the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread
- Thread starter wader
- Start date
Looks like the inevitable is finally hitting, Federal Flood Insurance Rates will start a march to more realistic numbers. I never saw the justice in folks from the plains of Nebraska having to pony up to subsidize insurance for folks living in high risk flood area. I've always been confused why those who choose to constantly rebuild in low lying areas, especially on barrier beaches. A barrier beach is just that, a strip of land that Mother Nature moves at her pleasure, it's not a fixed chunk of land...
This article focuses on coastal Florida, but it is being repeated all over the country.
Hike In Federal Flood Insurance Rates
This article focuses on coastal Florida, but it is being repeated all over the country.
Hike In Federal Flood Insurance Rates
wader
Well-Known Angler
Grimes Wants to Start a Lesbian Commune on One of Jupiter's Moons
Is it too early to ask how much tickets to join this lesbian space commune will cost?
wader
Well-Known Angler
Drunken man joins search party looking for him: ‘Who are we looking for?’
Citing local media reports, Vice reports that Beyhan Mutlu spent hours scouring neighborhoods near where he’d been boozing with friends to help locate a missing person being sought by authorities.
www.pennlive.com
He put the “party” in “search party.”
Turkish man Beyhan Mutlu joined his neighbors in their search for a 50-year-old man who’d gone drinking with friends, then wandered into the woods and disappeared. Much to Mutlu’s surprise, he was the missing man the party was seeking.
Citing local media reports, Vice reports that Mutlu spent hours scouring neighborhoods near where he’d been boozing with friends to help locate a missing person being sought by authorities and concerned community members. When Mutlu realized the volunteers were calling his name, he solved the mystery.
“Who are we looking for?” he reportedly asked. “I am here.”
It’s not known how Mutlu hooked up with the search party without being noticed by friends who’d organized the manhunt. Police escorted him home.
wader
Well-Known Angler
bunch of 'em this morning..............
www.yahoo.com
Man opens emergency door, jumps onto wing of plane in Miami
A passenger on an American Airlines flight that landed at Miami International Airport opened an emergency door and walked onto the wing as the plane reached the terminal, authorities said. Flight 920 from Cali, Colombia, had just landed in Miami Wednesday night when the incident happened.
Liar, liar, pants on fire!!!!
The Vinland Map was unveiled in 1965 by a Yale team that believed it was made in 1440. A new team found a titanium compound used in inks first produced in the 1920s.Credit...VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images
Doubts crept in around Greenland, which looked so good it was frankly suspicious, and questions soon spread all over the map: about the wormholes, the handwriting and, most important, the weirdly crumbling ink.
For over half a century, scholars have fought over the authenticity of the Vinland Map, which Yale University unveiled to the world in 1965; at the time, calling it evidence of Viking explorations in the western Atlantic, the first European depiction of North America and a precious medieval treasure.
Yale now says someone duped a lot of people.
“The Vinland Map is a fake,” Raymond Clemens, the curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, said in a statement this month. “There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest.”
The university said that a team of conservators and scientists, analyzing the elements in the map’s lines and text, found high levels of a titanium compound used in inks that were first produced in the 1920s. Mr. Clemens said the team hoped to publish an article in a scientific journal. Ars Technica, Smithsonian Magazine and Gizmodo, among other news outlets, reported the conclusion this month.
Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, an associate professor of Scandinavian history at the University of Cambridge, said it was “deeply satisfying to have the strongest possible scientific confirmation of the historians’ longstanding arguments that the Vinland Map had to be a forgery.”
Experts in the field, she said, had long since determined that the map was a forgery along the lines of the Kensington Runestone, a carved stone on a Minnesota farm that scholars found to be a 19th-century hoax. But the debate over the map persisted, with decades of competing claims.
“It went on and on, like a tennis match over 20 years or more,” said William Fitzhugh, the curator of North American archaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He praised the Yale team’s work as thoughtful and well done, adding, “We need to put a lid on this can.”
The researchers also found that a Latin inscription on the back of the map was overwritten with modern ink, which Mr. Clemens called “powerful evidence that this is a forgery, not an innocent creation by a third party that was co-opted by someone else.”
The map can be traced at least to 1957, after Laurence Witten, an antiquarian in New Haven, Conn., acquired it from an unknown source in Europe. He sold the parchment to the philanthropist Paul Mellon, who donated it to Yale.
In 1965, Yale revealed the map to the public, with stories appearing in major newspapers, including on the front page of The New York Times. At the time, the school’s experts believed the map was compiled around 1440, about 50 years before Christopher Columbus sailed west.
Archaeologists and scholars have no doubt that a small number of Norse people reached the area of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence around A.D. 1000, with evidence both in 13th-century sagas about the journeys and the archaeological remains of a Viking settlement at a site called L’Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland.
There were probably fewer than 100 people on the largest of those voyages, and the travelers landed on shores where Native people lived in large numbers, said Gisli Sigurdsson, a professor of Norse studies at the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland.
“The stories, told and retold through generations, remember the general lay of the land: There are lands beyond Greenland, but they are really beyond our reach, too far away and too dangerous to visit,” Mr. Sigurdsson said. He added that the Vikings did, however, “continue bragging about how great and glorious an adventure it was.”
When the Vinland Map appeared in 1965, not long after the Newfoundland discovery caused a sensation, scholars quickly raised doubts about the parchment. While the curator of maps at Yale’s library at the time saw the “amazingly accurate” drawing of Greenland as evidence of Viking exploration, others saw it as the mark of an artist looking at a 20th-century map.
Greenland’s northern coast was drawn “suspiciously similar to what you can see on modern maps,” Mr. Sigurdsson said. “Greenland is so close to the real Greenland, it’s hard to believe anyone in the Middle Ages would have drawn a map like that.”
It also seemed unlikely for a medieval scribe to know that Greenland — drawn for centuries as a peninsula — was an island. “Information about the geography of the western Atlantic would have taken the form of lore and advice passed on orally from sailor to sailor,” Dr. Rowe said. “They did not use maps for navigation.”
Cartographers raised other questions. They noticed that its ink was crumbling off “in a very strange way that medieval map ink doesn’t crumble,” Dr. Fitzhugh said.
Tests ensued, and debates over ink, handwriting and other elements of the map lasted decades. Scholars also raised questions about whether holes in the map matched wormholes in an authentic medieval volume that was thought to be the source of the map’s calfskin parchment.
In 1974, Yale said research indicated it “may be a forgery.” In 1987, scientists at the University of California argued that it could be genuine after all. In the 2000s, various researchers published conflicting studies about it, even as defenders of the map dwindled.
“No one in the actual field of Norse studies or Vinland studies has believed in the authenticity of the map for a long time,” Mr. Sigurdsson said.
Like the Kensington Runestone, however, the map has fueled mythologies about the first Europeans in the Americas, said Dale Kedwards, a map historian at the Árni Magnússon Institute.
“The Vinland Map is just one in a long series of forgeries that are about demonstrating a medieval European presence on American soil,” he said. “It’s used to undermine Indigenous First Nations history, and is tied with the kind of partisan, nationalist historiography that develops in Europe.”
Dr. Rowe said whoever forged the map may have been motivated by a “desire to enhance the international importance of Viking Age exploits at a time when Norway was one of the most impoverished countries in Europe.”
But she and other experts said the map’s exposure as a forgery was no loss to the field. “The map is irrelevant to our understanding of Norse travels west of Greenland,” she said.
Yale now hopes to close the issue. “Objects like the Vinland Map soak up a lot of intellectual air space,” Mr. Clemens said in the university’s statement. “We don’t want this to continue to be a controversy.”
Mr. Kedwards, the map historian, said that modern technology would easily catch such a forgery today, but that the map had deceived “some wonderful scholars” over the years.
“It’s part of the map’s history that’s quite sad,” he said. “But whoever did it must have been a really skilled calligrapher — it’s not easy to do — with at least a glancing familiarity with medieval maps.”
Mr. Clemens said the map would remain in Yale’s collection, calling it a “historical object in and of itself” and “a great example of a forgery that had an international impact.”
Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, Is Fake
For decades, researchers at Yale and elsewhere have questioned the authenticity of a map that seemed to reflect Viking travels to North America. The school now says the case is closed.
The Vinland Map was unveiled in 1965 by a Yale team that believed it was made in 1440. A new team found a titanium compound used in inks first produced in the 1920s.Credit...VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images
Doubts crept in around Greenland, which looked so good it was frankly suspicious, and questions soon spread all over the map: about the wormholes, the handwriting and, most important, the weirdly crumbling ink.
For over half a century, scholars have fought over the authenticity of the Vinland Map, which Yale University unveiled to the world in 1965; at the time, calling it evidence of Viking explorations in the western Atlantic, the first European depiction of North America and a precious medieval treasure.
Yale now says someone duped a lot of people.
“The Vinland Map is a fake,” Raymond Clemens, the curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, said in a statement this month. “There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest.”
The university said that a team of conservators and scientists, analyzing the elements in the map’s lines and text, found high levels of a titanium compound used in inks that were first produced in the 1920s. Mr. Clemens said the team hoped to publish an article in a scientific journal. Ars Technica, Smithsonian Magazine and Gizmodo, among other news outlets, reported the conclusion this month.
Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, an associate professor of Scandinavian history at the University of Cambridge, said it was “deeply satisfying to have the strongest possible scientific confirmation of the historians’ longstanding arguments that the Vinland Map had to be a forgery.”
Experts in the field, she said, had long since determined that the map was a forgery along the lines of the Kensington Runestone, a carved stone on a Minnesota farm that scholars found to be a 19th-century hoax. But the debate over the map persisted, with decades of competing claims.
“It went on and on, like a tennis match over 20 years or more,” said William Fitzhugh, the curator of North American archaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He praised the Yale team’s work as thoughtful and well done, adding, “We need to put a lid on this can.”
The researchers also found that a Latin inscription on the back of the map was overwritten with modern ink, which Mr. Clemens called “powerful evidence that this is a forgery, not an innocent creation by a third party that was co-opted by someone else.”
The map can be traced at least to 1957, after Laurence Witten, an antiquarian in New Haven, Conn., acquired it from an unknown source in Europe. He sold the parchment to the philanthropist Paul Mellon, who donated it to Yale.
In 1965, Yale revealed the map to the public, with stories appearing in major newspapers, including on the front page of The New York Times. At the time, the school’s experts believed the map was compiled around 1440, about 50 years before Christopher Columbus sailed west.
Archaeologists and scholars have no doubt that a small number of Norse people reached the area of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence around A.D. 1000, with evidence both in 13th-century sagas about the journeys and the archaeological remains of a Viking settlement at a site called L’Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland.
There were probably fewer than 100 people on the largest of those voyages, and the travelers landed on shores where Native people lived in large numbers, said Gisli Sigurdsson, a professor of Norse studies at the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland.
“The stories, told and retold through generations, remember the general lay of the land: There are lands beyond Greenland, but they are really beyond our reach, too far away and too dangerous to visit,” Mr. Sigurdsson said. He added that the Vikings did, however, “continue bragging about how great and glorious an adventure it was.”
When the Vinland Map appeared in 1965, not long after the Newfoundland discovery caused a sensation, scholars quickly raised doubts about the parchment. While the curator of maps at Yale’s library at the time saw the “amazingly accurate” drawing of Greenland as evidence of Viking exploration, others saw it as the mark of an artist looking at a 20th-century map.
Greenland’s northern coast was drawn “suspiciously similar to what you can see on modern maps,” Mr. Sigurdsson said. “Greenland is so close to the real Greenland, it’s hard to believe anyone in the Middle Ages would have drawn a map like that.”
It also seemed unlikely for a medieval scribe to know that Greenland — drawn for centuries as a peninsula — was an island. “Information about the geography of the western Atlantic would have taken the form of lore and advice passed on orally from sailor to sailor,” Dr. Rowe said. “They did not use maps for navigation.”
Cartographers raised other questions. They noticed that its ink was crumbling off “in a very strange way that medieval map ink doesn’t crumble,” Dr. Fitzhugh said.
Tests ensued, and debates over ink, handwriting and other elements of the map lasted decades. Scholars also raised questions about whether holes in the map matched wormholes in an authentic medieval volume that was thought to be the source of the map’s calfskin parchment.
In 1974, Yale said research indicated it “may be a forgery.” In 1987, scientists at the University of California argued that it could be genuine after all. In the 2000s, various researchers published conflicting studies about it, even as defenders of the map dwindled.
“No one in the actual field of Norse studies or Vinland studies has believed in the authenticity of the map for a long time,” Mr. Sigurdsson said.
Like the Kensington Runestone, however, the map has fueled mythologies about the first Europeans in the Americas, said Dale Kedwards, a map historian at the Árni Magnússon Institute.
“The Vinland Map is just one in a long series of forgeries that are about demonstrating a medieval European presence on American soil,” he said. “It’s used to undermine Indigenous First Nations history, and is tied with the kind of partisan, nationalist historiography that develops in Europe.”
Dr. Rowe said whoever forged the map may have been motivated by a “desire to enhance the international importance of Viking Age exploits at a time when Norway was one of the most impoverished countries in Europe.”
But she and other experts said the map’s exposure as a forgery was no loss to the field. “The map is irrelevant to our understanding of Norse travels west of Greenland,” she said.
Yale now hopes to close the issue. “Objects like the Vinland Map soak up a lot of intellectual air space,” Mr. Clemens said in the university’s statement. “We don’t want this to continue to be a controversy.”
Mr. Kedwards, the map historian, said that modern technology would easily catch such a forgery today, but that the map had deceived “some wonderful scholars” over the years.
“It’s part of the map’s history that’s quite sad,” he said. “But whoever did it must have been a really skilled calligrapher — it’s not easy to do — with at least a glancing familiarity with medieval maps.”
Mr. Clemens said the map would remain in Yale’s collection, calling it a “historical object in and of itself” and “a great example of a forgery that had an international impact.”
wader
Well-Known Angler
Squirrel stashes 42 gallons of walnuts in a Chevrolet Avalanche
Built from 2001 to 2013, the Chevrolet Avalanche was a segment-bending cross between a pickup and an SUV that could carry a wide variety of items thanks to its clever Midgate system. What no one at Chevrolet bothered to figure out is how many gallons of walnuts can be stored behind the truck's...
Built from 2001 to 2013, the Chevrolet Avalanche was a segment-bending cross between a pickup and an SUV that could carry a wide variety of items thanks to its clever Midgate system. What no one at Chevrolet bothered to figure out is how many gallons of walnuts can be stored behind the truck's body panels, but a North Dakota man found the answer thanks to a red squirrel hoarding food for the winter.
Billy Fischer was stunned to find his second-generation Avalanche brimming with black walnuts. They were all over the engine bay, including behind the radiator and around the battery, and dozens were hidden in and under the body panels. He quickly realized that a red squirrel had spent several days carrying them from a tree in his yard to the truck-turned-buffet, where it hoped to live and feast during the winter months.
Squirrels aren't very talkative, so we don't know why it chose the Avalanche over any of the other cars in the tree's vicinity. We're guessing the cavernous engine bay was better suited to becoming a pantry than, say, one sized for a Subaru flat-four. Regardless, Fischer ended up having to dismantle most of the truck's front end (including the fenders, the grille, and the bumper) to take the walnuts out, but some were stashed in places only a squirrel could reach. "I still have some rolling around the frame, rail wells as well, that I can't get at," he told the Fargo-based Grand Forks Herald. At least it sounds like the squirrel was so busy hoarding food that he forgot to chew up the wiring.
Fischer pulled out about 42 gallons (or about 150 pounds) of walnuts, a number that's even more impressive when you consider the squirrel likely brought them in one at a time. He's giving the paw-picked bunch away on Facebook; black walnuts are edible raw or cooked.
Chinacat
Well-Known Angler
Not so fast there Mr. Roccus
The majority of flood claims are from heavy rains, NOT the overflow of a body of water
True enough, BUT the constant rebuilding of houses on in high risk areas like flood plains or barrier island irks me the most. Regardless, if the folks in either situation ever had to pay the true market value for their flood insurance there wouldn't be a lot of building in either area.
Maybe a "once and done" provision, they get one rebuild, but the next one is on them?
wader
Well-Known Angler
they just keep on coming today.........
www.yahoo.com
Shakira Says Her Handbag Was Stolen by ‘Gang’ of Wild Boars in Barcelona
Reuters/Mike BlakeShakira has accused a “gang” of wild boars of stealing her handbag and her phone while she was casually strolling through a Barcelona park.The pop star shared the extraordinary anecdote on her Instagram stories on Wednesday, explaining that she was walking with her son, Milan...
Oh yeah...
A man dressed up like a ninja reportedly attacked special operations soldiers training in California
A man dressed up like a ninja reportedly attacked special operations soldiers training in California
wader
Well-Known Angler
I would imagine it didn't go well...Oh yeah...
A man dressed up like a ninja reportedly attacked special operations soldiers training in California
A man dressed up like a ninja reportedly attacked special operations soldiers training in California
Here's an unexpected upside to Climate Change!! After a long summer of being overrun by tourists, a shortening or elimination of the Leaf Peeper Invasion would be a welcome benefit...
pressherald.com/2021/09/30/why-climate-change-is-making-it-harder-to-chase-fall-foliage/
By PATRICK WHITTLE September 30, 2021
Droughts that cause leaves to turn brown and wither before they can reach peak color. Heat waves prompting leaves to fall before autumn even arrives. Extreme weather events like hurricanes that strip trees of their leaves altogether.
For a cheery autumnal activity, leaf peeping is facing some serious threats from the era of climate change.
Leaf peeping, the practice of traveling to watch nature display its fall colors, is a beloved annual activity in many corners of the country, especially New England and New York. But recent seasons have been disrupted by weather conditions there and elsewhere, and the trend is likely to continue as the planet warms, said arborists, conservationists and ecologists.
Typically, by the end of September, leaves cascade into warmer hues throughout the U.S. This year, many areas have yet to even pivot from their summer green shades. In northern Maine, where peak conditions typically arrive in late September, forest rangers had reported less than 70 percent color change and moderate leaf drop on Wednesday.
Across the country in Denver, high temperatures have left “dead, dry edges of leaves” early in the season, said Michael Sundberg, a certified arborist in the area.
“Instead of trees doing this gradual change, they get thrown these wacky weather events. They change all of a sudden, or they drop leaves early,” Sundberg said. “Its been a few years since we’ve had a really good leaf year where you just drive around town and see really good color.”
The reason climate change can be bad for fall foliage has a bit to do with plant biology. When fall arrives, and day length and temperature drop, the chlorophyll in a leaf breaks down, and that causes it to lose its green color. The green gives way to the yellows, reds and oranges that make for dramatic autumn displays.
Achieving those peak colors is a delicate balance, and one jeopardized by changes in the environment, said Paul Schaberg, a research plant physiologist with the U.S. Forest Service based in Burlington, Vermont. Warm fall temperatures can cause leaves to remain green longer and delay the onset of what leaf peepers look for in terms of fall color, he said.
Worse, dry summers can stress trees and cause their leaves to miss the fall color turn altogether, Schaberg said. A 2003 study in the journal Tree Physiology that Schaberg cowrote stated that “environmental stress can accelerate” leaf deterioration.
“If climate change is going to mean significant drought, that means trees are going to shut down, and many trees are just going to drop their leaves,” he said. “Severe droughts that really mean that the tree just can’t function — that doesn’t improve color.”
It’s happening already. This summer’s heatwave in the Pacific Northwest brought temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit to Oregon, and that led to a condition called “foliage scorch,” in which leaves prematurely browned, said Chris Still, a professor at the Forest Ecosystems & Society department at Oregon State University.
The leaves’ pigment was degraded and they fell shortly thereafter, Still said. That will led to a less scenic fall season in parts of Oregon.
“That’s a really big example of color change just due to heatwave shock,” Still said.
Climate change also poses longer-term threats that could disrupt leaf peeping. The spread of diseases and invasive pests and the northward creep of tree species are all factors tied to warming temperatures that could make for less vibrant fall colors, said Andrew Richardson, a professor of ecosystem science at Northern Arizona University.
The onset of fall colors, which has been drifting later into the fall, could also continue to arrive later, said Jim Salge, foliage expert for Yankee magazine.
“My observations in the last decade have had more years that were later than what we would consider historical averages,” he said.
The economic impact of poor leaf peeping seasons could also be consequential. Officials throughout New England have said fall tourism brings billions of dollars into those states every year.
Conservationists say that’s a good reason to focus on preserving forests and reducing burning fossil fuels. Recent fall seasons have been less spectacular than typical in Massachusetts, but leaf peeping can stay a part of the state’s heritage if forests are given the protections they need, said Andy Finton, landscape conservation director and forest ecologist for The Nature Conservancy.
“If we can keep the big, important forests intact, they will provide what we’ve depended on – clean air, clean water, clean forests, as well as fall inspiration,” Finton said.
Why climate change is making it harder to chase fall foliage
By PATRICK WHITTLE September 30, 2021
Droughts that cause leaves to turn brown and wither before they can reach peak color. Heat waves prompting leaves to fall before autumn even arrives. Extreme weather events like hurricanes that strip trees of their leaves altogether.
For a cheery autumnal activity, leaf peeping is facing some serious threats from the era of climate change.
Leaf peeping, the practice of traveling to watch nature display its fall colors, is a beloved annual activity in many corners of the country, especially New England and New York. But recent seasons have been disrupted by weather conditions there and elsewhere, and the trend is likely to continue as the planet warms, said arborists, conservationists and ecologists.
Typically, by the end of September, leaves cascade into warmer hues throughout the U.S. This year, many areas have yet to even pivot from their summer green shades. In northern Maine, where peak conditions typically arrive in late September, forest rangers had reported less than 70 percent color change and moderate leaf drop on Wednesday.
Across the country in Denver, high temperatures have left “dead, dry edges of leaves” early in the season, said Michael Sundberg, a certified arborist in the area.
“Instead of trees doing this gradual change, they get thrown these wacky weather events. They change all of a sudden, or they drop leaves early,” Sundberg said. “Its been a few years since we’ve had a really good leaf year where you just drive around town and see really good color.”
The reason climate change can be bad for fall foliage has a bit to do with plant biology. When fall arrives, and day length and temperature drop, the chlorophyll in a leaf breaks down, and that causes it to lose its green color. The green gives way to the yellows, reds and oranges that make for dramatic autumn displays.
Achieving those peak colors is a delicate balance, and one jeopardized by changes in the environment, said Paul Schaberg, a research plant physiologist with the U.S. Forest Service based in Burlington, Vermont. Warm fall temperatures can cause leaves to remain green longer and delay the onset of what leaf peepers look for in terms of fall color, he said.
Worse, dry summers can stress trees and cause their leaves to miss the fall color turn altogether, Schaberg said. A 2003 study in the journal Tree Physiology that Schaberg cowrote stated that “environmental stress can accelerate” leaf deterioration.
“If climate change is going to mean significant drought, that means trees are going to shut down, and many trees are just going to drop their leaves,” he said. “Severe droughts that really mean that the tree just can’t function — that doesn’t improve color.”
It’s happening already. This summer’s heatwave in the Pacific Northwest brought temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit to Oregon, and that led to a condition called “foliage scorch,” in which leaves prematurely browned, said Chris Still, a professor at the Forest Ecosystems & Society department at Oregon State University.
The leaves’ pigment was degraded and they fell shortly thereafter, Still said. That will led to a less scenic fall season in parts of Oregon.
“That’s a really big example of color change just due to heatwave shock,” Still said.
Climate change also poses longer-term threats that could disrupt leaf peeping. The spread of diseases and invasive pests and the northward creep of tree species are all factors tied to warming temperatures that could make for less vibrant fall colors, said Andrew Richardson, a professor of ecosystem science at Northern Arizona University.
The onset of fall colors, which has been drifting later into the fall, could also continue to arrive later, said Jim Salge, foliage expert for Yankee magazine.
“My observations in the last decade have had more years that were later than what we would consider historical averages,” he said.
The economic impact of poor leaf peeping seasons could also be consequential. Officials throughout New England have said fall tourism brings billions of dollars into those states every year.
Conservationists say that’s a good reason to focus on preserving forests and reducing burning fossil fuels. Recent fall seasons have been less spectacular than typical in Massachusetts, but leaf peeping can stay a part of the state’s heritage if forests are given the protections they need, said Andy Finton, landscape conservation director and forest ecologist for The Nature Conservancy.
“If we can keep the big, important forests intact, they will provide what we’ve depended on – clean air, clean water, clean forests, as well as fall inspiration,” Finton said.
movetheboat
Well-Known Angler
'It's a bit scary': Statue of drowning girl prompts visceral reactions
As the tide levels change, the head of a drowning girl appears, and then disappears again. The statue's creators say it's a reflection of the effects of a force that is unsettling for many around the world.By Zachary Rosenthal, AccuWeather staff writer
Updated Sep. 30, 2021 2:52 PM EDT
Copied
so cool!!!
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weat...tm_content=1429835&utm_campaign=pushly_manual
wader
Well-Known Angler
truly WTF???
As if people aren't stressed out enough & on the edge. Do they really need this?
wader
Well-Known Angler
no clue how true this is - it's the headline that drew my attention:
www.yahoo.com
Kennedy: Biden on a 'mission from God' to appease 'pink-haired wokers who carry around Ziploc bags of kale'
Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, said the Biden administration seeks to "tax unrealized gains on inherited property" on its divine mission to appease the nation's "wokers."
That's true enough, forgot the term, but right now if a person dies leaving something like stocks behind to their heirs, the only increase in value captured as taxable is from the day of death to the day the stock is sold or transferred by/to the heirs. Personally, my sibs and I made out like a bandito on this from my mother's estate. Mom held stocks a long time, some as many as 40 years, but the only "capital gain" realized by us was for the 2 years from her death to the day they were sold, including the fact that the cost basis was the value of the stock on the day of her passing, which in most cases was 200-400X the original purchase price!!no clue how true this is - it's the headline that drew my attention:
Kennedy: Biden on a 'mission from God' to appease 'pink-haired wokers who carry around Ziploc bags of kale'
Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, said the Biden administration seeks to "tax unrealized gains on inherited property" on its divine mission to appease the nation's "wokers."
This is a MAJOR target for those wanting tax reform.
movetheboat
Well-Known Angler
I think it's really cool...not stressful at alltruly WTF???
As if people aren't stressed out enough & on the edge. Do they really need this?
wader
Well-Known Angler
that was one of my concerns when my EL stock transfers to my daughter (not MTB - sorry Gene) after I go..
Most of it was purchased at $26 a share - none over $95 a share - don't want her creamed with taxes when she goes to sell - good house down payment.
Gonna fold it into a Trust.
Job security for @movetheboat !!!
The skyscrapers of New York’s so-called Billionaires’ Row in Midtown Manhattan have something in common besides eye-watering prices: The city still considers them active construction sites, with a range of safety-related requirements that remain incomplete, sometimes years after occupancy.
All eight of the towers were missing final signoff from the Department of Buildings on elevators and plumbing; seven did not have final signoff on fire sprinklers and standpipes; and five were missing approvals from the fire department.
There are at least hundreds of buildings across the city that similarly have not received what is known as a final certificate of occupancy, and the system of temporary certificates that allows buildings to be occupied without these final approvals has been in place for decades.
But the stakes have never been higher. The surge of supertall towers near or above 1,000 feet tall across the city in the last decade is without precedent, and the buildings, skinnier and more complicated than ever before, are exposing gaps in the city’s enforcement strategy that could pose safety risks if left unchecked, according to interviews with engineers, urban planners and former employees of the Department of Buildings.
A building is not necessarily unsafe because it did not complete all of the oversight tasks required by the city, and there is no evidence of danger on the scale of the deadly condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., in June. All of the supertall buildings in New York City have obtained what are known as temporary certificates of occupancy, or T.C.O.s, which the city says it does not issue if there are structural problems.
But these supertall buildings fall under rules that in some cases were created with prewar buildings in mind and do not consider significant changes in building design, said Jose Torero, the head of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London, and an expert on fire-safety engineering. Some fire resistance calculations, for instance, are predicated on much more compartmentalized floor plans, not the open floor designs of luxury condos, and fire can spread differently in a building with a glass facade, compared to one with brick exteriors.
A deficiency in one mechanical system could trigger problems in another, he added, and outdated building codes, even when followed to the letter, can be inadequate.
“The answer is, I don’t know how safe these buildings are, and nobody does,” he said. “Nobody really knows what they’re truly approving.”
Read the rest here: New Supertalls Test the Limits, as the City Consults an Aging Playbook
New Supertalls Test the Limits, as the City Consults an Aging Playbook
Only three of New York’s 25 tallest residential buildings — and none of the towers on Billionaires’ Row — have completed building safety tasks required by the city.The skyscrapers of New York’s so-called Billionaires’ Row in Midtown Manhattan have something in common besides eye-watering prices: The city still considers them active construction sites, with a range of safety-related requirements that remain incomplete, sometimes years after occupancy.
All eight of the towers were missing final signoff from the Department of Buildings on elevators and plumbing; seven did not have final signoff on fire sprinklers and standpipes; and five were missing approvals from the fire department.
There are at least hundreds of buildings across the city that similarly have not received what is known as a final certificate of occupancy, and the system of temporary certificates that allows buildings to be occupied without these final approvals has been in place for decades.
But the stakes have never been higher. The surge of supertall towers near or above 1,000 feet tall across the city in the last decade is without precedent, and the buildings, skinnier and more complicated than ever before, are exposing gaps in the city’s enforcement strategy that could pose safety risks if left unchecked, according to interviews with engineers, urban planners and former employees of the Department of Buildings.
A building is not necessarily unsafe because it did not complete all of the oversight tasks required by the city, and there is no evidence of danger on the scale of the deadly condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., in June. All of the supertall buildings in New York City have obtained what are known as temporary certificates of occupancy, or T.C.O.s, which the city says it does not issue if there are structural problems.
But these supertall buildings fall under rules that in some cases were created with prewar buildings in mind and do not consider significant changes in building design, said Jose Torero, the head of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London, and an expert on fire-safety engineering. Some fire resistance calculations, for instance, are predicated on much more compartmentalized floor plans, not the open floor designs of luxury condos, and fire can spread differently in a building with a glass facade, compared to one with brick exteriors.
A deficiency in one mechanical system could trigger problems in another, he added, and outdated building codes, even when followed to the letter, can be inadequate.
“The answer is, I don’t know how safe these buildings are, and nobody does,” he said. “Nobody really knows what they’re truly approving.”
Read the rest here: New Supertalls Test the Limits, as the City Consults an Aging Playbook
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