If We Focus, We Can Do Better Than the Paris Accords

An important thing to remember is international accords are meaningless unless people watch their own energy use. Climate change is a problem of CO2 accumulation, and accumulating CO2 slowly is almost as bad as accumulating it quickly. Despite Trump's short-sightedness, if we transition away from fossil fuels, we can do better than the Paris accords, and defy Trump too.

Trump finally signs his Energy Independence Executive Order

Take a Look at the List of Words She Had to Get Right to Win

Wow! “Gargouillade,” “cuivre,” “dasein,” “nuraghe,” “shyana,” “arribada,” etc., etc.

Ananya, a three-time California State Elementary Spelling Bee champion, was among an elite group of 15 spellers competing Thursday in the nail-biting finalist rounds – three from Texas, two from California and one each from North Carolina, Alabama, Illinois, Virginia, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Jersey.

The 12-year-old Fresno, California, girl, who attends Fugman Elementary School in Clovis Unified School District, first competed in the National Spelling Bee in 2016, qualifying out of the Fresno County Spell-Off that’s sponsored by the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools office in partnership with The Fresno Bee.

Neighborhood Disaster

At first, I didn't pay much attention. At midnight, I noticed there were two cop cars across the street. I hadn't met the new neighbors across the street. Maybe another time.

By 2 a.m., however, there were other vehicles there too. In particular, a large, black van.

They wheeled a stretcher into the house. They wheeled out the stretcher with a body, and put it into the van. The van did not look like a private funeral-home vehicle. It had an official, police look. So maybe not an expected death.

My mind was spinning. There was an unexplained event Wednesday afternoon. Two men I didn't recognize passed nearby and vanished into my immediate neighbor's yard. Nevertheless, I had no idea if the events were related. Maybe nothing.

The following morning, I did have a chance to speak to the two mysterious men. They were fine - there's an Air BNB rental next door, and they were guests. There was lots of auto traffic across the street. People coming and going.

And here it is:

South Command

17-153551 (Casualty Report): 2700 block of Florence Pl at 0020 hours.

Officers responded for a medical aid call. Officers arrived and contacted the caller who stated she found her adult son on his bedroom floor. Officers located the victim and determined he had a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was deceased. The coroner responded and took over the investigation as there were no signs of foul play.

A silent plague. So sad....

As Long As The Republican Fuckers Don't Apologize For Ted Nugent, I Want A Whole Collection of Bloody Heads

Mein Covfefe

Signs

When I'm late feeding the pigeons, the pigeons come looking for me. They gather where they can see my back door, and look for signs.

Starting To Watch Season Three of "The Wire"

Murky doings on the streets of Baltimore.

Flying Over the Martian Landscape

John sends this!:

A FICTIVE FLIGHT ABOVE REAL MARS from Jan Fröjdman on Vimeo.

The Words People Have the Most Trouble Spelling, by State

People in New Mexico have trouble with "banana"; people in Nevada, "available." People in Rhode Island have trouble with "liar"; people in Wisconsin, "Wisconsin."

Painted the Back Porch

The Moon Rock glows even in the event of a power failure. I'll have to replace some rotten wood on a support, but for today, just paint it.

Curiosity Captures Florida Man

Duh!:

A man accused of stealing a smartphone made a mistake when he answered a FaceTime call on the phone, Florida authorities say.

The call came from an Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office deputy, who snapped a photo of Chandler Ridge Carlyle, 18, of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., when he answered, reports the sheriff’s office on Facebook. The deputy showed the photo the phone’s owner, who identified Carlyle as the person who took his phone.

People in New Mexico Are Prone to This Brain Illness

Scary:

A new study suggests that a type of bacteria that lives in the gut may trigger disease among people with the mutation, which is more common in New Mexico than anywhere else in the world.

The mutation, brought to New Mexico centuries ago by an early Hispanic settler, can lead to an illness called cavernous cranial malformation, or CCM. It can cause bleeding in the brain and lead to strokes and seizures.

Don't Stick Your Head in a Particle Accelerator

This is what happened to the scientist who stuck his head inside a particle accelerator:

And on July 13, 1978, a Soviet scientist named Anatoli Bugorski stuck his head in a particle accelerator. On that fateful day, Bugorski was checking malfunctioning equipment on the U-70 synchrotron—the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union—when a safety mechanism failed and a beam of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light passed straight through his head, Phineas Gage-style. ... Although proton therapy—a cancer treatment that uses proton beams to destroy tumors—was pioneered before Bugorski’s accident, the energy of these beams is generally not above 250 million electron volts (a unit of energy used for small particles). Bugorski might have experienced the full wrath of a beam with more than 300 times this much energy, 76 billion electron volts.

Great Article on "Breaking Bad"

Best show ever!:

“Breaking Bad” is not just the chronicle of an individual’s breakdown, but a global map of modern Western civilization: from its roots in a Lockean/Newtonian liberalism founded in empiricism and hands-on innovation all the way to its contemporary denouement in an abstract capitalism of runaway corporations unresponsive to human ideals. The series unflaggingly maintains the highest cinematographic standards — at the level of a Buñuel, Godard or Antonioni — for not just a couple of hours but for more than 60 hours. In doing so, it translates the abstract chronicle of the rise and fall of empire, and of the various classes of people who are part of it, into visual material that will outlast its moment.

My Thinking Exactly

Driftglass

Meth House

Roll of the Dice

White Sands Dust Storm

Pretty awesome! (unless you are in the plume, of course.):

The dust plumes in this astronaut photograph stretch more than 120 kilometers (74 miles). The vigor of the winds also can be judged from the fact that they are lifting dust particles from the valley floor to more than 1200 meters over the mountains. The winds channel the dust through a low point in the mountains, about 800 meters lower than the ridge crests to north and south (image right).

Married a Train Station

California woman finds happiness. "I can never leave San Diego, because my lover is here."