5 Apr - Morning Surfing

Obama’s mountaintop-removal crackdown could mean more than offshore drilling

Offshore drilling, auto-efficiency standards,water-heater regs, green jobs for strippers… there’s a ton going on this week.

But today’s big news is a lot brighter than yesterday’s offshore drilling hubbub: the Obama administration announced sweeping new regulations for mountaintop removal, the coal-mining method that tends to (a) remove mountaintops, (b) fill mountain valleys with rubble, and (c) pollute waterways downstream.

The new EPA regs focus on clean water, which limits the ability of mining companies to dump waste freely, which puts the whole mountaintop-removal method in jeopardy. So it’s kind of a big deal. Both mining advocates and mountain-and-water defenders agree on this.

"It could mean the end of an era," Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association told theWashington Post. He said that to limit valley fills "is tantamount to saying the intent is to strictly limit coal mining in Appalachia."

"Mountaintop mining, by its nature, destroys water," Joe Lovett of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment told the Post. "I hope it means the beginning of the end."

continued

Desertification 'spreading like cancer' in Middle East, Egypt conference told

Read more:http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=113413#ixzz0kF6afPYf
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)

Its effect can be seen in Syria, where drought has displaced hundreds of thousands of people, ruining farmers and swelling cities, Erian said.

He said that Darfur in western Sudan is still reeling from a devastating conflict exacerbated by a shortage of water and fertile land.

The UN Development Program’s 2009 Arab Human Development Report said desertification threatened about 2.87 million square kilometers of land – or a fifth of the Middle East and north Africa.

Erian said a large portion of rangeland and agricultural land was under threat, with little effort taken so far to reverse the process. Burgeoning populations, which put further strain on the environment, and climate change are accelerating the trend, he added.

“The trend in the Arab world leans toward aridity. We are in a struggle against a natural trend, but it is the acceleration that scares us,” he said.

Desertification in the Arab Region: analysis of current status and trends

UNESCO Chair for desert studies and desertification control

Desertification: a general review Journal of Arid Environments

Current Status in, and Future Trends of, Ultraprecision... CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology  Current Status in, and Future Trends of, Ultraprecision Machining and Ultrafine Materials Processing CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology, Volume 32, Issue 2, 1983, Pages 573-582 Norio Taniguchi Abstract The historical progress of machining accuracy is plotted and its probable further development is shown by extrapolation, both in the micro-technology and nano-technology regions. Single point “mirror machining” of soft metals and the ultraprecision polishing of hard and brittle materials are discussed. The concept of “atomic-bit” chip removal first by elastic emission machining, etc. is introduced. Photolithography for LSI wafer processing and electron beam processing/lithography for IC photo masks are then described. Ion beam sputtering, a promising atomic-bit machining process for the near future, is also described. Finally, analysis is made of the problems to be addressed and solved in achieving true accuracies of 0.1 μm - 0.05 μm for electronic, optical and mechanical workpieces; measuring resolution and random errors in the required ultra-precision processing machines will have to be no worse than 0.01 μm (10 nm).  Purchase PDF (815 K)

P23. A comparison of the current status of pharmacoecon... Clinical Therapeutics

Interactions between climate and desertification Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

Desertification Encyclopedia of Biodiversity

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argues that achieving women’s equality is central to global security in an op-ed for The Times of London:

Hat Tip : Foreign Policy Blogs

US special forces 'tried to cover-up' botched Khataba raid in Afghanistan

US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.

The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies.....

The family had more than 25 guests on the night of the attack, as well as three musicians, to celebrate the naming of a newborn child.

“In what culture in the world do you invite ... people for a party and meanwhile kill three women?” asked the senior official. “The dead bodies were just eight metres from where they were preparing the food. The Americans, they told us the women were dead for 14 hours.”

( 'Achieving women's equality' ? )

A view into the U.S. diet

We eat something like 30 percent more grain than we should--presumably mainly in the form of bread--and 20 percent too much meat. Meanwhile, we're eating just 80 percent of the vegetables we should be, 60 percent of the dairy, and 40 percent of the fruit.

Another way to put it is like this: from a dietary perspective, we're overproducing (and consuming) wheat and meat, and underproducing (and consuming) fruits and vegetables.

Children, the childless, and diverse human ecosystems

We seem to have lost the sense of ourselves as embedded in communities, which is a fairly radical turn when you think about it. In the evolutionary history of homo sapiens, it's only the blink of an eye that we've been living in discrete nuclear family units, in rows of houses and apartments alongside roads dedicated to automobiles, driving to 40-hour-a-week jobs, watching TV at night, buying consumer electronics on weekends, and eating food-like substances like Go-Gurt ("specially made to freeze and thaw by lunchtime"). Living this atomistic life, each a consumer in our own castle, is a radical departure from over a million years' worth of living communally, in tribes.

Results from the growing field of happiness research strongly indicate that beyond a certain basic level of material comfort, more wealth doesn't reliably bring more happiness. The most reliable way to maximize happiness is through social connectedness -- through having a tribe. That means close bonds with loved ones (or even pets), people to confide in, and broader social networks in which we play a meaningful role and are acknowledged for it. (Technically, given how strong early imprinting is and how much the brain's plasticity declines with age, the way to maximize happiness is to be raised within supportive social networks.) Connections with others are how we develop a sense of empathy and decency, which turn out to be crucial to happiness. It stands to reason that if we want more healthy, happy people, we should create more supportive social networks.