How South Africa’s Wine Industry Plans to Survive the Water Crisis - Brendan Lowe

From the article:

South Africa’s Cape Winelands are limping through the third year of a drought whose severity is estimated to occur only once in 311 years. Experts expect vineyard yields in parts of the region to be reduced by as much as 50 percent. But at Paul Cluver Wines, a 2,000-hectare estate in the Elgin Valley, about 75 kilometers southeast of Cape Town, where about half as much rain fell between 2015 and 2017 as between 2012 and 2014, the yield is increasing.

Cluver Wines is also one of 292 grape-growing farms that monitor their irrigation by means of FruitLook, a satellite-based tracking service provided to area farmers for free by the Western Cape Provincial Department of Agriculture. Each week, farmers can log on to a website and see the amount of evapotranspiration, biomass growth, and seven other data points for each pixel of their land, which represents 20 by 20 meters.

“The main angle of [the service] is to increase what we refer to as water-use efficiency,” said André Roux, a drought and water specialist in the Western Cape Government’s Department of the Premier. “The general feeling is that [we’ve seen] 10 to 20 percent water savings. Some farmers indicate [that they’ve had] up to 30 percent water savings.”

As a result of its multifaceted approach, Cluver is not suffering as much as many other wineries.

“It’s like building a bridge—you have to build it for the 100-year flood,” says Cluver. “If you build it for the 10-year flood, it’s going to wash away. If your water use doesn’t take into account the 100-year drought, then you’re going to have a problem.”

Read the full article HERE

One Town, Four Elements - Tom Scott

There’s a small town in Sweden that has not one, not two, not three, but four elements named after it. Those elements–yttrium(Y), terbium (Tb), erbium (Er), and ytterbium (Yb)–were discovered by part-time chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius in the gadolinite, a black stone that’s also referred to as ytterbite, in Ytterby Mine on the Stockholm archipelago. From wikipedia:

In addition, three other lanthanides, holmium (Ho, named after Stockholm), thulium (Tm, named after Thule, a mythic analog of Scandinavia), and gadolinium (Gd, after the chemist Johan Gadolin) can trace their discovery to the same quarry making it the location with most elements named after it.

In this video, Tom Scott tells the story behind this historical landmark.

My Mom's Favorite Geologic Feature - Transgressive Regressive Cycles

My mom was also a geologist - I have a lot of memories as a kid of her pointing out different features in the land around us, though I didn't appreciate it very much when we would stop somewhere on vacation to pick up rocks.  How times have changed!

What are Transgressive Regressive Cycles?

When a river delivers its load of sediment to the shoreline, wave energy acting on the shoreline winnows out the fine grained mud, leaving the larger grains of sand on and near the beach. Offshore in deeper water, beyond the reach of waves, mud settles on the sea-floor. A lateral change occurs in sediment type and environment, from shoreline sand to offshore mud. Such lateral change in sediment and environment is also observed as vertical changes in ancient strata. The vertical alternation of sandstone and mudstone results from transgression and regression of a shoreline. During shoreline transgression (Figure 1, Time 1 to 4), the shoreline moves towards the land and the sedimentary environments “follow” the shoreline. As transgression continues, perhaps over a distance of tens of kilometers, offshore mud is deposited on top of sandy shoreline sediments. If a sediment core was collected from the deposited sediment, there would be a vertical change from sand at the bottom of the core into mud at the top of the core. Transgression of the shoreline occurs during sea-level rise.

Figure 1. Illustration showing how transgression and regression of the shoreline deposits a transgressive-regressive sedimentary cycle. Such cycles may extend horizontally for several tens of kilometers, and range from a few meters to a few hundred meters in thickness. 

During shoreline regression (Figure 1, Time 5 to 8), the shoreline moves towards the ocean and the sedimentary environments “follow” the shoreline in a seaward direction. Shoreline sand is deposited on top of offshore mud. If a sediment core was collected of these sediments, there would be a vertical change from mud at the bottom of the core into sand at the top of the core. Regression of the shoreline usually occurs during sea-level fall. However, if there is a very high rate of sediment supply to the shoreline, such as occurs at a delta, regression may also occur during sea-level rise.
The sediment deposited during a complete transgression and regression is referred to as a transgressive-regressive cycle. Each transgressive-regressive cycle at Point Upright commences with a thin sandy interval overlain by dark grey mudstone. This is the transgressive “fining-upward” part of the cycle. The mudstone in the middle of the cycle then grades upward into sandstone and this is the regressive “coarsening-upward” part of the cycle.

Shoreline transgression and regression occurs in response to rising and falling sea level, respectively. An important mechanism of sea level change is the alternate melting and freezing of polar continental ice. Water added to the ocean derived from melting ice causes sea-level rise and shoreline transgression. On the other hand, when water is removed from the ocean as polar ice-caps grow, sea-level falls and shoreline regression occurs. The alternate melting and freezing of continental ice is caused by climate variation. The second main mechanism of sea-level change is uplift and subsidence of the sedimentary basin floor arising from plate tectonic movements. Uplift of the basin floor results in shoreline regression, while subsidence results in transgression.

Transgressive-regressive cycles can play an important role in the concentration of Earth resources such as oil, gas, and groundwater. These resources are found in the pore spaces between grains of permeable sandstone. The impermeable mudstone units that surround such sandstones act to trap these resources. Thus oil and gas traps are made up permeable sandstone (termed reservoir rock) and impermeable mudstone (seal rock). In the case of groundwater, the water-bearing sandstone is referred to as an aquifer while the surrounding impermeable mudstones are called aquicludes. In recent years, porous sandstones sealed by mudstone have been investigated as places where human-produced carbon dioxide can be injected and stored.

  

  

How the student activists of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High demonstrate the power of a comprehensive education - Dahlia Lithwick

As someone who received an above average education, I know that everyone deserves the same opportunity.

From the article:

Part of the reason the Stoneman Douglas students have become stars in recent weeks is in no small part due to the fact that they are in a school system that boasts, for example, of a “system-wide debate program that teaches extemporaneous speaking from an early age.” Every middle and high school in the district has a forensics and public-speaking program. Coincidentally, some of the students at Stoneman Douglas had been preparing for debates on the issue of gun control this year, which explains in part why they could speak to the issues from day one.

...

To be sure, the story of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students is a story about the benefits of being a relatively wealthy school district at a moment in which public education is being vivisected without remorse or mercy. But unless you’re drinking the strongest form of Kool-Aid, there is simply no way to construct a conspiracy theory around the fact that students who were being painstakingly taught about drama, media, free speech, political activism, and forensics became the epicenter of the school-violence crisis and handled it creditably. The more likely explanation is that extracurricular education—one that focuses on skills beyond standardized testing and rankings—creates passionate citizens who are spring-loaded for citizenship.

Read the full article HERE

Color Our Collections (2018) - Biodiversity Heritage Library

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RrNoSFKsPS6D0u47dZ3JtGWOxGujf3W4/view

Two Women in STEM Articles - NYT & The Atlantic

Women in Cryptocurrencies Push Back Against 'Blockchain Bros' - NYT

"Women always question if they're qualified," one female cryptocurrency investor said.  "But look at these clowns around us."

The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the U.S., where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or STEM, as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife, and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

So what explains the tendency for nations that have traditionally less gender equality to have more women in science and technology than their gender-progressive counterparts do?

According to a new paper published in Psychological Science by the psychologists Gijsbert Stoet, of Leeds Beckett University, and David Geary, of the University of Missouri, it could have to do with the fact that women in countries with higher gender inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom. And typically, that path leads through STEM professions.

The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in them.

But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading. And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this disparity between boys and girls in showing science to be their best subject. (The most gender-equal countries are the typical snowy utopias you hear about, such as Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Turkey and the United Arab Emirates rank among the least equal, according to the Global Gender Gap Index.)

The gap in reading “is related at least in part to girls’ advantages in basic language abilities and a generally greater interest in reading; they read more and thus practice more,” Geary told me.

What’s more, the countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields such as science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries. Stoet and Geary posit that this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they’d enjoy most and be best at.

“Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states,” they write, “with a high level of social security.” Meanwhile, less gender-equal countries tend to also have less social support for people who, for example, find themselves unemployed. Thus, the authors suggest, girls in those countries might be more inclined to choose STEM professions because they offer a more certain financial future than, say, painting or writing.

Sun and Moon Valentines Day Painting

Black Locust Longbow

Tustin Street Name History

Columbus Tustin showed a lack of originality in 1870 when he named the streets dividing Tustin City's 100 acres into 300-square-foot blocks. He used numbers for east and west streets with First on the north side of town and Sixth on the south. North and south streets received alphabetical names, A through H.

Fourth Street became Main Street as businesses congregated there, and Fifth Street never got off the plat map. D Street doubled as State Highway 101 after 1914, but was renamed El Camino Real in 1968. 

More original, but unexplained names, such as Pasadena, Myrtle, Pacific, California, Yorba and Mt. View, were attached to streets added later on the west side. Some streets surrounding Tustin were named for their destinations, Irvine Boulevard, Newport Avenue, Tustin Avenue, and Red Hill Avenue.

David Hewes, who relocated to Tustin from San Francisco in 1881, building a Victorian mansion at the corner of Main and B, inspired Hewes Avenue, which lead to Anapauma ranch, agricultural property he acquired between Tustin and El Modena. Vanderlip Avenue memorialized Nelson Vanderlip, a banker and Tustin resident who served as treasurer of the Santa Ana, Orange and Tustin Street Railway in early 1886.

John Holt, a Swedish immigrant, who owned property on First Street as well as near the present Civic Center, inspired Holt Avenue. Browning Avenue was named after Felton P. "Frank" Browning, owner of Red Hill and its mercury mine.

When the 1950s brought mass development to Tustin and the surrounding area, developers and landowners came up with both commonplace and unusual names for the streets in the new subdivisions. However, some of the names selected honored early residents and ranchers.

Fourth Street was reincarnated when it was cut through the orange groves as a continuation of Santa Ana's Fourth Street in the 1950s. Later it was extended into Irvine Boulevard and renamed. Utt Drive in South Tustin recalled Lysander Utt who came to Tustin in 1874 as well as his son, Tustin entrepreneur C. E. Utt, and grandson James, both a state assemblyman and a congressman representing Tustin. Mitchell Avenue identifies Ralph Mitchell, a South Tustin rancher.

Preble Drive honors the Preble family, including brothers Samuel and James as well as cousin George. Nisson Road is named for Mathias Nisson, a Denmark native, who established himself in Tustin in 1876. His grandsons are still Tustin residents. Warner Avenue, Williams Street and Kenyon Drive were named for Frank Warner, Albert C. Williams and Chester Kenyon, who farmed in the area.

Ebel Road remembers the Ebel family which traces its Tustin roots back to the early 1900s. Marshall Lane was created when Joseph Marshall subdivided his orange acreage. Enderle Center Drive leading to Enderle Center harks back to Herman Enderle who came to Orange County in 1892.

More recently, streets in Tustin Ranch have been named for civic leaders and war heroes.

Northern Lights Painting

18/01/10