Stink Bugs!
Doctors warn against eating Tide pods. Words fail me. I suppose that if you're a doctor, you're ethically required to say something if you see someone doing such a thing, but in all honesty it might be better in the long run to let natural selection take its course.
When I was about eight or so, Shell chemical came out with something called a "No-Pest Strip", which was a piece of waxy plastic imprenated with some type of insecticide. You folded out a rather neat-looking gold coloured cardboard holder for it, then hung it from the ceiling in a central location. The vapour it gave off sank to the floor and killed insects there.
At any rate, shortly after these came on the market, I recall our teacher Mrs. MacIntyre telling us about a boy who died from eating one of the strips. The explanation given was "he mistook it for cheese" which seemed improbably stupid to me even at the age of eight. The strip looked like an oddly-shaped processed cheese slice, yeah, but those things stank something fierce ^1, plus the texture was nothing like cheese.
*****
For the past five years or so, Ohio has been in the grip of a plague of stink bugs of biblical proportions. Those things are everywhere. It's apparently going to get worse.
*****
There seems to be a great deal of water ice on Mars!
*****
So, the secret Zuma satellite seems to have never uncoupled from its adapter, and consequently rode the sustainer stage back down into the atmosphere. I've no ill-will against Grumman (who built the adapter), but I'm relieved that it wasn't the Falcon 9 that caused the mishap. I really want Space-X to succeed.
What I'm entirely unable to learn is *why* the project is called 'Zuma". I tend to wonder if that was just a name chosen at random. It sounds southwestern American, but it brings to mind Jacob Zuma as well.
^1 And, in looking at old ads for these, they never fail to say "practically odorless", so yeah, they stank.
Original posted at https://rain-gryphon.dreamwidth.org/29152.html
When I was about eight or so, Shell chemical came out with something called a "No-Pest Strip", which was a piece of waxy plastic imprenated with some type of insecticide. You folded out a rather neat-looking gold coloured cardboard holder for it, then hung it from the ceiling in a central location. The vapour it gave off sank to the floor and killed insects there.
At any rate, shortly after these came on the market, I recall our teacher Mrs. MacIntyre telling us about a boy who died from eating one of the strips. The explanation given was "he mistook it for cheese" which seemed improbably stupid to me even at the age of eight. The strip looked like an oddly-shaped processed cheese slice, yeah, but those things stank something fierce ^1, plus the texture was nothing like cheese.
*****
For the past five years or so, Ohio has been in the grip of a plague of stink bugs of biblical proportions. Those things are everywhere. It's apparently going to get worse.
*****
There seems to be a great deal of water ice on Mars!
*****
So, the secret Zuma satellite seems to have never uncoupled from its adapter, and consequently rode the sustainer stage back down into the atmosphere. I've no ill-will against Grumman (who built the adapter), but I'm relieved that it wasn't the Falcon 9 that caused the mishap. I really want Space-X to succeed.
What I'm entirely unable to learn is *why* the project is called 'Zuma". I tend to wonder if that was just a name chosen at random. It sounds southwestern American, but it brings to mind Jacob Zuma as well.
^1 And, in looking at old ads for these, they never fail to say "practically odorless", so yeah, they stank.
Original posted at https://rain-gryphon.dreamwidth.org/29152.html