Natura Park

I spent last week at Natura Park in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. It was an ok week. I had fun taking pictures, but I was a lazy photographer for all but a few moments of the trip. Going down, I had enough CF cards to take almost 3000 pictures. I was worried that it might not be enough. I took 714 pictures.

The Green Herons were my favorite subjects. There were two juvenile males and one older female on the grounds. I didn’t get a good picture of the female. she only came out at night, and perched deep in the mangrove trees. The two males weren’t so shy. they used the guests as dupes in their fishing.

As with most Punta Cana resorts, leftover bread is put into boxes around the resort. Guests can throw pieces of bread to the fish in ponds. These two little guys would take the bread back to the shoreline and fish with it. They’d drop a piece in the water and wait for an unsuspecting fish to come get it. No bites? Pick up the bread and move to a new spot. brilliant critter.

Natura Park Photo Set

Whats for Lunch

I got these lunch bags for Christmas in 6th grade. After a week of merciless mocking, I left the rest in a drawer. Strange that I should be searching through that very drawer today. I’m going to the Dominican for a while.  I think lunches will be much better this year.  I hope your’s are, too.

Come Into my Web

 This lady set up camp next to a drafty window in my garage last summer.  It’s winter now, but I’d like to have a new place ready for her this spring.  there are some commercial web frames out there.  They’re mostly aimed at kids, but I’ve picked up a few pointers.  This one looks like a simple picture frame.  At first, I thought that the flat corner on the right was just a placard for their logo.  It’s a spider retreat, though.  That’s a great idea.  I’m going to make several frames in different sizes.  I’m going to make the retreat out of heavy screen, though.  that way, I’ll have more light when I’m taking pictures in that little pocket.

 

The Peony in my back yard seems to attract a cadre of spiders, too.  They’re smaller than the spiders in the garage.  Maybe a small plastic hoop would work better outside.  I’ll try both and see.

Get Your Bot on

Canandaigua Photo Set

I’ve been reading Make magazine’s blog for a while now. I have a lot of old junk lying around here, and they specialize in hacking that junk into useful stuff. I got inspired to always try to fix it myself first by shows like Robot Wars and Mythbusters. Now, we can all indulge our inner Frankenstein. there are plenty of robotic web sites out there, aimed at every age group. Make Magazine sells one called Adruino. It’s an interesting platform. After reading through some of the tutorials, I can understand most of it, but I’ll need to learn more about printed circuit boards before I can do something really cool with it.

Clean Coal in my Stocking

 We live in a power hungry society.  I like living with cheap power.  I know I waste a lot.  I’ve bought a more efficient car, compact fluorescent light bulbs, but I’m still an energy pig.  I just look good because the guy across the street has enough Christmas lights to make a UFO landing strip.  I use almost 10 times more power than  my counterpart living in the ’60’s.  A quadraphonic Hi-Fi doesn’t even hold a candle to a modern HDtv with surround sound… when it comes to power consumption.

One of the most promising power sources here in America is coal.   We have a butt load of it.  America has more coal than Saudi Arabia has oil.  The problem is, coal is a dirty power source.  Efforts to filter and clean the output of a coal fired electric plant can only go so far.  We can’t just build higher smokestacks anymore, either.

There is another alternative, though.  Instead of letting the output go up the smokestack, some are proposing to entomb it underground.  The Earth’s crust has many pockets in it.  Oil and water gather in those pockets.  Empty pockets can be used as banks to store carbon dioxide.  Emissions from a coal plant can be directed into an empty aquifer or dome structure, encasing it there instead of releasing it into the atmosphere.  We can assume that a dome holding oil for millions of years should safely encase our CO2.

Department of Energy Carbon sequestration. Another DOE Site.  Carbon Sink Article on Wikipedia.

Snow Day

 The district has a snow day today, leftovers from yesterday’s storm.  After I dig out, I think I’ll take the dog to a park.

Lollypop Snow Day

From my first Lollypop Farm set

Lollypop is closed today due to the weather. We’re getting a clipper/nor’easter/Lake Effect snow storm. Here are some older pictures from Lollypop.

 

From my second Lollypop set

Card

The Queen of Hearts

Manuel does a themed post each Saturday. This week, the topic is “Card”. I don’t play cards, so I found this assignment pretty hard. After thinking about it, I remembered some high speed photography taken by Eugene Edgerton. He took amazing pictures of “the instant”. By timing strobes in his lab, he was able to stop motion in microscopic increments. One of the pictures he took was of a bullet slicing a playing card in half. I hope that’s close enough

Papa Flash on Wikipedia, The Edgerton Center at MIT

The Racketeer Nickel

In 1883, the US Mint changed the design of the nickel. Charles Barber created the new design. In its first year, there was no mention of the denomination except the Roman V. Since this new nickel looked very similar to the $5 gold coin, some people gold plated their nickels and tried to pass them off as $5.

 

Here’s what a plated nickel looks like. Just think, the last person to spend this coin was ripping someone off. The Mint changed the design mid year to add “cents” to the back of the coin. This coin’s quality grade is judged by the legibility of “Liberty” in Lady Liberty’s headband. The definition of her hair and facial features are important, too. My racketeer nickel is actually a higher grade than my regular 1883 nickel. Neither one is worth too much, $30 for the gold one if I find an overly enthusiastic collector (that’s how I got it). 1885 is the rare year. I like the 1883 racketeer nickel, though. It has more personality than the others.

The US Mint has some for sale. Josh Tatum was the most famous Racketeer. Here’s what Coinfacts has to say about the racketeer nickel.

The Bashful Billionaires

In 1994, Bill Gates bought one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, the Codex Leicester, for 30 Million Dollars. It sounded like a lot of money until I thought about it. Bill wasn’t eating tuna fish sandwiches for the next couple months to pay for his treasure. That got me thinking about other billionaires and what interesting things they’ve been up to.

I remember hearing a lot about oil billionaires earlier this year. Funny how it hasn’t been mentioned in a couple months… even though Exxon’s quarterly profits would still be a record as recently as 2 years ago. 9.4 Billion dollars. I’m not advocating a punitive tax on the oil companies, but I am frustrated that the future is trapped on a balance sheet. these record profits represent the best chance to transition to cleaner fuels. The oil companies argue that new fuels are more expensive, less powerful alternatives to petroleum. it’s hard to argue with that. petroleum represents so many essential elements of our lives that it’s hard to imagine another substance with the same properties. Bio fuels, Solar, geothermal, wind, and the other ideas we just shake our heads at, are in their infancy. A large infusion of capital and development funds are needed to make these ideas viable. It took almost 40 years before oil was used for more than lubrication and lighting. Can you imagine still using gasoline 40 years from now? I think oil will be over $150/barrel in 4 years. Now imagine each major oil company spending 1 billion dollars per quarter to develop the solutions. Exxon would still have 8 billion dollars left in the checking account.

Digitized classic works from Leonardo and others