that sleeping for 2 hours at a time, combined with over-working my body and very little to eat, makes for one wicked headache! :seeingstars:

That there are finger sized eggplant...and I accidentally bought that kind for the garden....:blush:

Picking up something heavy and turning my body at the waist, isn't a good thing.

I learned there is such a word as boodle... :| I have a very good vocabulary...and tons of college credits...and never in my life have I seen that word. Thank you Pogo...thank you for expanding my world! And thank you for justifying the time I waste worshiping at your altar..... :)

I learned that coral reefs are created elsewhere by the coral expelling their eggs and sperm into the ocean after a full moon. It is hit and miss whether or not they mate and when they do they adhere to some other piece of rock and they build that way. Truly amazing.

Why chirpy cicadas are a bunch of math geniuses
 

If you're in the Midwest, your summer might have a very crunchy soundtrack: The sounds of hordes of cicadas emerging from the Earth, chirping and whizzing and sexing and dying after more than a decade underground. That isn't to say that people around the rest of the United States aren't hearing the same thing on a smaller scale.

That's because cicadas spend most of their long, long lives (the longest of any known insect) underground, and some species emerge periodically -- once every 13 or 17 years. When broods sync up, things get loud -- which is what's happening right now in the Midwest.

In the latest video from It's Okay to be Smart, Joe Hanson explains why you should be more in awe of the insects than annoyed with them: They're actually doing some pretty impressive math -- though it's not on purpose -- and it's a really smart evolutionary tactic.

By coming out in literal droves, cicadas are able to survive -- er, at least for the handful of weeks it takes them to reproduce -- even though basically everything wants to eat them. Birds can go to town on the emerging cicadas and still leave plenty over to lay eggs.

That's where the prime numbers come in. Why 13 and 17 years? By living life in the prime, cicadas can minimize the number of times their big debut coincides with the birth year of a predator. If they'd "picked" a number divisible by another number, they'd link up with predators who were born at those intervals way more often -- and the predators could adapt to follow cicada lifecycles even more closely, shifting so that they had their babies right when cicadas showed up to provide an endless food source.

But 17 years (and even 13 years) is a long time for just about any bird or lizard, so they've got no chance of hitching their carts to the cicada's brood. And by coming out every 17 years instead of every 16, the cicadas also avoid sync-ups with predators who have 2-year and 4-year reproductive cycles, too.

Very cool.

I learned that when you lend your car to your kids...you need to walk around and inspect it when they bring it back.

goop..
 

Just read a great article on "secrets of the pelvic floor"
Food for thought

Sacrificing 4,200 eagles a year for green energy sounds fine to regulators
 

By Robert Bryce
The Wall Street Journal
May 15, 2016

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency charged with protecting Bald and Golden eagles, is once again trying to make it easier for the wind industry to kill those birds.

Two weeks ago the agency opened public comment on “proposed improvements” to its eagle conservation program. It wants to extend the length of permits for accidental eagle kills from the current five years to 30 years. The changes would allow wind-energy producers to kill or injure as many as 4,200 Bald Eagles every year. That’s a lot. The agency estimates there are now about 72,434 Bald Eagles in the continental U.S.

Let’s hope Judge Lucy H. Koh is keeping an eye out. Last August, Ms. Koh, a federal judge in California, shot down the Fish and Wildlife Service’s previous “improvements.” In a lawsuit brought by the American Bird Conservancy, Judge Koh ruled that the agency had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by declaring that it could issue 30-year permits without first doing an environmental assessment. Now the agency has drafted an environmental review and is still pushing for the 30-year permits.

Yet as Judge Koh noted in her ruling, one of the agency’s own eagle program managers warned that 30-year permits are “inherently less protective” and “real, significant, and cumulative biological impacts will result.”

A 2013 study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin estimated that wind turbines killed about 888,000 bats and 573,000 birds (including 83,000 raptors) in 2012 alone. But wind capacity has since increased by about 24%, and it could triple by 2030 under the White House’s Clean Power Plan. “We don’t really know how many birds are being killed now by wind turbines because the wind industry doesn’t have to report the data,” says Michael Hutchins of the American Bird Conservancy. “It’s considered a trade secret.”

The new rule could further harm Golden Eagles, which are rarer than Bald Eagles and are being whacked by wind turbines in far greater numbers. Mr. Hutchins says that the lack of protection for Golden Eagles is “the biggest weakness of this whole rule.”

The double standard is stunning. In 2011 the Fish and Wildlife Service convinced the Justice Department to file criminal indictments against three oil companies working in North Dakota’s Bakken field for inadvertently killing six ducks and one phoebe.

Now see how the agency treats wind: In 2013 it submitted to the Federal Register that “wind developers have informed the [Department of the Interior] and the Service that 5-year permits have inhibited their ability to obtain financing, and we changed the regulations to accommodate that need.”

Nine months after being rebuked by a federal judge, America’s top wildlife protector is still bending over backward to accommodate an industry that is killing iconic wildlife while at the same time collecting huge subsidies from taxpayers. If there’s a better example of regulatory capture and crony capitalism, I can’t think of one.

dont fuck with the eagles

Supreme Court will review unusual citizenship law
 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to referee a dispute about an odd piece of U.S. citizenship law that treats men and women differently.

The justices said they will hear a case about a law that applies only to children born outside the U.S. to one parent who is an American and one who is not. The law makes it easier for children whose mother is a citizen to become citizens themselves. Even after reform legislation in 1986, children of American fathers face higher hurdles claiming citizenship for themselves.

The federal appeals court in New York struck down the law in the case of Luis Ramon Morales-Santana. He challenged the law and asserted he is a U.S. citizen after U.S. authorities sought to deport him after convictions for robbery and attempted murder.

Morales-Santana is the son a of a Dominican mother and an American father, who left Puerto Rico for the Dominican Republic 20 days before his 19th birthday. For people born before 1986 to parents who are not married, their U.S. citizen fathers had to have lived in the U.S. for 10 years, at least five of them after the age of 14. Morales-Santana's father missed meeting the second part of that requirement by 20 days.

American mothers need only have lived in the U.S. continuously for a year before the birth of a child.

Changes to immigration law made in 1986 reduced the total residency time for fathers to five years, only two of which had to be after the age of 14.

By contrast, a child born in the United States, regardless of the parents' nationality, is a U.S. citizen, as is a child born abroad to two American citizens if one of them has ever lived in the United States.

The justices attempted to answer this question in 2011, but divided 4-4 with Justice Elena Kagan out of the case because she worked on while serving in the Justice Department. This time around, the case will again be heard by eight justices, but with Kagan taking part.

The case, Lynch v. Morales-Santana, 15-1191, will be argued in the fall.

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Dont remember ever hearing about this before.

Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World"
 

Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote a piece in 1995 that has re-emerged in the past week - the reason? Because many people believe it has actually come to pass.

He wrote in his book, The Demon-Haunted World, about the dangers of pseudoscience, and of the importance of being sceptical.

One passage in particular stands out as a pretty spot-on prediction of today.

Sagan wrote:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

https://www.indy100.com/article/carl...future-7545956

That you truly have to watch your language when at work, no matter who is around!

I learned that my truck I traded almost 3 weeks ago hasn't been paid off yet.