Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: News

  • Lewis and Clark

    Today is (exactly) the 200th anniversary of the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition, on May 14, 1804. Did anyone realize this? I almost missed this entirely, but for Reuter’s Oddly Enough RSS feed: “Lewis and Clark’s List: Opium and ‘Portable Soup’” lists some of the provisions they took on their expedition, including opium, “portable soup” (“paste made of boiled-down beef and cow’s hooves, eggs and vegetables”), quills, inkstands, and 10 yards of linen.

    Wikipedia has a decent start on an article on Lewis and Clark, but it needs fleshed out more.

    Among other things, I seem to remember reading once that the Lewis and Clark expedition was one of the most successful such expeditions in history, because in a 28-month, cross-country trip they only lost one out of 33 members: Sergeant Charles Floyd died from acute appendicitis. Seems pretty good to me.

  • Library of Alexandria discovered

    This is big: Library of Alexandria discovered.

    Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the site of the Library of Alexandria, often described as the world’s first major seat of learning.

     

    A Polish-Egyptian team has excavated parts of the Bruchion region of the Mediterranean city and discovered what look like lecture halls or auditoria.

    One of the greatest losses of antiquity. For more background, Wikipedia has a really good entry on the Library of Alexandria.

  • Oddly enough…

    Since I subscribed to Reuter’s Oddly Enough RSS feed the other day, I’ve noticed that about a sixth of the odd news involved biting in some way. Weird? Yeah. Creepy weird.

  • South Sister Quakes

    Sweeping the local news this evening is the South Sister earthquakes: more than 100 shook the area three miles west of the South Sister today, with a magnitude of up to 1.5 on the Richter scale. Bend.com has the best writeup on the story I’ve seen online.

    The quakes were occurring in the northeast part of an area centered three miles west of South Sister, in which the ground has undergone what scientists call “crustal uplift” (but others have called “the bulge”) by as much as 25 centimeters (about 10 inches) since late 1997….

    The magma appears to be accumulating at a depth about four miles below the ground surface, and measures about 50 million cubic yards in volume.

    Interesting stuff; of course the entire Cascade Range is geologically active, so it’s not really a surprise, but with the South Sister about, oh, 30 miles away, this news has more than a few people worried, I’m sure.

    Personally, I’d expect Mount Hood to be the one to erupt first, of all of them.

  • Water on Mars

    Forgot to point to this the other day: Opportunity finds evidence of water in Mars’ past. Probably you’ve all heard this by now, but it’s still incredible.

    “Liquid water once flowed through these rocks. It changed their texture, and it changed their chemistry,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the science instruments on Opportunity and its twin, Spirit. “We’ve been able to read the tell-tale clues the water left behind, giving us confidence in that conclusion,” he said.

  • Bend Gridlock

    Bend made the national headlines last week (CNN: Rush minute becomes rush hour) because it’s the largest city in the west without a public transit system. And we’re not going to get one anytime soon, unfortunately. From the CNN article:

    Public transportation advocates in the city are up against a steadfast car culture reinforced by the influx of Californians, plus a wealthy population that probably wouldn’t ride the bus even if one existed.

    “If they are getting around town in their Lexus, they are not too concerned about the next bus stop,” said Brian Shetterly, the town’s chief planner.

    All too true. Bend’s traffic is one of the big drawbacks to living here; I’ve watched it steadily get worse over the last decade, as more people have moved into the area but the infrastructure hasn’t scaled accordingly. I sometimes think Bend is a city with a small town mentality: people don’t want to accept that they are living in a city and therefore can’t or won’t deal with the issues that growth inevitably brings—like gridlock. Classic denial: “Hey, we live in a small town, we can’t possibly have traffic problems that need fixing.”

    I’d love it if Bend got a mass transit system, I’ve thought we’ve needed one for years. I’d ride a bus, if one was available, and I think a lot of other people would, too, despite the picture the article paints. Here’s a hint: Not everyone who lives here is wealthy and tools around in a Lexus.

    They wouldn’t need to start big, at first: maybe two or three routes in Bend, covering downtown, west up to the college, north to the malls and back down east along 27th and Knott Road, swinging south and back up Country Club maybe. Then a route to Redmond, maybe Sisters, and one to Sunriver/Lapine, but those extended routes could come later.

    Oh, well. It’s nice to dream.

  • Local Loser

    Could’ve been worse, I suppose, if it weren’t so amusing.

    According to this article on Bend.com, Jodie Lynn Ackerman was released from jail last Wednesday (the 8th) due to overcrowding. By Saturday night (three days later), she “was booked back into the jail on charges of second-degree theft, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, first-degree criminal mischief and a probation violation.” Seems to me that if you suddenly got a “get out of jail free” card, shouldn’t you not do something stupid, like, oh, I don’t know, steal a car and some beer and evade the police?

    (This also showed up on UtterlyBoring.com.)

  • Fire Update

    We’re all safe and sound from the 18 Fire, and we never had to evacuate. All is well.

    Here is a link to the Forest Service’s website on the 18 Fire; they have some really good images of the fire, better than anywhere else I’ve seen online. Pretty amazing.

  • 18 Fire

    18 Fire on Bessie ButteWe were on evacuation alert last night as a 600-acre wildfire burned only 3 miles or so from our house. We didn’t have to evacuate, thankfully, as the fire was moving south, away from any developments, but it sure made for an interesting evening.

    Here’s two links to local stories about the fire: Bend.com and The Bend Bulletin. I even have a couple of pictures I took myself, of Bessie Butte, where the fire was burning; there’s two resolutions: one at 640×480, and another at 1024×768.

    The fire is “officially” known as the “18 Fire” and less-officially also known as the “Bessie Butte Fire”. It was probably started by a lightning strike (though there’s no official word on that yet), and began burning enough to be noticed yesterday (Wednesday) around 1:30 PM. There was a terrific smoke plume; a friend described it as though an atomic bomb had been dropped. It could be seen for miles. Almost immediately they had fire crews fighting it, and the big airtankers were dropping retardant all over the area. I even saw a helicopter with a water bucket lowering to fill up in a pond as I was driving home.

    But all is well. I’ll post updates if there’s any further developments.

  • Truth? Or Onion?

    This is what passes for news in the Bend Bulletin, our local newspaper. I swear, this reads like it’s straight out of The Onion (excerpts, with my own commentary):

    Tuesday, June 25, 2002

    Prineville man questions how the pyramids were built

    Alan St. John was reading the December issue of Popular Mechanics when he spotted a one-page article about an investigation… about how the pyramids were built….

    That’s the Egyptian pyramids, not to be confused with their muddy Mexican and Central American siblings….

    (That’s good. I didn’t want to accidentally misunderstand which pyramids we might be reading about here.)

    Just how the ancients constructed these triangles in the sand has long been a head-scratcher for scientific eggheads and occultists alike.

    (Triangles in the sand? Pyramids have square bases and four sides. Nice tone to this paragraph, too; I think it’s meant to target the low-brow audience.)

    They have good reason to want to reason through this: They didn’t exactly have backhoes 5,000 years ago….

    (Gee. They didn’t exactly have backhoes. What exactly did they have? Tractors? It’s clear at this point who the intended audience is: people who are intellectually equivalent to having lived in a cave for most of their life. Give your readers some credit.)

    St. John believes everyone has been overlooking the obvious.

    (Yeah. The obvious. Despite the obvious lack of any evidence to support his theory. I’m immediately suspicious of anyone who’s got a theory they think is “obvious.”)

    With pulleys and enough rope, sand could be used as a counter-weight to the huge stones….

    (Here I admit, this sounds reasonable. Then of course, 3 paragraphs later, comes my favorite part:)

    The recently divorced St. John, who lives in a fifth wheel trailer next to his parent’s house in Prineville, has been a quick study in Egyptian history, when he’s not working at Norm’s Extreme Fitness Center….

    (Okay. This blows away any shred of credibility he might have had. He’s a kook.)

    The article goes on with St. John citing Herodotus (which the Bulletin misspells as Herodatus), but apparently that’s as much as he’s read on the pyramids. He also sent a letter to Popular Mechanics, which generated some initial interest, but hasn’t subsequently heard back from them. And that leads into the most sensible quote from the entire article:

    The problem… is that there’s no hieroglyphic or archaeological evidence that counterweights were ever used in ancient Egypt….

    What amazes me is how this made it into the paper to begin with… it really does come across like an article you’d read in The Onion. I’m thunderstruck and laughing at the same time. How did they find this St. John guy? Did he approach the Bulletin? And why— why??— is this considered news?

    Unfortunately, the Bulletin isn’t even running the article online on their web site. Otherwise, you could even see the goofy photo they have of this guy holding his hands over his head in the shape of a pyramid…

    This was just too priceless not to share. Interestingly, the same issue of the paper also has an article about Rocket Guy, arguably Bend’s most notorious and colorful character.

    What a day.