I'm Shocked! Bush Creates World's Second Largest Marine Sanctuary

This headline seems about as probable as "Lincoln Buys Slaves For Plantation" or "Reagan Switches to Communist Party," but it's not April 1st, so... here you have it.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"President Bush today will create the world's largest marine protected area, a total of 140,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean surrounding a necklace of islands and atolls that stretch from the main Hawaiian Islands to Midway Atoll and beyond, senior administration officials said."

The Honolulu Advertiser also has a good article.

I wonder if this will help his approval rating?

It's extremely appropriate that this should occur during the annual U.N. conference on oceans and the law of the sea. I shall have to go chat with the U.S. delegation and applaud this decision. :)

Update: A colleague who used to be a member of the Australian delegation pointed out that while the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument is significant larger in area than the Great Barrier Reef marine protected area, it's not as large as the Macquarie Island marine park. Most search results indicate the GBR is the largest, but Macquarie actually covers a larger area. So I updated the title. That said, the NWHINM looks like it will eventually be "no-take," and for a protected area that large to completely ban "extractive uses" is a very, very big deal.

Giant Space Laser Time-Lapse

Gemini North Telescope and its adaptive optics laser, with the Canada France Hawaii telescope in the background. 38 minutes of real time crammed into 6 seconds of video. :) I'll blog soon about how I talked my Rebel XT into being the world's cheapest intervalometer.

UH88 Timelapse

A short timelapse of the University of Hawaii 88-inch (2.2-meter) telescope on Mauna Kea, shot during gradually brightening morning twilight. Each frame of video is a 30-second exposure, with 1 frame shot each minute.

UH88 with Star Trails

A colleague asked if I could come up with some desktop wallpaper of UH88 with star trails, so I took a couple long (12-15 minute) exposures, with star trails and a little bit of dome tracking movement. This shot happened to contain a couple possible meteors from the Lyrid shower - 1 long and 1 short streak are visible at most resolutions, and at higher resolutions, a second, fainter long streak may be noticed above the first.  It is, of course, not cleared for commercial use.

And in other news...

The U.S. is sending an aircraft carrier strike group (carrier, cruiser, frigate, destroyer, 80 or so planes, 6,500 or so sailors, etc.) to conduct a couple months of "exercises" off the coasts of a bunch of countries that haven't complied with its demands that they sign an agreement pledging not to turn Americans over to the International Criminal Court... and one nation that's already expecting an invasion.

No pressure, guys!

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor bank robberies...

 I just read in the the old-stomping-grounds paper that a mail carrier back in Burlington -- quite possibly the one who delivered our mail during the years we lived there -- was instrumental in the quick apprehension of a bank robber a couple months back. He had a good eye for the way things were supposed to be (not surprising, since he walks the same route all the time) and called the police when something wasn't right. Good for him!

Return of the Breezy House

Our modest home is on the windward side of a tropical island (a mighty fine place for a home to be, I might add!).  This means it gets nice breezes most of the time.  Unfortunately, certain small creatures (my daughter and her neighborhood friends) have, from time to time, done a number on the windowscreens.  Further on the topic of unfortunate things, this activity has made it possible for smaller creatures (of the six-legged, and possibly four-legged, variety) to get into the house.

A couple days ago, after having to catch and kill a rat that had spent the night in my daughter's bedroom, I once again fixed the screen on the porch window, just in case it had gotten in that way.  And at lunchtime today, I decided that I wanted the breeze to actually make it all the way through the house for a change, and replaced both of the screens in her room, which she had shredded quite some time ago in a fit of little-kid pique.  So any holes big enough to be a problem are now gone, and since there's a pleasant breeze today, the house is pleasantly breezy.

While I was being handy, I walked over to the hardware store and picked up a pair of vise-grips, which I used to remove the remaining mechanical bits of my daughter's formerly spinny stool (she had spun it so much that the hole where the top was screwed on got enlarged and it came apart).  A little bit of wood glue and some optional screws, and it will soon be reborn as a stool of the non-spinning variety.