A town not far from me composts its sewage solids with the sawdust from a mill. The solids support bacteria that breaks down wood fiber; the sawdust supports bacteria that breaks down the solids. Let a batch sit for a week then shave off the face of a pile and toss on a wad of office paper and the paper bursts into flame in less than two second – the stuff is self-sterilizing and the result is a mildly acidic soil additive.
A company here started a project to mix human solid waste with dairy waste in a digester to produce methane to generate electricity. It was amazingly successful until a power company dredged up some obscure regulation about feeding power to the grid and got them shut down – the port tried to set up their own grid to avoid the regulation but the bond to finance it failed (idiocy).
One more from Utah, this time of the San Juan River at the Goosenecks:
And some broccoli seeds sprouting. Not very clear, since it’s shot through the side of a Mason jar:
Love Utah and all the red rock country. Favorite hike there was on the Paria River but lots of others, which is good to remember as the likelihood of doing more becomes ever more remote.
I’ve not been as active lately cause of crazy work stuff. For the last three years my shift has been mostly 3am-130pm. I moved to a new plant few weeks ago and it’s 3pm-11pm one week and the following weeks it’s 5am-3pm and often on those first shifts I often end up working from 5am until 7pm very long shifts. But this is the lower hour week and so since I go in at 3pm I woke up at 630am and went on a six mile hike, then to the gym and that was after watching a few episodes of Chucky with my gf. Now about to head into work for my shift. It was a bit of a fast walk and so not as many pics as normal.
Oof. I would find that kind of shifting shift brutal.
If some-one painted that sunset, it’d look fake.
Given the location, I would think that’s a sunrise.
That view is magical! Hard to beat sunrises/sunsets. It’s so awesome that we live in a world where witnessing such beauty is possible.
Lately, I’ve been finding myself thinking of some beautiful or unusual thing, ‘Oh, it must be AI’, only to remember that I’m looking at it in real life.
Stonington has views both east and west over water. This one is facing west, toward the setting sun – from Dubois Beach, to be specific.
Anyone know any evolutionary reason we should like such sunrises/sunsets?
Interesting question. Just indulging in unfounded blue sky speculation, this is how we inherited the earth. No other species has populated the frontiers, nooks, and crannies of the entire planet, and this may have been propelled by a particular human curiosity for novelty, the fleeting and unusual. It is not everyday you get a beautiful sunset.
Sunrises/sunsets are related to the difference between dark and light. Humans are poorly adapted to life in the dark, rather a clumsy prey than a predator during the night. Many predators hunt during the dawn/dusk, which makes also these periods dangerous. A sunrise signals the victory of light, a start of the time period when humans have an advantage.
Why people like certain kind of landscapes and scenes more than the others is a question that has been studied. I have not followed that field of research. One hypothesis is that the ‘beautiful’ scenes signal the availability of the resources that humans have needed in the past.
A couple of photos in my garden late yesterday. First an alpine Aster. with a mystery bulb which hasn’t yet bloomed for me.
Then a red blooming plant native to the SE US and on into Texas, Ipomopsis rubra growing above a Salvia ‘Pozo Blue’.
A little earlier would have been better.
Barred Owl (with insomnia, I guess), in our tree out front. I used zoom. Manual “zoom” - as in I was up on a ladder cleaning out our gutters when I snapped this shot (okay - and a bit of the other kind of ‘zoom’ too!). It patiently watched me, and whenever I moved somewhere where leaves blocked the sight line, it would crane its neck to continue watching me.
As owls go, Barred Owls are relatively diurnal (they are mostly active crepuscularly, rather than when it’s fully dark), so seeing one in daylight is not too unusual. They definitely are not as extreme as Burrowing Owl or the Pygmy-Owls, though.
Yet another interesting vocabulary term! “crepuscular”–twilight? I had to look it up.
Thanks; interesting!
Beautiful pictures. You were brave, too.