Lost In GroVont

Surf & Sierra

While I could complain about my sporadic access to hot water this week or the lack of power on my block for twelve hours this weekend, we all know there are more pressing concerns in the world. This week the country's oil issues hit close to home when a 810-foot-long container ship hit the Bay Bridge releasing 58,000 gallons of oil into the bay.

The area has been blanketed in a thick fog for a couple of weeks but this is typical weather here at 8:30 in the morning. No other ships in recent history have rammed into the bridge and investigations into the incident are ongoing. The Coast Guard is blaming the ship's pilot; the pilot is saying that the Guard gave him the okay. We'll probably be hearing about the case for months while it will take volunteers even longer to clean up the area.

The oil spill has already impacted the Bay Area. A triathlon on Treasure Island today became a biathlon as the swimming portion was canceled. The start of the crab season has been delayed and sport fishing has been closed.

Volunteers can call the Fish Game volunteer line at 800 228-4544 for information on opportunities to help today.

During my sojourn home, I read an interesting article in the New Yorker on Paul Watson who is the man behind the Sea Shepherd Conversation Society.

Raffi Khatchadourian paints Watson as a controversial environmentalist whose extreme tactics are not supported by other major environmental agencies. (Watson was kicked out of Greenpeace.) He and his crew of mostly unpaid volunteers seek out fishing ships in the world's oceans and impair the ships to prevent them from continuing to hunt and fish. This tactic also puts his crews in danger. In seeking out a Japanese whaling fleet, Watson's ailing ship the Farley Mowat set out "to end its days at sea as a battering ram in the service of marine life."

Depending on the interpretation of laws applied to the oceans, specifically the U.N. World Charter for Nature, Watson's activities are illegal.

No country regards ramming, disabling, or scuttling ships to be legal activities, and, except on rare occasions, even naval ships cannot lawfully interfere with foreign vessels on the high seas.

This has caused Watson's ships to be stripped of their flags by countries who did not support his actions. When the Farley lost its flag in Australia, Watson ran a Sea Shepard flag up the line and told his crew that they were "on a pirate ship."

While Watson is fighting the good fight and his concerns about illegal fishing of endangered oceanic animals is admiral, the actions he takes are questionable. Read Khatchadourian's full article online at newyorker.com.

For the geek in us all...

SCI FI Wire | The News Service of the SCI FI Channel.

In Fanboys, [Kristen] Bell plays Zoe, one of several fans who set out in 1999 from the Midwest to California to honor the wish of their dying friend to break into George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch and watch Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace before the movie's worldwide release.

Veronica Mars as a geek!?! I'm intriqued.

Also on the SciFi channel is a great new series called Eureka which is somewhere between The X-Files and Roswell on the interest scale in my brain which means I'll watch it for at least two seasons. Plus, they showed a quick preview of the next season of Battlestar Gallactica. Wow!

View the trailer for Eureka:

A wee bit sceptical of the predicted weather...

NASA - Space Shuttle - Launch and Landing.

Update Report: The Countdown to Launch Continues Launch week for the STS-121 mission officially began on Tuesday, June 27, with the arrival of Commander Steven Lindsey and his crew at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Flying into the center in a squadron of T-38 jets, Discovery's crew arrived ready and excited for liftoff.

NASA - Bye Bye, Birdies.

Birds come with the territory at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which usually doesn't mind when any of the nearby Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge's 310 species of birds swoop through for a visit. But one particular type of bird is causing concern: vultures. Bird hits Discovery's external tank during 2005 launch. That's why NASA plans to test special radar to track any vultures around Launch Pad 39B during the countdown to liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-121.

Evolution of an unbreakable heart

Hearts and Minds -- Gray 2006 (616): 1 -- ScienceNOW.

Now, a new study suggests that a powerful heart is what keeps the giraffes from swooning.

Thanks to its long neck, a giraffe's head can rise up to 5 meters in mere seconds after the creature takes a drink. One would expect this dramatic motion to trigger a massive drain of blood from the brain, but giraffes obviously aren't fainting all over the place.

Save the Baby Seals!

brooklynvegan: Stream the new Morrissey | Seal Hunts Suck.

We will not include any Canadian dates on our world tour to promote our new album. This is in protest against the barbaric slaughter of over 325,000 baby seals which is now underway.

globeandmail.com : Observers banned from watching seal hunt.

The quota for this year's Gulf hunt is 91,000 seals. Another 234,000 can be taken in a second hunt that begins in April off the north coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Track the next pandemic with dollar bills...

Show Me The Money!

To date, more than 76-million bills have been entered into the wheresgeorge.com database. But the website and its tracking abilities are more than a diversion. According to a study published in the January 26th issue of Nature, it may provide important information that will help us understand the next global pandemic.

Scientists are using a website designed to waste your time to track human movement and the spread of disease. Web 2.0 here we come!

Hubble, will you paint me a picture?

Hubble's view of Orion reveals thousands of stars

"Orion is a bustling cauldron of activity. This new large-scale Hubble image of the region reveals a treasure-house of beauty and astonishing detail for comprehensive scientific study," said Jennifer Wiseman, NASA's Hubble program scientist.

And this quote from the article makes it sound like the scientists are studying baby animals in their natural environment:

The Hubble Space Telescope also spied for the first time a small population of possible binary brown dwarfs -- two brown dwarfs orbiting each other. comparing the characteristics of newborn stars and brown dwarfs in their natal environment provides unique information about how they form.

Two Sizes Too Small

Broken Social Scene has updated their Arts & Crafts website with one those annoying flash sites. (I think it was flash before too. Grr.) The site has no new information except for the "Ibi Dreams of Pavement" video.

It has been determined that Charon is half the size of Pluto. The size was determined by measurements taken when Pluto's moon blocked light of a distant star, the technique called stellar occultation. Astronomers also discovered that Charon had little to no atmosphere supporting the theory that "Charon was formed in a collision between two objects early in the formation of the solar system."

Grey's Anatomy now has 3 TypePad blogs for the show. Two are boring and fictitious: written by Joe, the bartender, and an unidentified nurse at Seattle Grace Hospital. The third blog, however, is updated after a new show airs by the episode's writer and is actually interesting. It's full of behind the scenes details and information about how the episode was written.

And if you want to learn something from television, check out the Did You Know section which includes education tidbits from each episode like these:

Living organ donation has become more and more common in recent years. It is possible to donate ½ a liver, one kidney or the lobe of one lung to a relative, loved one or person in need.

GCS stands for Glasgow Coma Scale. It measures three components of consciousness - eye movement, verbal response and motor response.

Why does watching porn help my Aunt Sally cope with her pain? Because porn releases endorphins. It releases endorphins. Vague enough for you? The truth is - we don't know why it works. But, if it does, no doctor will knock it.

"looking over Melville's shoulder as he wrote Moby Dick"

In Vowell's Assassination Vacation she references the Grandfather Paradox during the retelling of her visit to Dr. Samuel Mudd's home and museum in Maryland. The Mudd house is where John Wilkes Booth went after the assassination of Lincoln; and where Dr. Mudd cared for the injured Booth.

At the museum gift shop, she purchased a copy of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd Family Home Cooking from Dr. Mudd's great-great-granddaughter. And she pondered traveling back in time to kill her great-great-grandfather a "racist, pro-slavery teenage terrorist" who was with Quantrill when he raided Lawrence, Kansas in 1863 killing over 182 people; and wondered what the cashier, a "descendant of racist, slave-owning, convicted assassination accomplice" thinks of the Grandfather Paradox.

The Grandfather Paradox being the idea that one travels back in time and meets and kills an ancestor therefore erasing himself from the future and thus is one of the greatest arguments against the possibility of time travel. (Or one of the greatest arguments against the possibility of time travel is the exact nature of time and it's uninterruptable continuance. But that's just my thoughts.)

Besides the Lawrence reference, I love this passage for the intersection of science & physics with literature & history. This is why I love science metaphors in poetry and fiction.