First Looks category archive

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:

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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.).

Transcript here.

“Even if the leak were stopped today, it wouldn’t wouldn’t change the fact that these water still contain oil from what is now the largest spill in American history.”

We know now the leak was not stopped. The wild well is still wild.

Remember, BP, not the President, did this thing. I recommend not buying their products.

Transcript here.

Gary Dammann at the Guardian considers celibacy, chastity, sex, morality, and Catholicism, but his thoughts can be generalized to Christianity as a whole and, indeed, to all the peoples of the book. A nugget:

This, to my mind, has been Christianity’s greatest single tragedy, turning a religion founded on a noble and genuine philosophy of love into an excuse for repression, oppression and persecution, in which suffering was turned into a cult and hypocrisy into standard practice.

Via BartCop.

My Lab, the one with the heart of gold and the head of lead, was a great watch dog.

He would have watched.

Spurs, a male German Shepherd, is being hailed a hero after taking a bullet to save his owner’s life.

What happened to the old one? Bad weather.

Buried deep in the story is this (emphasis added):

“Our land base is shrinking because of sea level rise and the accompanying strong storms,” said Lou Hinds, manager of the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge on the Virginia side of the island. “These are all naturally occurring reasons, and there’s nothing the American public or government agencies can do.”

Hinds said 115 yards of beach have been lost since 1962. Vestiges of former parking lots attest to this. Cables and a wellhead have been unearthed by the surf. And farther back from the ocean, concrete fragments intermingle with the sand.

Sea level rise. Yeah. Naturally occurring reasons. Hardly.

My father’s mother taught school on Assateague Island before she married my grandfather. (It’s pronounced ASS-a-teeg for those of you not from these parts.) That was back when Assateague was inhabited by persons as well as ponies.

I wonder whether it will still exist for her great-great-grandchildren to visit.

Monday’s episode of Voices in the Family is well worth a listen. Frank Meeink’s story of who and why he fell in with skinheads is especially revealing.

From the website:

According to the SPLC, the number of hate groups have proliferated by 50% over the last decade, and the traffic on neo-nazi websites has risen dramatically in the last few years. People point to the poor economy, immigration, and also to the first African American president taking office during this economic nadir. But preference for who’s “one of us” and prejudice against who’s “one of them” has been around as long as humans roamed the earth. So is it built in, or do we learn these cues from our environment, or both? What can we do about it, and what is the best way that tolerance can be taught? Our guests are Richard Cohen. He runs the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has taken on some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist organizations and litigated important civil rights actions. We’ll also hear from Frank Meeink – a recovering skinhead and author of Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead: the story of Frank Mink. Then we’ll hear from Nilanjana Dasgupta, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts who studies prejudice and stereotyping – in both its implicit and explicit forms.

Follow the link to the website or click here to listen (MP3).