Random Families, Zinio, Big Old Fat Female Fish, Urchins)

more grub(s), originally uploaded by jto_.

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Having lived in Manhattan in 1980,
lived with a heroin dealers wife & kids while he was in prison,
Loved "Jennie from the Block"
& lived with dirt poor Barrio extended family over 8 years,
so its odd that I came late to "Random Families" 2003
the story of a Puerto Rican family from late 80s through to 2000

gothamgazette interview

npr audio interview
- she says those days in South Bronx were her happiest. Odd how poverty can be fun.
LeBlanc was rather poor herself during most of the 10 years she researched the book
- claims she was never asked for $ by Coco. That seems hard to fathom
She now has degrees from Smith,Oxford & Yale
Her 'characters' (absolutely not fictional) place a lot of importance on photos
so its a shame her book doesnt have pictures.
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Science Magazine sends me an email offering a sub for $100
turns out they mean their electronic version, which is a "Zinio" kind of ebook
As much as I love HTML I hate PDF, and I now know I hate Zinio even more
Its like pdf but worse - cant jump to a page, slow scrolling, cant select text,
an altogether unpleasant experience. I moved to Darlington to be near Sydney U in 96
and bugger me if Fisher Library didnt cancel the print version of 'Science' & 'Nature'
I guess guessing that academics had their own e-version.
Anyway their free sample went on about glaciers suddenly speeding up
figures of 70 and 100 km³ tossed about. Time to go short on shore property.

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Oil Eaters :
alternet
University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of over seven calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400 calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have "consumed" 2,800 calories of fossil-fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio to be as high as ten to one.)
..to process just one pound of coffee requires over 8,000 calories of fossil-fuel energy -- the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas, or around two and a half pounds of coal.
">harpers
motherjones
Julia Whitty .....
Apparently no one really remembers how many big fish used to inhabit the sea or how big they got. “The few blue marlin left today,” says Myers, “reach one-fifth of the weight they once had
....Big Old Fat Female Fish (BOFFFs), who produce better-quality and -quantity eggs than younger females. Yet fisheries managers continue to promote the targeting of older fish, followed by younger fish, until none can grow old.....
....Fifty years ago no one imagined that the Green Revolution would prove so lethal to the world ocean. But now we know that chemical fertilizers cause plants to bloom in the sea as miraculously as they do on land, with deadly consequence. It’s no coincidence that almost all of the nearly 150 (and counting) dead zones on earth lie at the mouths of river
............
deadzones
[I hadnt realised that urchins were in trouble..this is talking about the "barrel" shaped urchins, not the nasty black long spined urchins

which are dong fine in Bohol, wrecking the resort swimming there, maybe because theyre not eaten (inedible or cultural?(its hard to believe the Filipino culture would refuse anything edible))]
In the wake of the epidemic, filamentous algae, which the sea urchins ate, exploded across the reefs. St. Croix saw a 27 percent increase in algal biomass within five days of the sea urchin die-off. In the course of two years, Jamaica’s reefs increased in algal cover from 1 percent up to 95 percent
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Diamond Sand cont...
World fuel carbon = 6.9E9T/yr
So: Diamonds/yr = 6.9E9/3.52m³ = 2E9m³ 2 km³
2 cubic kilometres of Diamond per year to absorb current fossil fuel carbon

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scoop
letters from Iraq "One of the most disturbing things was what a little girl told me the other day. She said that when American soldiers smile it’s like seeing a skull looking at you. She said that every time they see a smiling American someone dies in their village."

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Random Families Zinio Big Old Fat Female Fish Urchins