Donald Winslow's blog

Every time an election comes up, I find myself cramming at the last minute to decide whom to vote against. Usually I don’t even know what races I’ll see on the ballot. Sometimes I don’t even know there’s an election until Tuesday! Now if I read the paper every day and attended public forums I’d be much better informed, but we slackers will never have a voice in politics unless we demand easy and transparent information about elections. Unfortunately, Pottawatomie County does not have a webpage and there is no simple way to be sure what will be on the ballot when I go into my polling place.

To rectify this situation, I asked my wife to stop by the County office and ask for sample ballots for our precinct (630003 in Shawnee, Oklahoma). I scanned them and posted them here. There’s a ballot for the city elections, and Karen (a registered Democrat) also picked up the Democratic primary ballot. Sorry, you’ll have to look elsewhere for the Republican ballot.

Last week we camped with my parents and my siblings and their families at Hickory Hills in Indiana. One day we went to McCormick’s Creek State Park to play at the falls!

This headline from USA Today: “Federal forecasters predict a near-normal Hurricane season”.

As if normalcy is abnormal!

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/forecast/story/2012-05-21/hurricane-forecast/55185644/1

The US Fish and Wildlife Service now says that logging is good for northern Spotted Owls. Yes, you heard that right–the bird that is loggers love to hate for shutting down timber operations in old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest will actually benefit from resumption of logging. This is a common theme. When legal action by Heartwood shut down logging in National Forests across the midwest and northeast over threats to the Indiana bat, the Forest Service planned a timber sale (Buzzard’s Roost) to benefit Indiana bats.

US Fish and Wildlife Service 2012. Endangered and threatened wildlife and plants; Revised critical habitat for the northern Spotted Owl. Federal Register 77:14062-14165, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-03-08/pdf/2012-5042.pdf, accessed 17 April 2012.

I received a message in my inbox from Staples, Inc., asking me to review a product I buy fairly frequently. I went ahead and filled out the review form and wrote a two-word review and then clicked “publish”, but an error message came up to tell me I needed to agree to the user agreement. So I clicked on the user agreement (with a company called PowerReviews) to see if I would agree to it and found this passage:

“By transmitting product or service ratings or reviews (collectively, “Reviews”) to the Review Service, you hereby (a) irrevocably assign and transfer to PowerReviews all of your rights, title and interest, on a worldwide basis, including, without limitation, all intellectual property rights and moral rights, in and to such Reviews; (b) to the extent the preceding assignment and transfer is ineffective, grant PowerReviews an exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual and fully sublicensable and transferable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, distribute, publish, create derivative works from and publicly display such Reviews throughout the universe in any media…”

So you’re telling me I can’t publish my review on Venus, because it’s now owned by PowerReviews? I’m probably violating their intellectual property by publishing part of the user agreement. So sue me.

The Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of making a rule to limit the amount of carbon pollution from new power plants. The press release states that it will be possible for natural gas and even coal plants to meet the standards. To meet the standard, a gas plant simply has to be efficient enough to produce at least one megawatt-hour for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted. Now coal is basically carbon, so how is it possible to burn coal without emitting carbon? The answer is that a power plant can capture the carbon dioxide and store it somewhere. Forever.

According to the press release, “Even without today’s action, the power plants that are currently projected to be built going forward would already comply with the standard. As a result, EPA does not project additional cost for industry to comply with this standard.”

So the proposed rule does nothing. Nevertheless, the National Audubon Society is urging its members to write the EPA to demand that it enforce the rule it’s making.

I’m sure I’m simplifying the situation, because I have not read the whole 257-page proposed rule.

The Department of the Interior has just released new guidelines for wind energy development to avoid and mitigate harm to birds and bird populations. The National Audubon Society paints a rosy picture, but the American Bird Conservancy wants mandatory regulations instead.

Audubon press release

ABC press release

The latest issue of The Lancet has an article about the movement to legalize assisted suicide in Britain (Holmes, 2012). In the same issue there is an open letter to the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, asking for the company to control the distribution of a drug it produces so that the drug won’t be used for capital punishment in the United States (Nicholl, 2012). It’s interesting to note that on this side of the pond, we tend to have the opposite set of viewpoints. A government should be able to take a citizen’s life, but no one can take his or her own life.

Holmes, David. 2012. Legalise assisted suicide, UK Commission urges. Lancet 379:15. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960005-1/fulltext

Nicholl, David J. 2012. An open letter to Michael Ball, Chief Executive of Hospira Pharmaceuticals. Lancet 379:25. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960013-0/fulltext

We just had a very noticeable tremor at 2049. Now it’s thundering and it’s hard to tell the difference! What if we have an earthquake and a tornado at the same time? Do we stay inside or run out of the house?

Another earthquake tonight at 2256. This was the strongest one I’ve ever felt. The whole house shook. I don’t see any damage, but it did knock over a steel water bottle. The three of us ran out in the front yard where it was windy. By then the ground had stopped moving.