Absolutely. Without warm clothes and warm houses freezer temperatures are challenging or possibly even deadly. I have discussed with homeless people when temperatures went to -20 C (below zero F). They are facing really hard times in those conditions. Some tried to sleep in such places as newspaper collection boxes but otherwise, they need a warm sleeping place to survive.
Being prepared means for example that if you plan to drive through a sparsely inhabited region, you should have such clothes in the car that you can survive a day in the cold - cars are not always reliable when temperatures drop to really cold.
Here, people are reminded to be prepared for exceptional situations. Everybody should have necessities for 72h without electricity in their house, and the houses should have secondary warming systems in case the primary heating system fails.
Electrical blackouts have been less of a problem after the companies were given both demands and benefits for digging the power lines into the ground, instead of having power lines that hang in the air. Storms do not usually affect the power lines that are beneath the soil surface. Only the main power lines, 110 kW or above are all still hanging in the air. It would be expensive to replace them with ground lines but even that is discussed for safety reasons - as our eastern neighbour is somewhat prone to aggression, we have to prepare the society for any kind of damage or crises.
Ice is problematic even with electricity, both for humans and animals. A freezing rain can result in elevated levels of accidents and animals having difficulties in getting through the hard surface of the snow.
Currently, we get low levels of wind energy because the blades of the wind mills are covered with ice. Only a small proportion of the blades are equipped with heating systems. Without such systems, there is a need for warm weathers or strong winds to get rid of the ice. That is a problem because a fairly large share of the national electricity is generated with wind - much more than with fossil fuels (less than 2 % of the energy was produced with coal, oil or natural gas).
It’s been a while since I posted a set of them, but I’ve had reason to take a number of additional pictures with the camera microscope over the last two and half years; here are every 500 (minus the one that’s of a specimen from the Smithsonian and thus I’m not allowed to post it online).
That’s one of the rules they give with the form for getting permission to visit the collections and photograph specimens. Exactly why beyond that, I do not know. The other two museums that I’ve visited have similar rules, so it seems to be standard.
It’s in one of the forms that gets emailed to the person requesting permission to photograph specimens. I can’t find it on the website, and I know where it should be if it were findable on there. If I recall correctly, the issue is basically that the images belong to the institution, not the photographer. I’ll try to find the email with the form.
They (the Smithsonian and the North Carolina Museum of Natural History) basically ask for the same treatment of images of their types takes by a visiting researcher as if they were taken by a staff member–they can be on the institution’s database, they can be used in journal articles, not in anything that earns the photographer any money, and all uses require some form of notice to the institution (sending them a copy of the journal article is the usual approach). I think they’re technically under a special version of a creative commons-type copyright held by the institution.
I liked this video my friend Ken took in San Diego where he lives now, having moved there from Michigan. Wanted to see if @klw had found him on Facebook. His bird photos are entertaining even to a plant lover like me.
What a colourful and engaging video clip of comorants just “doing their thing”. I just checked out Ken’s page and there are indeed some fantastic photos there. He clearly has a talent and a good eye. Thanks.
