When childishness backfires

Greta Van Susteren, Fox News talking head and Sarah Palin's BFF, got some hate mail the other day. Someone named Brian wrote to say "if you put a pea in your skull it would rattle around like a BB in a boxcar." Okay, that was pretty childish and the joke is old. Susteren, maintaining the professional dignity that we've come to expect from Fox News, ran to her the blog on her show's site and wrote this, "Why does Brian watch if he thinks I am so stupid? How stupid is that????" Not content with merely mocking Brian, she added a poll:

Who is dumber?

Greta?

Brian for spending his time watching someone he thinks is dumb

As you can see, that's the exact punctuation used on her site, four question marks in the intro, and that weird extra question mark after her name. Okay, you're probably thinking that Greta doesn't really write her own blog, that she has an underpaid staffer to do that for her. But who has she hired for her staff, thirteen year old mean girls? The responsibility for the behavior of her staff rests solidly on her shoulders. She has been a journalist for about fifteen years; is this the first silly piece of hate mail she's ever received? Does she react to all of them this way?

The results of the poll are about as can be expected. Bloggers on both sides of the spectrum have sent their flying monkeys to crash the poll. As I write this, almost fifty thousand people have visited and voted. Seventy-six percent think Greta is the dumber). That's exactly what would happen to any public figure who did something this childish. If Keith Olbermann put up a poll asking "who's dumber, me or some schmoe I've randomly picked out of the mail pile for public humiliation?" you can bet the results would say "you are, Keith, for being such a petty crybaby." The same thing would happen to Beck, Maddow, Limbaugh, or me (though I would get far fewer responses).

Unbelievable.

Worst disaster ever. Really?

On one hand we have BP executives, Rush Limbaugh, and various Southern politicians saying the Gulf oil contamination from the Deepwater Horizion disaster is no big deal. The Gulf is a big place, nature will clean itself up, and you won't be able to tell anything ever happened there in a few years. On the other hand, we have oil industry critics and environmentalists saying it is indeed a big deal and that the leak will cause permanent damage to the ecologies and economies of the US Gulf coast. And then we have this:

If even BP’s backup plans fail, it would cause a pollution disaster "heretofore unseen by humanity," said one expert.

It is this rapidly accelerating realization that is giving BP’s attempt Wednesday to cap the well new political and environmental urgency.

The worst-case scenario is hoped and believed to be a continued flow of 5,000 barrels per day, and by some estimates vastly more, until August, when BP completes “relief wells” to intercept the damaged well.

But, experts say, there are no sure things when operating equipment a mile under the water and 13,000 feet below the ocean floor.

Professor Tad Patzek, who heads the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas-Austin, gives the relief well a 90 percent chance of success. But he’d rather not consider the other 10 percent.

"As a petroleum professional, I don’t even admit the possibility that that might be possible," he said when asked about a failure to stop the flow. "That would be an environmental disaster of a caliber that was heretofore unseen by humanity."

Keep in mind, this is not the ranting of a tree-hugging granola-head (like me); it is the professional opinion of someone within the oil industry. I think any one left of Limbaugh will agree that if we don't manage a permanent closure of the well, the environmental impact of the leak will be orders of magnitude beyond anything we've been able to watch on our teevees in recent years, but will it be "an environmental disaster of a caliber that was heretofore unseen by humanity?" I have no doubt that Mr. Patzek is a first rate engineer and geologist, but how does he rate as an historian? Has humanity ever witnessed a worse environmental disaster?

Ignoring the human economic impacts, here are some worst-case, long-term environmental impacts that leap to my mind:

• As the crude hits the beaches and soaks into the coastal marshlands, it will render the majority of that area unfit for most animal life. These marshlands are made up of several unique ecologies. As they die, a number of species will likely go extinct.
  
• The beaches are birthing grounds for endangered sea turtles and the marshes are a vital stop on the paths of many migratory bird species. Again, a blow like this could cause several extinctions and, at a minimum, will add a severe new pressure to the survivor species' life cycles.
  
• If the marsh grasses die, the barrier islands will wash away exposing the wetlands to sea storms and dramatic erosion all along the coast.
  
• In the sea, the oil has contaminated the entire water column, not just the top or bottom.
  
• The microbes that will slowly digest the oil on the seabed, suck up vast amounts of oxygen, creating anoxic (oxygen free) zones where virtually no life is impossible.

I'm sure I missed a lot, but these are the main points that I can think of. In short, the oil is going to create a dead zone that will extend, in places, dozens of miles inland and as far as two hundred miles off shore. The coastline itself will change in certain areas. Several species are already threatened with extinction by the leak. The longer the well leaks, the worse the local effects will be and the further afield it will spread.

That's pretty bad, but is it the worst environmental disaster humanity has ever witnessed? Right off the top of my head, global warming seems to be a real contender in that contest. Our part in the end-Pleistocene extinction of mammoths and other megafauna could be another contender. Any others? Leave your suggestions and arguments in the comments. The only rules I'll set are that the disaster has to have been clearly environmental in nature, that it must arguable have been human caused, and that it must have happened in the last fifty thousand years or so. Feel free to argue for other or different rules.

The usual apologies

Posting has been nonexistant for the last two weeks due to an eye injury. I've spent a lot of time laying in the dark with warm compresses on my face. My skin is clean and soft now and I can see as well as usual (which is so-so). That means I need to get back to work. I have some mammothy and non-mammothy things in the works. Stay tuned.

May is mental health month

Support mental health or I'll kill you.

Imagine that

I'm watching the British election returns. The ancestral Mackay land was just called for the Liberal Democrats.

From "drill, baby, drill" to "burn, baby, burn"

Looking at the coverage of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, I'm puzzled by something. Several of the commenters I've looked at have expressed horror at the idea of burning the oil at sea. Two things: first, we were planning on burning most of that oil any way; second, while bad, burning it at sea is orders of magnitude less horrible than letting it hit the beaches. The wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig has already pumped out about half as much oil as the Exxon Valdez lost in 1989. It will keep leaking for days, if not weeks, more. The oil from the Exxon Valdez spill traveled 460 miles and covered 1300 miles of shoreline with varying amounts of oil. In the Gulf, that would be equal to covering the beaches from the mouth of the Mississippi, across eastern Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and another 200 miles or so of the Florida panhandle. It would coat the Breton National Wildlife Refuge and the Gulf Islands National Seashore, penetrate into the lagoons behind the barrier islands, and foul Mobile Bay. It would cost billions to clean up, as far as that is even possible. The environmental damage would linger for decades. The economic damage would possible surpass Hurricane Katrina. With this alternative, I say "burn, baby, burn."

Our mollusk overlords

In a thread on Twitter, our friend Southern Fried Scientist made this claim: "rewind the tape and mollusks could have easily replaced vertebrates." Rewind the tape is a reference to Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life. In the final chapter, Gould argues that there was nothing inevitable about the course of evolution, that it does not aim toward any result. We are a fluke. Intelligence is a fluke. Rewind the tape, start over, and you might get a different story every time.

Many of you are probably familiar with the humanoid dinosaur imagined by the Canadian paleontologist Dale Russell in the early eighties. Russell presented a thought experiment wherein the end Cretaceous extinction never happened and the Troodon evolved into an intelligent, tool-making biped that just happened to look a lot like one of the extraterrestrial species that a subset of UFO buffs believed in. This idea that evolution tends towards something human-like is exactly the opposite of what Gould believed. However, the illustrations and models that Russell's intelligent dinosaur spawned were too irresistable and refuse to go away.

Southern Fried's mollusk world needs its own intelligent, tool-maker and an illustration. I humbly submit the following:



Tell the Discover Channel that SFS and I are open to discussions of a documentary about mollusk world and marketing plans for super mollusk.

Shpigs? Peeps?

This is not a Photoshopped picture. These are Mangalitsa pigs (also spelled Mangalitza and Mangalica). They really do have curly, sheep-like wool. They were developed in Hungary in the nineteenth century by cross-breeding local swine with Serbian swine to create a fattier, easily kept pig. Since WWII, fatty pork has gone out of style and the herds have dwindled to just a few thousand in the Balkans and Hungary. A closely related British, curly-haired hog went extinct in the 1970s. Many foodies think the trend toward leaner pork has gone too far, with modern pork becoming a dry, flavorless meat that requires brining or cooking in liquid to bring out the flavor. Re-enter the woolly pig. Several British and American farms have imported Mangalitsas and begun selling the pork through farmers' markets and gourmet outlets much to the joy of pork lovers. Since they are also terribly cute, I imagine Mangalitsas will soon show up as exotic pets. Even if they were not cute or tasty, there would be value in keeping a herd here and there to maintain genetic diversity.

It was a mangy weasel

Last month, two women in the Sichuan province of China captured an ugly, dog-sized animal that they found raiding their chicken coop. Because it was like nothing they had seen before, they kept it captive. The next morning, as word of the strange beast got out, neighbors began flocking to Ke Suying's farm to gawk. Eventually, the local Forestry Department heard about the capture and took the animal in to do tests and find out what kind of animal they had. A Ms. Chen in the same county had been feeding an unfamiliar animal on her farm. When she heard about Ke's mystery animal, she called the Forestry Department to come take her animal and see if they were the same species. Ke's animal was described as:

...around 60 centimeters in length--bottom-heavy--and its tail adds another 30 centimeters. There is a wound on its stomach. Almost all of its fur is gone apart from a few sparse, brown-colored hairs on its back. Its head looks mostly like that of a dog, but its nostrils are that of a cow, and it has a few short whiskers hanging from its cheeks. It has round ears and folds on the skin on its neck. Its hindlegs are far longer and heavier than its forelegs, and each of its four wide feet has five toes, almost like that of a lion or tiger.

Foreign tabloids named Ke's animal the Oriental Yeti--which is both redundant and silly--and the Chinese Chupacabra. One of the foresters who looked at it said it looked like a common badger. My best guess was that it was a binturong. Several other bloggers opined that it was a palm civet. Chen said she thought her animal was a beech marten.

The Daying County Forestry Department has finally announced their results. They're calling it a Himalayan weasel with mange. It is the first time one has been reported in Daying County. The suggest that recent reforestation efforts might have drawn it in. Despite the fact that Himalayan weasel's are known chicken thieves, the foresters treated it for its mange and released it back into the forest. The foresters decided Chen's visitor was a masked palm civet and also set it free. Just to keep things confusing, an English language story from Xinhua translated the name for Ke's mystery animal given out by the Daying County Forestry Department as "albino civet cat."

Who knew?

Finding a Sanjak level breakdown of the 1905 Ottoman census online is harder than you might expect.