Dan Lungren and John Van de Kamp have penned an opinion piece in the L.A. Times about the Hetch Hetchy Valley. They’d like to see the valley restored and the dam removed. I’m too young to remember what the valley looked like, but I’m of the opinion that it’s too late, and California has already wasted too much of the taxpayer’s money doing idiotic things like re-electing mistakes for governor and investing in high speed rail that nobody – except those getting rich off kickbacks – wants.
Well, I’m no scientist, but I could have told you that without having to embark on any years-long study. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with how cattle graze and where toads live knows that cattle don’t graze in marshy water areas and toads don’t forage in dry meadows. Duh.
But, to make it official, a UC forest study has found that excluding cattle doesn’t help toad population.
Shell has announced a lead-free replacement for the 110LL that is currently used by most general aviation piston aircraft. From the AOPA website:
Shell Aviation, a subsidiary of the multinational oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, announced Dec. 3 that a 10-year effort in the laboratory has produced a fuel that may put a long-sought goal—once thought to be unattainable—within reach: a lead-free “performance drop-in” replacement for 100LL that could power any aircraft in the piston fleet.
The USDA has posted an article about the Watershed Assessment Model that’s being used at Yosemite National Park:
An award-winning watershed assessment tool, the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (AGWA), was deployed to assess potential Rim Fire threats in Yosemite National Park in California. The park experienced a devastating fire that began on August 17, 2013, and took several months to contain. The fire burned more than 400 square miles in and around the park, cost $125.8 million to date, and is considered one of the largest wildfires in California’s history.
When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut had some great stuff. He famously warned people away from the use of semicolons by describing them “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.”
Eight years before his passing, Vonnegut published a collection of short stories titled “Bagombo Snuff Box.” The book was made up of previously published short fiction from his early (and short) career from the 1950s writing for magazines. These works did not appear in Vonnegut’s previous collection, “Welcome to the Monkey House.”