State Rep. Mark Owens (R-Crane) can see the fires from his front porch.
This summer, the Big Grass, Coleman Creek, and Second Flat fires tore across southeast Oregon, all three of them megafires (covering greater than 100,000 acres), in the biggest wildfire summer in recorded state history. On the worst days, the air quality index near Owens’ alfalfa fields in Harney County hits 540. He checks the weather every morning like any farmer. Lately, that means checking smoke.
Owens has represented House District 60 in southeastern Oregon since 2020. His district contains more acres than the state of Indiana: Malheur, Harney, Lake, Baker, and Grant counties, plus part of Deschutes. It is easily the most fire-exposed legislative district in Oregon, if not the nation. It’s also alfalfa and cattle country.
This piqued my interest because my niece and nephew are in the fishing business. Those are some big halibut, but where's Iturup? It's an island northeast of Sapporo, Japan:
Google Maps failed me. Pull up Iturup on Google Maps and it shows you the island, but no cities towns or roads. If you ask it for one of the three airports, it will show it to you, but then it won't shut up about it and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off. New and improved for your viewing pleasure, and for most people, most of the time it probably works very well. Not for me. I might have to start using one of the other free, online, maps of the world.
Looks like the price for computer memory chips has gone up by a factor of ten in the last year. Some people are betting heavily that the Artificial Intelligence / Data Center boom is somehow going to pay off big time.
Anyway, looking at the Open Infrastructure Map I see there is substation devoted to Ronler Acres, but it is kind of small, so that's not what all these power lines are for. But then a short distance away I find the Evergreen Substation (shown on the above map), and it is right in the middle of all the big box warehouse like buildings being built just north of Evergreen Road. I suspect some, if not all, are data centers.
Right next door to the Evergreen Substation is Constable BESS. And what the heck is Constable BESS? It's a 75 megawatt battery. Somebody really wanted dependable power in this area. Decision to construct the battery was made back in 2021, so somebody was planning for this explosion of data centers several years before it got started. I'm pretty sure that three years ago all that land north of Evergreen was empty farmland. 2023 was the year Constable BESS came online. Huh.
Rivers of Fate - Official Trailer [English] | Netflix
MVSRS
Very good. The first and maybe the second episodes are nerve wracking. You know something bad is going to happen to our girl. I can't tell you just what techniques the show's makers used to induce this feeling, but it was very effective.
Our girl, Janalice, is a very attractive 16 year old girl whose teenage lust leads her to trust a boy that she shouldn't. She becomes a social pariah, so her parents send her to live with her Aunt in Belem and things go wrong. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
We also have a gang of teenage river pirates. They steal cargo from boats traveling on the river. The merchants file an insurance claim and then buy their goods back from pirate's fence for half price and everybody's happy. Well, except for the passengers who got robbed and the insurance company.
4 episodes 45 minutes each.
Ilha de Marajó Breves at lower left, Belem at lower right
Ilha de Marajó is in the state of Para on the northeast coast of Brazil. It is in between the Amazon River, the Guajará Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. At Belem the bay is ten miles wide.
A mother seeking revenge against a river gang that murdered her family. She is a former soldier. She & her husband ran a bar that floats in the middle of the river.
Luca
Dan
Guilherme
Mariangel's gay son.
Lucas
Galvino
Preá
River gang leader who becomes obsessed with Janalice
The is the 1961 version of the Lagos Palm. It was the second ship of that name working for the Palm Line:
The Palm Line was a UK-owned shipping line that was engaged in the West African trade from 1949, primarily servicing the ports along 5,000 miles of coastline from Morocco in the north to Angola in the far south. It ceased trading in 1986.
Navigating the Niger Delta required certain accommodations:
It is notable that all Palm Line ships, with the exception of Kano Palm and Katsina Palm, built before 1970, had to be less than 500 feet long in order to navigate the creeks of Nigeria. Draught is another important feature. The coast of West Africa is extremely flat, and the slow-moving rivers and tidal currents have combined to build up long sand bars a mile or two off the coast. To enter most of the rivers, ships must pass over these bars; 27 feet being the maximum draught to serve all ports. Even so, to enter many rivers, - for example the Escravos River which leads to Sapele - ships cannot carry more than 4,000 tons since the maximum draught to successfully make it over the Escravos Bar is limited to 17 feet (5.2 m), so vessels would often cross over the bar at the entrance to the adjacent Forcados River, then take the connecting creek to the Escravos River.
Here are some maps of the Niger Delta. I'm not real happy with any of them:
the space shot doesn't have a scale,
the one labeled estuaries doesn't name any of the rivers,
the admiralty chart is too zoomed in, so much so that I don't know what I am looking at,
the last one is pretty good, it has a scale anyway, it has a bunch of names but leaves out the names of the big rivers.
Oh well, they're free, I should be happy with what I've got. It's not like I'm going on a voyage to Nigeria any time soon.
As you might expect, Europe is just lousy with castles. This map has an interesting feature - a slide adjustment that lets you control what period of time you are looking at. It goes all the way back to 3000 BC, but until you get to the year zero, nothing much is happening. Prior to zero, there are only a couple of dozen castles and it isn't until you get to 1000 AD that things start popping.
Jack got hisself a new toy - a Meshtastic radio, about $50. It's a little smaller than a smartphone. The four dots you see are for a USB cable with a magnetic connector. Connect it to your phone (does it have Bluetooth?) and you can send text messages over the Mesh Network. The Mesh Network is made up of whoever has a similar radio within range, which can be a few miles. Popular with some Neighborhood Emergency Teams. These mesh radios don't use the cell phone network and data is encrypted, so transmission is reasonable secure.
The big problem with these things is you need other people to also be using them. If you and your mother are the only ones with these radios and you are fifty miles apart, this thing isn't going to help you.
Long trains moving extremely slowly equal maddening waits for drivers on the Central Eastside.
Problem is the railroad cuts the eastside in two and there are only a few place to cross it that are not grade level crossings, which means at rush hour those few crossings are going to be jammed as well.
The portion of eastside of Portland near the Willamette River is full of railroad tracks. It's hard to get a clear view of the situation. If you zoom out you see orange lines running from top to bottom.
I knew a large portion of the Netherlands was below sea level, which is crazy, but the Dutch, at least in most other respects, seem to be fairly level headed. And you don't hear them crying about it, so if they want to indulge in a bit of crazy and live in a place that ought to be underwater, well, go ahead on. I'll let you.
But I kind of thought it was only place in the world like that. Well, there is Death Valley (280 feet below sea level) and the Dead Sea(1400 feet below sea level), but they are not right up against an ocean that could flood them in a moments notice. In any case Holland isn't the only place. Jakarta Indonesia is slowing sinking and large parts of it are now below sea level. They noticed this a while back and started building a sea wall in 2014.
This video from the Drop A PinYouTube channel got me started. He uses a curious format. He asks a question of like two dozen people who all get the answer wrong before he finally finds someone who gets it right. He sucked me in the first few dozen videos I saw, but now I skip to the end to find the answer.
The Inland Customs Line, incorporating the Great Hedge of India (or Indian Salt Hedge), was a customs barrier built by the British colonial rulers of India to prevent smuggling of salt from coastal regions in order to avoid the substantial salt tax.
I have no evidence of any of this. I will say it seems plausible, both that Ukraine launched such an attack and that they were foiled.
No, the reason I am posting this is because of the map. The map originally posted on RT is all in Russian. I couldn't make any sense of it, though I suspect that the big city in the upper right quadrant is Moscow. But I fed the link to Google and Google offered to translate it for me, so I said go ahead, and that's the image we have above. Ukraine does not appear in this map. Note the label on the big city in this translated version.
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