Cap'n Bob & the Damsel

May 2007

Alligators in the Sewers – The Epilogue

For a couple of years, we have been posting about Reggie, the alligator. Now, it appears that he has been relocated to the Los Angeles Zoo. Before the capture, one of my colleagues took this shot of Reggie floating serenely on Lake Machado in the Harbor City District of Los Angeles.

reggie-des

Photo credit & © Des Wong (used by permission)

Life was getting good for Reggie the alligator.

The scaly, 7-foot-long abandoned pet had basked in his own legend on the shores of Machado Lake for nearly two years.

Sightseers by the hundreds came to get a glimpse of the creature that had eluded professional gator wranglers over the months.

But about 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Reggie’s luck simply ran out.

Read the rest of the story about Reggie’s capture (South Bay Breeze):

Continue reading…

25 May 2007 by California Critters Photography

Two Houses

Two houses — two contrasting stories . . .

The first house:

gore-farmA 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house, all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American Home. This house is not in the northern or Midwestern ‘snow belt .’ It’s in the South.

The second house:

WDesigned by an architecture professor, this house incorporates every ‘green’ feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid-high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels – such as oil or natural gas – and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

The Assessment:

By now, you probably have guessed that house number one is that of environmental activist, film maker and former Vice President Al Gore, located near Nashville, Tennessee. This house has been under siege in the news lately since Gore won the Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth” — which has a few accuracy flaws, to say the least. Gore shrugs the excess off by purchasing “Carbon Offsets” — from himself, incidentally. The mainstream media give him a pass on it.

What surprised me about the second house is that it is the home of George W. and Laura Bush, located near Crawford, Texas. So, why isn’t this trumpeted in the Greenbat news, heralding the President as being an environmental icon? I think you can figure that out on your own.

Hat Tip to Global Warming Hoax — A Story of Two Houses

24 May 2007 by Global Warming Greenbats

Mark Steyn on the Amnesty Bill

Mark Steyn writes this interesting piece regarding ‘fast-track’ legalization for illegal aliens. The ‘Kathryn’ Mark is speaking to is KJ Lopez who also blogs on NRO‘s The Corner.

Great news! The terrorist Z-visas will take 48 hours! [Mark Steyn]

steyn.jpgKathryn, that [Senator John] Cornyn amendment is a good example of the kind of final “bipartisan compromise” Congress may settle for: The 12-20 million illegal immigrants will get legal residency in the United States by the end of the next business day (and, incidentally, I’d love to see a list of other US agencies which guarantee full service within 24 hours – or is the express line only available to lawbreaking foreigners?), but terrorists will have to be subjected to what Sheila Jackson-Lee described to me as an “ongoing background check”.

The more you look at this bill the more it seems just the usual Beltway kabuki. Secretary Chertoff says in a time of war we need to know who’s in the country. Okay. But is dumping a gazillion new applications on a sclerotic immigration system the way to do that? Mohammed Atta was the second most famous terrorist in the world and on the front page of every American newspaper but the then INS still sent him a valid US visa six months to the day after he died, and without even updating his address from that Florida flight school to Big Hole In The Ground, Lower Manhattan. And the excuse the agency made was, oh well, we’re only issuing visas to dead terrorists not living ones – which Americans pretty much had to take on trust and which seems a distinction far less likely to be maintained once there’s another 15 million in the system entitled to next-day service. If I were Mullah Omar, I’d apply for a Z-visa. The odds have got to be better than even.

So it will be a fraud on “conservative” enforcement grounds. As for “liberal” fast-track-to-citizenship grounds, I would be surprised if most of those “undocumented” choose to go beyond limited legalization. If you’re remitting vast percentages of your income back to your village in Mexico every month, US citizenship is only going to complicate your life, given that the IRS is one of the few revenue agencies on the planet to claim global jurisdiction. Some things are best left “living in the shadows”.

“Comprehensive” reforms usually backfire in spectacular ways: the “war on poverty” gave us ongoing cross-generational poverty, etc. “Comprehensive” immigration reform will metastasize illegal immigration, embed the “undocumented” support networks as a permanent feature of American life, expand identity fraud, and make it even more impossible for Washington to know which aliens are in the country at any one time.

24 May 2007 by Beltway Kabuki Congress Whacko Politics

Widget Work

Last week, I saw a poster at Sharp as a Marble that inspired me to tackle a new sidebar widget project for our blog. It is a work-in-progress at this point, and I hope that I can get some suggestions and advice from those of you with an interest in this.

The idea is to pose the question of how you are prepared to cope with ever-increasing violence in suburban areas in light of the ever-decreasing police coverage and, of course, the constant attacks on your Second Amendment rights. We previously posted an article about how the police are spread too thin to protect everyone.

So have at it. Don’t hesitate to criticize what you see because it’s still an unfinished product. Consider what story you would like to tell with it and suggest away. As an extra incentive, I am willing to provide the resulting sidebar widget to anyone who is willing to help out.

The resulting product will be a Flash™ animated widget that fits in the sidebar or just about anywhere else on your web page. You can use the raw file or I will provide scripting to make it compatible with most browsers.

Update: By the way, if you don’t want to register for comments on this post, you may also email me at capnbob (‘at’) capnbob (‘decimal-point’) us, or use the secure feedback feature.

Update II: For the time being, user registration will not be required for commenting on this post.

23 May 2007 by Blogosphere Cyberspace Firearms

Dr. Sanity — WOW

Dr. SanityThis week’s WOW selection goes to Dr. Sanity. Dr. Sanity is an M.D. practicing in psychology and aerospace medicine. She also runs a very popular and widely read weblog where she shares her common sense views on a variety of topics.

Dr. Sanity’s blog was a finalist in the 2006 Weblog Awards and for good reason. We enjoy visiting Dr. Sanity on the web often, and are pleased to select her site as our Weblog of the Week.

22 May 2007 by Blogosphere

Earth Approaching Maximum Black Body Temperature

tongueIn physics, a black body is an object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation that falls onto it. No radiation passes through it and none is reflected. It is this lack of both transmission and reflection to which the name refers. These properties make black bodies ideal sources of purely thermal radiation. That is, the amount and wavelength (color) of electromagnetic radiation they emit is directly related to their temperature. Black bodies below around 700 K (430 °C) produce very little radiation at visible wavelengths and appear black (hence the name). Black bodies above this temperature, however, begin to produce radiation at visible wavelengths starting at red, going through orange, yellow, and white before ending up at blue as the temperature increases.

Image: CIE Black Body Color Temperature Chart — “The Tongue” — click for full-sized chart

The color temperature of the Sun is near the yellow zone on the inset chart, while the color temperature of the Earth (obviously) is outside the visible radiation spectrum and in the far infrared (low temperature) corner of the chart. Given the (more or less) constant energy level emitted by the Sun, the Earth can only rise to a finite maximum temperature. An independent study predicts that we’re almost there!

John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia, passes along this article by Ian Schumacher, in which he offers six postulates supporting the maximum temperature argument: What is the maximum temperature of the Earth?

  1. The average temperature of a body in thermodynamic equilibrium with an external energy source can never exceed the temperature of a black body in the same environment.
  2. The maximum temperature of a body in thermodynamic equilibrium with an external energy source can never exceed the temperature of black body in the same environment.
  3. The greenhouse effect can never produce a temperature that is higher than the temperature of a black body in the same environment.
  4. The earth is operating very close to its maximum possible temperature.
  5. The transition from Ice Age to warm period and back to Ice Age is achieved through a runaway greenhouse effect and its opposite.
  6. The runaway greenhouse effect ends when the Earth has achieved a effective absorptivity as close to unity as it can get after which the earth becomes insensitive to further positive feedback changes.

Read the entire article to get a sense for the physics involved and narratives associated with these six postulates.

Hat tip to my colleague, Rick, for bringing this to my attention.

22 May 2007 by Global Warming Science

Yellow Rose

I snapped this picture last weekend at the garden shop at our local home improvement outlet.

yellow-rose.jpg

Credit to ProFlowers for the meanings of yellow roses:

Yellow roses have a shorter, albeit no less fascinating, history than other roses. It wasn’t until around the 18th century that yellow roses were discovered growing naturally in parts of the Middle East. Prior to this, roses in cultivation predominantly existed in various shades of pink and to a lesser extent, white. However, once the first yellow roses were introduced, their popularity quickly spread.

A bouquet of yellow roses now brings to mind all of the sunny, cheerful feelings of warmth and happiness. In contrast to the romantic meanings attributed to other roses, the yellow rose is purely a symbol for friendship. This gives it a unique place in the pantheon of roses. Yellow roses can send the perfect message of appreciation and platonic love without the romantic subtext of other colors. They can represent feelings of joy and delight, and are an ideal way to brighten someone’s day who may be feeling down. There is perhaps no other flower that is able to bring out a smile in quite the way that a yellow rose can.

21 May 2007 by Home & Garden Photography

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