natalie pont's List: NINA

• “It was quite difficult, technically, to paddle with a big dog in your lap. Sometimes he jumped in to hunt fish. When he became too cold, he had to borrow my jacket.”
• The thought of leaving Arthur to return to his former life, unloved on the street, was too much for Lindnord to bear — so he set about the process of getting the hearty little dog back home with him to Sweden. For what might have been the first time in his life, Arthur was taken to a vet to get the health check he needed to be approved for the journey.

• “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not 10 feet away, their 9-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”
• How did this captain know—from 50 feet away—what the father couldn’t recognize from just 10? Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect.
• Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound.
• Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event.
• The Instinctive Drowning Response
• is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect.
• There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.
• of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In some of those drownings, the adult will actually watch the child do it, having no idea it is happening.
• Drowning does not look like drowning
• “Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled before speech occurs.
• Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.
• Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you all right?” If they can answer at all—they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents—children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

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• Windy needs three crewmen: a driver inside the tank to steer and stop it; a controller in a rear cabin at the back of the platform to run the jet engines and the water jets; and a fire chief who walks about 15 feet away, issuing orders to the two other crew members through a remote-control unit.
• As Windy was rolled out of its transporter in Kuwait, some 27 other teams that were fighting the fires stopped to gawk. They were from as far away as China and Canada, and they'd never seen anything like Windy. These crews-including one led by the famous oil-fire fighter, the Texan Red Adair-used explosives to stop the fires. One tactic was to pack 250 pounds of explosives into a 55-gallon oil drum welded onto the end of a long boom to place it by the well. The explosion robs the blaze of its oxygen, and the fire goes out. We asked Nandor Somlai, the 53-year-old Hungarian who heads Windy's crew, which system is better, and he replied, "Would you really want to walk up to a 2000-degree flame through burning heat and oil rain carrying explosives?"

• The West tends to be arid, the East tends to get plenty of rain and snow, and the Midwest lands, well, somewhere in the middle. So the map remains a good proxy for understanding where water tends to fall and where it doesn't,
• but climate models and the fossil record suggest that its 21st-century precipitation levels could be significantly lower than the 20th-century norm, when California emerged as a fruit-and-vegetable behemoth.
• Not only is California gripped in its worst drought in at least 1,200 years,
• Now my gaze is heading south and east, to acres now occupied by cotton—a crop burdened by a brutal past in the South (slavery, sharecropping) and a troubled present (a plague of herbicide-tolerant weeds):
• This is what's left of the old—and let's face it, infamous—Cotton Belt that stocked the globe's textile factories during the 19th-century boom that delivered the Industrial Revolution
• I'm simply pushing a more regionalized, widely distributed scheme for filling our salad and fruit bowls, one less dependent on California and its overtaxed water resources.
• a farmer advocacy organization, also said the idea make sense—with caveats. O

  ne is credit. Marlow says that most farmers who still plant cotton are large enough that they rely on loans to start the growing season—and bankers understand and are used to cotton, but may find vegetables too exotic and risky.
• He added that the South's high levels of precipitation can actually be a liability compared to California's aridity, because "rain spreads diseases through splash erosion, ruins product, screws up harvest, reduces product quality." California farmers, who meet their watering needs through controlled irrigation, don't have those problems.
• The South's farmers have demonstrated the ability to innovate, he said, but "there have to be markets, there has to be risk management, and there has to be access to credit."
• Converting swaths of Dixie country to vegetables won't be a fast or easy process. But if California's water troubles drag on, as it appears they will, broccoli may yet emerge as the heir apparent to doddering King Cotton.

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• But to even get to the moon takes hundreds of thousands of miles of travel. Between the Earth and the moon you can fit every other planet in the solar system:
• One of those planets above is Mars. On Mars is a mountain called Olympus Mons. It makes Mount Everest look like a little baby:
• Every day Jupiter keeps Earth safe from space debris by “shepherding” it out of the way:
• Our solar system is constantly moving too. We are in the same position now that we were 225 million years ago, when dinosaurs were still on the planet:
• inside your body are 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, each billions of years old.

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• Without Drugs, What's the Point of Bitcoin?
• The trial of the Silk Road founder reveals enormous flaws in the decentralized currency.
• The idea behind Bitcoin is simple. Unlike modern fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar, Bitcoin has no supervising authority, no regulation, and no central bank. Users can use bitcoins to buy and sell goods anonymously without any outside interference. The idea has caught on.
• Bitcoin has begun to enter the mainstream.
• As an unregulated currency, Bitcoin appeared to be a natural fit for the illicit drug market. But while Bitcoin is anonymous, it isn't untraceable.
• When users convert bitcoins to hard currency, their name becomes linked to a "public blockchain" that comprises the entire transactional history of the bitcoin. This would be equivalent to a $20 bill containing a comprehensive history of every person who has touched it since emerging from the printing press.
• These public blockchains make it very easy for law enforcement officials, once users' identities are compromised, to understand the full extent of their illicit activity.
• But even in legal markets, the currency's volatility makes it an unattractive bet for would-be investors.
• And unlike the ruble, which Moscow can rescue through manipulating interest rates and instituting capital controls, Bitcoin's lack of a central bank means there's nothing to stop it from sliding even further.
• Why is Bitcoin so volatile? Although generally thought of (and used as) a currency, bitcoins are better thought of as an asset bubble,
• The supply of bitcoins increases when investors "mine" new ones, a process that involves using supercomputers to solve difficult mathematical equations.
• But when bitcoins lose their value, investors cannot mine each bitcoin to pay off their loans—a fate that struck Mark Karpeles, a Tokyo-based owner of the world's largest Bitcoin exchange who was forced to file for bankruptcy early last year.*

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• nearly 50 percent of the world’s riches is soon to be in the tightly clenched fists of just a few ultra wealthy people, the vast majority of our population sounds like it gets the short end of the financial stick.
• Florida:  $1,488,367 / $34,387
• Arkansas:  $895,844 / $34,179
• Michigan:  $942,993 / $37,324
• • Louisiana:  $974,376 / $40,792
   
  • Tennessee:  $925,479 / $38,942
   
  • Montana:  $920,802 / $38,931
   
  • Missouri:  $936,785 / $39,778
• Arizona:  $877,466 / $37,811
• • South Carolina:  $724,646 / $35,167
• • Kentucky:  $685,742 / $37,124
   
  • New Mexico:  $676,217 / $36,883
   
  • Mississippi:  $634,614 / $34,947
• West Virginia:  $537,989 / $33,109

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• male puppies ‘soften’ their play style when playing with females but not when playing with other males. It’s almost as if they will let the female “win” at play games in order to entice the females to play with them.
• The gentlemanly dog behavior is even accompanied with a bow. “We found that self-handicapping tends to occur in conjunction with play bows,”
• “A play bow is a signal that dogs use when they want to communicate playful intentions to a potential play partner,”
• Females were more likely than males to initiate play with their own sex, but that may be to stave off more vicious behavior later. “Because adult female-female aggression, when it occurs, can generally be more intense than female-male aggression, we suggest that females may use play with other females as one way to practice threat and appeasement signals that may serve to ritualize aggression and limit overt aggression later on,”

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• Much like the defining features on many animals, a lion's mane is all about attracting the ladies.
• when lions fought one another, they rarely went for the mane region. Instead they regularly attacked from the rear, targeting the back and the hindquarters.
• So, if the mane isn’t designed for protection, what is its purpose? Why, propagation of the species, of course. In the sweltering heat of areas where lions gather, a huge ring of long hair around the face and neck does nothing to help cool the body. That bushy fringe is an inviting home to a variety of parasites, and it also makes the lion stand out against the scenery (a desirable trait for a fashion model but not so much for an ambush hunter).
• With all those negatives attached to sporting neck hair, the only positive is that it takes some sturdy genes and a very healthy constitution for a male to live long enough to grow a substantial mane.
• Over the centuries, lionesses have twigged onto the fact that a huge, lush, thick, impressive head of hair equals a virile baby daddy who has the stones to not only sire her cubs but also to aggressively protect them along with the rest of the pride.

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