candlabra

Second to last day of work before a three week holiday. Leaving for Calgary on Saturday to visit friends and Natalie's family. Also, the trip will be used to do some aggressive clothes shopping for the sheik. Hopefully that will round out the clothing component of the shop and allow us to start it up in September.

Then back to van to do some climbing and hiking in and around Whistler.

School starts on the 7th and I will be super busy with classes and the UVSS.

economicsnews: the eminent domain ruling at SCotUS took an upsetting turn when the private company that won the right to evict the tenants to build their tax collecting "public use" compound had the audacity to charge back rent. the trial has been on for 5 years, so the tenants are being charged in the 10-100 thousand range. reading comments on it, you see a lot of calls for revolution. one would think that america, with its intense pride of being the land of the free, the land which endorses private property and the land where guns are kept to ensure that one cannot lose their lives nor property, would not be taking this lightly. Unfortunately, it seems as if this has been polarized into a left/right debate so that up-in-arms people from both sides are defending ideas that are just not right because those ideas have been adopted by one side or the other. this is a battle between haves and have-nots. hopefully it will be resolved soon. from what I understand, the SCotUS decision gives each state or municipality the right to restrict eminent domain.

sciencenews: a massive siberian peat bog is melting, supposedly due to global warming, and it threaten to release a massive amount of methane. Water is the most prevalent greenhouse gas (which is not very well known) but methane has a global warming potential (GWP) of 22 times carbon dioxide (CO2 is defined as having a GWP of 1) but the GWP for CO2 does not take into account indirect effects while the GWP for methane does. Luckily methane only survives for ~12 years (compared to CO2's 250-400 years) . It is too bad that this is still so contentious. If scientists could just agree that global warming is happening (or is not happening) then we could get somewhere. As it is, any politician can simply refer to a study that backs up their chosen path and be done with it.