We are now testing the capabilities of our fully armed and operational homebrew fish facility in the lab. Pumps are humming, water is flowing, we are evaluating all joins for leakage, and it’s looking good. Tomorrow we put in a small bank of tanks and start the water cycle. Next week, fish!
That is all.
I know you’re all busy fracking that poll, but this is relevant. It’s all about the oil, and Charles Pierce always puts it so well.
As we await the decision on whether or not TransCanada will get to complete the northern leg of our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death-funnel aimed at transporting the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel from the poisoned moonscape of Alberta down the spine of North America to Texas, where what already hasn’t spilled out and killed ducks and bunny rabbits — and the agricultural economy of half the country — will be put on ships and sent out to the rest of the world, we should check to see how the pipeline system is working elsewhere.
It’s not working so well.
A Northern Alberta pipeline sprung a little leak. A leak that spewed 9.5 million liters of waste water into Canadian wetlands. A spokesman for the company running the pipeline, Texas-based Apache Corp. (do you Canadians know you’ve got fucking Texas oilmen running loose in your backyard, with boldly named racist companies?), said it was just “salty water” with “trace amounts” of oil. Right. Do you believe him?
The substance is the inky black colour of oil, and the treetops are brown. Across a broad expanse of northern Alberta muskeg, the landscape is dead. It has been poisoned by a huge spill of 9.5 million litres of toxic waste from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta, the third major leak in a region whose residents are now questioning whether enough is being done to maintain aging energy infrastructure.
“Trace amounts”. OK.
“Every plant and tree died” in the area touched by the spill, said James Ahnassay, chief of the Dene Tha First Nation, whose members run traplines in an area that has seen oil and gas development since the 1950s.
Oh. Well that sounds…innocuous.
This is where capitalism fails, among many other places. Look to the future: as gas and oil prices steadily climb, there will be more and more incentive to unscrupulous people to profit at the land’s expense, and there’s nothing to stop them. Furthermore, there will always be lots of short-sighted people who will see only dollar signs and easy comfort, who will chant “drill baby drill” and enable the looters. And then someday we get to live in the wreckage.
Somebody has to actually reckon the cost and say simply, “no.” Even if it discomfits a few Texans.
The Ventura County Star has a poll up on hydraulic fracturing in California:
How concerned are you about fracking (hydraulic fracturing) in California?
- I have little or no concern about it.
- I’m concerned about its effects on water and the environment.
- I’m concerned about a possible link to earthquakes.
- I’m concerned that overregulation of it will kill jobs.
Fracking’s increasingly big news in California. My KCET colleague Char Miller has a good California fracking backgrounder here, but the short version is that the fossil fuel industry is eyeing the Monterey Shale, a Miocene marine sedimentary formation thought to hold as much as 15 billion barrels of oil. That’s twice what the Bakken holds in North Dakota. The stakes are high for the oil industry.
I’ve been informed by one of my geopals that the Western States Petroleum Association has quietly put the word out to its fanbase, asking them to swamp the poll. Right now votes of fracking opponents are about equal to those who either support fracking or don’t care, though the way the answers are phrased makes it look like opponents are well ahead.
I suspect there’s a diversity of opinion on fracking here. That’s fine. (Though those of you who disagree with me are wrong.) To its credit, the Star admits it’s a pointless exercise:
Note: This is not a scientific poll. The results reflect only the opinions of those who chose to participate.
But the oil lobby does seize on spurious polls like this for PR spin purposes, so whatever your viewpoint, go add some noise to the signal.
They’ve mastered our technology.
Oops, too late. The Western Black Rhino has been officially declared extinct.
In case you were wondering how that happened…
In happier times:
Don’t you hate it when you get up in the morning and the first thing you read on the internet is the news that your entire career has been a waste of time, your whole field of study has collapsed, and you’re going to have to rethink your entire future? Happens to me all the time. But then, I read the creationist news, so I’ve become desensitized to the whole idea of intellectual catastrophes.
Today’s fresh demolition of the whole of evolutionary theory comes via Christian News, which reports on a paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution which challenges the ape to human evolutionary theory. Wait, that’s a journal I read regularly. What did I miss?
See, if bees go extinct, we’ll be fine. We don’t need that many choices anyway.
Why when they tell me I could lose all hope of ever eating one again, do I suddenly have a craving for apples?
We sometimes focus too hard on the struggle with the regressive jerks who squawk and scream on the internet, but I have to tell you — they are completely irrelevant to major policy initiatives in academia (note: this does not mean academics can’t be assholes, too, it just means policies try to be more enlightened). Every time I have to deal with the people managing the major granting institutions, it’s simply taken for granted that we will be doing our best to encourage equal opportunities for everyone. The blind stupidity we seem to encounter when dealing with leaders of major skeptical organizations just doesn’t happen — that behavior would get them fired.
Latest example: the NSF is expanding maternity leave opportunities. Why? It’s obvious: because sexist policies derived from the conventions of the 1950s drive good people out of science.
Instituted in 2012, NSF’s Career-Life Balance (CLB) Initiative is an ambitious, ten-year initiative that will build on the best of family-friendly practices among individual NSF programs to expand them to activities NSF-wide. This agency-level approach will help attract, retain, and advance graduate students, postdoctoral students, and early-career researchers in STEM fields. This effort is designed to help reduce the rate at which women depart from the STEM workforce. Further information on the CLB initiative may be found on the Foundation’s website.
…
The purpose of this DCL is to announce a new opportunity for GRFP institutions to submit supplemental funding requests to sustain the research of active NSF Graduate Research Fellows who have been granted an NSF-approved medical deferral for dependent-care (family leave) situations (see Guide for fellowship status options). This gender neutral supplemental funding opportunity is in addition to the limited paid leave option for Fellows on Tenure with an NSF-approved medical deferral. GRFP institutions are invited to submit supplemental funding requests to provide additional personnel (e.g., research technicians or equivalent) to sustain the research of NSF Graduate Research Fellows on approved medical deferral due to dependent care (family leave) situations. The supplemental funding request may include funding for up to 3 months of salary support for the additional personnel, for a maximum of $12,000 in salary compensation. The fringe benefits and associated indirect costs may be in addition to the salary payment and therefore, the total supplemental funding request per Fellow may exceed $12,000. The supplemental request also must include a letter from the Fellow’s faculty advisor supporting the CLB/GRFP Supplemental Funding Request.
Beneath the bureaucratese, it’s pretty simple: gender-neutral family leave opportunities are now available at all ranks of the scientific enterprise, from graduate students on up. And they don’t ask questions.
There should be no privacy related information provided in this request, i.e., the rationale for leave should not be disclosed to NSF.
Vox Day/Theodore Beale really is hilariously easy to trigger into paroxysms of foolishness. He now refers to me as a professional "biologist" in those lovely scare quotes, because he thinks his understanding of “genetic science” is better than mine. He explains what he meant by his remarks that he, a white man, and NK Jemisin, a black woman, are not equal.
You see, Africans are pure homo sapiens sapiens. Non-Africans are not. NK Jemisin, being of African extraction, is almost surely more purely homo sapiens sapiens than I am. Or, for that matter, than PZ Myers is.
"Previous research has revealed that Neanderthal DNA can be found in the genomes of everyone who isn’t of African extraction. But, as Pääbo said, "The Denisovans had contributed DNA only to people in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Australia, and other places in Melanesia." In other words, modern humans entering Asia interbred with Denisovans. But the Denisovan DNA didn’t wind up circulating to other areas of the world the way Neanderthal DNA did."
So, everyone who isn’t African possesses DNA from other homo species, including Homo neanderthalensis and what is either Homo denisova or Homo sapiens denisova. This is why I often mock those who believe in both evolution by natural selection and human equality, because humanity is not only NOT all the same under our skin, we are not, according to current genetic science, even all entirely the same subspecies. If we apply their idiot logic, then I was actually claiming that I am not fully equal to Jemisin rather than the other way around.
Pure what? What is a “pure” human? Every single person on this planet belongs to the same identical species, Homo sapiens, so his distinctions by differences in alleles is irrelevant. I must also mention that his habit of capitalizing the binomial name is a bit irritating. We teach a class in science writing here that hammers on a lot of the scientific conventions, and we literally tell our students that one of the first signs you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t know basic biology is that they get the punctuation wrong.
The existence of individual variants, even regional patterns, is an expected aspect of the genetic complement of a population. A species is not ever assumed to be genetically homogeneous, so it’s ridiculous to point to one member with a particular admixture of genes within a group and say they’re more a member of the group than someone else with a slightly different genetic complement.
It’s pure typological thinking. Theodore Beale has a crude version of 19th century biology (to be generous) rattling around in his head, and he thinks it makes sense.
Oh, look, Sinfest has a comic just for Theodore.
