there's always a place to go and have fun.

Happy B'Day Google..........

The west coast is a good place...cept getting to all those great places has become more difficult with so much traffic...people commuting as well as visitors...they all drive.

Americans love their cars, no doubt. One day only electric and solar powered vehicles will travel roads and freeways. Parking meters will become obsolete and in their place.........plug ins.

Good God! Somehow i can't see myself driving a car that looks like a toaster, and sounds like a sewing machine.

Stradee and all............ Electric cars are not as earth friendly as most people think.
Think about where the electricity comes from............ Probably a COAL burning plant to produce the heat to turn the water into steam to turn the turbines that produce the flux that creates electricity........... THEN, there is the transportation of that power to the PLUG that you plug your car to. That isn't the answer and all people in power and the politicians they control know that.
There are simpler and more efficient ways to produce fuel for transportation for us. 2/3'ds of the universe is hydrogen. WHY don't we use it??
Way back in the '80's a person in Seattle, WA built an engine that was actually installed on a city bus using hydrogen as fuel. It ran beautifully. Two weeks later there was NO mention of the bus anywhere.
Way, Way back in the 1950's a man built a carburator for gasoline engines that ran OVER 50 miles per gallon of gas --- that disappeared in about two weeks. Never to be heard again.
There are many many many more instances of such things --- the GAS companies paid the people to stop and be quiet.
They are still in control with all Congress people.
Just like the Tobacco people.
They all buy a Congress person or two when they feel the need.

Sorry bout that - but it's in our faces and we don't see it.

Thanks Danon, points well taken. I had heard rumors of wonderful things being bought up so that the patent would disappear.

Amen, Dan!

A guy in Foresthill who developed an additive that would STOP the use of California's money making 'Smog checks'... just a guy who worked in a service station all of his life...developed a product that (surprise) wasn't cleared for sale in the marketplace...and mentioning also, the guy couldn't be bought.

I have a 1989 Chevy Silverado. The truck has commercial plates because in California, all pickup trucks are considered work trucks, even if a person, such as me and a million others, don't use their vehicles for work. Called DMV and asked if i could get new plates and NOT pay a weight fee of $144.oo a year (plus the tag and license fee bringing my cost to '$237.00 per year. They said i could make an appointment for an inspection. There must be a camper shell on the truck, and also a full size bed. WHAT! I have carpet, sleeping bags and kitten supplies living in the camper shell. Period. DMV said 'ah, well, if you even place a grocery bag in the bed of the truck, you must have commercial plates" "i said" Then began laughing! "Ok, then i can park in any commercial zone and not worry about receiving a ticket...I said" Now it's become a damned stand up comedy act because me and the person on the phone were laughing at the ridiculousness of California's DMV laws. So my next trip to the mall, i'm parking where all the other commercial vehicles park...right by the door.

ha! that's what my aunt said about my first Civic 20+ years ago "it sounds like a sewing machine"

I can't imagine what she'd think about my little Fit. It's so quiet, I'm sometimes not sure it's running. Love it, and its Magic Seat - so many configurations in Percy.

Clicked

Clicked

and sent a shout-out to the WildClickers on FB

thanks Stradee and ehBeth and sumac and all the clickers that don't post -- thanks.

Another tree asmiling.......

Love it.

PS: Stradee - get some TX plates - down here we have another option = farm truck. That's really the least costly plate.

Huray! Got a tropical storm taking dead aim at me. All clicked

Good going for the enviornment Beth! Your aunt and I are probably the same age...accustomed to sitting in a vehicle a tad higher than most new cars.

Trucks pretty much restored now, getting good gas mileage and i have all the new air friendly stuff i could replace installed. Plus, i'm not driving a zillion miles a year, keeping the truck pretty much in the garage most days.

For people who commute, new technology is the only way to go. Daughter bought a new Ford Focus for work, but still luvs her Expedition.

Happy traveling Beth and all ~

Sounds like a good idea

you look remarkable for a woman with a close eye on 90!

Aaaaaggghhhhaaaa.

Let me tell ya, Stradee is a model person. She looks nnnnooooooo where near her age............

Been there, seen that, thought about it.................

Now............

Let us see a pic of ehBeth after all the dancing~!!!! I bet you are the most perfect person on this post ----------- Except for your guy - who is, in my opinion, one of the most exceptional people on this planet.
Ahh Hemmm -- I'm straight as an arrow but I do admire intelligence.

Till later,

Dan

Scientists: Mussels may leave carp nothing to eat

By JOHN FLESHER, AP Environmental Writer
1 hr 45 mins ago

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. – If huge, hungry Asian carp reach Lake Michigan, their long-dreaded invasion may turn out to be less ferocious than once expected because a tiny competitor is gobbling up their primary food source, some Great Lakes researchers say.
The quagga mussel, a thumbnail-sized foreign mollusk first spotted in the lakes two decades ago, has devoured so much plankton in southern Lake Michigan that the entire food web is being altered, federal and university scientists reported in a series of newly published articles.
Mussels have "beaten the Asian carp to the buffet table," Gary Fahnenstiel, senior ecologist with NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, said Tuesday. "While the public has been worried about Asian carp and the Chicago canal, another invader has fundamentally changed the lake and made it inhospitable to the Asian carp."
Some biologists and government officials say if the carp get a foothold in Lake Michigan, they could spread to most of the Great Lakes and vacuum up enough plankton to threaten collapse of the $7 billion fishery. But Fahnenstiel and other researchers said the quagga mussel is a greater danger.
Some types of microscopic plants have declined more than 80 percent with the mussel's arrival, they said, which probably explains a similar drop-off of a freshwater shrimp species that is a dietary staple for small fish pursued by prized sport varieties such as salmon and trout.
Other scientists and policymakers insisted the carp could survive and even thrive in a plankton-depleted environment.
"They can eat other things besides plankton," said Duane Chapman, a U.S. Geological Survey fisheries biologist. "They are very flexible fish."
Bighead and silver carp — Asian varieties threatening to enter Lake Michigan through Chicago-area rivers and canals — are filter feeders that consume up to 40 percent of their body weight daily. The biggest can grow to 4 feet in length and weigh 100 pounds.
But Fahnenstiel said that if carp evade electronic barriers and reach the lake, they'll probably find so little nourishment they'll either go back or starve.
Chapman is based at the Columbia Environmental Research Center in Missouri, where researchers are measuring Asian carp's appetite for substances that will remain abundant in the Great Lakes even where plankton runs short. One example: bits of food the mussels spit out rather than digest.
Another is cladophora, a green algae that annoys beachgoers by washing ashore in stinky, rotting clumps. The cause of its resurgence in recent years is unknown but some believe it's linked to the mussels, which improve clarity as they filter water, allowing sunlight to penetrate deeper.
"Chances are pretty good that Asian carp would do just fine eating that stuff, but we're going to test it to make sure," Chapman said.
Quagga and zebra mussels, believed to have hitched a ride from Europe to the Great Lakes in ballast tanks of freighter ships in the 1980s, have wreaked ecological havoc and done hundreds of millions in damage to all the lakes except Superior, where only isolated colonies have been found.
Fahnenstiel and Michigan Tech University biologist Charles Kerfoot were among co-authors of a series in the Journal of Great Lakes Research that described the quagga mussel's takeover of southern Lake Michigan this decade.
Quaggas — which unlike zebra mussels thrive in cold, deep waters — are a likely culprit in the disappearance of phytoplankton blooms that feed opossum shrimp, the scientists said.
Those tiny invertebrates, crucial food for prey fish, have plummeted by more than 70 percent, said Steve Pothoven, a biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration field station in Muskegon.
Scientists say whitefish and salmon, two of Lake Michigan's most popular species, have gotten smaller in recent years, a probable sign of malnutrition from a deteriorating food web.
"We are really getting a genuine collapse in the third-largest freshwater lake in the world," Kerfoot said.
The quagga population should outgrow its food supply and level off sometime. How soon that happens will determine how severely fish populations suffer, Tom Nalepa, another NOAA researcher.
If Asian carp arrive in large numbers and successfully reproduce, the situation would get even more dire.
Even as scientists debate how likely that is, five Great Lakes states are suing in federal court, demanding closure of Chicago shipping locks and separation of the lakes from the Mississippi River basin to block the path of Asian carp and other invaders. Chicago business interests say doing so would cripple the local economy.
Marc Gaden, spokesman for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, says he hopes never to find out how well the carp would fare in Lake Michigan.
"What's important is to focus on the prevention," Gaden said. "Once you let the invaders in and they spread, it's permanent."
___

Oh my...not quite but i do understand your auntie

Woop

My God! We had better begin taking better care of the great lakes!

Hamsters must be on strike again. Here is a bit of whimsy for your reading pleasure:

eptember 30, 2010

Polar Ponies and Ice Dogs

The ancient convention for naming newly discovered geographical features is fairly simple: royalty, sponsors, loved ones and crewmates come first, possibly followed by the explorer. That is how most of the landmarks around Antarctica got their names. But now a new set of names is being added — not to geographical spots, which are mostly taken, but to navigation waypoints along the main air routes between New Zealand and McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

They will bear the names of the dogs and ponies used by Robert Falcon Scott and by Roald Amundsen during their great race to the South Pole in the winter of 1911-1912, names like Bones and Nobby, Helge and Uroa. Everyone responsible for the waypoints — civil air authorities, scientific bodies — yielded to a two-year campaign by Ronald Smith, an American Air Force colonel, to honor those animals.

It is apt and lovely. Neither explorer would have succeeded without the aid of their animals. Amundsen, who reached the pole before Scott, relied solely on dogs. Scott chose small, stout Manchurian and Siberian ponies, who found the going hard and, in the end, hampered his expedition. But those ponies were also reminders of home and the object of much care from the men. On the Web site of the Scott Polar Research Institute, you can see photographs of the ponies — four in their stalls above decks, 15 under the forecastle.

“Poor patient beasts,” they were called by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a crew member and author of the best account of Scott’s expedition. He wondered what they would remember of sailing through Antarctic waters. “It would seem strangely merciful,” he wrote, “if nature should blot out these weeks of slow but inevitable torture.” Most of us will never fly over those newly named waypoints. But we can call up the photos of the ponies aboard the Terra Nova and marvel at their beauty and acceptance.

September 29, 2010

New Planet May Be Able to Nurture Organisms

By DENNIS OVERBYE

It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life.

Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is orbiting a star about 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

But if the finding is confirmed by other astronomers, the planet, which has three to four times the mass of Earth, would be the most Earthlike planet yet discovered, and the first to meet the criteria for being potentially habitable.

“It’s been a long haul,” said Steven S. Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who, along with R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, led the team that made the discovery. “This is the first exoplanet that has the right conditions for water to exist on its surface.”

In a recent report for the National Academy of Science, astronomers declared the finding of such planets one of the major goals of this decade. NASA’s Kepler satellite — which was launched in March 2009 as a way to detect Earthlike bodies — is expected to harvest dozens or hundreds.

Gliese 581g (whose first name is pronounced GLEE-za) circles a dim red star known as Gliese 581, once every 37 days, at a distance of about 14 million miles. That is smack in the middle of the so-called Goldilocks zone, where the heat from the star is neither too cold nor too hot for water to exist in liquid form on its surface.

“This is really the first Goldilocks planet,” Dr. Butler said.

Other astronomers hailed the news as another harbinger that the search for “living planets,” as Dimitar D. Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calls them, is on the right track.

“I’m getting goose bumps,” said Caleb Scharf of Columbia University.

But they expressed caution about this particular planet, noting uncertainties about its density, composition and atmosphere, and the need for another generation of giant telescopes and spacecraft in order to find out anything more about it. Other Goldilocks planets have come and gone in recent years.

The discovery was announced at a news conference Wednesday in Washington, and the findings have been posted on the National Science Foundation’s Web site and will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The authors said the relative ease by which planet was found — in only 11 years — led them to believe that such planets must be common.

“Either we have just been incredibly lucky in this early detection, or we are truly on the threshold of a second Age of Discovery,” they wrote in their paper.

Pressed during the news conference about the possibility of life on Gliese 581g, Dr. Vogt protested that he was an astronomer, not a biologist. Then he relented, saying that, speaking strictly personally, he believed that “the chances of life on this planet are almost 100 percent.”

Asked the same question, Dr. Butler squirmed and said, “I like data.” After a pause he added: “And what the data say is that the planet is the right distance from the star to have water and the right mass to hold an atmosphere. What is needed simply to find lots and lots of these things is lots and lots of telescope time.”

The latest results from Gliese 581 were harvested from observations by two often competing teams, using telescopes in Chile and Hawaii to measure the slight gravitational tugs the star gets as its planets swing by.

This is hardly the first time around the block for Gliese 581, which is a longtime favorite of planet hunters and now is known to have six planets in its retinue. It is a dwarf star about one-third the mass of the Sun and only about one-hundredth as bright, allowing planets to huddle closer to the campfire. “It hauntingly reminds us of our own solar system,” Dr. Butler said.

Two of Gliese’s planets have already had their moment in the limelight as possible Goldilocks planets. One, known as Gliese 581c, circles just on the inner edge of the habitable zone and was thus thought to be habitable three years ago. But further analysis suggested that the greenhouse effect would turn it into a stifling hell. Another planet, just on the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone, is probably too cold.

“One is on the hot side, the other is on cold side,” and the new planet is right in between, Dr. Vogt said. “It’s bookended.”

He and his colleagues estimated the average temperature on the surface of Gliese 581g to be between 10 and minus 24 degrees Fahrenheit, about the same as a summer day in Antarctica.

But that means very little, he said, because the planet, like all the others in that system, keeps the same face to the star all the time. So the temperature could vary wildly from the day-side to the night-side of the planet, meaning that an organism could perhaps find a comfortable zone to live in.

But nobody really knows what is going on on Gliese 581g, said Sara Seager, a planetary astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it was all carbon dioxide, like Venus, it would be pretty hot,” she said, adding that she would give the planet a 90 percent chance of holding water.

That, she pointed out, is faint praise in scientific circles. “Sounds high, but would you fly on a plane that only had an 8 or 9 chance out of 10 of making it?” she asked.

“Everyone is so primed to say here’s the next place we’re going to find life,” Dr. Seager said, “but this isn’t a good planet for follow-up.”