nature

Take some time to get to know each other:

Hey, honey, I think these pictures will be perfect for the baby’s room, what do you think?

More on Flickr.

Another installment in the continuing series of Francis linking to embargoed content that you probably don’t have access to online, but which you should, because it’s Harper’s dammit, and you’d pay money for it if you cared about the world of letters at all you philistine.

Writing for Harper’s, McKenzie Funk reports that AIG and other insurance companies are offering enhanced private firefighting services for those who want to pay extra:

... Firebreak has a proprietary system to coat houses with liquefied Phos-Chek—the same chemical retardant used by the Forest Service and first developed in the 1960s by Monsanto. The spray is colorless and harmless, Chief Sam said, and it can protect your home for up to eight months, far longer than rival gels and foams.

In 2005, Firebreak went to work for AIG’s insurance division, now called Chartis Insurance, increasing the fleet of the division’s Private Client Group from two to twelve trucks and expanding its reach from fourteen elite California zip codes—90049, 90077, 90210, etc.—to nearly 200, plus zips in Vail, Aspen, and Breckenridge, Colorado. Chief Sam joined the company in 2006, after five years as fire chief in Monrovia. He’d been planning a second career in executive coaching until he read about AIG’s new wildfire unit in Fortune. “It was the thing of the future,” he told me, “and I wanted to get in on the ground floor.”

Firebreak was growing—Chief Sam’s friend George had just started a two-truck pilot program for Farmers Insurance—but now there was competition. Chubb insurance protects policyholders in thirteen western states through Montana’s Wildfire Defense Systems, which sprays homes with rival Thermo-Gel retardant. Fireman’s Fund contracts San Diego’s Fireprotec to clear a defensible space around clients’ homes, and offers evacuation services to its richest customers. San Diego’s Fire-Pro USA sprays homes with patented FireIce gel. Wildomar’s Pacific Fire Guard deploys “the Navy SEALs of firefighters” to spray homes with GELTEC retardant.

And the services aren’t simply limited to firefighting:

AIG has Firebreak, but where rich policyholders are clustered on risky coastlines, the Private Client Group is offering the Hurricane Protection Unit: men with GPS units and satellite phones who are on the scene after a storm blows through, boarding up broken doors and windows, patching holes in roofs, covering skylights with tarps, evacuating valuable artwork.

For what it’s worth, nothing in the Harper’s article seems to indicate that these private operators were at all interfering with the actions of government firefighters. Also, I’m one of those people who thinks that maybe California needs to set an explicit zone past which the assistance of government firefighters can’t be counted on, and maybe that the federal government shouldn’t be implicitly subsidizing development in hurricane zones either. Obviously a situation in which the poor can’t live safely in these troubled areas, but the rich can do so if they’re willing to pay for the luxury, certainly makes income inequality more glaring. But I’m not sure that governments should be funding further encroachments on unstable climes either.

Jesus H. Christ.

... a ban on certain breeds—such as Britain introduced—might not work. Fanciers of muscular hounds with big jaws could circumnavigate the law by crossing, say, a mastiff with a pit bull, to create a perfectly legal canine nasty (as, indeed, has happened in Britain).

To meet the difficulty, Flemming Moller, a veterinarian who took over the parliamentary seat vacated when the former prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, went off to run NATO, proposed a logical, if drastic, solution: kill all mongrels. Mr Moller claims this is the only way to eliminate aggressive traits from the doggy gene pool. Only dogs registered in the national stud book have a record of their parentage and genetic traits. Other puppies, he says, could be the products of anything from joyful encounters in leafy suburbs to deliberate breeding by thugs.

So this parliamentarian is suggesting killing all mongrels not because they’re likely to be violent, but because they are harder to categorize? And completely ignoring the fact that pure-breeding can often have its own horrible consequences. Luckily, nobody else in Denmark seems to be taking him seriously.

But I can’t help but wonder: What sort of veterinarian recommends a policy like this? If you’re down with systematically killing tens of thousands of dogs, how’d you become a veterinarian in the first place?

Because cuteness aestheticizes helplessness and deformity, it almost always involves an act of sadism on the part of its creator, who makes an unconscious attempt to maim, hobble, and embarrass the thing he seeks to idolize.

—Daniel Harris, Cuteness

Fuck yeah.

Animals.

With casts.

Seriously, this blog has been going for a year and I’m just hearing about now? I’m doing something terribly, terribly wrong. I’m talking about Artificial Owl, a site dedicated to abandoned man-made creations. It’s only the awesomest new thing ever. To wit:

Mexican church consumed by lava:

Abandoned ships in the dead Aral Sea:

Acoustic mirrors:

Communist flying saucer monument on a mountaintop:

The giant hand of the Atacama desert:

(via JWZ)

Who wants to go to Newquay?

Aquarists at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Newquay have discovered the identity of a mysterious killer that had been devastating their coral reef display over recent months. Staff at the award-winning attraction had been puzzled by violent attacks on their fragile living reefs – in some cases the corals had been literally cut in half.

After staking out the display for several weeks, aquarists decided as a last resort to take it apart rock by rock. Halfway through the process the terrifying perpetrator was finally revealed – a monstrous four-foot-long giant reef worm.

... “It really does look like something out of a horror movie! It’s over four feet long with these bizarre-looking jaws. Having done some research we also discovered that it is covered with thousands of bristles which are capable of inflicting a sting resulting in permanent numbness’.”

Dear nature, you fucking rule. Sincerely yours, Francis.

(via JWZ)

The full RubyConf videos are now up. Included in this batch is my talk, “Conversations vs. Laws: What do we mean when we say Ruby is dynamic?” I got to jam in a bunch of tangential interesting ideas, and somehow found a receptive audience to them. The only blemish on the experience was that Laurent Sansonetti was giving his OS X and Ruby talk in the other room, so I had to miss that. Good thing for video.

Gloriously creepy video involving writhing plants with eyes. Something for me to absolutely not think about the next time I’m on mescaline. Via JWZ.