First Looks category archive

Bloomberg reports that the lawsuits against Buccaneer Petroleum are starting. I must admit that suing the board of directors under civil racketeering statutes is a creative touch (emphasis added):

In addition to scores of claims brought in five states along the Gulf shore, coastal businesses and property owners in Georgia and South Carolina have sued for damages from the drifting oil, which has yet to round the southern tip of Florida and enter the Atlantic Ocean.

Investors in three states, including Louisiana and Alaska, have sued BP’s board of directors for allegedly causing more than $50 billion in shareholder losses by failing to implement safety policies that would have prevented the spill. In a separate class-action lawsuit in Florida, the company is accused of “a pattern” of criminal acts including fraud. That suit seeks triple damages under federal civil racketeering law.

(Counting down.)

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette looks at the bottled water scam (to quote from the title of the article). A nugget:

In fact, tap water may actually be cleaner. Last month, researchers found that some bottled water contains more bacteria than tap water. More than 70 percent of the popular brands tested in this new study failed to meet bacterial standards set by the United States Pharmacopeia, a nongovernment agency that sets safety standards for medications and health-care products, according to the Montreal Gazette.

In comparison, tap water is usually so pure, bottled water companies can simply bottle it and sell it to you. For example, Coca Cola-owned Dasani bottled water often comes from local water utilities. Visit its website and you can follow the eight-step Dasani treatment process, but never once read which contaminants are so terrifying that the company needs to disinfect the water all over again. If it’s taste you’re after, you can spend up to $5.50 a gallon on the bottled stuff, or as low as $0.15 per gallon for tap water with a home filter.

From the BBC:

US scientists have created working liver grafts in the lab, and say the research could one day allow the growth of livers for transplant.

There is a shortage of liver donors, but so far it has been difficult to grow replacement organs.

In the work, published in Nature Medicine, a team from Massachusetts General Hospital, created successful grafts using rat cells.

Beaching it.

When all is said and done, it is still British Petroleum.

From the BBC:

Japanese scientists are celebrating the successful deployment of their solar sail, Ikaros.

The 200-sq-m (2,100-sq-ft) membrane is attached to a small disc-shaped spacecraft that was put in orbit last month by an H-IIA rocket.

Ikaros will demonstrate the principle of using sunlight as a simple and efficient means of propulsion.

The technique has long been touted as a way of moving spacecraft around the Solar System using no chemical fuels.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I remember that the trainer of Flipper ultimately regretted his role and began to campaign on behalf of dolphins.

The Navy trains dolphins to look for mines:

They know to look for a couple of specific things: man-made, metal objects that are a few feet long, things with wires or explosives. If there’s a television set or a washing machine in the water, a trained dolphin will indicate that as a possible mine, he said.

Using echo-location, bottlenose dolphins can detect those types of objects from about 150 yards away. After a dolphin has been commanded to look for an object, it will scan the area and swim back to the boat. If it believes it’s found something, it touches a tennis ball or plastic disk at the front of the boat.

Then the handler will give the dolphin a marking device and signal it to drop the marker a certain distance away from the suspected mine. A Navy diver will take to the water for a detailed inspection and decide whether to disarm or detonate the mine.

Tuesday, during the vigil, the spoils pipe of at the Rudee Inlet dredge had separated.

In this sequence, you can see

• the separated pipe, then
• the crew tie up to the two pieces of pipe, then
• manoeuver them into a position where they could work with them, then
• reconnect them.

The last picture shows the reconnected joint, which is still leaking. Other joints were leaking too, so I reckon losing some water isn’t that big an issue so long as the spoils are disposed of.

Read more »

Some pictures from yesterday’s vigil marking the 50th day of BP’s wild well.

It was a quiet and respectful gathering.

Flyover:

Read more »

Addendum:

The Rude One speaks (warning: language at the link):

Could BP (or everyone else) stop pretending like there is any way to “make this right.”

(snip)

There’s uncorrectable wrongs in this life. Make it better? Maybe. Right? You’re delusional.

That’s the beginning and the end. For the middle, follow the link (once again, warning: language).

This almost makes me wish I were back in Delaware for a day:

Aboard a 95-foot-long trailer specially constructed by an Ohio company will be a full-size mockup of the first stage of Orbital Sciences’ Taurus II rocket being towed roughly 150 miles across portions of three states — from the Port of Wilmington to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island.

A local newspaper columnist had a couple of columns on “religious predators.” I cannot find them on line (the local rag does not place all its content on line).

They reminded me of this.

When I was growing up, the deer had pretty much disappeared (now they’re back big time).

Now it’s reportedly cougars, and not the television actress kind. Wildlife folks are skeptical:

It is unlikely, though, to make it to this area, said Sue Rice, manager of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Eastern Shore of Virginia National Wildlife Refuge at the time of the February sightings.

“The chances of there being a mountain lion that is a wild animal on the Eastern Shore of Virginia is extremely low,” she said. “Even in the whole state of Virginia, I don’t believe there are enough sightings.”

A wild cat would have to come from the woodsy north. “The chances are pretty slim for them to get here without being seen or getting hit by a car if they are wild animals,” Rice said, suggesting instead a pet released locally.

Cougars are both solitary and nocturnal for the most part and feed on white-tail deer.

Females have ranges of several square miles, but the male’s home-range is much larger, which could account for reports of sightings in Melfa and Wachapreague and other parts of Accomack, too.

Hot summer day, carry me away . . . .

The ultimate Bond car will be auctioned on October 27.

The vehicle comes fully equipped with all the Q modifications, including oil slick and smokescreen capabilities, bulletproof shielding and an ejector seat. There’s also revolving licence plates and machine guns hidden in the front indicators. Okay, the guns don’t work, but they pop out at the click of a button and would certainly have the desired effect in a road rage incident.

If I could afford this, I’d buy a Lamborghini.

Wo-wo-wo-wo those wild well nights,

Those wild wild wild well nights.

Via Brendan.

Facing South analyzes the oily tongued spin of the oil industry apologists.

The “Starving Time” occurred shortly after the Jamestown colony was established.

Tree ring evidence has indicated that one of the factors was drought.

The BBC reports research involving oysters that provides additional evidence of this.

The team compared oxygen-18 values in the 17th Century James River oyster shells with those from their modern day counterparts.

(snip)

Previous data based on tree rings and historical documents show that the arrival of the English colonists in Virginia coincided with a severe regional drought.

The years 1606-1612 were the driest in nearly eight centuries.

“Shortages of food and fresh drinking water, combined with poor leadership, nearly destroyed the colony during its first decade,” the authors of the latest study write in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences–ed.).