Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water?
—Nick Traeden
Yes! We can do anything we want. We shouldn't do this, though, because it would be gross.
Death Valley is an endorheic basin[1]"Big hole" in California. The floor of the valley is about 80 meters below sea level. It contains the lowest point on land in North America[2]Excluding artificial points like mines. and is the hottest place on Earth.[3]If you're about to say "Wait, what about Liby—," then don't worry, I'm with you. Just hang on and read a few more words ahead!
Now, if you're the sort of person who's into world records, you might have heard that the hottest place on Earth was Al Azizia, Libya. Al Azizia recorded a temperature of 58.0°C (136.4°F) in 1922, a mark Death Valley has never come close to. So what gives?
It turns out Al Azizia has recently been stripped of its record. In 2010, an exhaustive—and definitely a little obsessive—investigation led by Christopher C. Burt convinced the World Meteorological Organization that the Libyan measurement was probably a mistake. This left Death Valley with the record of 56.7°C (134°F), set in 1913. Case closed!
Except it's not quite settled. Burt has raised questions about the 1913 record as well, and has gone so far as to catalog a number of historical extremes along with a credibility score for each. The "real" record is probably 53.9°C (129°F). This temperature has been recorded four times, in 1960, 1998, 2005, and 2007—every time in Death Valley.
These records were recorded with modern instruments and are considered reliable. They also make sense from a theoretical point of view. Geographers have calculated[4]This Army Corps of Engineers publication cites a couple of sources for this, including a 1963 paper by G. Hoffman. Unfortunately, that paper is in German, which I can't read, so I've just decided to trust that the Army Corps of Engineers writers Dr. Paul F. Krause and Kathleen L. Flood aren't pulling a fast one on me. that the highest possible temperature in ideal spots (in desert basins like Death Valley) during the 20th century is 55°-56°C, so 54°C sounds like a reasonable world record.
Now, back to Nick's question.[5]This is nowhere NEAR the record for "most boring digression into world record trivia." That record was recently challenged by IBM computer capable of producing millions of boring pieces of trivia per second, but the machine narrowly lost to reigning human champion Ken Jennings.
Since Death Valley is below sea level, we could, as Nick suggests, flood it with seawater. It would take a lot of digging, since there's a lot of Earth in the way. The lowest route to Death Valley is probably by traveling up the Colorado River watershed, along the Arizona border past Quartzsite,[6]Trivia: If you want to reach Quartzsite, Arizona from my school, Christopher Newport University, you just step out onto Warwick Blvd (Rt. 60) and turn left. That's it—Route 60 runs across the country, from the CNU campus in Virginia to I-10 just outside Quartzsite. then northwest[7]Possibly following one of the routes shown on page G34 in this report. past Zzyzx, which is a real place.
If you did all that digging, you could create a channel from the Gulf of California to Death Valley, and water would flow in. We can use this handy stream-flow calculator to figure out how wide we'd need to make the channel. A channel 20 meters deep and 100 meters wide should be able to fill it in a few months. A really wide channel—like the kind carved by glacial floods—could fill it in hours.
We know it's possible to create this kind of inland sea because we've done it before—by accident. In 1905, irrigation engineers working on the Colorado River made some mistakes. During a flood, the entire Colorado river broke through into the Alamo Canal and flowed directly into the Salton basin to the north. By the time they repaired the canal, two years later, the Salton basin had become the Salton Sea—one of the larger human-caused changes to the world map.
The Salton Sea is fed mainly by agricultural runoff, so it's become saline[8]"Salty" and hypereutrophic.[9]"Gross" Large numbers of dead fish, combined with algal decay and unusual chemistry, have created a smell that the US Geological Survey describes as "objectionable," "noxious," "unique," and "pervasive." The sea is a birdwatching hot spot, but also the site of a lot of mass bird die-offs, so kind of a mixed bag if you're into birds. In recent years, the water has been evaporating quickly, leaving behind dried toxic residue which is swept up into dust storms. Work to clean up and rehabilitate the region is ongoing.
All in all, the Salton Sea is a mess—and Nick wants to make another one.
Nick's Death Valley project would start off connected to the ocean, but without a source of flowing water at the Death Valley end,[10](It's a desert.) the channel would gradually silt up. The link to the ocean would eventually be broken, the sea would start to evaporate, the water would become saline, algae would bloom, and eventually the US Geological Survey would start complaining about the smell.
There would be one more consequence to all this. Thanks to the flood of cold ocean water burying the whole region, Death Valley would stop setting temperature records, and someone else would eventually claim to have broken their 129°F record. The Death Valley records would have to be compared to the newer candidates, which would probably use slightly different methods ... and that means one thing:
There comes times in every cookbook author’s life that they have a very specific kind of gift to bestow on unsuspecting others — tasty, deeply loved dishes that were dismissed/ejected/left homeless in the editorial process because they didn’t make the cut. The reasons may be myriad; the ingredient, format or flavor felt redundant with another dish or, as happened here, something else about it gnawed at me until I decided it was best to move on without it.
Third party candidates want to be serious contenders, so John Oliver considers them seriously as potential presidents.
Connect with Last Week Tonight online... Subscribe to the Last Week Tonight YouTube channel for more almost news as it almost happens: www.youtube.com/user/LastWeekTonight
I’m sure that Primoz Mlakar didn’t mean to minimize your childhood…but he totally did. He has built a series of microscale versions of the earliest Space theme sets. Each build is recognizable, and packed full of nostalgia.
Let’s take a look at some of these classic Space sets, starting with the iconic 928 Galaxy Explorer:
483 (920) Alpha-1 Rocket Base (with bonus 885 Space Scooter and 442 Space Shuttle)
The United Nations has just announced that Wonder Woman will be named an honorary ambassador as a “women’s champion.” Did you hear that, fellow nerdy comic-book-loving feminists? Rejoice, for the days of women’s subjugation will soon be at an end. Our savior is here!
Don’t get me wrong–this wouldn’t be the first time I thought the UN missed the mark on an ambassador. After all, the Honorary Ambassador for the Decade of Literacy is Laura Bush, a woman who couldn’t even teach her own husband to read. But Wonder Woman pisses me off like nothing else, for a few reasons:
SHE IS FICTIONAL. There are actual, living, breathing women who can “promote messages about women’s empowerment and gender-based violence.”
She is a product. I know, this is tough to hear. You’ve bonded with this strong, beautiful female character. You cheered when she came out of the closet. You can’t wait to see what she does next. But you also bought her comic books, and her Underoos, and her officially licensed t-shirts and purses and earrings and action figures. And in a few months, you’ll buy tickets to her new movie. Yes, Wonder Woman is a beloved character of literature, but Wonder Woman is also a product that is very carefully marketed and sold to you. Yes, it feels good to be able to support a character that seems to line up with your own feminist ideals, but your support is a transaction that DC Comics has noted in a spreadsheet and used to make decisions on how they can extract more money from you and your friends to improve their bottom line.
Don’t believe me? Go ahead and read to the end of the BBC article I linked above. Pay attention to this bit:
The campaign is being sponsored by Warner Bros and DC Entertainment
And don’t forget this:
There is also an upcoming Wonder Woman film starring Gal Gadot of Batman v Superman fame, due out in the UK next year.
This is known as public relations. Someone in the marketing department at DC or WB came up with this way to make you buy more movie tickets, and they probably got a bonus for it. Those billion dollar corporations then either gave some money to the UN (great!) or just allowed them use of the Wonder Woman license (eh) in exchange for an absolutely tremendous amount of publicity, as all the feminist nerds dutifully rush to support the venture.
I fully admit that I often buy things I don’t need just because they reinforce my philosophies. I’d rather reward faceless corporations for being progressive than for being regressive. At the same time, I get sick of feminism being bought by conglomerates, repackaged, and sold back to me. Wonder Woman is great, but she’s not going to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” as the UN has laid out in their 17 goals to transform the world. That takes more than a corporate sponsorship from companies that continue to focus on telling men’s stories while shoving scantily clad women into refrigerators. That trope, of course, was popularized by Gail Simone, the amazing comic writer who writes Wonder Woman, amongst other titles. She’s great, and she’d be a great choice of someone to work with the UN on empowering girls through comic books. Even more than that, she’s a real human being who can actually accomplish things, unlike Wonder Woman, who is a fictional character who can only say and do whatever the man or woman writing her allows her to say and do.
An even better idea than nominating an actual living human being to the role of Women’s Ambassador might be for the United Nations to not give 9 out of 10 senior positions to men, or to just once in its entire history nominate a female Secretary-General. Those would be actual steps toward gender equality, and not empty PR stunts that are more capable of selling movie tickets than empowering anyone.
people who complain about dinosaurs “not being scary anymore” because its been discovered they have feathers and are closely related to/ancestors of birds are so bizarre like
its not about how scary they are, they are/were real life animals and what matters is learning more about them, not how well they fit into your science fiction horror film lol
can you imagine a 13 foot chicken running at you with full intent to eat you??? thats fucking terrifying holy shit
peacocks are synonymous with vain, frivolous beauty and they will attack cars. they will attack you while you try to get to your car. they’re like six feet of useless feathers and they will destroy you. imagine if they were carnivorous and had functional spurs.
a t-rex could look like a gay disco ball and i guarantee that you would fucking book it if it had a problem with you
listen
listen
have you ever met a swan
if anything the birdier they get the scarier they are
Australia literally fought a war against giant birds AND FUCKING LOST
“Oh man, I can’t deal with birds ‘cause they’re dinosaurs and sometimes it’s like they get this glint in their eyes and they remember.”
“Have you ever interacted with a goose? ‘Cause those things are dicks.”
If chickens were still the size of a T-Rex we’d all be dead. No question.
Feathered creatures that give some serious lie to the idea that feathered dinosaurs ain’t scary:
This is a bearded vulture, or lammergeier. It’s four feet long and has a nine foot wingspan and it eats bones.
This is a shoebill stork. It dropped the duck without biting down shortly after the picture was taken, but if it had decided not to-
… it could have been the end of the road for that duck.
This is the last thing a fish sees before a macaroni penguin eats it.
This is a secretary bird in the act of demonstrating to Lord Voldemort that he came to the wrong neighborhood, ese.
This is a goose.
This is a vulture.
This is a cassowary on the attack.
Be glad I couldn’t find the actual gif of a pelican swallowing a fish, because it’s freakin’ Lovecraftian in its HEADS SHOULD NOT BEND THAT WAY factor. You’ll have to settle for the idea of a feathered dinosaur suddenly going GLORP and devouring its victims whole just like this lady here.
Steven Spielberg didn’t create these. These are the feet of an emu.
And this is what happens when a swan (this one is named Asboy; his father was Mr. Asbo, the first swan in the UK to get named after an anti-social behavior order in ‘honor’ of his tendency to attack boaters) decides it doesn’t like you. I should probably note that this one attacked a cow.
Respect the feathered dinosaur, yo.
Terrifying. The last two illustrate why you did not fuck around with the Children of Lir.
“For years, Republicans managed an exceptional acrobatic act: to mobilize right-wing populist anger and white working-class voters behind a program whose benefits flowed to the economic elites….The assumption was always that the base would get the noise and the elites would get the policy. Now the noise is deafening, a dangerous and profoundly flawed man leads the party, and its candidates cannot move one way or the other without falling off the wire. No one expected an implosion this spectacular.”
Ashley from Pinner said that he was willing to take a “short-term” hit on his business in order to free Britain from the bureaucratic red tape of the EU.
James asked for just one European law that he was excited to repeal. And Ashley couldn’t name a single one.
Eventually, Ashley laughed as he said: “The shape of your bananas.”
But James responded: “It’s not funny, is it? The pound is at the lowest it’s been since 1985, you just said “any law” and I’m just asking you to name one.
“We both know that bananas was a lie made up by Boris Johnson. Remind me which side he was on during the Leave campaign.
“What is the law? You know you were going to take short-term economic damage, you knew that all your customers would do as a newly-formed electrician company. Every single customer in the country is going to be potentially worse off than they were before the vote.
“So I’m just wondering what those laws are that you won’t have to obey any more that made you vote for this short-term economic hit.
“Can you name one?”
Ashley’s response: “I wouldn’t be able to, no.”
This is exactly what happens when the Mail, Express, Sun go on about “meddling Brussels” and “EU bureacracy” time and time again. Repeat the soundbites, and people will believe them as truth. But ask them to tell you what it means and they haven’t got a fucking clue. And the gullibility and stupidity of these people are exactly why we’re going to be utterly fucked.
Life expectancy on the vertical axis vs. inflation-adjusted health expenditures on the horizontal axis, over a forty-year time period, in 24 countries.
There are of course a huge number of factors that influence longevity other than health-care expenditures (genetics, lifestyle, diet), and longevity is not a priori the best measure of quality of life. And one can probably quibble over methodology. But anyone who has personally experienced the U.S. health-care system will have a gut feeling that the data shown are what one would expect.
Via the Enough Trump Spam subreddit, where the image credit was attributed to Imgur user, FayeKalius. The image may be a composite; if the hand positions have been Photoshopped, I'll take the post down, but a Google Image search shows other similar photos.
Addendum: a tip of the blogging hat to reader The First for locating other images from the second debate to confirm that the arm positions are not Photoshopped. Example here.
There comes times in every cookbook author’s life that they have a very specific kind of gift to bestow on unsuspecting others — tasty, deeply loved dishes that were dismissed/ejected/left homeless in the editorial process because they didn’t make the cut. The reasons may be myriad; the ingredient, format or flavor felt redundant with another dish or, as happened here, something else about it gnawed at me until I decided it was best to move on without it.
