Huge ice island calves off Greenland glacier
An ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off from one of Greenland’s two main glaciers, scientists said on Friday, in the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.
The new ice island, which broke off on Thursday, will enter a remote place called the Nares Strait, about 620 miles south of the North Pole between Greenland and Canada.
There is a map of the Nares Straight here. One of the other more striking comparisons was the ice island contained enough water to supply the entire U.S. population for 120 days.
Minerals Service Had a Mandate to Produce Results
When tensions arose between the factions, Mr. Oynes cast himself as the neutral broker, but subordinates sensed where his instincts lay. “From my perspective, we can’t sit here and talk about it forever,” he said. “We have to get on with things.” The result was a culture that favored trust over doubt, saying yes over saying no.
One day in a staff meeting Mr. Eve raised a question: with wells being sunk at ever-greater depths, what are the chances of a blowout, a catastrophic eruption?
Mr. Oynes said the answer would come from the head of field operations. “And later on the answer came back that it was impossible,” Mr. Eve said. “They said the blowout preventer will take care of it.” (That head of field operations, Donald C. Howard, was fired in 2007 for accepting gifts from a drilling company, and pleaded guilty to lying on his ethics form.)
Mr. Oynes expressed a similarly confident view in a 2003 interview with Tyler Priest, an oral historian at the University of Houston. Referring to a giant spill in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, Mr. Oynes said, “You could almost say it is impossible for that to happen again.” Given modern cleanup technology, he added, “Even if you had a spill, how much harm is it going to do?”
Mr. Eve calls the comment “absurd.”
Interesting how a career bureaucrat can have the power to either side step or ignore safety regulation altogether. Oynes is gone and President Obama has separated the environmental regulation part of the MMA and the part responsible for granting leases. Better late than never. Oynes’ view that he did what had to be done and the bottom line was job creation is a typical view, suffering from tragic tunnel vision. Proponents of drill and drill some more never see, or do not wish to see, the middle ground between sensible regulation and being so cozy with the oil industry. That kinf of relationship leads to oil spill disasters small and large. Blow-out preventers are not fool-proof but BP, for the sake of saving a few dollars, failed to keep their preventers updated. The costs would have been about half a million dollars. The cost of the spill, just to BP ( not the Gulf Coast economy) has been about 6 billion dollars. Who’s really for saving jobs here – BP and the corrupt crony culture that Oynes represented or environmentalists.
How to Find Cheaper College Textbooks
Renting…
On Campus Some universities have started programs that allow students to rent their textbooks. Rent-A-Text, for instance, has teamed with 800 college bookstores. It says renting books for the semester costs about half the purchase price, while online purchases can be picked up in your college bookstore. (Note to highlighting fanatics: you won’t be penalized, as long as your markings are not “excessive.”)
Online But you’ll also want to find out how those prices compare with renting online. Chegg.com has a reputation for being the Netflix of book rental companies — its used books are known for arriving in a bright orange box, and, more important, in good condition. Shipping starts at $3.99, and return shipping is free.
There are a number of other online companies that rent books, including BookRenter.com and CampusBookRentals.com, which provide free shipping both ways. ECampus.com, meanwhile, rents, sells and buys back textbooks. Our colleague’s article also suggests Textbookrentals.com and Collegebookrenter.com.
There are some other good and not so good tips at the link. I’m not a big fans of reading classic texts on-line for other than refreshing my memory about a short passage. Used copies of classics like Moby Dick or Wuthering Heights are very cheap and you can dog ear them, and highlight until your heart’s content. If you’re comfortable with electronic texts than Kindle is great. I’m not sure how deep the selection is for iPads, but that is another route to take.
Project Gutenberg has a huge selection of classic works available in plain text downloads.
U.S. dietary supplements often contaminated: report
The organization pointed to 12 supplement ingredients in particular that it said could be dangerous: aconite, bitter orange, chaparral, colloidal silver, coltsfoot, comfrey, country mallow, germanium, greater celandine, kava, lobelia, and yohimbe.
Potential dangers include liver and kidney damage, heart rhythm disorders and unhealthy blood pressure levels, it said.
tangledwing 