The vast wildfires of this summer and last represent a new normal for the western United States. They may signal a radical landscape transformation, one that will make the 21st century West an ecological frontier.
Unlike fires that have occurred regularly for thousands of years, these fires are so big and so intense as to create discontinuities in natural cycles. In the aftermath, existing forests may not return. New ecosystems will take their place.
“These transitions could be massive. They represent the convergence of several different forces,” said Donald Falk, a fire ecologist at the University of Arizona. “There is a tremendous amount of energy on the landscape that historically would not have been there. These are nuclear amounts of energy.”
Falk’s specialty is fire dynamics in the American Southwest, a region where record fires have become routine. Fueling the infernos is a combination of fire suppression, livestock grazing and logging.
Because small, low-intensity blazes are usually prevented from spreading, dead wood has accumulated, especially in arid and semi-arid regions where decomposition occurs slowly. Without these fires, dense shrubs and small trees proliferate, as they also do in gaps opened by harvesting of large trees. Grazing removes grasses that traditionally carried small fires and causes erosion that reduces soil’s ability to hold water.
‘The fuel structure is ready to support massive, severe fires that the trees have not evolved to cope with.’
– Dan Binkley
Much of the West is now a giant tinderbox, literally ready to combust. Yet thanks to fire suppression, the consequences have been postponed for decades.
“When you look at the long record, you see fire and climate moving together over decades, over centuries, over thousands of years,” said pyrogeographer Jennifer Marlon of Yale University, who earlier this year co-authored a study of long-term fire patterns in the American West.
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See, It Can Be Done – LA Superintendent Fires Entire School
Faced with a shocking case of a teacher accused of playing classroom sex games with children for years, Los Angeles schools Superintendent John Deasy delivered another jolt: He removed the school’s entire staff — from custodians to the principal — to smash what he called a ‘culture of silence.
‘It was a quick, responsible, responsive action to a heinous situation,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to spend a long time debating student safety.’
The controversial decision underscores the 51-year-old superintendent’s shake-up of the lethargic bureaucracy at the nation’s second-largest school district. His swift, bold moves have rankled some and won praise from others during his first year of leadership.
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Library of Congress: Today in History “Each day an event from American history is illustrated by digitized items from the Library of Congress American Memory historic collections.”
Cats don’t have sweat glands over their bodies like humans do. Instead, they sweat only through their paws. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
Above from HERE.
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Quite Likely the Worst Job Ever….
A tosher at work c. 1850 ,sieving raw sewage in one of the dank, dangerous and uncharted sewers beneath the streets of London. From Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor.
To live in any large city during the 19th century, at a time when the state provided little in the way of a safety net, was to witness poverty and want on a scale unimaginable in most Western countries today. In London, for example, the combination of low wages, appalling housing, a fast-rising population and miserable health care resulted in the sharp division of one city into two. An affluent minority of aristocrats and professionals lived comfortably in the good parts of town, cossetted by servants and conveyed about in carriages, while the great majority struggled desperately for existence in stinking slums where no gentleman or lady ever trod, and which most of the privileged had no idea even existed. It was a situation accurately and memorably skewered by Dickens, who in Oliver Twist introduced his horrified readers to Bill Sikes’s lair in the very real and noisome Jacob’s Island, and who has Mr. Podsnap, in Our Mutual Friend, insist: “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!”
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Study Finds High Sexting Rates among US Teens
Researchers say the percent of US teens who have shared nude photos via email or text is greater than previously thought. A survey of nearly 1,000 public high school students from Texas found that almost 30 percent are “sexting.” Many of the students said they were uncomfortable with the practice, yet they did it anyway. Researchers say that sexting can be an indicator of sexual behavior, as girls who sexted were found to be more likely to engage in risky sexual activities, and that educational programs rather than legal punishments are necessary to discourage this sort of behavior.
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Caught in a Taliban love triangle: Moment Afghan woman, 22, is gunned down ‘after fighters couldn’t decide who should have her’
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AS a general rule, the United States government is run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists. Others interested in helping the lawyers out need not apply.
Of course, there are some exceptions. The government employs scientists of many varieties in technical capacities, from estimating the environmental toxicity of a chemical to the structural soundness of a bridge. But when it comes to forming policies, these scientists and, especially, behavioral scientists are rarely at the table with the lawyers and the economists.
Economists teach us that monopolies are harmful, and this is no exception. Are they really the only social scientists with anything useful to contribute to the efficient running of a government? Imagine that along with the Council of Economic Advisers, a Council of Behavioral Scientist Advisers also provided counsel to the president. What might emerge from such a group?
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Hospitals ‘letting patients die to save money’
Hospitals may be depriving elderly patients of food and drink to hasten their deaths as part of cost-cutting measures to free up bed space, leading doctors warn.
ens of thousands of patients with terminal illnesses are placed on a “death pathway” to help end their lives every year. However, in a letter to The Daily Telegraph, six doctors warn that hospitals may be using the controversial scheme to reduce strain on hospital resources.
Supporters of the Liverpool Care Pathway, which allows medical staff to withhold fluid and drugs in a patient’s final days, claim it is the kindest way of letting them slip away. But the experts say in their letter that natural deaths are often freer of pain and distress.
Informed consent is not always being sought by doctors, who fail to ask patients about their wishes while they are still in control of their faculties, warn the six. This has led to an increase in patients carrying cards informing doctors that they do not wish to be put on the pathway in the last few days of their lives.
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ST. LOUIS — Genetics researchers at Washington University, one of the world’s leading centers for work on the human genome, were devastated. Dr. Lukas Wartman, a young, talented and beloved colleague, had the very cancer he had devoted his career to studying. He was deteriorating fast. No known treatment could save him. And no one, to their knowledge, had ever investigated the complete genetic makeup of a cancer like his.
So one day last July, Dr. Timothy Ley, associate director of the university’s genome institute, summoned his team. Why not throw everything we have at seeing if we can find a rogue gene spurring Dr. Wartman’s cancer, adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia, he asked? “It’s now or never,” he recalled telling them. “We will only get one shot.”
Dr. Ley’s team tried a type of analysis that they had never done before. They fully sequenced the genes of both his cancer cells and healthy cells for comparison, and at the same time analyzed his RNA, a close chemical cousin to DNA, for clues to what his genes were doing.
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500 Piccolo Petes Lit All at Once
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Elephants Are on a Deserved Vacation
Officials of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu ordered that the elephants working in the temples must be sent together on a deserved vacation. The order was issued in the official program, which aims to return the exhausted animals in shape. All the 45 elephants in the “constant work” at the temples and shrines throughout the state of Tamil Nadu were sent to the woods of Mudumalaj, along the coast for a 48-days recovery. “Elephants were transported by trucks from various churches around the country”, said one Indian official, adding that the elephants during their stay at sea will have a special diet based on sugar cane, coconut and banana, rich in medicinal herbs and vitamins. Elephants are an integral part of Hindu rituals in the temples where they kiss believers and pilgrims with a raised trunk. They are also trained to perform various physical work for the temple needs.
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Archaeologists working at the site of La Corona in Guatemala have discovered a 1,300-year-old-year Maya text that provides only the second known reference to the so-called “end date” of the Maya calendar, December 21, 2012. The discovery, one of the most significant hieroglyphic finds in decades, was announced today at the National Palace in Guatemala.
“This text talks about ancient political history rather than prophecy,” says Marcello A. Canuto, director of Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute and co-director of the excavations at La Corona.
Since 2008, Canuto and Tomás Barrientos of the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala have directed excavations at La Corona, a site previously ravaged by looters.
“Last year, we realized that looters of a particular building had discarded some carved stones because they were too eroded to sell on the antiquities black market,” said Barrientos, “so we knew they found something important, but we also thought they might have missed something.”
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How to Pop a Pimple The Right Way
You shouldn’t be popping zits at all — but here’s how to do it if you can’t resist.
By Sarah Carrillo
how to pop a zitLet’s get this out of the way. Popping zits is bad.
It forces more bacteria into the area, which adds fuel to the whole disgusting fire — but we all do it anyway.
So we talked to experts and put together this guide to doing it right. At least this way you can cut down on the germs and get that sucker to heal faster, and less time spent hiding from hot women.
One warning: if your zit is a cyst (swollen bump as opposed to a white or black head) do not pop it. Cystic acne is like a balloon underneath your skin; you pop it and all that gunk stays under the surface and really messes things up for you. That said, if you’ve got a nasty white- or black here’s how you can safely get rid of it:
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Reciprocity, Not Reward, Drives Decision to Cooperate
Reciprocity, Not Reward, Drives Decision to CooperateA new study suggests the decision to cooperate with others comes from someone’s mood and his or her history of cooperation. The finding overturns the long-held belief that a decision to cooperate is based upon the rewards an individual believes they will receive.
In the investigation, Spanish researchers studied 1,200 students as they participated in an electronic game known as the “Prisoner’s Dilemma.”
The game is oriented so that the greatest benefits occur when both individuals collaborate, but if one collaborates and the other does not, the latter will receive more benefits than the one who cooperates. On occasion, this allows an individual to take advantage of the cooperation of others, but if this tendency is extended, in the end, no one cooperates and as such, nobody obtains rewards.
Analysis of the game results revealed that when cooperating with others is beneficial, the way the individuals involved are organized into one social structure or another is irrelevant.
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Gioconda Belli on Fifty Shades of Grey
ORGASMS ARE SHORT, unfortunately. Clearly the allure of sex does not reside in its climax alone; sex is a manifold experience constantly nourished by socialized eroticism. As natural and instinctive as sex is, it’s also a highly developed form of human interaction and intimacy, forever in need of reinvention. Much of the sexual experience takes place in our imagination.
The history of sex is also a literary history. From Catulo and Sappho to Candy and Fanny Hill or the Marquis de Sade and Story of O, the way we make love owes a lot to our curiosity, to the voyeuristic side of our nature and the many forms of artistic representation that allow us to peek into the forbidden or daring practices of others. Clothes, movies, porn sites and the like do their part, but books are still unrivaled in their capacity to evoke fantasies and fuel the erotic imagination. A book does not allow the reader to be just an observer; it requires the intrinsic complicity of the mind, which stages a mental production based on the often sparse notes of the author, fantasies woven by words forcing the reader to bring into play his or her own desires or experiences.
Having said this, what are we to infer from the sudden bestseller popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey and the two sequels that compose E.L. James’s trilogy? In spite of their sophomoric tone and less than lucid writing, the story of (the oh, so beautiful) Christian Grey and Anastasia Steel, and their cat and mouse sexual game of sadist predator and virginal prey, has touched a chord in the collective imagination of readers, most of whom are women.
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I’m very taken with James Charlick’s photo, “The Grand Library,” shot in an abandoned house during an urban exploration expedition.
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Is the Internet Making Us Crazy? What the New Research Says
Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressed—and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness, Tony Dokoupil reports. Print Email Comments 3 Before he launched the most viral video in Internet history, Jason Russell was a half-hearted Web presence. His YouTube account was dead, and his Facebook and Twitter pages were a trickle of kid pictures and home-garden updates. The Web wasn’t made “to keep track of how much people like us,” he thought, and when his own tech habits made him feel like “a genius, an addict, or a megalomaniac,” he unplugged for days, believing, as the humorist Andy Borowitz put it in a tweet that Russell tagged as a favorite, “it’s important to turn off our computers and do things in the real world.” But this past March Russell struggled to turn off anything. He forwarded a link to “Kony 2012,” his deeply personal Web DOCUMENTary about the African warlord Joseph Kony. The idea was to use social media to make Kony famous as the first step to stopping his crimes. And it seemed to work: the film hurtled through cyberspace, clocking more than 70 million views in less than a week. But something happened to Russell in the process. The same digital tools that supported his mission seemed to tear at his psyche, exposing him to nONSTOP kudos and criticisms, and ending his arm’s-length relationship with new media. He slept two hours in the first four days, producing a swirl of bizarre Twitter updates. He sent a link to “I Met the Walrus,” a short animated interview with John Lennon, urging followers to “start training your mind.” He sent a picture of his tattoo, TIMSHEL, a biblical word about man’s choice between good and evil. At one point he uploaded and commented on a digital photo of a text message from his mother. At another he compared his life to the mind-bending movie Inception, “a dream inside a dream.”
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Terror tactics: Science in the anarchists’ cross hairs
World’s fastest camera used to detect rogue cancer cells.
US Drought Monitor shows record-breaking expanse of drought across US
Moisturiser modified to tackle skin cancer <
Computer that could outlive the universe a step closer .
Diagnosing Parkinson’s in a phone call with a computer .
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THE PLEASURES OF MINDFUL LIVING NSFW!
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USS Texas
One of the last of the old “Dreadnaught” class of battleships. Built in 1915. Served in WWI and WWII. Now a museum situated on the south side of the Houston Ship Channel just east of Houston.
photo by Louis Vest