Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Turns out, according to Wired, squinting actually helps us see better.
Recently, I bellied up to a bar waiting for what seemed like an eternity to order my beer. It’s not that the place was busy, in fact the bartender was waiting for me. But I’d forgotten my glasses, so reading the tap list—hung high on the back wall—was slow going, even though it was written in six-inch chalk letters. Just before I made my choice, I caught a glance of myself in the back mirror. I was squinting like a sea captain steering through a gale. With wide open eyes, the list would have been unreadable.
Why do people squint to see better? For the longest time, I thought squeezing my eyelids somehow reshaped my faulty eyeballs. And while squinting does slightly change the shape of your lenses, the real answer has to more to do with the back of your eye than the front. …
The Verge has an article on New York City’s deer problem. Deer (rats with hooves) have become a serious problem throughout the country. This piece is a bit long, but it expands its focus beyond Staten Island to the whole country.
Just before Christmas of last year, John Caminiti, who lives in Staten Island, New York City’s least populated borough, watched traffic come to a standstill outside the Staten Island Mall. “It got quiet all of a sudden,” Caminiti told me. “I look around, and there was a big buck, standing right on the fringe of the wilderness and the mall. A calm came over people.”
Staten Island is located a half-hour by ferry off the southern tip of Manhattan, and the Caminitis have lived here for almost a century. “My grandmother was a baby when my great-grandfather brought her over here,” he said. At that time, the island had practically no deer. Then the island had a few deer. Now there are a lot of deer, and they are everywhere.
Nobody really knows where the herds came from. The Staten Island Advance reported sightings as far back as 1991; according to The New York Times, deer began appearing “with some frequency” around 2000.
In 2008, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation conducted a survey of Staten Island’s deer population. The biologist who searched the woods estimated there were approximately 24 white-tailed deer in the borough. Last winter, the New York City Parks Department conducted an aerial, infrared survey of the island and found 793 individuals — an apparent 3,304 percent increase in just six years.
Deer on the island have gone from a rarity to a delight to a problem with no immediate solution. …
… White-tailed deer are not particularly large animals, but they are muscular and athletic, some reportedly able to jump over fences 10 feet high. The tails from which they derive their name stick up jauntily over their rears as they run away from you.
Before European colonization, North America was home to somewhere between 24 and 33 million white-tailed deer, most widely distributed east of the Rocky Mountains. In the following centuries, that population was destroyed — first by traders operating out of coastal cities, making deals with Native Americans for pelts; then by settlers moving out West. Deer died by the hundreds of thousands as the market grew for their meat and hides.
But it was the second half of the 19th century that truly decimated animal populations across the United States. In his book Nature Wars, wildlife historian, journalist, and hunter Jim Sterba writes, “All wildlife suffered, from bison to songbirds. Demand for wild products soared as immigrants poured in and the US population grew to 76 million. Any wild species with any value was killed for meat, fur, or feathers.”
The white-tailed population plummeted to an estimated low of 350,000 animals in 1890. According to Serba, “by the end of the 19th century white-tailed deer were so scarce that market hunters no longer bothered with them.”
“By the end of the 19th century white-tailed deer were so scarce that market hunters no longer bothered with them.”
Then, thanks to a set of concepts and policies referred to as the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, the deer made a tremendous comeback. The model, encouraged by a rising American bourgeoisie that yearned for recreational hunting, established a series of principles to promote rebounding deer populations: create protected green spaces where commercial hunting was banned; foster safe and abundant spaces for regulated, recreational hunting; and further discourage predator species that had essentially already been eradicated. The logic was simple: you can’t hunt the deer if all the deer are already dead.
As a result, the United States now has over 30 million white-tailed deer, much more densely populated than they ever were before Europeans arrived. Unchecked by wolves, cougars, and bears, the herds wreak havoc: a 2012 Rutgers University study alleges that white-tailed deer are responsible for most of the $4.5 billion worth of crops that US agriculture loses to wildlife annually; they account for three to four thousand car collisions a day. New Jersey alone had 31,192 deer collisions from 2011 to 2012. Unchecked by predators or hunters, only starvation will limit population growth.
To bring a native species back from the brink of eradication should be cause for celebration — in this respect, the revival of white-tailed deer is one of the conservation movement’s finest accomplishments. But our understanding of what is best for the deer, for people, and for the wider ecosystem is, perhaps, changing. And success is starting to resemble failure. …
Kevin Williamson has some cogent observations on the drop in crude oil prices.
Whatever happened to the go-juice cartel?
When gasoline prices rise, there is inevitably a great deal of ill-informed and irresponsible talk about conspiracies, price-fixing, “gouging” poor drivers, etc. After a spike in gasoline prices in 2007, opportunistic House Democrats passed a bill that would have empowered the federal government to lock American citizens in prison for selling gasoline at prices that displeased the president. (Clapping people into prison is the unwavering gut instinct of so-called liberals.) When Republicans in the Senate blocked the Democrats’ patently insane plan to — repeat — lock human beings in cages for a decade for selling gasoline at presidentially unapproved prices, the Democrats instantly retreated even farther into conspiracy theory, claiming that corrupt Republicans had sold their votes to Big Oil.
Among the leading gasoline-conspiracy theorists during the Great Gasoline Kerfuffle of 2004 were Ed Markey, who was in the House at the time but has since been elevated to the Senate by Massachusetts masochists, and Frank Pallone of New Jersey, who co-authored a letter (signed by another 51 Democrats) demanding that the attorney general investigate displeasing gasoline prices, which they blamed on “the Bush administration’s cozy relationship with big oil companies” rather than the usual interaction of supply and demand. Apparently, gasoline prices should command the personal attention of the attorney general at least, if not that of the president.
The mind-boggling fact is that state attorneys general from Arizona to Texas to Illinois actively monitor gasoline prices — and, to make sure that everybody knows they’re serious, Illinois refers to its price monitors as the gasoline “SWAT” team. …
… Where’s the conspiracy now, when oil prices and retail gasoline prices are plunging? If the goblins in Nancy Pelosi’s head are correct in their insistence that higher gas prices must necessarily be the result of a criminal conspiracy, does it not follow that lower gas prices also must be the result of that same conspiracy? Either nasty wicked Big Oil controls gas prices or it doesn’t. A mind as narrow and uncomplicated as Pelosi’s shouldn’t be that difficult to make up.
Inevitably, the same authoritarian mentality that seeks to police gas prices that are too high also seeks to police gas prices that are too low. George Will relates the sorry story of Raj Bhandari of Merrill, Wis., who brought down upon himself the full force of the state when he committed the crime of giving oldsters a 2-cent-a-gallon discount on gas, and then compounded his misdeed by offering supporters of local youth-sports programs a 3-cent-a-gallon discount. Wisconsin law mandates that retailers sell their gas at no less than 9.18 percent above the price they are charged by wholesalers. (I’ll bet the story of how that precise 9.18 percent figure was arrived at is a fascinating study in political thinking.) Bhandari faced a $2,000-a-day fine and the possible loss of his business for cutting his elderly and community-minded neighbors a break without permission from politicians. …
Science20.com posts on the idiot John Holdren who in the 70′s predicted a new ice age and who now is claiming it has been forestalled by “human caused” global warming. This wouldn’t be much of a story if the man hadn’t been named by the president to be his “science advisor.” It’s true, perfectly ignorant fools wherever you look in the narcissist’s administration.
… In “Open For Questions with Dr. John Holdren” a Facebook commenter asks a fairly softball question, if and how humans are affecting the climate, and instead of just answering it the way rational scientists would he goes all eugenics on modern climate science, takes us back to the 1970s kind, which logically leads the public to believe the policies of his boss are hurting business and actually helping no one – because global warming is preventing the new Ice Age.
“In their current phases, moreover, they would be gradually cooling the earth – taking us to another ice age – if they weren’t being more than offset by human-caused warming.”
Yes, Dr. Holdren says our global warming ‘pause’ is just climate change fighting off the Ice Age. Global warming is our friend. Well, order my Escalade then, I care about the environment too much to want Fresno to look like Alaska.
Throw on some custom 22s, also. The crisis is over.