Musings to Start February

It’s February already!  Where has the year gone?  My apologies for a January without posts.  Things have been busy here and well, blogging got put on the back burner for me with the new semester starting and a new class to design.  But interesting kernels from January:

The World is Trying to Kill You – Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you have a 20% failure rate, does that make a speculative technology a waste of time?  Conversely if your success is 20% is it successful?   I think no and no.

Have you noticed that February is the month we have been getting the worst winter weather in the Midwest and northeast? Not December or January?  I used to shovel snow all January and wait for the February respite.

Killer whales are now a protected species.  What does that say about the killer whales as SeaWorld?

There is a honeybee crisis.  No really, a real one.  Not the Jerry Seinfeld movie.  But the lesson is the same.  No bees, no food.  We need to figure out how we are killing them.  No doubt when we find out it will come back on pesticides, herbicides, monocultures, some combination of the above.  Not a good thing for farming.

The bison are under attack again in Montana.  Maybe Mother Nature is trying to tell us something – buffalo want to roam to their winter grazing fields.   And no brucelliosis, the issue rancher bring up as to why the bison are bad, has still NEVER been transmitted from bison to cattle.  Bison are way better on the land since there hooves are much large and they do not compact the ground as much.  But they are not as stupid as cattle.  They know they can walk thought a barbed wire fence.  They are bison afterall!

A Utah rancher shot and killed Echo, the female wolf that made it to the Grand Canyon last summer and became a national story.  He thought she was a coyote.  Um, I think wolves are a little bit bigger than coyotes.  We have a man with a gun who can’t tell what he’s shooting.  What could possibly go wrong with that?

Then there is the bear hunt in Florida because people move closer to the woods and cannot figure out how to secure their garbage of close their garage doors.  Bears get killed.  People…..

Miami Beach installed $40 million dollars in pumps last summer, with an expected $300 million for.  The nearshore nutrient concentrations increased dramatically (a factor of six), which could adversely impact beach quality, fishing and reefs.  Unintended consequences, but an issue was brought up as a potential concern.