Public service announcement about an article from the New York Times about the best pasta in Italy, illustrated.
The 25 Essential Pasta Dishes to Eat in Italy
This is the The Spaghettone all’Amatriciana at Santo Palato (Rome):
Oops. As you might notice, this post is temporally out of sequence. I didn't notice that I had not posted a Lighthouse of the Week for the week of June 9-15, 2024 during that week. So I'm making up for that now. In the most recent Lighthouse of the Week, I promised I'd visit a few lighthouses of southern New Brunswick, Canada. But since this one is out of sequence, I'm doing something a little different.
This is a lighthouse on Lake Champlain, in Vermont. It's also a private residence. But it is apparently an active lighthouse, according to the Lighthouse Directory.
So let's find it first. I showed where it was on a map that includes Montreal, because that's really not very far away. You can zoom in to see clearly how close it is to the Canadian border. It's located at the mouth of the Richelieu River. The actual address is in Alburgh, VT.
Now the Lighthouse Directory fills in the blanks.
"1858. Reactivated (inactive 1931-2002); focal plane 52 ft (16 m); white flash every 4 s. 40 ft (12 m) octagonal limestone tower with lantern and gallery, attached by a passageway to a 1-1/2 story granite keeper's house; 300 mm lens. Originally red, the lantern has faded to orange. ... The lighthouse, a sibling of the Point aux Roches Light in New York marks the northern end of the the lake and the entrance to the Richelieu River. The light was moved to a skeletal tower in 1931, but with the cooperation of the owner the Coast Guard returned the light to the lighthouse on 7 August 2002. The light station is a private residence."
A couple other sites:
Windmill Point, VT (Lighthouse Friends)
All you have to do is read the headline (and what I excerpted):
This Alabama AG won’t stop at the state line to prosecute abortion
Steve Marshall is Exhibit A in why leaving abortion to the states is a nightmare."One thing we’ve learned since Dobbs is that women who are determined to obtain abortions will find a way to do so: The number of abortions in 2023, the first full year after the ruling, was 11 percent higher than in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute."In other words, be careful about getting what you ask for, because it might not mean getting what you want. I told some GOP abortion opponents that overturning Roe wasn't the right way to reduce abortions, but did they listen?
I discovered a cluster of lighthouses that I'm going to feature in the next weeks. Now, it should not be surprising that the Canadian Maritimes have a lot of lighthouses, but I was still surprised by how many of them were in a relatively small area.
I'm going to start with an "easy" one; not a great deal of history, and also not a lot of pictures of it, either. So, getting right to it, here's where the Southwest Wolf Island Lighthouse is located. You can zoom in to see what the island itself looks like. Switching to the satellite view shows how rocky the island is, and you can also see the lighthouse.
So, the Lighthouse Directory gives us the basics:
"1982 (station established 1871). Active; focal plane 39 m (128 ft); white flash every 10 s. 8 m (28 ft) fiberglass tower with lantern and gallery, painted white; lantern is red.
Located on the southern tip of the island in the Wolf Islands off the mouth of Passamaquoddy Bay. Accessible only by boat; visible distantly from the Grand Manan ferry and from Head Harbour Light on Campobello Island." (Campobello Island was the summer retreat of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.)
Lighthouse Friends has more about it, including some history.
I've provided three pictures of it below, including one with the tail of a whale.
I'm not sure if "nutsier" is actually a word, but describing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump's speaking appearances needs to express how they are progressing down Crazy Road, according to Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post.
Will Trump be held accountable — in the courts and the news?"On Saturday, Trump held a rally in New Jersey. (Odd location, given it is not a state in play, right? One wonders why he does not travel well far from home.) Many outlets, including The Post, reported on his obscenities and insults directed toward Biden, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) and Justice Merchan. Fewer adequately portrayed the full picture of his derangement.
The Daily Beast did the best job competently conveying at least part of Trump’s insane babbling. “Thousands Turn Out to Hear Trump Rant About Whales and Hannibal Lecter.” That’s the essence of the biggest underreported story of the election: Republicans are nominating a mental and emotional basket case. “Careening from tangent to tangent, Trump went from praising ‘the late great Hannibal Lecter’ to falsely claiming offshore windmills are slaughtering whales,” the piece recounted. To their credit, the New York Times also quoted Trump’s incoherent, run-on musings to help convey how disturbing (and disturbed!) his appearances have become.
However, most outlets still refuse to provide a complete portrait of Trump’s unhinged appearances. What about his babbling about eating a hot dog or his garbled words and slurred speech? From most reports, you’d never know he threatened to deport college protesters, lied by saying Democrats want to allow “executing the baby after birth” and repeated his claims he would not protect “delinquent” NATO countries. He sounds, frankly, off his rocker.
The topic of Trump’s emotional and mental health should not be ignored. When responsible media outlets do not consult experts on the topic, display portions of his blather to illustrate his incoherence or put his abnormal conduct in context, they wind up normalizing him. That amounts to an in-kind donation."
So, if you've got the money to spend, I've got a place for you to spend it. Getting there is probably just as pricey, if not more so, than dining there and sleeping there.
Enjoy!
A view of the restaurant, which is in a cave:
The hotel rooms look quite intriguing, too.
Several years ago I noticed this somewhat blank area on the maps of the United States.
You can see how blank it is, in terms of roads and towns and just about anything else.
It turns out there are a lot of people that want to keep this area pretty blank on the map, by establishing a national monument. One good reason to do it is that it has a fairly large area of sagebrush prairie, which for many reasons is a declining ecosystem in the American West and Midwest.
But it isn't a sure thing.
Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands Is the Biggest Conservation Opportunity Left in the West. If Congress Won’t Protect it, Should Biden Step in?"In the Owyhee Canyonlands, Western sagebrush landscapes surround rock formations reminiscent of the Colorado Plateau, leading some to liken it to the Grand Canyon. It stretches across roughly 7 million acres of high desert in Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. Roughly a third of that landscape is high-quality wilderness—more land than in many existing national parks—with no roads or cell service.Here's more about it:
Some of the last pristine sections of the rapidly declining sagebrush habitat that once dominated much of the Western U.S., the Owyhee Canyonlands—named for the phonetic pronunciation of Hawaii after three island natives were lost in the wilderness and never found—have remained wild despite little federal protection. “Its remoteness protected it,” said Ryan Houston, the executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, an environmental group leading efforts to protect the area."
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is untrustworthy. Anyone who is a lawyer but bashes the proper working of the legal system just to kowtow to the proven (over and over and over) LIAR Donald Trump does not deserve our trust. One could easily go beyond this and point out all the other reason not to believe the Speaker, but in this case (and knowing the recent votes in Congress against protecting IVF and the right to contraception), there's no reason we should believe him here, either.
Johnson says he does not see national abortion ban next year, even under Trump"Timmaraju [president of the pro-abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All] also said that Johnson’s “flip-flopping” on abortion is more evidence that congressional Republicans cannot be trusted on reproductive freedom.
Johnson has long described himself as staunchly pro-life and supported restrictions on abortions, earning him an A-plus from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and from Students for Life Action, major antiabortion groups."
Burning fossil fuels for energy production is the main way that humans are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. But the second-best way is making concrete.
This new tech might be a way to cut down on that pathway.
Researchers find use of olivine in cement production could result in carbon negative concrete"Prior research has shown that cement-making is one of the major contributors to the release of CO2, and it happens in two ways. The first is when fossil fuels are used to heat products used in the mix (clay, water and calcined lime) when creating cement. The second is when limestone is heated to produce clinker, a cement binder. In this new study, the research team found a replacement for clinker that does not result in CO2 emissions."
"The researchers found that adding products [made] from olivine to cement mix instead of the clinker resulted in a cement that was not only more Earth-friendly, but also stronger and more durable. They note that olivine is an abundant mineral that contains silica and magnesium sulfate, which can be extracted and which also reacts with CO2, resulting in sequestration."
Seriously ... if we do meet intelligent aliens, what will be the basis of any conversation? Will we have anything in common enough to exchange information?
How top scientists think we'll finally hear from aliens - and why it could happen in the next decade"Seth Shostak, 80, has been the senior astronomer at the SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) for almost a quarter of a century and is betting it all that on the human race will hear from intelligent aliens by 2036.OK, I'm not sure what we'll have to talk about. But I do know one way we could try to start the conversation.
The gamble is based on the steady improvements in telescope technology and computing hardware.
In a recent Reddit AMA, Shostak said: 'The trend of improving hardware - mostly computers -- has proceeded unabated. I'm still betting on a signal by 2036.'
The astronomer has also argued that recent research has determined there could be billions of Earth-like worlds in the universe, suggesting it's highly unlikely that Earth is the only one with life."
If you don't know, WAG stands for "Wives and Girlfriends". It is usually attached to sports stars, primarily in the British press, especially the tabloid press, and that certainly includes the Daily Mail. So with the end of the Premier League season (I've still got to comment on how Crystal Palace ended it), and the FA Cup championship and the Champions League championship, the Daily Mail provided a nice update on new WAGs they've spotted.
They featured Iris Law, who is the daughter of Jude Law and Sadie Frost (have to keep that straight, as e's fathered kids with a few more than one). She and Trent Alexander-Arnold may just be in the getting-to-know-each other stage, however.
Notable in this article is a comely young woman named Freya Tidy, who has been linked with Mason Mount, but it's not clear if they are officially linked.
If I was Mr. Mason Mount, I'd certainly move in that direction. The picture below was acquired from a feature entitled "Sensual Mornings with Freya".
This is a sobering report.
More Than a Third of All Americans Live in Communities with ‘Hazardous’ Air, Lung Association Finds
In its annual “State of the Air” report, the group noted that while poor air quality is pervasive, communities of color are more than twice as likely to experience the worst impacts.
“We’ve seen the Environmental Protection Agency finalize a number of new standards to clean up the air pollution and address climate change, with more on the way,” said Bender.Remember, electing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump would negate any advances on this issue for years.
“We’ve seen the tighter particulate matter standard. We’ve seen strong measures to reduce emissions from future cars and future trucks. We’ve seen measures to reduce methane and volatile organic compounds from the oil and gas industry,” she said. “And we’re calling on the administration to get across the finish line to more items on their to-do list.”
Bender said that the association hopes that the EPA will update the national ozone standard, which has not been revised since 2015.
“Sometimes people don’t realize that poor air can affect them pretty drastically,” said Amit “Bobby” Mahajan, a national spokesperson for the Lung Association. “We know that there are asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes, but we also see increases in preterm birth, cognitive impairment and development of lung cancers in individuals who have high exposure to ozone and particle pollution."
Some things we take for granted, and some things we shouldn't. So if you're losing a lot of gourmet sea salt on your dishes, you might still want to consider shaking a bit of the standard iodized halite onto your meals occasionally. (You can also get iodized sea salt, by the way.)
How the arrival of iodized salt 100 years ago changed America
"Not long after Michigan’s success at kick-starting salt iodization in the United States, iodine-fortified salt became a daily part of the American diet. This slight but crucial modification eventually saw goiters become rare to the point of near extinction, erasing the “goiter belt” forever.So get your iodine.
Other major 20th-century U.S. public health campaigns, such as antismoking and occupational safety, remain relevant to the present day. The American goiter, though, either goes ignored or exists merely as a historical curiosity.
“The very success of the campaign, all but eliminating goiters, has made the issue fall out of public consciousness,” said Jim Tobin, a Michigan native and professor of journalism at Miami University of Ohio."
I accidentally saw a picture of this lighthouse a couple of weeks ago, and I don't even remember now what the accident was. This is only the third lighthouse from Poland that I've had in the Lighthouse of the Week slot. Poland has a large number of lighthouses for a country that doesn't actually have that much coastline to put them on.
So, here's where the Kolobrzeg Lighthouse, and Kolobrzeg, are.
And this is what the Lighthouse Directory tells us about it.
"1948 (station established 1899). Active; focal plane 33 m (108 ft); white flash every 3 s. 26 m (85 ft) round cylindrical brick tower with lantern and double gallery, rising from a large round eighteenth-century fortification. A most unusual lighthouse. The lantern is not attached directly to the tower, but is raised on eight columns; underneath, the open gallery provides a great observation platform for tourists. The tower is unpainted red brick; lantern and galleries are painted white, the lantern roof black. ... During World War II the city was almost completely destroyed when the retreating German Army held out in Kołobrzeg against a 14-day siege. Nearly everything had to be rebuilt, including the lighthouse. Today there is a small museum in the lighthouse."The pictures show what it looks like.
As I have noted many times, archaeologists, both professional and amateur, keep finding ancient relics in England. Of course, a lot of events happened in England that could provide ancient relics. What is amazing to me is that they are still lying around. They might be under some soil, or a parking lot (like King Richard III), or in a stream or lake, or even in someone's closet after a day spent picking up little trinkets. But they keep finding them.
In this case, they found an object that is known to be Roman -- but also something for which no definitive use has been found. Also in this case, they were amateur archaeologists.
12-sided Roman relic baffles archaeologists, spawns countless theories
Hazelnuts aren't just for coffee anymore. By the way, I know they are good for a lot of things besides coffee. Like Nutella, for instance.
Seeing the wood for the trees: how archaeologists use hazelnuts to reconstruct ancient woodlands
Summary: Humans in northern Europe have been snacking on hazelnuts — a key accessible source of energy — since the early Holocene. Now, archaeologists have shown that it is possible to analyze the hazelnuts found at archaeological sites for their carbon isotopes, which preserve a record of the ancient environment: hazelnuts which grew in closed environments, like thick shady forests, have very different carbon isotopes to hazelnuts growing in open, sunny environments. Using this data, scientists can understand what a place humans lived in looked like millennia ago.
I guess I'm a bit late to announce this on the blog, after mentioning it several times, but I'll still note that after numerous attempts to get pregnant, glamour model Rhian Sugden completed her pregnancy journey successfully and gave birth.
By the way, another lovely lass, Australian model Simone Holtznagel, also gave birth in the past few weeks, as seen below.
What a breakthrough! Molecules never found in nature, designed to cure some of the rarest diseases known to mankind!
"Hilary Eaton, Chief Business Officer at Profluent, said: 'It’s phenomenal that the first CRISPR-based treatments for genetic diseases such as sickle cell disease are already changing the lives of patients, but there remains an urgent need to accelerate the development of this technology for thousands of other currently incurable diseases.'
'Our intention with OpenCRISPR is to partner with cutting-edge research institutions and drug developers with a powerful and practical way to safely expedite the development of new CRISPR genetic therapies.'
To achieve the breakthrough, [CEO of Profluent] Madani’s team ‘trained’ Large Language Models on huge amounts of genetic data - in the same way that ChatGPT is ‘trained’ on text and images from the internet.
‘AI was at the heart of this achievement. We trained large language models (LLMs) on massive scale evolutionary sequences and biological context,' Madani said."
‘Our vision is to move biology from being constrained by what can be achieved in nature to being able to use AI to design new medicines precisely according to our needs.’
I am totally NOT an anti-vaxxer, by the way. In this case, though, there's a chance that playing God with the molecules of life (that life never made) could end up with unexpected consequences.
Ask Dr. Jekyll, or Bruce Banner, about that.
One lesser-reported effect of global warming and the related melting of ice is reported here: it may affect the collection of meteorites in Antarctica.
Global warming threatens Antarctica’s meteorites
The continent is home to Earth’s largest concentration of the objects from outer space
"The researchers project that in all emissions scenarios, at least 5,000 meteorites a year will disappear from the surface. Every tenth of a degree of temperature increase is correlated with a loss of between 5,100 and 12,200 meteorites, and under a high-emissions scenario, 76 percent of the areas currently covered by meteorites will be lost.
This would represent a catastrophic loss to space scientists, who prize meteorites because of the information they contain about the development of our solar system. Since they formed up to billions of years ago, the space rocks offer important clues about stars, planetary formation, and even Earth’s geologic history.
As a result, the researchers say, it’s important to “rapidly and purposefully” collect as many such specimens as possible before they become inaccessible to science."
The picture below is from the article linked below the picture, showing meteorites collected in Antarctica, and where to find them. While they're still there, that is.
Model, hot wife, and multiple mother Abbey Clancy can still take good shots in front of a camera.
One of the snaps:
I just have to make a brief comment about rugby player (including representing England) Danny Cipriani. While he had a decent sports career, where he has really distinguished himself is in the dating arena. Dating Kelly Brook would be the highlight of most men's dating diary, but for Danny she was just one in a long run (but still, definitely a highlight).
He's started dating actress and considerable hottie AnnaLynne McCord, and at least according to her, he is very good for her. Maybe not so good for the end stages of the Cipriani marriage, though.
This more recent article indicates that being with Danny might cool off some of AnnaLynne's more exotic erotic tendencies.
Evers since the Voyager mission reached Jupiter, we've known that the pizza-faced moon Io had volcanoes. Now, the Juno probe (still working) has revealed it also has a lava lake.
Perhaps not a big surprise, given the volcanic activity that's all over the moon, but still, interesting to know.
The lake is located at the volcano named Loki Patera.
Juno Reveals a Giant Lava Lake on Io
" “Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action,” said Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton during a news conference at the European Geophysical Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria. “There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.” "
