"Waiting for the second volcanic shoe to drop"

New Scientist has a brief report on the volcanos of Iceland:

"...volcanologists have warned that previous Eyjafjallajökull eruptions have triggered eruptions of neighbouring Katla, one of the largest volcanoes in Iceland... The three eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in the last 1100 years – in 920, 1612 and 1821 – have all triggered larger Katla eruptions."

One implication of a larger eruption with a greater ash ejection might be an alteration in the earth's albedo or at least a partial shading of the surface, reversing global warming.  If we start heading toward a nuclear winter, it might become incumbent on everyone to start creating more greenhouse gases.  What happens to the value of your carbon credits then??

While we are on this subject, the photo above comes from a gallery of volcanic ash sunsets at The Guardian, showing a colorful sunset at Edinburgh.  It reminds me of the theory that Edvard Munch may have painted the sky red in his iconic painting, The Scream, because he remembered the sunsets after the explosion of Krakatoa ten years previously.

The Nuclear Summit, logos, and FOX News

www.thedailyshow.com

Make your own envelope with a map inside

I made one of these using a Google map of my home address; the envelopes are small, but the result is quite interesting. 

Link, via The Presurfer.

New York City, 1905

New York City circa 1905. "Bridge of Sighs." Named after a similar span in Venice, this covered passage connected the Tombs prison and Manhattan Criminal Courts building. 8x10 dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Co.

I just love looking at photographs of cities in the pre-automobile era and imagining what it must have been like to walk down the middle of broad avenues and smell manure rather than exhaust.

Found at Shorpy, where you can search a jumbo-sized version of the photo in vain looking for a morbidly obese person...

15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing

The fact that the 168 deaths at Oklahoma were the result of Americans killing Americans in the name of America has made the incident in some ways harder for the nation to process than 9/11 and the less complicated enemy, al-Qaida. "It made a terrible difference that this was homegrown terrorism," says Almon-Kok. "It left you with nothing to trust or believe in, apart from my faith that this city did everything it could in the aftermath, and that we have a legal system which, for the most part, works. But that doesn't answer why fellow Americans wanted to come killing our kids."

Perhaps this is why the Oklahoma bomb is not as centre stage in America's collective memory as it should be. When Al Gore was interviewed about the extreme right by Larry King recently, there was no mention of Oklahoma. Coverage of last month's arrests of militants belonging to an offshoot of the same Michigan militia that McVeigh belonged to omitted to mention the bomb, days away from its 15th anniversary. There is extreme awkwardness around this enemy within, but also current concern about reverberations of McVeigh's cause: war against the American government...

...nine people appeared in court in Detroit, members of an offshoot of McVeigh's Michigan militia called Hutaree, charged with "seditious conspiracy" to kill a police officer and then bomb the funeral cortege, in order to spark insurrection akin to that sought by McVeigh. The previous week, congresswoman Louise Slaughter, who voted for President Barack Obama's health care reform, received one of many threats of violence to elected representatives, this one pledging that snipers would "kill the children of the members who voted for health care reform". Such language makes the blood run cold in Oklahoma; and the fact that most people in Oklahoma are deeply conservative makes the irony of both the bomb and their disgust at this language all the more cogent.

These paragraphs are from a much longer commentary at The Guardian.

Imagine a sweater made from... pig's fur ??

When I started TYWKIWDBI, I wrote 14 posts in a "name that animal" series.   This critter would have fit well into that category, because I have never seen one - even in a zoo.  Pictured above is a curly-coated Mangalitza [Serbian "hog with a lot of lard"], commonly referred to (for obvious reasons) as a "sheep-pig."

‘The woolly coat makes them very hardy and helps them to survive in the harsh winters in their native Austria and Hungary.  In the summer it helps protect them from sunburn.’

The sheep-pig used to be a common sight in Lincolnshire and was shorn once a year to make sweaters, but it became extinct in Britain in 1972...

Hair from the pigs is particularly popular in the U.S. as it retains air bubbles under water making it ideal for tying fishing flies.

At the link there is also a photo of Emma Thompson taking a sheep-pig to a world premier of a movie.

Matt Taibbi discusses the financial crisis and the Obama White House

This is an no-holds-barred presentation by Matt Taibbi, journalist for Rolling Stone magazine.  I have previously cited his views on health care reform and on Goldman Sachs' questionable practices in world financial markets.  In this interview he offers a scathing indictment of the financial team put together by the Obama administration.

I know (or believe) that most readers of this blog are Obama supporters and will not like what Taibbi has to say, but I blog from the center, and I believe Taibbi's comments here are worth hearing.