OUR INCREASINGLY ACIDIC OCEANS - II

Stewart Dean:  “It’s possibly much worse than that.  You can see coral reefs and shells.  What you can’t see are the microscopic plankton that are the base food stock for virtually the entire fabric of swimming ocean life.  And these plankton are having a harder and harder time forming their exoskeleton as the oceans acidify.  If they go, fish and ocean mammals will disappear, possibly leaving only jellyfish.  See this excellent article from the November 20, 2006, New Yorker.”

YOU WON’T BELIEVE YOUR EYES (AND SHOULDN’T)

“This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa.  Amazingly, 97% of the machines components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft, Iowa.  Yes farm equipment!  It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was well worth the effort.  It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.”

☞  Amazing!  But how could this be possibly be real?  Like so many things on the Internet, it’s not.  Just a (wonderful) computer animation.

LIFE LESSONS FROM A COUPLE MARRIED 80 YEARS

Thanks to Beth Smith for passing this along.  Sweet.

WHAT THE IMF MIGHT TELL U.S.

A sobering analysis from the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund – Atlantic Monthly’s cover story.  His conclusion: nationalize the big banks, clean them up, break them up, and sell them back into private hands.  No bank should be “too big to fail.”