Fish for Friday

Mutually surprised?

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Albert Einstein: Imagination is more important than knowledge.

"From a Million Miles Away, a New NASA ‘Blue Marble’ View of Earth." [Andrew C. Revkin, NY Times] Excerpt:

[From] Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reflection on the newest “Blue Marble” photograph of our home planet:

In 1972, when NASA’s Apollo 17 astronauts first captured an entire hemisphere of our planet, we were treated to such a view. The Blue Marble, it was called.

The Space Program’s unprecedented images of Earth compelled us all to think deeply about our dependence on nature and the fate of our civilization.
    Of course, at the time, we had other distractions. Between 1968 and 1972, the United States would experience some of its most turbulent years in memory, simultaneously enduring a hot war in Southeast Asia, a Cold War with the Soviet Union, the Civil Rights Movement, campus unrest, and assassinations....
    Regrettably, we still live in a turbulent world. But we now have at our disposal, not simply a photograph of our home to reflect upon, but continual data of our rotating planet, captured 13 times per day, by the robotic Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a specially designed space camera & telescope, launched and positioned a million miles from Earth.
    We will now be able to measure and track Sun-induced space weather as well as global climactic trends in ozone levels, aerosols, vegetation, volcanic ash, and Earth reflectivity, all in high resolution; just the kind of data our civilization needs to make informed cultural, political, and scientific decisions that affect our future.
    Occasions such as this offer renewed confidence that we may ultimately become responsible shepherds of our own fate, and the fate of that fragile home we call Earth.

The Pacific Northwest is now 315 years into a 243-year earthquake cycle – way overdue for "The Really Big One." [Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker] Excerpt:

Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan [9.0]
    Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada....
    ...When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater...The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
    In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America....

Iowa State Law Library stairs:

Popeye Village – Malta:

Built as a movie set in 1980 for the Walt Disney film Popeye.
Today it is open to the public as a museum.

Here's more about what some tourist destinations are doing about the "Picture of Excess" mentioned in last week's column: "The Revolt Against Tourism." [Elizabeth Becker, NY Times] Excerpt:

COPENHAGEN — As we glide under a bridge on the city canal tour, our guide announces that we have entered a quiet zone. “This is a residential area,” she says, nodding toward balconies where Danes are enjoying coffee — or maybe wine. “I’ll resume talking in five minutes.”
    Denmark is one of the world’s top destinations for conferences and a mainstay of trans-Atlantic cruise ships. Attracted by noir detective series and fashionable cuisine, nine million tourists last year visited this city, a record for Denmark, which has fewer than six million people.
    The “quiet zones” are emblematic of the Danish philosophy toward tourists: They should blend in with the Danish way of life, not the other way around. The Danes have prohibited foreigners from buying vacation cottages on their seacoasts; devised their famous bicycle-friendly transportation system to include tourists; and strictly limited bars and restaurants from taking over Copenhagen.
    The question, says Henrik Thierlein, a spokesman for the city’s tourism office, is: “How do you take advantage of the growth in tourism and not be taken over by mass tourism?”
    Outraged by tourists’ boorish and disrespectful behavior, and responding to the complaints of their constituents, local officials around the world have begun to crack down on tourism, and the tourism industry, even in the face of opposition from their national governments, which want the tax revenue from tourists.

"The Republican Fetish With Water Bottles." [Editorial Board, NY Times] Excerpt:

The National Park Service has a cautious, sensible policy that allows parks to ban the sale of plastic water bottles. Those that do so are required to provide easily accessible filling stations at which visitors can replenish their own containers — or fill reusable bottles sold at park concessions — with fresh, potable water....
    ...House Republicans contend there is no evidence that the bans work to reduce waste. They have also called allowing the ban of bottled water “intrusive government overreach” that is robbing consumers of choice and could cost jobs for people who bottle water in “a noble industry.” House Republicans are trying to undercut the Park Service policy with an amendment, approved last week with cheers from the industry, to prevent any appropriated money from being used to carry out or enforce the bans.

We all need our hearts and hope they last as long as we do, and take a lickin' and keep on tickin', just slightly short of when we might get terminal Alzheimer’s or a radically painful wasting disease.

Nuts [0:46]:

Mission Impossible: Squirrel Editionhttp://bit.ly/nuts-ios
Posted by Nuts on Thursday, November 20, 2014

You're never too old to learn something stupid.

Ever heard of the pangolin? Turns out these scaly, obscure animals – of which there are eight species in existence – are the world's most trafficked mammals and at risk of extinction. So this week a coalition of wildlife groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, petitioned the U.S. government to designate seven species of pangolins across the globe as "endangered" under the country's Endangered Species Act (the eighth species, a native of Africa, is already protected).
    More than 960,000 of these armored mammals were illegally traded over the past decade; numbers are plummeting due to a massive and growing demand for pangolins' meat and scales, especially from East Asia. But even U.S. demand is significant: At least 26,000 imports of pangolin products were seized in the United States between 2004 and 2013.
    "If we don't act now, demand for pangolin parts will wipe this extraordinary, odd and beautiful animal off the map," said Sarah Uhlemann, international program director at the Center. "The United States must do its part to shut down trade in pangolin scales."
    Read more in the Center for Biological Diversity's press release.

It takes a pretty hard-hearted person to walk past a sick and shivering baby. But when Riley, a newborn piglet, was tossed to the side of a pen at a New York stockyard, no one seemed to notice–or if they did, they did nothing to help.
    Riley was considered a “downer”–a farm animal too sick or injured to stand or walk. But he was lucky. He was a baby at a stockyard where Farm Sanctuary could rescue him. Had he been an adult in the same miserable condition at a slaughterhouse, the pork industry might have gone to incredible lengths–even shocking him with electricity or dragging him across the slaughterhouse lot in construction machinery–to force him into the human food supply.
    I’m sure you agree that it should be against the law to treat animals so cruelly. But, abusing helpless animals is business as usual in the factory farm industry.
    Please sign Farm Sanctuary’s petition to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to help stop cruelty to “downed” farm animals.

Like so many dogs in North Carolina, he was kept chained 24/7. He was neglected for months, and as he grew, his collar got tighter and finally became embedded in his neck.
    We found him just in time. Justice's body healed, and he was adopted into a loving forever home, but he is in the minority. Most chained dogs suffer for years, and many die of starvation, exposure, dehydration, and/or an untreated illness or injury.
    The cruel—yet common—practice of keeping dogs chained 24/7 deprives these highly social pack animals of companionship and any relief from extreme weather. At least six chained dogs have been found dead from starvation and exposure in North Carolina in recent months.

    Take action for chained dogs.

Vic Midyett's comment on To Kill a Mockingbird [reviewed last Sunday], taken together with the themes in the book, made me think once again about the issue of the sins of our fathers: how the fall-out from evil reaches both forward and backward; do we have any responsibility to atone for it? And there are more, many more unresolved questions.

And we all, who are alive now, are alive because, at every juncture over thousands and thousands of years, the mothers and fathers who are our ancestors managed to survive long enough – by luck and by taking whatever actions necessary, including by cheating and murdering their competitors – to procreate our line....We are deeply complicit, at least by inheritance, in all manner of injustice and cruelty. Does it bear brooding about?

Having a bad day?

The morning after the party:

Limerick of the week:

Susan speaks in words, she speaks in colors too;
either way, she speaks in chatty hue.
    When it's words I tune my ears,
    when she draws or paints, my see-ers
(as long as I'm not deaf or blind I do).

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean