Bald eagles are everywhere on the BC Coast but I rarely get one in front of the camera. Unfortunately not even this image is as clear as it could be.
This particular eagle was slowly riding the cool breeze over Boundary Bay on Saturday evening.
when David Bowie released Space Oddity:
planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing i can do
well i certainly didn't see this one coming (via John Cole):
In a report that will surprise few of Bush's critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.
From the Scientific American Gallery.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which reached orbit around the moon last month, passed over the Sea of Tranquility on Sunday and spied the Apollo 11 lunar module, still resting on the surface.
The lander set down on the moon by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in 1969 is at the center of this image, a small white dot [arrow] with a long shadow stretching to the right. Each pixel in the photograph, which comes from the LRO's Narrow Angle Camera, is 1.14 meters across, so the Apollo 11 craft is just a few pixels wide.
Flying over the city on the way back from Victoria, looking east past BC Place stadium to the coast mountains, Burrard Inlet, and Burnaby.
A couple of weekends ago the bairns and I participated in the Bullhead Derby in Steveston. Scores of kids chasing sculpins large and small off the shore of Garry Point. It was a lot of fun and #2 child took 2nd prize with a 9 1/2" fish (at right). All good.
I found this at Unreasonable Faith and, as he says: "Life — enjoy it while you have it"
Peggy Noonan bids farewell to Sarah Palin in the Wall Street Journal. A Republican ex speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan, Noonan turns words with economy and humour. She crafted some killers for this column.
and
"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the
party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her
and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites,
from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and
attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite
confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.
"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.
Ouch. That's going to leave a mark.
When I think of China's energy's future, I usually think coal. Or Three Gorges. Or both. But as this article in the NYT (via Balloon Juice) highlights, China is positioning itself as a global leader in renewable energy.
This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines
— after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years.
State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar
plants fastest, though these projects are 
much smaller than the wind
projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to
generate electricity, are sprouting up….
….But in March of last year, as power companies began accelerating construction of wind turbines, the government issued a forecast that 10,000 megawatts would actually be installed by the end of next year. And now, just 15 months later, with construction of coal-fired plants having slowed to one a week and still falling, it appears that China will have 30,000 megawatts of wind energy by the end of next year — which was previously the target for 2020, Mr. Li said.
30,000 MW! By way of comparison, Canada's installed capacity is expected to reach 3000 MW by the end of 2009.
Another reminder that the world,us included, belongs to bacteria. A human is a bacterial/mammal hybrid. This is relevant at even a behavioural level. How often does our digestion affect our actions?
A new concept is to consider human as a super-organism containing those microbes in or on human body as well [7]. There are more than 100 trillion bacterial cells in human gut, which are about 10 times more than cells in human itself [8]. Those bacteria can help digest food and harvest nutrition and energy that otherwise cannot be collected by the human body directly [9]–[11], i.e., human has obtained many genes needed for itself though these genes did not evolve in human genome.”
iBiome 