oil
sastyk | December 16, 2009Note: Tonight is the sixth night of Chanukah, the night we remember Judith hacking off Holofernes' head by eating cheese (yes, there is a reasoning behind that strange statement), and I really had planned to write a post about that. But it is also Isaiah's sixth birthday and deep in the grading nightmare for the husband and the night before we get up at 4am to butcher the turkeys (and if anyone is looking for a free-range, heritage turkey for the holidays in the greater Albany/Schenectady area, email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com) and I'm just not feeling innovative. So here's an old piece…
bioephemera | June 12, 2009
Sometimes art doesn't need to be complicated. Shawn Knol's simple videos of oil in water capture fascinating patterns reminiscent of dividing cells, budding spores or lava lamps, depending on your mood. His newest, Psycho Bubble (above), was just released a few days ago.
"A lot of people are asking how I did this. It's pretty simple. I just put the camera on its lowest jpeg setting, placed the camera into continuous mode, and locked the shutter down with my wired remote. The oil is being dumped into a tall cylindrical glass, with about a cup of water in it. The whole thing is lit from…
zooillogix | November 28, 2008Very cool video of a bizarre squid from the genus Magnapinna. Also known as bigfin squid, few specimens have ever been observed and only a handful ever captured. The squid in this footage has tentacles 20 feet long.
This footage was filmed in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Houston, Texas by cameras attached to deep sea oil rig.
mikethemadbiologist | June 25, 2008If Republicans claim that oil pipelines are good for caribou, I wonder what they'll make of the blackfly outbreak in Maine. About the first half of the previous sentence--that's not hyperbole. Really (by way of Digby):
During a radio interview on Wednesday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attempted to argue that drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) would be beneficial for Arctic wildlife. Bachmann claimed that drilling would cause not only an "enhancement of wildlife expansion," but that the area around oil pipelines would also "become a meeting ground and '…
mikethemadbiologist | June 12, 2008Wolfrum at Shakesville alerts us to The New Right's attempt to lay our failed energy policies every but at the feet of Republicans:
Take the post "How did the GOP get stuck "Defending Big Oil" again?"
Now, this post could have been just five words long: "Because that's what they do." But the post is more about how to change the oil debate to make the GOP look better rather than on how to do anything about oil prices:
First, I don't see any reason at all we need to keep getting stuck with the "defending tax breaks for big oil" charge over and over again. Subsidies are not a free market…
mikethemadbiologist | November 4, 2007A while ago, I stumbled across this amazing article about a car mechanic, who never even graduated high school, and who has developed a diesel engine that is cleaner (biodiesel based), more fuel efficient, and more powerful than the standard engine produced by car companies (italics mine):
This is the sort of work that's making Goodwin famous in the world of underground car modders. He is a virtuoso of fuel economy. He takes the hugest American cars on the road and rejiggers them to get up to quadruple their normal mileage and burn low-emission renewable fuels grown on U.S. soil--all while…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2007By way of Litbrit at Shakespeare's Sister, I came across a Greg Palast article about possible motivations for a troop increase in Iraq. Palast writes (bold in original; italics mine):
Here's my question: Who asked the waiter to deliver this dish? Who asked for the 21,000 soldiers?
We know the US military didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Outgoing commander General George Casey called for a troop reduction.)
We know the Iraqi government didn't ask for the 21,000 troops. (Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is reportedly unhappy about a visible increase in foreign occupiers).
So who wants the…