Wildfire!

Debi's a member of Emergency Animal Rescue, and this evening she got a call from the supervisor. It seems there was a fire, a big one, and not that far from our house (although the supervisor only knew generally where it was. We were asked to make a run out to the area and check it out.

So off we went, in a big hurry because the supervisor's information was quite alarming. After we drove out of our valley, we expected to be able to see the smoke plume (and if it was really a big fire, we would have). But there was no plume anywhere in sight. We drove to within about 2 miles of the fire before we saw any sign of it at all, and even then all we could see was a layer (trapped by a thermocline, most likely) of hazy brown smoke. It didn't look like an active or large fire.

In Deerhorn Valley there's a fire station, and we stopped there to get a little information from a volunteer. He told us exactly where the fire was, and told us that he believed it was under control. The location he gave us was only about three miles down the road, so we went off to see for ourselves.

Our route took us from Honey Springs Road to Deerhorn Valley Road, then three miles or so to Manzanitas Road. At that intersection we could actually see where the fire had burned, right next to a large electrical substation. There was a tanker plane circling overhead, a firefighting helicopter hovering over the burned area, at least 25 or 30 fire crew working on the ground, and several pieces of equipment (pumpers, dozers, etc.) parked around the area. Nobody had been evacuated, and the prevailing wind would have taken the fire over uninhabited areas toward Barrett Lake. From what we could see the fire was out and under control.

Whew!

After we got home, I got out my maps and did some measuring. That fire was only 6.5 miles from our home as the crow flies, though it was over 25 miles by the very indirect roads. That's close enough to be a major concern to us, had the conditions been hot, dry, and windy (in the wrong direction). As it was, we really weren't in any danger at all.

One thing that was very nice to see: firefighters were all over this fire, and apparently very quickly. By eyeball, I'd guess there was 10 to 15 acres burned; that goes very quickly in the chapparal. Those firefighters got very quickly to an area far more remote than our home. That's a nice feeling...

APOD

APOD brings us...

What has this supernova left behind? As little as 2,000 years ago, light from a massive stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Clouds (LMC) first reached planet Earth. The LMC is a close galactic neighbor of our Milky Way Galaxy and the rampaging explosion front is now seen moving out - destroying or displacing ambient gas clouds while leaving behind relatively dense knots of gas and dust. What remains is one of the largest supernova remnants in the LMC: N63A. Many of the surviving dense knots have been themselves compressed and may further contract to form new stars. Some of the resulting stars may then explode in a supernova, continuing the cycle. Pictured above is a close-up of one of the largest remaining knots of dust and gas in N63A taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. N63A spans over 25 light years and lies about 150,000 light years away toward the southern constellation of Dorado.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Rhea

Cassini brings us another spectacular image from the Saturn system:

Saturn's brightly sunlit moon Rhea commands the foreground in this image from Cassini. The planet's splendid rings are discernible in the background. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

The spacecraft was just above the ringplane when it acquired this image, and thus captured the darkened appearance of the dense B ring when viewed with sunlight filtered through the rings. From this perspective, bright areas in the rings are regions of low density, containing very small particles that effectively scatter light toward Cassini.

North on Rhea is up and rotated about 25 degrees to the left. This view shows principally the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Rhea. The right side of Rhea is overexposed.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 540,000 kilometers (340,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 110 degrees. The image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage.

Click on the image for a larger view.

Quote for the day

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

   Hannah More

Yon reports

Michael Yon has filed another report from Northern Iraq. An excerpt:

Iraq's army accordioned in defeat, and the first Coalition folded most of their tents and sailed home, leaving the Kurds to fend for themselves. Saddam had revenge on his breath when he turned his attention north and unsheathed his fury against the Kurds. Initially a slaughter of wholesale proportions, somehow, still the Kurds kept fighting. They hung on until the US gave military support and maintained the no-fly zone overhead. In 1993, Mr. Qatou was able to return to the rubble that had once been Yezdinar.

An Iraqi. A Kurd. A Yezidi. A village Headman. Whatever the label, more than forty years after his birth, this man came home. Only now, after the latest war, does Mr. Qatou finally have confidence in the peace, after more than a half century of life lived under orders or under sentence.

This seemed like the moment to ask the question, "What do you think of the United States?"

"We cry when America loses one soldier. We pray for the soldiers every night."

Don't miss this latest in Michael's excellent series of postings...

APOD

APOD brings us...

Most bright stars in our Milky Way Galaxy reside in a disk. Since our Sun also resides in this disk, these stars appear to us as a diffuse band that circles the sky. The above panorama of a northern band of the Milky Way's disk covers 90 degrees and is a digitally created mosaic of several independent exposures. Scrolling right will display the rest of this spectacular picture. Visible are many bright stars, dark dust lanes, red emission nebulae, blue reflection nebulae, and clusters of stars. In addition to all this matter that we can see, astronomers suspect there exists even more dark matter that we cannot see.

This photo is even more beautiful than the usual fare from APOD — you don't want to miss it! Click on the picture for a larger view.

Kidney story

Today's San Diego Union-Tribune has a heart-warming story about a 74 year old mother receiving a kidney from her 44 year old son:

Three months later, his mother needed a kidney. While on a trip to Oshkosh, Wis., she noticed her ankles were swollen. Within a few months, her kidneys failed. She began going to dialysis treatments three times a week. The procedures exhausted her. Her health deteriorated quickly. She had a stroke and needed surgery to remove her diseased kidneys before a transplant could be considered.

The average wait for a kidney from the transplant donation list in San Diego County is two to five years, said Landes' transplant surgeon, Dr. Evan Vapnek.

Mary Lou Landes, 74, received her son's kidney May 19, 2004. The next day, he said, "she looked like she had 10 years ago. I hadn't realized how ashen she had become, and now her eye had a sparkle in it again.""Younger, healthier people can stand dialysis for many, many years, but older people don't do well," Vapnek said. "She would not have been able to wait long enough to get a kidney off the list."

A donation from a living family member wouldn't necessarily save her. She was older than the typical recipient and her health was poor. During a family dinner at an Italian restaurant in Fallbrook, Landes and his brother and sister all said they were willing to give their mother a kidney. They decided, though, that because of his job flexibility, Landes would be the best choice.

That's quite a gift mom got!

Azerbaijanis for freedom

Via Gateway Pundit, an article and photos about Azerbaijanis demonstrating for freedom:

Thousands of opposition protesters chanted "Freedom!" and carried pictures of President Bush as they marched across Azerbaijan's capital Saturday, urging the government of this U.S. ally to step down and allow free parliamentary elections this year.

The massive rally in Baku was the largest opposition demonstration in the former Soviet republic since October 2003, when one person died and nearly 200 were injured in clashes between police and demonstrators protesting vote-rigging in the presidential election.

Tensions have been building steadily in this oil-rich Caspian Sea nation in the run-up to parliamentary elections set for November, leading some observers to predict that Azerbaijan could see a massive uprising similar to those that toppled unpopular regimes in other ex-Soviet nations of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan during the past 18 months.

The Anchoress and I have the same reaction: isn't it just interesting as all get out that the protesters are holding up pictures of George W. Bush on their posters?

Think about it: in the context of today, if you're living under the bootheel of a repressive government and you work up the courage to openly demonstrate, who's your message going to be aimed at? You only have one agenda — you want help in freeing the people of your country (along with yourself, of course). So you aim your message at the one person or country that you believe will be most effective in helping you. The people of Azerbaijan apparently understand that that means George W. Bush and the United States. Not Putin and Russia, but also not...Chirac and France, Schroeder and Germany, and so on. No, you don't look to their ilk for help in freeing yourself. You look to the United States and its leader.

These pictures are good evidence that the people who really matter have figured out how the world really works. Despite the best efforts of the MSM to "educate" them.

Quote for the day

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.

   Henri Poincaré

Discipline

Without discipline an Army would just be a bunch of guys wearing the same color clothing.

So begins a very interesting post by an unusually articulate soldier in Iraq. The post is about an Iraqi unit demonstrating discipline. Another excerpt:

I didn’t think back to that clipped broadcast until I returned to Iraq. Here in the throbbing heart of Baghdad, swimming in a sea of shimmering heat - that news segment seems almost disingenuous. I’m sure that yesterday, half a world away that same newscaster spent 10 or 15 seconds covering the latest insurgent ambush before moving onto the local weather forecast. And I’m equally certain that someone watched that broadcast and grew a little more despondent about the situation here in Iraq. But what was lost in that syrupy smooth slice of news was a story that shows just how much Iraq has changed, and about how disciplined some Iraqi Army units have become in a few short months.

I heard the story this morning from one of our NCOs who works hand in hand with the Iraqi Army unit that was ambushed. After conducting operations outside of our sector the IA unit was returning in the shadowy silence of early morning. The unit was moving in a snaking column, a long sinuous file that took them right into the waiting ambush. I can imagine the silence of that morning, the only sound echoing off the urban canyon the grumbling clamor of Bongo trucks and Iraqi vehicles making their way down the road. And then the silence was broken, and the sky was aflame with a storm of machine gun fire. The insurgents had set their ambush in the middle of a quiet residential area an arrangement that guaranteed that any returning fire would careen through a densely populated neighborhood and compound the tragedy by killing innocent civilians sleeping in their beds. The Iraqi unit took the worst the insurgents had to throw at them, making the wrenching decision to limit their return fire to protect the civilians the insurgents were using as unwitting shields.

Frank Burns is the soldier's name, writing in his blog "365 and a Wakeup". Don't miss the rest of this post, or his other writings. I've added him to my blogroll...

Quote for the day

Logic will get you from A to B, Imagination will take you everywhere.

   Albert Einstein

Nazi squirrel?

I never dreamed that slowly cruising on my motorcycle through a residential neighborhood could be so incredibly dangerous. Little did I suspect!

I was on Brice Street, a very nice neighborhood with perfect lawns and slow traffic. As I passed an oncoming car, a brown furry missile shot out from under it and tumbled to a stop immediately in front of me. It was a squirrel, and must have been trying to run across the road when it encountered the car. I really was not going very fast, but there was no time to brake or avoid it — it was that close. I hate to run over animals, and I really hate it on a motorcycle, but a squirrel should have posed no real danger to me. I barely had time to brace for the impact.

Animal lovers, never fear. Squirrels, I discovered, can take care of themselves! Inches before impact, the squirrel flipped to his feet. He was standing on his hind legs and facing my oncoming Harley with steadfast resolve in his beady little eyes. His mouth opened, and at the last possible second, he screamed and leapt!

I am pretty sure the scream was squirrel for, "Bonzai!" or maybe, "Die, you gravy-sucking, heathen scum!"

The leap was nothing short of spectacular... He shot straight up, flew over my windshield, and impacted me squarely in the chest. Then, instantly, he set upon me. If I had not known better, I would have sworn he brought 20 of his little buddies along for the attack. Snarling, hissing, and tearing at my clothes, he was a frenzy of activity. As I was dressed only in a light T-shirt, summer riding gloves, and jeans, this was a bit of a cause for concern. The furry little tornado was doing some damage!

Picture a large man on a huge black-and-chrome cruiser, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and leather gloves, puttering at maybe 25 mph down a quiet residential street, in the fight of his life with a squirrel...and losing!

I grabbed for him with my left hand. After a few misses, I finally managed to snag his tail. With all my strength, I flung the evil rodent off to the left of the bike, almost running into the right curb as I recoiled from the throw. That should have done it. The matter should have ended right there... It really should have.

The squirrel could have sailed into one of the pristinely-kept yards and gone on about his business, and I could have headed on home. No one would have been the wiser — but this was no ordinary squirrel. This was not even an ordinary, angry squirrel. This was an EVIL MUTANT ATTACK SQUIRREL OF DEATH!

Somehow he caught my gloved finger with one of his little hands and, with the force of the throw, swung around and with a resounding thump and an amazing impact, landed squarely on my BACK, and resumed his rather antisocial and extremely distracting activities. He also managed to take my left glove with him! The situation was not improved...not improved at all.

His attacks were continuing, and now I could not reach him. I was startled, to say the least. The combination of the force of the throw, only having one hand (the throttle hand) on the handlebars, and my jerking ba! ck, unfortunately, put a healthy twist through my right hand and into the throttle.

A healthy twist on the throttle of a Harley can only have one result — torque. This is what the Harley is made for, and she is very, very good at it. The engine roared and the front wheel left the pavement. The squirrel screamed in anger. The Big Harley screamed in ecstasy. I screamed in...well...I just plain screamed.

Now picture a large man on a huge black-and-chrome cruiser, dressed in jeans, a slightly-squirrel-torn t-shirt, wearing only one leather glove, and roaring at maybe 50 mph and rapidly accelerating down a quiet residential street on one wheel, with a demonic squirrel of death on his back. The man and the squirrel are both screaming bloody murder.

With the sudden acceleration I was forced to put my other hand back on the handlebars and try to get control of the bike. This was leaving the mutant squirrel to his own devices, but I really did not want to crash into somebody's tree, house, or parked car. Also, I had not yet figured out how to release the throttle...my brain was simply overloaded.

I did manage to mash the back brake, but it had little effect against the massive power of the big cruiser. Also, about this time the squirrel decided that I was not paying sufficient attention to this very serious battle (maybe he was an evil mutant NAZI attack squirrel of death), and he came around my neck and got INSIDE my full-face helmet with me. As the faceplate closed part way, he began hissing in my face. I am quite sure my screaming changed intensity. It had little effect on the squirrel, however. The RPMs on the Dragon maxed out (since I was not bothering with shifting at the moment), so her front end started to drop.

Now picture a large man on a huge black-and-chrome cruiser, dressed in jeans, a very raggedly-torn and blood-stained T-shirt, wearing only one leather glove, roaring at probably 80 mph, still on one wheel, with a large puffy squirrel's tail sticking out of the mostly-closed full-face helmet. By now the screams are probably getting a little hoarse.

Finally I got the upper hand...I managed to grab his tail again, pulled him out of my helmet, and slung him to the left as hard as I could. This time it worked...sort-of. Spectacularly sort-of — so to speak.

Picture a new scene. You are a cop. You and your partner have pulled off on a quiet residential street and parked with your windows down to do some paperwork. Suddenly a large man on a huge black-and-chrome cruiser, dressed in jeans, a torn, blood-stained T-shirt flapping in the breeze, wearing only one leather glove, moving at probably 80 mph on one wheel, and screaming bloody murder roars by, and with all his strength throws a live-squirrel-grenade directly into your police car. I heard screams... They weren't mine.

I managed to get the big motorcycle under control and dropped the front wheel to the ground. I then used maximum braking and skidded to a stop in a cloud of tire smoke at the stop sign of a busy cross street. I would have returned to 'fess up (and to get my glove back)... I really would have. Really... Except for two things.

First, the cops did not seem interested or the slightest bit concerned about me at the moment. When I looked back, the doors on both sides of the patrol car were flung wide open. The cop from the passenger side was on his back, doing a crab walk into somebody's front yard, quickly moving away from the car. The cop who had been in the driver's seat was standing in the street, aiming a riot shotgun at his own police car. So, the cops were not interested in me. They often insist to "let the professionals handle it" anyway.

That was one thing. The other? Well, I could clearly see shredded and pieces of foam and upholstery flying from the back seat. I could also swear I saw that squirrel in the back window, shaking his little fist at me. That was one dangerous squirrel...and now he had a patrol car. Granted, it was a somewhat-shredded patrol car, but it was all his.

I took a deep breath, flipped on my turn-signal, made a gentle right turn off of Brice Street, and sedately left the neighborhood. I decided it was best to just buy myself a new pair of gloves...and a whole lot of Band-Aids!

APOD

APOD brings us...

Eta Carinae, one of the most massive and unstable stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, has a profound affect on its environment. Found in the the South Pillar region of the Carina Nebula, these fantastic pillars of glowing dust and gas with embedded newborn stars were sculpted by the intense wind and radiation from Eta Carinae and other massive stars. Glowing brightly in planet Earth's southern sky, the expansive Eta Carinae Nebula is a mere 10,000 light-years distant. Still, this remarkable cosmic vista is largely obscured by nebular dust and only revealed here in penetrating infrared light by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Eta Carinae itself is off the top left of the false-color image, with the bright-tipped dust pillars pointing suggestively toward the massive star's position. The Spitzer image spans almost 200 light-years at the distance of Eta Carinae.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Boiling water

Did you ever wonder what would happen if you threw a pot of boiling water into the air in Antarctica while it was -50C?

Well, I never wondered that, either. But that's what the picture at right is all about — the folks at Halley station in Antarctica, with apparently way too much time on their hands, are having a little fun with the extremely cold temperatures.

Don't miss their video!

Dohuk

I'd never heard of Dohuk before, but I know it now through a wonderfully uplifting post by Michael Yon. It's a town in northern Iraq, in the Kurdish section — and it's thriving. The people are safe in their everyday lives, the markets are full of goods, and the economy is in good shape (at least, by the evidence of Yon's eyes). An excerpt:

The Army left me behind and I stayed alone. I walked for miles and miles.

Through the marketplace, up and down the streets.

There were shoeshine boys, flower shops and computer stores. The computer stores in little Dohuk are much better stocked than those Milano, Italy. This is fact.

I walked into a store called Zanest Computer & Electronics, at 14th Anthar Street, and there I sat with Mr. Abdul Shukry, and asked him about business. Mr. Shukry said business is good, and that the US Army had come a few days earlier and purchased sixty computers and sixty UPS's and gave them all to Dohuk University.

"That's great," I said, "But how are sales if you do not include the Army business?""Still is good," he said, "Since the war has ended, all is good.""Are the people happy?" I asked.Mr. Shukry paused for a moment, as if it were the simplest question he'd been asked in months, "Of course they are happy, " he said."Are you Muslim?" I asked."Yes," he said."Sunni, yes?""Yes, Sunni. Most Kurds are Sunni.""Many people think the Sunnis all make war.""Not us. We are Kurds."

We talked on, exchanging answers to questions like, "What do you think of the police?" "What do you think of the U.S.?" "What do you think of the U.K.?" "Of Germany, of France?" "What do you think of Yezidi people?" "What is on your mind?"

You don't want to miss this post; go read it before you forget to. And don't miss the link to Dohuk University in his post!

Egyptian protests

At Rantings of a Sandmonkey, there's an interesting post (with photos) about the recent "Black Wednesday" protest in Egypt. Hosni Mubarak has committed publicly to holding free elections. These elections, were they truly free, would likely throw Mubarak out of office. So what's really happening, according to nearly all information I've been reading on the subject, is that Mubarak is mouthing "free elections" but using every tool at his disposal to suppress anything even remotely resembling an opposition. And because Mubarak is actually a dictator, those tools are numerous and high-powered. An excerpt from Sandmonkey:

The great country can set the example, no problem. It's Mubarak that has to set it really by punishing the kind of behaviour that took place the day of the referendum, and maybe, just maybe, follow some standards for a far election.

Oh look, Bush has some for you in case you can't come up with some on your own:

"People ought to be allowed to vote without being intimidated, people ought to be allowed to be on TV, and if the government owns the TV, they need to allow the opposition on TV, people ought to be allowed to carry signs and express their pleasure or displeasure. People ought to have very vote count," he said.

See Hosny? It's not that hard is it? No? Ok, then why don't you stop being a douche bag and let us have our free fu**in elections? God knows you will probably win any way with the current state of the opposition, so why don't you just give the people a real right to chose for once? It may forgive some of the shit you've put us through those past 24 years.

Blogs are one of the few things that Mubarak and his ilk have very little means to control. I do not know how widely read the Egyptian blogs are, but I know they are quite numerous. Relatively few are in English, of course, and Sandmonkey is one of them — albeit an unusually pro-American, pro-Western example.

As readers of this blog know, I subscribe to the blogospheric theory that once the protest babes show up, the opposing side is in big trouble. So the best news of all (from Sandmonkey's post) is that the protest babes have showed up supporting the Egyptian opposition. Telegram to Mubarak: it's all over but the shouting. You might as well start planning your retirement...elsewhere.

Deep Throat

By now you've probably heard the "sensational" news about the Watergate source code-named "Deep Throat" finally being revealed, as the then number two man at the FBI, former Director W. Mark Felt. The MSM is all over this story, trying as hard as they can to create an instant hero in Mr. Felt, and in reliving what must be the most glorious days in living memory for the MSM.

As many have pointed out, there are good reasons to wonder about Felt's motives — and even better reasons to question his actions, whatever his motives were. Any law enforcement office with knowledge of a crime has an obligation to report that crime — not to a newspaper reporter as a secret source, but through ordinary law enforcement channels. Even if one were to buy the argument (that some have made) that Felt had good reason to be suspicious of his superiors, then there were still other legitimate channels he could have pursued. For instance, he could have spilled his guts to any ranking Democrat — the political process would have ensured that Watergate was fully exposed, just as it was after the press reported it. So why did Felt take this route? Almost certainly for the most pedestrian of reasons: it was the safest thing for him to do personally. Not hero stuff in my book.

From the always-informative Captain's Galley, here's another interesting and related tidbit. It seems that this story (about Felt being Deep Throat) has been being shopped for several years, by his family members who are interested in making some money from the story. And it's been turned down at least a couple of times by enterprising MSM journalists who did not believe it was ethical to pay for a story, or who couldn't get reliable enough information to pursue a book deal. My current sense of journalistic ethics in the MSM is such that I have to think that either this story is incredibly rotten, or that the journalists involved are unusually principled. An excerpt from the Captain's Galley story:

Even Felt himself claimed during several sections of the taped interviews that Woodward made up the source Deep Throat.

"I just thought he was making it up," the then 90-year-old Felt told my partner. ...

The problem with Felt is that three summers before, he had suffered a stroke and briefly was sent to recuperate in a convalescent home. ... On Nov. 8, 2003, Felt told my writing partner when asked if he wanted to come forward: "You can tell them that I am Deep — that I was Deep Throat. The only thing is that Deep Throat is a little different than you probably have in mind. Deep Throat was not anybody real inside that was furnishing information. It was somebody confirming information."

Then Felt described his motive for coming clean then: "I guess I want some money for my family."

Earlier in that same interview, Felt said he didn't remember anything about Deep Throat, even saying at one point: "Well, I wasn't a Deep Throat."

Of Woodward, he said: "I don't think I ever provided information to him."

Later, Felt said: "I thought Deep Throat was another source entirely."

Don't miss the rest of the posting; it's fascinating stuff...

Quote for the day

The minute you read something you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer.

   William Penn Adair Rogers

APOD

APOD brings us...

Why caused this great white spot on the surface of Saturn's moon Rhea? The spot was first noticed last year by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Cassini's flyby of Rhea in April imaged in the spot in great detail. Astronomers hypothesize that the light-colored spot is the result of a relatively recent impact on the surface of the icy moon. The impact that likely created the crater also splashed light-colored material from the interior onto the darker surface. Rhea spans 1,500 kilometers across and is the second largest moon of Saturn after Titan. Rhea sports several other light colored surface features that are, as yet, not well understood.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Quote for the day

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.

   William F. Buckley