Vegas has too much damn money.  Or so it would seem by the way it gets wasted. Even in a drought.

Still, water is a commodity and subject to market pressures. It's a tradeoff. Too much environmentalism and we couldn't afford to pay for clean water, too much pollution and we can't clean the water we have to safe levels.
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Vegas has too much damn money.  Or so it would seem by the way it gets wasted. Even in a drought.
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Been through the central valley in California?

Sprinklers going in the rain.


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I haven't seen near as much pollution as waste. I was reading about a guy treating waste from hog farm water. Good enough to drink. (he actually drank some, though I wouldn't recommend it.)
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It tends to be worse in industrial areas like the upper midwest (--ask davis about Peoria--) and the Northeast. That's where a lot of the crap drifts. Asthma in children is near epidemic levels here.
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Doesn't anyone remember when that river near cleveland and Lake Erie caught on fire?



http://www.on.ec.gc.ca/glwqa/sht-history-e.html
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Funny you should mention it. (see above) The Cuyahoga? SP.

Will check your link now.
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Tucson uses something like a quarter  less water than Phoenix. It's about everyone saving a bit and being just a little bit frugal. Mostly just basic awareness.
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Yes, I just want to stay away away from that. Far away. I've read that that's how the rivers are in China. They have very little if any environmental controls.
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I took a cruise on one. You don't even want to know. And the air is no better. No sun, just an eerie glow.
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That must of really been something. I work with a man that goes to China every 5 years or so to see family. Very nice person. He likes it here.


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Don't usually think of Iraq as having marshes. I guess they just usually show the dry parts of Iraq on the news. With the Tigris and Euphrates it's not like they don't have water.
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Missile parts, WMDs, Chemical agents, who knows
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Doesn't anyone remember when that river near cleveland and Lake Erie caught on fire?



http://www.on.ec.gc.ca/glwqa/sht-history-e.html
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Missile parts, WMDs, Chemical agents, who knows
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Baby chamelians...

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Oh my
look at them

I looove curly tailed chamelions. But they don't do well in captivity


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HMMMMMM no people.
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Maybe they're in the cabin, bit of a wake there.....


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If this boats a-rockin', don't come a-knockin'...


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Looks like a daysailer. Tighter for two than the drivers side of my old VW bug.

Still, not impossible.
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Yes, indeed...as a matter of fact, the impossibilty decreases in direction  proportion to the amount of firm resolve one has....



My all time record for tight squeezes was in a mummy-type sleeping bag during a light snow flurry in a meadow not far from  Mt. Humphrey, just outside good ol'Flagstaff, Az...


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When you're 19 there is no limit to resolve in regards to sex. At 40 not much lack of resolve when it comes to staying warm, but a bit less resolve on the sex end.
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Perhaps a bit...

Perhaps.

 
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Braggart.


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May 30, 2005, 10:33PM

Peeling back corn's genetic profile
The plant's wild ancestor, teosinte, could hold the key to a better crop
By ERIC HAND
St. Louis Post-dispatch

ST. LOUIS - In one hand, plant geneticist Michael McMullen holds black teosinte kernels, the seeds of what scientists say is the grassy ancestor of corn. In the other, he holds needle-nose pliers — definitely needed to crack the tough hulls into a few starchy bits.

"If you have squirrel teeth, you might be able to eat this," said McMullen, a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

The weedy teosinte plant, with its miserly portfolio of kernels, barely resembles its bountiful descendent. McMullen and his colleagues have pegged the genes responsible for the dramatic transformation. They think wild teosinte, with its high genetic diversity, still has a lot to offer corn while inbreeding eventually could confound the search for higher-yielding hybrids.

"If you want to make corn even better, these are genes you want to work on," said McMullen, tanned from days in the field with his experimental crops.

Corn researcher Brad Barbazuk said McMullen's work will have a big impact on the plant science industry.

"By understanding where we've lost genetic diversity over time, we can look at reintroducing diversity," said Barbazuk, who works at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur, Mo., a nonprofit research institute.

The work, a joint project among the University of Missouri, the University of California at Irvine and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was published Friday in the journal Science.

Teosinte is a hardy grass of Mexico and Central America with ears of just eight kernels protected in a stony casing. The seeds can be dispersed after passing intact through animals' digestive systems.

Corn has about 500 soft kernels per ear. It needs human cultivation, human protection, to survive. Its seeds would otherwise be eaten by animals — or else corn seedlings, undispersed and growing in place, would wither in the shadow of existing plants.

Scientists say that between 6,000 and 9,000 years ago, ancient breeders tried to tame teosinte. Year after year, they took the best teosinte plants — plants, perhaps, with bigger or softer or more kernels — and crossed them with each other. Thousands of years later, Native Americans had corn.

The problem is the inbreeding. Most corn genes have retained 57 percent of the diversity of teosinte genes, the researchers found. But for at least 1,200 of corn's 50,000 genes — the genes Native Americans were winnowing year after year — there's almost no diversity at all. That makes it increasingly difficult for modern-day breeders to stumble on outstanding traits that would make for better strains of corn.

"The yields are becoming less easy to improve," Barbazuk said. "You're pretty much tapped out."

Eric Sachs, a geneticist at agricultural products developer Monsanto, concurred. "The improvements through conventional breeding are beginning to plateau," he said.

In the paper, the researchers offered a list of 30 genes with a high probability of controlling some important corn characteristic. They aren't sure what all the genes do. Some control the nutrition content, others might control kernel size. But instead of cooking with a 50,000-ingredient recipe, plant scientists can begin experimenting with 30.

"Things like this will make it simpler," Barbazuk said. "There will be less shooting in the dark."

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3204347
Just thought that was interesting.
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Editorial
A (White) House Party for Lobbyists

Published: June 9, 2005

President Bush moved quickly after the 2000 election to fill many of the important environmental and energy jobs with corporate lobbyists who had spent their careers trying to weaken the laws they would then swear to protect. Most were vetted by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. The result has been an erosion of the regulatory framework protecting the country's air, water, public lands and wildlife, combined with a chronic unwillingness by the administration to address difficult environmental issues.

Anyone needing evidence of industry's influence need look no further than Andrew C. Revkin's article in Wednesday's Times involving the handiwork of one Philip Cooney, an important but heretofore obscure official who serves as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Mr. Cooney spent his immediate pre-White House years as a lawyer at the American Petroleum Institute, where he helped organize the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gas emissions from factories and automobiles. Mr. Revkin reported that Mr. Cooney had been fighting the same fight in his new job by sanitizing government reports in an effort to cast doubt on the link - a link accepted by mainstream scientists - between climate change and the emissions caused by burning fossil fuels.

Creating uncertainty about that connection, of course, reduces the chances that anything meaningful will be done to clamp down on those emissions and thus to discomfit Mr. Bush's corporate allies.

This is hardly the first time this administration has tinkered with the truth. In 2002 and 2003, about the same time Mr. Cooney was deploying his literary skills, the White House censored two Environmental Protection Agency reports that linked warming to industrial activity.

It's sad to think of a White House run by people who believe that a problem can be edited out of existence.

In the New York Times today.
Couldn't agree more.
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