Fluid Flow

Confiscated weapons to be melted into rebar: Weapons were on display Monday at Los Angeles County Sheriff’s headquarters, where Sheriff Lee Baca announced the destruction of more than 8,300 weapons confiscated from criminals in Los Angeles County. The guns will be converted Tuesday morning into steel rebar as part of ‘Project Isaiah.’ Tamco Steel donates its furnace, equipment and personnel to convert the weapons into rebar, and will allocate the steel from the melted weapons to be used for upgrades to freeways and bridges in California, Nevada and Arizona.

(Via Los Angeles Times - Top News.)

Melt the guns
Melt the guns
Melt the guns
And never more to fire them
Melt the guns
Melt the guns
Melt the guns
And never more desire them
(XTC - Melt the Guns, 1982)

I hope the song blasting at the foundry tomorrow.

Gulf Disaster Is Now Worst U.S. Offshore Oil Spill:

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey say the flow rate from the blown-out well is at least twice as much and possibly five times as much as estimates cited by BP. The oil giant says engineers won’t know until at least Thursday afternoon whether the latest attempt to plug the leak is succeeding.

(Via NPR News: Top Stories.)

I have been remiss, any self respecting blog with a name like Fluid Flow should have a link to the oil (and now drilling mud) gushing out of the Gulf Coast seafloor. My apologies, you will have go to the NPR story to see/watch the feed.

The Big One is inevitable. Catastrophe is not.: “The message for Southern California from the horror in Haiti should be — but probably won’t be — to prepare for disaster.

(Via L.A. Times - California | Local News.)

I actually started this post before this LA Times article came out. But it is an easy post to work off of. While we don’t expect a natural disaster will turn our cities into third world countries, we must expect it.

There is a difference between a natural disaster and a man-made one. We make man-made disasters by being unprepared.

Should Earth Scientists Take a ‘Hippocratic Oath’?: “Earth scientists should take a do-no-harm oath like doctors do, suggest two researchers, in light of climate change and proposed massive geoengineering projects.

(Via Wired News.)

Wow, what a brilliantly stupid idea. After hundreds of years of helping plunder the planet for monetary gain, we all should step back and say “my bad! I’ll go climb under a rock now”.

To get to the position of where you can say to others “You will do no harm”, you have already done harm.

Brown Pelican Flies Off The Endangered List:

After nearly 40 years on the brink of extinction, the brown pelican has made a substantial enough comeback that it will be removed Wednesday from the endangered species list, The Associated Press reports.

(Via NPR News: Top Stories.)

I have lived long enough to remember when it was rare to see these birds. Now I see them every time I go to the coast. Banning DDT was probably the key to their survival. Score one for the humans.

Welcome back pelicans.

Now let’s save the red-legged frog, checker-spot butterfly, and a myriad of others on the list.

I am not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I am approaching 50 (in a year or so), perhaps it’s because I am reading Farley Mowat’s “final” memoir, I am not sure.

It certainly isn’t because I have something to write. I have never had a desire to write. Prose and poetry do not leap from my keyboard. The only time that my writing has achieved passing marks is in journalism, geology, and one composition class at UCSB, where the teaching assistant did not mind my simple and direct approach.

It isn’t much to hang your hat on.

But I do like telling stories and I have lived long enough to have a few.

So I have started an outline. The two top headings are “Timeline” and “Themes”. I don’t know where this is going to go, but it seems worthy of exploration.

Woman’s Shattered Life Shows Ground Beef Inspection Flaws - NYTimes.com: “Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, thought she had a stomach virus. The aches and cramping were tolerable that first day, and she finished her classes.

Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed.

Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.”

(Via NY Times: Health.)

This is a very chilling story on meat handling processes and food safety in the US. The following quote pretty much sums up the problem:

“Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. ‘I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,’ Dr. Petersen said.”

Gee, that sounds a lot like putting corporate profits and cheep consumer products over public health. That doesn’t really sound like the expected mandate of Food Safety and Inspection Service.

While I don’t eat a lot of ground beef, anyway, I think that I will pay much better attention to were it comes from now.

I had a troubling afternoon today. There was a very large earthquake off Samoa this morning and it generated a tsunami that swept parts of the islands and caused at least 14 deaths.

Tsunami warnings were raised throughout the south pacific. Tsunami watches were also issued. And in the afternoon a tsunami advisory was issued for most of the west coast of North America.

Now each of these alerts have different meanings. In scale a warning is worse than a watch which is worse than an advisory. If you are under a warning you move up immediately. Under a watch, you are ready to move up if necessary. An advisory suggests you that you not be in or near the water when the tsunami arrives.

So when the advisory was raised, I thought about posting it to Facebook. Some of my friends live on the coast and I thought they might like a heads up. On the other hand, I didn’t want to entice other folks to run to the beach to check it out.

I finally decided to post a link to the advisory and spell out that most likely nothing will happen. But you want to keep safe if you are around the coast this evening.

After posting the note, I got a comment that the warning had been canceled. And while that was true, the advisory was still in effect.

The problem was that the warning had been canceled, and watches had been downgraded to advisories for other parts of the Pacific. The advisory is still in effect on the west coast.

In this day of instant news, you need to be aware of both when and where reports are coming from. While a tsunami warning may be canceled in the South Pacific, that doesn’t mean you have the all clear on the west coast.

Anyway, I am glad that I decided to make the post, and I am also pleased that the comments pointed out flaws in the system.

So I got to do my part for the economy the other day. I plunked down $400 for new driver’s and rear windows. I will also get to spend $150+ for a new/used iPod, $200 for a new sleeping bag, and $3-5k for a new bike.

All of this spending thanks to one reasonably small act of crime. Judging from the business that the auto glass place was doing, it seems like crime may be rivaling federal investments to promote consumer spending.

Crime hurts those of us who have been putting off investments while our income is down or non-existant. I was quite a happy with my 17 year old truck, my 20 year old sleeping bag, 6 year old iPod, and 5 year old bike. I was fine with what I had and had no plans to replace them.

Now I have to replace them, or do without. It just sucks.

Three falcon chicks hatch atop San Jose City Hall: “For a mother who just watched three offspring hatch — and is watching her fourth egg — Clara appears to be in excellent health today from her perch atop San Jose City Hall.”

(Via Mercury News: News.)

More good news. Once again, I think that $300 million for a platform for falcons to nest is money well spent. For all the stuff that goes on inside the building, I am not so sure.

Update: Make that four new falcons. I don’t think even Ford could do as well.