Listics

Water by the gallon is worth more than gasoline. Ask Perrier. Nestle and Perrier came a calling not too many years back, and they wanted our groundwater. Concerned citizens kept the corporate water miners at bay, but the threat lingers and there is no reason to think that we’ve protected the resources forever. We haven’t. They’ll be back, with pumps and pipelines and tank trucks and they won’t leave us alone until the entire Great Lakes Basin is as arid as the Mojave.

In fact, while Wisconsin was able to stave off the corporate greedsters for a while, it was at the expense of Michigan, where the bottlers sunk their well and began extracting the fresh water. “Since May 2024, a facility owned by the Nestle Corporation has been pumping 200-400 gallons per minute from a Michigan aquifer that is hydrologically connected to the Great Lakes. The majority of the water pumped out is bottled and shipped away, never to return to the watershed.”

The Great Lakes Basin is endangered. A few weeks ago I was swimming in Lake Superior and drinking the water I swam in. I remember when you could roam the high Sierra with a Sierra Club cup on your belt and no fear of contaminants in the mountain streams. Those days are gone. How much time does the big lake have left? Here’s a cheerful thought…. The lakes will be terminally polluted long before they dry out.

And they will dry out. There are plans to divert the water as far as Arizona, and no plans for replenishment. I ask myself if I’m engaged in some kind of rarefied NIMBYism. I don’t think so. I think it’s my responsibility to be aware of those who would degrade my environment and to encounter them.

Sometimes it’s hell living in paradise.

Intrepid researchist Mr. R. Boy of Boulder, CO has an offer on his masthead that we shouldn’t refuse. We can sign up for a free trial membership at High Beam Research. Go forth beyond Google. Dig ye into the stuff of knowledge that resides beneath the trivial effluvia of webpub. This is the real dope!

Speaking of dope… it’s dope that the typo on the “Permission Marketing” post got fixed. Must have been the elves that did it.

Fundamentally we all need cheez. This was proven by the gentleman scholar, Abe Maslow, as early as 1940. Stumbling drunk from behind the ag school’s dairy barn early one morning, Abe was heard to mutter, “Undergrads, cheez… can’t live with them, can’t get in their knickers.” While much of this was naturally incomprehensible to the Chairman and the Dean who happened to be within earshot that morning, they well understood the reference to cheese. This was after all, the University of Wisconsin, where you’re as likely to turn your ankle on a big gouda used as a doorstop in the lecture hall as you are to find a wedge of cheddah with your apple pie in the dining commons. It’s the law. No cheddah, no pie (1935 Laws of Wis., ch. 106). We take this shit seriously.

The big federal grants for torturing monkeys had yet to be won, and the Rogerian adventure in mass media pop psych was still waiting for the birth of network TV, but Abe was there charting the course, bridging the gap between both analytic and experimental psychology with a sociological interpretation that Friedrich N., Dick Wagner and Herr Schicklegruber all would have found to their taste.

As you can see from the accompanying diagram, for most of us it all revolves around hunger and fear. Curds, whey, and a jar of Spider-Be-Gone are the essential tools for people functioning on these lower levels. Ascending the pyramid we work our way through cheddar (social cheese), Swiss (ego cheese), the blues… Stilton or Roquefort depending on which side of the channel you land (the self actualization moldy cheeses), and finally - at the top of the pyramid according to some revisionist geek whose name escapes me we find the Limburger (stinky cheese for all your spirtual needs… transcending social values).

API
8:51 a.m. June 16, 2024

At New York’s Kennedy Airport today an individual, later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney General John Ashcroft said he believes the woman is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. She is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

Al-gebra is a fearsome cult, Ashcroft said. They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute value. They use secret code names like x and y and refer to themselves as unknowns. But we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axes of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are three sides to every triangle .

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.

(thanks to a friend who would undoubtedly prefer to remain anonymous for forwarding to me this email from his friend)

We have this contract opportunity from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources… anybody out there able to give this a shot for ridiculously depressed rates (like $25 to $30 per hour…)? “The [applicant] should have some knowledge of the Wisconsin Frog and Toad Survey and the ecological landscapes of Wisconsin.”

Project Title: Wisconsin Frog & Toad Survey Geospatial Models

Amphibians are currently of great interest to ecologists and land managers because of their potential importance as indicators of ecosystem health. The Wisconsin Frog and Toad Survey (WFTS) is one of the longest running monitoring programs of its type in the country and served as a model for the development of the national frog and toad monitoring program. With the completion of the 2024 season the WFTS achieved a milestone, having completed 20 years of data collection.

As with many long-term monitoring programs, interpretation can become difficult simply due to the enormity of the data. Trying to grasp geospatial and temporal trends for multiple species becomes a daunting task. One way to address this challenge is through the use of cartographic products, which are often used as a visual means of portraying and interpreting large datasets. Specifically, geospatial models are a means to incorporate both spatial and temporal information into one visual product.

The goal of this project is to simplify the interpretation of the dataset by creating a series of geospatial models, or “animated maps”. The maps will serve as a tool to identify geographic areas where it may be important to focus monitoring, research, and management and conservation efforts.

This project will use the existing WFTS data to create a series of state maps based on species, year and indices of abundance. These maps will be compiled in a series of geospatial models that will allow the DNR’s species experts and managers to view a map of Wisconsin and see changes in presence and abundance for each species over time. These patterns will be represented visually through changing size or color of the WFTS locations across the state. In other words, the user can “travel through time” to see changes in the status of Wisconsin’s frogs and toad. These maps could also be viewed at the ecoregion or county level for more geographically specific interpretation.

This will really give W. a reality check… the aliens have landed in Mexico and when they said “Take us to your leader,” they were escorted into Mexico City to meet with Vincente Fox.

The European Space Agency reported last month that the atmosphere on Mars contains traces of methane. They postulate that it must have either a volcanic or a biological origin.

My boy Matt is a Maestro! Naturally on the maestros photo page his photo is missing, but heck! After a year in Central America it’s nice to see a trace of him appear on the web, even if I can’t see his smiling phizz.