Tag: DONE: Comments Imported

Sometimes I wonder, why is the Salton Sea worth saving?

Sometimes I wonder, why is the Salton Sea worth saving? It’s not like the Aral Sea or Lake Chad. It was created in an engineering accident 100 years ago. Until then it was a low area in the desert.

This article makes the case for restoration, or at least remediation. A century’s worth of agricultural runoff (which has made the lake too toxic for fish) has settled to the bottom. If it dries out, all that toxic sediment becomes wind-borne dust.

Dust rising: As California’s largest lake dries up, it threatens nearby communities with clouds of toxic dust

On Wandering.shop

@Alonealastalovedalongthe responds: Too Big To Fail : Lake Edition

Yeah, that’s…a pretty good description.

@mithriltabby wonders about bioremediation and just how salty it’s gotten.

Hmm, according to Wikipedia it’s currently around 56 grams per liter, which is saltier than the ocean, but not as salty as the Great Salt Lake. But it’s increasing by 3% each year.

Wikipedia: Salton Sea

Back up your accounts!

In the last few months:
– Tumblr purged adult content (and a bunch of stuff it misindentified).
– Flickr purged free storage above a limit of 1000 photos/account.
– Myspace deleted 12 years’ worth of music.

And Google+ only has two weeks left before Google pulls its plug.

Back up your accounts!

And if you can, consider donating to the Internet Archive. https://archive.org

On Wandering.shop
Expanded on K2R: Year of the Social Media Purge

I realize I didn’t make this clear, but I mean back up ALL your social media accounts. Mastodon too.

I’m not trying to say that these four services are doomed and you should bail. I actually have more confidence in Flickr than I did a year ago!

It’s that if you’re not running the site yourself, you can’t be sure they won’t change business models, shut down, have their servers washed away in a flood, or lose everything to massive database corruption.

Request archives from all your accounts.

On Wandering.shop

@kline suggests helping ArchiveTeam crawl sites for those who can’t donate to the Internet Archive

Not sure if I’m more appalled by the idea of smiling plastic poop that poops smiling candy poop, or amused by the shelf placement

Not sure if I’m more appalled by the idea of smiling plastic poop that poops smiling candy poop, or amused by the shelf placement

Not sure if I’m more appalled by the idea of smiling plastic poop that poops smiling candy poop, or amused by the shelf placement.

#tacky #💩 #wtf #go #emoji #EmojiGoneWrong

On Wandering.shop
Cross-Posted on K2R

Facebook comments:

Jim Vibber: Upside-down, “PooP” looks like “dood”. Maybe that’s why they call it “doodie.”
Nov 26, 2018, 6:26 PM
Brion Vibber: How awfully recursive. . .
Nov 26, 2018, 7:08 PM
Lisa Lee: “U Can’t Touch This”
Nov 28, 2018, 10:29 AM

Also comments on Mastodon – try to use brid.gy first!

Overloaded! Someone was trying to move boulders on wooden pallets for landscaping, and they seem to have been a bit much for the pallets to handle…

Overloaded! Someone was trying to move boulders on wooden pallets for landscaping, and they seem to have been a bit much for the pallets to handle…

On PixelFed.Social

Comments from Facebook:

Jim Vibber: Possibly. The pallet underneath looks okay, and the band around the boulder *might* be tight. I wonder if the upper pallet was intentionally smashed to keep the boulder from rolling back and forth during transportation.
Oct 28, 2018, 3:12 PM

Kelson Vibber: Hmm, that could be it.
Nov 1, 2018, 3:25 PM

A binary star system passed within one light year of our solar system only 70,000 years ago. It may have jostled a bunch of comets out of their orbits at the time.

A binary star system passed within one light year of our solar system only 70,000 years ago. It may have jostled a bunch of comets out of their orbits at the time.

Did a close pass by an alien star system millennia ago rain down comets on the solar system?

Comments on Facebook:

Brion Vibber: The Red Star…!
Mar 22, 2018, 12:52 PM

Kelson Vibber: Yeah, I was thinking that too! Sadly, the red dwarf system would have still been too faint to see without a telescope even at its closest approach.
Mar 22, 2018, 4:53 PM

Kelson Vibber: Wish I had time to re-read some of the Dragon Riders books, though.
Mar 22, 2018, 4:54 PM

Jim Vibber: Well, strictly speaking, the “Red Star” in McCaffrey’s series was a red planet, kind of like Mars — with an eccentric orbit harmonically linked to the orbit of Pern — so it LOOKED like a star in the sky, just like Mars does. The one time they tried to travel “between” to that planet, the description sounded more volcanic or like Venus than anything else — winds, heat, acidic atmosphere… kind of an odd source for spores of a fungus-type life form (but I trust her to have done lots of research to justify it). Humans without telescopes have very limited perceptions of just how far away those “lights in the sky” really are.
Mar 22, 2018, 5:05 PM

See-through skyscraper?

See-through skyscraper?

See-through skyscraper?

#building #reflection #sky

On Facebook
On Photog.Social

Comments on Facebook:

Don Anthony
Is that close to LAX? It’s the best place for invisible buildings.

Kelson Vibber
Yeah, right on Century. Tall buildings on one side of the street, short on the other.

That’s the roof of a gazebo sticking out of the water. Correction: it’s an information kiosk.

That’s the roof of a gazebo sticking out of the water. Correction: it’s an information kiosk. Same style of roof as the picnic shelters, but not as tall. #flooded

Photo taken at: Polliwog Park

That’s the roof of a gazebo sticking out of the water.

—

Correction: it’s an information kiosk. Same style of roof as the picnic shelters, but not as tall. #flooded

eighteenbelow says:
Oh geez, that seems pretty extreme! I’d heard you guys got a lot of rain and flooding, but I hope it’s a good thing in the long run and helps alleviate the drought.

Thanks, I hope so too. Our part of town did pretty well. We had an inch of water in our garage, but it only went halfway back (apparently it’s not level) and the only things that seem to have any damage are an old suitcase that might dry out ok, and some empty boxes. Power only went out for about a minute before it came back on, and we drove through some flooded roads yesterday before holing up at home.

This park is a basin in the hills, and apparently used to be part of the same seasonal marsh system as the preserve I’ve posted photos from. It’s all playground areas, benches, and picnic shelters. A friend who used to live here says flooded during heavy rain when she was here, so I imagine it’ll be fine when it dries out. Muddy, but the area near the pond is usually covered in duck and goose dropping anyway. Not my favorite part of the park, let me tell you.

The local paper reported one death a few miles away, believed to be the same person who went missing during a rescue from a flooding homeless camp. Lots of mudslides, flooded garages and damaged stuff, but not much structural damage. A retaining wall a few blocks from us collapsed and crushed an empty car.

Other parts of the LA area fared a lot worse, especially near the mountains, and especially areas downhill from last year’s fires, but we’re ok here.

—

Notes: Flickr album with more photos, other commentary and pics here.

Interesting graph of LA smog trends from 1976 through 2012. Note the general downward trend …

Interesting graph of LA smog trends from 1976 through 2012. Note the general downward trend despite the fact that we have *more cars* on the road now than we did 40 years ago.

Source: Q&A: 25 years and counting of Metro Rail, part two

Comment from Tal: I guess those big exhaust fans in the hills are working. Oh you thought they were generating electricity huh?

On Facebook

Convention fans, by the numbers.


Convention fans, by the numbers. The article where I found this was particularly interested in the fact that younger con-going fans are 50/50 male/female.

Found at https://www.comicsbeat.com/eventbrite-research-younger-congoers-5050-male-to-female/

Comment by Lee Vibber: The general results pretty much match my experience in recent years.

On Facebook

I actually do this with leftover ice at fast food places too.

I actually do this with leftover ice at fast food places too. Not house plants of course, but instead of putting the whole paper cup with ice in the trash (where the ice will melt and fill up the bottom of the bag), I'll take it outside and dump it into a planter or onto the lawn where it'll do some good.

Found at https://wateruseitwisely.com/100-ways-to-conserve/

Obviously not getting fast food would be even better, but a little offsetting is better than none. Yesterday Katie and I were discussing ways that restaurants could cut down on waste, from tightening dishwashing practices to using the dishwater as greywater for plants or toilets to collecting liquids for…well, we weren't too sure what you could do with random liquids, but maybe find a way to dispose of them that replenishes groundwater instead of making the trash bins all nasty. All subject to sanitation / food safety needs of course.

Jul 16, 2014, 8:30 AM

Lee VibberAt home I just pick them up and rinse them off and put them in my drink…. Good idea about fast food ice, though.

Jul 16, 2014, 8:50 AM

Lee VibberJust thinking about what I said….rinsing them off probably wastes more water than was in the cube, doesn't it? D'oh!

Jul 16, 2014, 10:03 AM

Kelson VibberHeh…yeah, it probably does.

Jul 16, 2014, 10:20 AM

Lee Vibber(Truthfully, I'm a 5-second-rule person when it comes to ice on the floor, I usually just pick them up and put them in the glass, but I didn't want to actually admit that….)

Jul 16, 2014, 10:28 AM

Kelson VibberHahaha!

Jul 16, 2014, 10:38 AM

Katie ForemanYou could rub it around in a (clean) napkin or something for a bit–use body heat to melt off the immediate outside and wipe off any crud. Unless it skids under the overhang of the cabinets. Then that sucker's plant nutrition.

Jul 16, 2014, 11:01 AM

Lee VibberDefinitely!

Jul 16, 2014, 11:11 AM

Kelson Vibber*shudder*

Jul 16, 2014, 1:34 PM

Talbot BradyAwwww. All this cleanliness. You gotta give your immune system to chew on from time to time.

Jul 22, 2014, 2:16 PM

Katie ForemanThat's all well and good, but I prefer to do that without also chewing on hair and mummified carrot peels.

Jul 22, 2014, 2:24 PM

David HewittEconomists Rule #1 for saving water: raise the price of water. Done.

Jul 22, 2014, 3:20 PM

On Facebook

We’ve been doing this for a couple of months now. Admittedly our vegetable garden’…

Tip #43: While you wait for hot water, collect the running water and use it to water plants.

We've been doing this for a couple of months now. Admittedly our vegetable garden's not that big, but we haven't needed to use the hose for watering in all that time (much to J's annoyance).

Found at https://wateruseitwisely.com/100-ways-to-conserve/

Lee Vibber This explains why he was so happy to help me water with the hose!

On Facebook

Back to my Les Miserables commentary!

Back to my Les Miserables commentary!

After 250 pages only seeing them from Marius’ POV, we meet Valjean, Cosette and their home in the Rue Plumet…and see their side of Marius & Cosette’s stealth courtship. Let’s just say Valjean is a lot more perceptive than Marius.

Back to the Rue Plumet

Comments on Google+:

Darrin Matteson: saw the musical and I’ve TRIED reading the book. I got about 60 pages into it and was bored to tears by the Bishop of Digne. I’ve read that the book was originally published in serial form in the Paris newspaper over a 20+ year span which explains why the book is so long and detailed.

Me: It picks up eventually, but even in the middle there are long stretches that leave you wondering just why on earth they were included. As for publishing, I don’t think it was serialized over that much time. It may have been published in several volumes, but I think they all hit in 1862.

The user-agent string for Opera 15 Next

The user-agent string for Opera 15 Next (the first preview of the new Webkit^H^H^H^H^H^HBlink-based browser) is 140 characters long. You can Tweet it, but there’s no room for even a 1-letter comment. (Note also the sheer number of engine/browser names that aren’t accurate, but are included for backward compatibility with browser sniffing websites).

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.20 Safari/537.36 OPR/15.0.1147.18 (Edition Next)”

Comment from Brion:

UA sniffing has to end… it’s also soooooo easy to do lazy regexes that count Firefox 20 as Firefox 2, etc. 😛

I think the only still-required UA sniffing we’re doing for Wikipedia is trying to detect mobile devices… lots of weird entries for older devices, then simple checks for modern ones. Sigh.

Party like it’s 1977…

Comments on Facebook:

Brion Vibber: I assume that’s playing the disco version of the Star Wars theme…
May 27, 2013, 12:00 AM
Kelson Vibber: Or the Cantina song.
May 27, 2013, 12:10 AM
Lia Brown: Oh man, those record players were the best. Does it still work?
May 27, 2013, 9:36 PM
Kelson Vibber: Believe it or not, it’s new. It turns out there’s a whole subset of the toy market for retro toys.It’s a bit different under the hood – I’ve had to fix it once already, and it’s actually chip-driven, not classic music box works. I figure it’s probably cheaper these days to make it with fewer moving parts.
May 28, 2013, 8:34 AM
Marisa Saam: I had one of those! 🙂
May 29, 2013, 12:58 PM

The old-school Curso de Photoshop sounds a lot better now.

Adobe is moving to an all-subscription model for its creative software. That means to use Photoshop, you’re going to have to keep paying them again and again, month in, month out. The old-school Curso de Photoshop sounds a lot better now.

Spamusement! Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines! – Curso de Photoshop

Discussion from Google+:

Stacy: Wow. Just Wow. It’s hard enough for me to get $500 upgrades to the latest FrameMaker and Dreamweaver, let alone a new Illustrator license every three or four years. This pricing model is going to be hard on small-time users.

Me: I can only assume they don’t want small-time users anymore.

Stacy: Not smart to price yourself out of startups around here. You want to be the tool used from the beginning.

I went for a walk at lunch, and this was just sitting there taking up …

I went for a walk at lunch, and this was just sitting there taking up a zillion parking spaces. And no license plate to take down. Anyone recognize this vehicle?

And the spaces clearly say “compact.” On what planet is *that* a compact car?

Note: Wayne adds on Google+:

And how brazen! Emblazoning the USA logo on its side too! What’s that blue dot there…

Unknown Caller is still trying to call me twice a day.

Unknown Caller is still trying to call me twice a day. But I guess it must not be that important, since they can’t be bothered to leave a message, and they went to the trouble of blocking Caller ID so that I can’t call them back.

Wayne comments: I’ve been getting regular calls from an 800 number that also doesn’t leave a message. Wonder if they’re related. ;p

–GP

Finally picked up the “Unknown” caller who’s been calling 2-3 times daily and not leaving a message. They hung up immediately. #WTF

–T