Coyote Crossing

Via Tee Poole, an astronomer’s sky cam in New Mexico catches something unexpected.

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Via Anuradha Mittal at the Oakland Institute, more change that looks remarkably like what we wanted to change from. Executive summary: http://www.stopvilsack.org.

An Action Alert from the Organic Consumers Association

Organic Consumers Association: Vilsack Not “Change We Can Believe In”

WASHINGTON, DC : Announcement that former Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack, has been selected as the new Secretary of Agriculture sent a chill through the sustainable food and farming community who have been lobbying for a champion in the new administration.

“Vilsack’s nomination sends the message that dangerous, untested, unlabeled genetically engineered crops will be the norm in the Obama Administration,“ said Ronnie Cummins, Executive Director of Organic Consumers Association. “Our nation’s future depends on crafting a forward-thinking strategy to promote organic and sustainable food and farming, and address the related crises of climate change, diminishing energy supplies, deteriorating public health, and economic depression.“

The Department of Agriculture during the Bush Administration failed to promote a sustainable vision for food and farming and did not protect consumers from the chemical-intensive toxic practices inherent to industrial agriculture. While factory farms and junk food have been subsidized with billions of…

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As of 7:57 PM Pacific Time, according to Technorati. Totals will change.

Ken Salazar, Obama’s pick for Interior Secretary,  will oversee resource extraction from and/or protection of one fifth of the US’s land area. Salazar has deep ties to the mining and ranching industries and though he opposes North Slope drilling and favors moderate environmental protections, Salazar is expected by many environmentalists to continue to manage public lands to benefit those industries rather than the public interest. The mining and ranching industries have lauded the pick. Salazar will also be the lead Federal official responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. His nomination has been known to bloggers for three days: Blog posts on Ken Salazar: 1,088.

Rick Warren, homophobic and sexist Evangelical preacher, was announced today as having been chosen by Obama’s inaugural committee to say a prayer at the inauguration ceremony.  Blog posts on Rick Warren: 14,447.

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Ruth has pictures of the Antelope Valley. There’s three inches of snow forecast on Las Vegas Boulevard.

And reader Warren sent me the video here, but it doesn’t look like Northwestern Arizona to me. (Turn down the sound for that one. In fact, maybe you should turn it off. And unplug your speakers.)

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Thanks for your patience if you came by and noticed the test pattern. I’ve updated the CMS and all seems to be working well.

For those who’re interested, the CMS I use is Expression Engine, which I really like. It’s a lot more configurable than any of the alternatives I’ve used, and for those of you who maintain your own site I recommend you give it a try. One downside is that updating the software is not a one-click process. But that’s an upside, too: about half the stuff I hear about WordPress, for instance, is that people are locked into upgrade features they don’t want.

EE isn’t open-source, but it’s all php scripts, so there’s nothing to keep a tinkerer from getting in there and rewriting/augmenting the code to suit their own uses. There’s a developer community that does just that, and they make some of the results available for free. Cool stuff. End unsolicited, unpaid product endorsement.

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At some point over the next day I’ll be upgrading this site’s system software. Given that the net connection here sometimes hangs for moderate stretches of time, this may take a little bit and the site may act strangely in the meantime. More strangely than usual, I mean. Any outage should be short-lived.

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Roger Minick’s “Woman with a Scarf at Inspiration Point, Yosemite Valley, 1980,“ reproduced here under Fair Use guidelines for purposes of criticism, is hanging these days at the Getty Museum right now as part of the exhibit In Focus, The Landscape. The exhibit is small but worthwhile, with photos from photographers as diverse as Steiglitz, Porter, and Weston, Adams and Lange, and covers a century and a half of landscape photography.

Minick’s ironic photo has become an icon in the post-modern, post-Ansel world of landscape photography, a literal foregrounding of something many nature photographers would sprain themselves to avoid portraying: the tourist. I’ve seen it — or more properly, low-res reproductions of it — so often that I hardly even see it anymore, the same way you might not really hear an overplayed song when it comes on the radio. I was thus a little surprised that The Raven, who hadn’t seen the image before, had as negative a reaction to the photo as she did when we viewed it yesterday afternoon.…

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Bob Kelley, spouse of my sister Carrie and father of my nieces Grace, Meghan, Emily and Carolyn, died last night of cancer.

The last couple years were excruciating for him and his family, and in that sense his passing is a mercy. Which doesn’t make it any easier for those close to him, just more complicated.

He was a complex, good, annoying, intelligent, self-involved, generous and loving man. He’ll be missed.

If you smoke, please stop.

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A kind reader sent me the article I asked for in this post, and I’ve filed it away in the database. Most of the writing I do as regards the paper will be for the book, but it’s relatively big news and I just have to engage in the sobersided, serious botanist version of a squee.

Taxonomists are forever arguing over whether certain closely related groups of organisms actually belong to the same species, or genus, or family, or name your taxon. The received wisdom is that these taxonomists tend to settle out into two roughly delineated groups, called “lumpers” and “splitters.“  In reality, there are taxonomists who maintain that there are several distinct kinds of both lumpers and splitters. Other taxonomists maintain that as few researchers advocate either splitting or combining all taxa, but rather make deliberate choices to lump or split based on the facts of the individual cases, that in reality “lumpers” and “splitters” should properly be considered members of their parent clade, “taxonomists,“ and the split between “lumpers” and “splitters” be deemed obsolete.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah: Joshua trees. These matters are rarely settled easily. I would imagine that there may be…

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Despite its dangerous reputation among non-physicists, the typical uranium atom is only weakly radioactive. More than 99 percent of the uranium found in nature consists of the isotope U-238, whose atomic nucleus contains 92 protons and 146 neutrons. The laws of physics make this a very stable configuration, with a half-life of 4.46 billion years. In other words, it takes four and a half billion years for half of the sample of U238 you hold in your hand to decay. U-235, with 143 neutrons, is far more radioactive: it has a half-life of just 704 million years. Anti-nuclear activists, among whose number I count myself, will often view these long half-life statistics with alarm, as they imply the material being discussed will be radioactive for a mind-bogglingly long time. And that’s true. For your handful of U-238 to become completely non-radioactive, you’d need to wait maybe eleven times longer than the universe has existed so far. But very long half-lives mean relatively low radioactivity. Stable isotopes have the longest half-lives of all, at infinity and change. It’s the stuff with the short half-lives you have to watch out for. Out in the desert, the naturally occurring uranium mixed in with…

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Bush has made his slimy little lame-duck attack on the Endangered Species Act, and it’s really, really bad. Please repost, re-tweet, email and spread this around.

From The Center for Biological Diversity:

Center Races to File Suit Challenging Bush’s Gutting of Endangered Species Act

Just hours ago, Bush announced his long-threatened 11th-hour regulations gutting the Endangered Species Act. In what might be the fastest lawsuit filing in history, the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit within minutes in San Francisco federal court to strike down the regulations. The Center and its partners - Defenders of Wildlife and Greenpeace - are asking the court to protect endangered plants and animals by completely nullifying Bush’s policies as quickly as possible.

As an early Christmas gift to industry, Bush’s policies exempted greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, oil and gas drilling, and other harmful developments from the Endangered Species Act. Having just listed the polar bear and two Florida corals as endangered species due to global warming in response to Center lawsuits, the Bush administration is now trying to handcuff federal regulators and the law by preventing actions needed to save these and other endangered species.

And if that weren’t bad enough,…

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