So, the votes have been counted and you guys liked Dress Number 1. Thank you all muchly. Whether anything even close to that will come to pass is subject to the whims of bridal fashion in the area.
An odd thing Nathan and I have discovered. Our temperature tolerances are four degrees apart. At seventy, he is comfortable and I am freezing. At seventy four, I am comfortable and he is too warm. How can four degrees make that much difference? Probably has something to with 98.6 being normal body temperature and 100 a fever, but that's not so very much either.
What exactly is it that needs to remain in that 98 point region? Our nervous system, or our circulatory system, or the entire body?
Life is such a wierd combination of tiny coorelations. I caught some PBS show narrated by Darth Vader (I can't remember his real name) about a lot of the connections on the planet. The rainforests, the tides, the Trade Winds, volcanos, and hurricanes are all connected to each other. The sea is slowly swallowing up the Hawai'ian islands (which used to be a much larger chain than it is now), yet that process is still faster than the volcanic eruptions can build and enlarge the islands.
Nathan took some class last year wherein the text book was about the Valdez oil spill. The jist of the book was, basically, that all of the work done to save the animals and the ecosystem might actually have been more detrimental than simply leaving the oil and allowing the planet to clean up after itself. The idea is that the initial shock would have been greater, but that the rebound to the area would have been much faster than tests are revealing it is actually progressing.
In spite of all the crap that happens here, we live on a self-cleaning planet. This is not to say continue the mass deforestation, but that, if we lay off now things will, eventually, work back on their own. The earth has a bounce back mechanism- it actually manages to regulate, repair, and largely continue the millions of delicate processes that can fall out of whack.
I suppose the ultimate example of this would be the tropical paradise this planet was before that little thing called the Ice Age. Only a few million years later and no more is the wooley mammoth king, but billions of little homonoids.
Perhaps humans tend to think about the planet in a far too short-term sense. We only think a couple hundred years on a planet where that particular length of time isn't really a significant blip. To mankind it is, so yes, keep the trees around so our children and grandchildren can see them- I'm hardly making exceptions for industry, but maybe we need to look a little more long term environmentally.
Although, there are at least 706 Potentially Hazardous Near Earth Objects (thank you to the people at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab) that could threaten the planet including Comet Catalina (the biggest object and most recent addition to the list) and Comet Swift-Tuttle, which is not going to make contact in this millennium, but has an orbit with an obliquity which will wipe out the planet (or the moon, which in the "we're doomed" scheme of things ain't much prettier) eventually.
Just to put that in perspective, since June 4 alone, we've narrowly (well, as narrow as a percentage of an Astronomical Unit is) missed being hit by things about ten times.
You know, all of you freaking out about the approach of the Armageddon and the Apocolypse and all that... You know who you are: you, with the tinfoil hat on, and you guys who hid in your basements on Jan 1, 2000. Well, maybe this wasn't the best thing for you to read.