Wednesday, December 30, 2020
RIP, Dawn Wells
Sad to hear:
Dawn Wells, who played the lovable castaway Mary Ann Summers on "Gilligan's Island," died in Los Angeles on Wednesday from Covid-19 complications, her publicist Harlan Boll confirmed to CNN.
She was 82.
Born in Reno, Nevada, Wells represented her home state in the Miss America pageant in 1959.
That opened the door for her to start a career in Hollywood where she appeared in a multitude of television shows, including "77 Sunset Strip," "Maverick," "Bonanza," "The Joey Bishop Show" and "Hawaiian Eye."
She beat out 350 other actresses to nab the role of girl-next-door Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island," which aired on CBS from 1964 to 1967 and later in syndication.
A New Beaked Whale Species?
Cool Stuff!:
"The Perrin's beaked whale [has] teeth … right at the end of the rostrum, they're right at the end of the jaw," Henderson said. "And so when we started looking at the photos, we realized that the teeth are further back, so they couldn't be Perrin's. And then when we started to look at other characteristics, including different color patterns and its size …. it's like a jigsaw puzzle. Once we started putting all the pieces together, we realized that not only was it not Perrin's, but it really didn't seem to match any of the other characteristics of described beaked whales."
Life Expectancy Plummets
Death statistics for 2020 don’t look so good. Three-year drop in life expectancy, Covid was third leading cause of death, illicit drug-quality issues caused many deaths, and less auto traffic didn’t lead to fewer highway deaths (maybe because the maniacs just drove faster and more carelessly when traffic declined):
This is the deadliest year in U.S. history, with deaths expected to top 3 million for the first time — due mainly to the coronavirus pandemic.
Final mortality data for this year will not be available for months. But preliminary numbers suggest that the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019.
U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted.
That would mark the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46% that year, compared with 1917.
COVID-19 has killed more than 318,000 Americans and counting. Before it came along, there was reason to be hopeful about U.S. death trends.
The nation’s overall mortality rate fell a bit in 2019, due to reductions in heart disease and cancer deaths. And life expectancy inched up — by several weeks — for the second straight year, according to death certificate data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But life expectancy for 2020 could end up dropping as much as three full years, said Robert Anderson of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Evicting The Neighborhood Bats
They are trying to evict responsibly. Nevertheless, the freeway is home to thousands of bats, plus many birds. (I’ve listened to them myself with my ‘Bat Finder’). Local populations will take a major hit:
Why did Caltrans bolt hundreds of upside-down traffic cones to the underside of the W-X freeway in downtown Sacramento? The answer is almost as odd as the sight of rows of orange cones clinging like bats to the belly of a concrete bridge.
In fact, the whole endeavor involves actual bats.
Thousands of bats and birds and even some owls reside in the crannies and crevices of the elevated freeway. Caltrans has decided to evict them so they won’t be in the way of a major upcoming Highway 50 widening project.
Each cone covers one of the structure’s “weep holes,” the holes that allow moisture to drain out of the bridge deck during the rainy season. Those weep holes have been serving another, informal, purpose: Birds and bats use them as entrances to hideaways in the structure where the bats roost and the birds build nests.
Workers screwed a short plastic tube to the narrow end of each cone, then they duct-taped a short plastic sheath to the end of the tube. Bats and birds who are inside the structure can exit the bridge through the center of the cone, the tube and the plastic sheath. But they cannot get back in because the sheaths’ sides press back together, closing up.
“It’s an ingenious way that is inexpensive, easy to make and install,” said Caltrans biologist Shawn Duffy, who is advising on the project.
Evicting the bats and birds means those species will not be around to nest or reproduce in the structure during the upcoming construction period, Duffy said. “We don’t want them having their young while we are working on it. They might abandon their young, which we don’t want them to do.
“You try to approach it with the idea that you are going to prevent any harm to these creatures that are using the structure, with the idea they can come back and take up residency again” as soon as the project work finishes in each bridge section.
Damned Dry
Rainfall totals have improved somewhat this dreadful 2020 rainy-season-so-far in Sacramento, but still, we are far, far behind, at about 32% of normal. It does give me a bit of solace, however, to know that at this point in the rainy season, the following years were even drier: 1878, 1883, 1905, 1910-12, 1917, 1923, 1930, 1939, 1956, 1958-59, 1976, 1980, 1986, 1999, 2013.
Monday, December 28, 2020
Octopuses Observed Punching Fish, Perhaps Out of Spite, Scientists Say
I understand. We all get tired of fish:
In fact, this antisocial fish-punching phenomenon – which scientists term "active displacement" of fish – occurs in the midst of collaborative hunting efforts, in which octopuses and fish team up to chase and trap prey together.
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