Florida Sinkholes Explained

map of active karst topography: USGS

 
No, it is not just that Florida is a really weird place (Dave Barry has plenty of stories about that):

 Here's what's going on underground: The entirety of Florida sits on a bed of limestone, covered in varying degrees by composites of sand, clay, and soil. Limestone is soluble and porous, and over millions of years, acids in water have sculpted out a network of subsurface voids beneath the Floridian ground (think: Swiss cheese). Depending on how strong that top layer of clay and sand is, and how close to the surface any one of those voids is, the land can bear its own weight and that of the infrastructure we build on top of it. But as the holes grow, that surface layer can suddenly give way.
Both drought and rain can herald collapses. During long periods of drought, groundwater tables will drop, and caves that were once supported by the pools they had collected become weaker. (Tapping into groundwater for agriculture can have much the same effect.) When rain eventually comes, the additional weight of a soaked-through top layer can become too much for a cave to bear. Florida sees different sinkhole patterns across the state depending on the thickness of that upper strata. In areas where it is thin and sandy, sinkholes are rare and small, as the ground is not strong enough to provide cover for a massive hole below. Where the top layer is thicker and made of clay, the ground can hold its own for millions of years as giant caves form below. Until one day when it can't.  Geologists call such a landscape karst topography, any place shaped by dissolving bedrock, typically limestone but also other soluble rocks such as dolomite, rock salt, and gypsum. And it's not just Florida: According to the U.S. Geological Survey, karst landscapes account for 10 percent of the Earth's surface. Around the world, some of the most beautiful and strange natural features are the result of this process, the not-so-solid Earth slowly, slowly dissolving away, leaving us with the caves of Slovenia, the hills of Ireland's western coast, and the pillars of Guilin, China.

Karst formations are also a concern with the application of manure, fertilizer and pesticides, as big holes in the limestone can lead to pollution spreading a long way very quickly.

Fish Fry!

Hopefully we can pull off our first fish fry without a bloodbath:

I've Got a Long Future Ahead of Me

A study indicates pessimistic folks may live longer than the optimists:

Older people blighted by pessimism and fear for the future are more likely to live longer, according to scientists.

A study, into 40,000 adults across ten years, has found those with low expectations for a “satisfying future” actually led healthier lives.

In contrast, people who were “overly optimistic” about the days ahead had a greater risk of disability or death within ten years.

The extraordinary research, published by the American Psychological Association, will not doubt prove comfort to anyone with a tendency to grumpiness.

Frieder R. Lang, lead author of the study from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, said: “Our findings revealed that being overly optimistic in predicting a better future was associated with a greater risk of disability and death within the following decade.

That sounds like a giant dose of irony.  People who enjoy life are more likely to die, and those that don't end up living longer.  I always figured that'd be my luck.  

Holy Grail: The T206 Honus Wagner

The latest 30 for 30 short film:

Another Chinese Environmental Disaster

Soil pollution:

Soil pollution has thus far received fairly limited public attention in China. “You can see with your own eyes when the air is smoggy, or see when the color of a river is wrong, but for soil pollution you need special equipment to check the levels of various elements,” says Chen Nengchang, a scientist at the Guangdong Institute of Eco-environmental and Soil Sciences. Yet, he cautions, the rampant overuse of fertilizer and pesticides in cropland and the seeping of heavy metals—such as lead, arsenic, and cadmium—from factories, smelters, and mines into the ground threaten the safety of China’s food supply.
Chen estimates that at least 15 of China’s 33 provinces and administrative zones have areas of severely contaminated soil. The problem is worst near the southeastern industrial zones, including parts of Guangdong province. Crops grown in or near polluted soils can absorb some chemicals and trace heavy metals. “If we eat contaminated foods, it can cause damage to the kidneys, liver, and other organs. In children, there can be developmental problems,” Chen says. “The health problems are caused by chronic exposure, not a sudden acute sickness.”
Scientists at his institute and others in China are trying to learn from Japan’s experience of restoring soils that were heavily polluted during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. In the 1960s, Japan’s Jinzu River basin gained infamy for the high occurrence of an unusual disease that softened the bones. The disease was later linked to the consumption of rice polluted with cadmium from local mining operations.

For all the folks bitching about the EPA, keep this in mind.  We've been there and done that. 

Why I Love Wisconsin

Yahoo:

Guido, the Racing Italian Sausage, is on his way home to the Milwaukee Brewers.
Missing for nearly two weeks, the 7-foot sausage costume was dropped off at TJ Ryan's bar in Cedarburg, Wis. on Wednesday night by two men — "one wearing a hoodie pulled tight over his face," reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the paper of record on this case:

[They] lugged the larger-than-life link into the bar just before 8 p.m. Wednesday, plopped him on a bar stool and warned staff, "You did not see anything," said bartender Jen Mohney.

"Like I didn't just see two guys plop a sausage on a bar stool," Mohney said.

Mohney said the two left in less than a minute and she immediately called police.

Hey, beertender: "You did not see anything" is a figure of speech!
Anyway, on Wednesday, The Stew reported that Guido, one of the Brewers' mascots and member of a troupe of five Racing Sausages, was taken from a store room inside a Wisconsin curling club Feb. 16. After a night of barhopping and picture-taking with local residents, the costume went missing.

A reward was issued by a local mustard company for Guido, estimated to be worth $3,000. It does not appear whoever returned the costume wants the reward, possibly because a police investigation continues.

I love several things about this:

1.  Stolen from the curling club.  What is it doing there?  I can just see some curlers putting away their stones and saying, "Holy shit, check this out."

2.  Obviously, the idea of going out drinking in the costume and taking pictures with people.

3.  Treating a bar as some kind of sanctuary where you show up and return the thing.  

To This Day

You know, I only ever remember getting bullied a couple of times (and they were minor), and I really don't remember bullying anybody (although I'm sure that if I didn't seriously bully them, I criticized some folks a little too much), but watching this definitely makes me feel guilty that I didn't do more to stop other people from bullying folks I knew.

Has The Commodities-As-Inflation-Hedge Play Run It's Course?

Mark Dow thinks so (h/t Ritholtz):

Many may have forgotten by now that the first massive wave in commodities was in 2007-2008, back before we knew what QE was. The story then was China and the Emerging Markets were rapidly plugging into the grid, set to consume our finite reserves with their vertiginous growth trajectories.

Subsequent boomlets in commodity prices, the ones that came post-crisis, were linked mainly to monetary stimuli and the flight into hard assets.

Together, this imprinting led us to reach for emerging markets and commodities any time we had a risk-on phase. In this last phase people have again reached for commodities and emerging markets to express their bullishness, but I’m suggesting this time they are setting themselves up for disappointment.

The first reason is that the emerging markets have downshifted their rate of growth. Some even have their own processes of credit digestion to contend with. Moreover, before the downshift we feared EM could grow to the sky, leaving many of us guessing at how intense the competition for scarce resources would become. We now have a better handle on “how high is high”.

Second, we have been coming around to a better understanding of monetary policy. We now increasingly get that the effects of monetary policy will be largely psychological and transitory until the deleveraging process approaches completion. At least, I hope we do. Otherwise, the fall in commodity prices will be deeper and the pain trade will last longer.

The main problem right now is that the folks with all the money are the ones who don't need it.  They've been driving the commodities investment wave.  If they find out it's a fool's game and pile back out, things may get really ugly.  As the commodity prices have increased, the real demand for commodities has diminished.  If speculators are the main buyers, then something bad is going to happen.  If we get a record, or even an average crop this year, things could get really ugly.

Celestine and Benedict

A curious story about the only two popes to voluntarily resign the papacy:

Back outside the basilica, Angelo Micheri arrives to pray, as he does every day. He reveres Celestine.
"He's important because he helps people in need," Micheri says.
Times are tough in Italy these days. Micheri is a carpenter who can't get a job. To survive, he begs.
Micheri is confident Celestine will answer his prayers for work.
"Yes, I think he will. I asked him before, and I found work," he says.
Some construction laborers who do have jobs are working on the basilica. It's still being repaired after part of the roof caved in during a big earthquake that struck L'Aquila four years ago.
After the quake, Pope Benedict came to console victims. He prayed before Celestine's coffin. In a highly symbolic gesture, Benedict laid upon it a most sacred vestment — his pallium, or a kind of scarf.
Shortly after that, Celestine's coffin was moved for a while. It was paraded slowly though the narrow streets, on the back of a small truck, to the nearby town of Sulmona.
Benedict went to pray before Celestine's remains there, too.
The significance of the two visits is "quite staggering," says Ferzoco. To him, it's amazing no one saw the message behind Benedict's actions.
"He was showing that it is permissible, licit, and in some cases spiritually beneficial that a pope may resign for the good of his soul and for the benefit of his flock," Ferzoco says.

The whole article is interesting.

Kinky Members Of The Animal Kingdom

BBC, via nc links:

Romantic relationships are complicated, and so is sex. Relationships can be fraught with the potential for miscommunication or misunderstanding at the best of times, so imagine how troublesome it is to admit, out loud, to your partner, that you've got a sexual interest or fantasy that sits far outside the cultural norms.
But here’s a secret. For just about any fantasy between consenting adults that might be thought of as beyond conventional sexual practices or decency as dictated by society, you can bet that there's a non-human species for whom that particular behaviour is commonplace. Sure, there are plenty of examples of creative role-playing, food in the bedroom, or unusual places to do the deed, but even when you push the boundaries much further the chances are you’ll find it happening in the animal world.
Take giraffes, for instance. Males, called bulls, make casual visits to various groups over time in search of a cow who might mate with him. In order to select the mating partner the bull literally finds the one that best suits his taste – by sampling their urine. Females co-operate in this "urine-testing" ritual, according to researchers David M. Pratt and Virginia H. Anderson. “When the bull nuzzles her rump, she must produce a stream of urine if he is to catch some in his mouth and savour it," they write. If a cow is particularly attracted to a visiting bull, she may simply decide to urinate as he walks past her, no prodding required. Urolagnia, or "golden showers" as it is more commonly known, is not a human invention, it seems.
While giraffes' social decisions are ruled by urine, hippos appear to rely on dung.

I don't know exactly how it works with cattle, but I've definitely seen the bull stick his head into a big stream of piss from a cow who's coming into heat, then he breathes in to get a big whiff and may take a little taste.  It's kind of gross, but it appears to mean he's getting ready to get busy.  More power to him, I guess, but I'll avoid that move.  Then again, I'm not very good at the relationship thing, so I probably shouldn't criticize.