California wildfire
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If you release 29,000 rubber duckies into the ocean, where do they end up? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Floatees – Our cool world.
How! They all started in the same place and ended up pretty much /everywhere/. So weird!
These 29,000 rubber ducks, lost from a cargo ship in 1992, have taught us a lot about ocean currents and how plastic debris degrades and enters the marine food chain.
This happens in places like the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, which is not the flotilla of lawn chairs and styrofoam cups you might be picturing. Instead, it’s microscopic particles, degraded by salt and sunlight, that cover thousands of square miles of ocean. That’s harmful for most creatures, but oddly beneficial for others. Find out more about the Garbage Patch here.
The story of the lost ducks is a fascinating one, though. Check out this NPR interview with Donovan Hohn, who tracked the ducks worldwide. He wrote a book about it called Moby Duck, which is just about the best title for a book, ever.
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We’ve cut back on education, we’ve cut back on nutrition programs, we’ve thrown kids off Head Start. We have billions to spend on a war but no money to take care of the very pressing needs of the American people.
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Westborough Planning Board hearing (at Forbes Municipal Building)
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Fascinating chart comparing two very different takes on a similar space, from Megan McArdle’s piece: Why Wal-Mart Will Never Pay Like Costco.
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to compare Costco to Sam’s Club?
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Going Solar
This graphic shows the many ways that homeowners can tap the sun to power domestic bliss. Suggestions run the gamut from modern contrivances like solar water heaters and light tubes to tried-and-true clotheslines and shade trees.
Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank focused on resource efficiency through integrative design, includes the average payback for solar upgrades in its graphic. This is a very general measure of when cost savings through using solar energy versus conventionally purchased grid electricity pays for the cost of the system and financing. Click here for a larger version of the image.
The plane is a 1960s turboprop with an odd array of antennas on its back end and the name of a Cuban national hero painted on its tail. It can fly, but it doesn’t. Government orders.
The airplane is called “Aero Martí,” and it is stuck in a kind of federal limbo. After two years of haphazard spending cuts in Washington, it has too little funding to function but too much to die.
The plane was outfitted to fly over the ocean and broadcast an American-run TV station into Cuba. The effort was part of the long-running U.S. campaign to combat communism in Cuba by providing information to the Cuban people uncensored by their communist government.
But Cuban officials jammed the signal almost immediately, and surveys showed that less than 1 percent of Cubans watched. Still, when Congress started making budget cuts, lawmakers refused to kill the plane.
But then they allowed across-the-board “sequestration” cuts. And there was no more money for the fuel and pilots. So the plane sits in storage at taxpayer expense — a monument to the limits of American austerity. In this case, a push to eliminate long-troubled programs collided with old Washington forces: government inertia, intense lobbying and congressional pride.
The result was a stalemate. And a plane left with just enough money to do nothing.
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I am the first pig to fly.
“In 1909, in a jokey attempt to prove that pigs can take flight, the pioneer aviator Baron Brabazon of Tara, better known to his friends as John Theodore Cuthbert Moore Brabazon, took a piglet aloft in his private biplane, strapped into a wastepaper basket.”
(Quote source http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/pigs-might-fly.html)
(Image source http://i.imgur.com/xY2lhBy.jpg)
(Via http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1klm18/i_am_the_first_pig_to_fly_4th_november_1909/)
A good rainfall is vital for plants, trees and grass. But rain falling on roofs, concrete and roads poses a problem for the environment. This is because the runoff can carry pollutants directly into lakes, streams and rivers.
One solution to reduce this stormwater runoff is what is known as a green roof—a roof covered in living, growing plants. Architect Elizabeth Grant at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va. is testing how effective the roofs are at controlling urban runoff.
“Instead of having a plain roof that just has water coursing off of it all the time, you put the plants on there to hold the water for a period of time to slow down the flow of water off of it,” said Grant.
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Sunset leaving work (at Bohler Engineering)
danelabonte 