Ichetucknee Springs
Ichetucknee Springs State Park is a 2,241-acre (9.07 km2) Florida State Park and National Natural Landmark located four miles (6 km) northwest of Fort White off State Road 47 and State Road 238. It centers around the six mile (10 km) long Ichetucknee River, which flows through shaded hammocks and wetlands into the Santa Fe River. The park contains hardwood hammock and limestone outcrops. Like many rivers in this part of North Florida, the Ichetucknee is fed by natural springs which boil up (in various holes) from the aquifer. There are a total of 7 springs along the Ichetucknee River. Several of those springs are pictured here.
Park wildlife includes white-tailed deer, raccoons, wild turkeys, wood ducks and great blue herons. There are also fish and reptiles: i.e. turtles, water snakes, American alligators, North American river otters, West Indian manatees in the winter months, crayfish, bream, bluegill, largemouth bass, alligator gar, mullet, catfish, several types of minnows, and the occasional humans in various stages of dress (or undress?) as we encountered on a recent afternoon.
Follow Phillip
on instagram
on facebook
on twitter
Expect Record Low Sea Level Pressures 3rd Weekend of January as Monster, Springlike Storms Explode Over California and Florida
Another stormy weekend for both U.S. coasts
 |
| The heavily populated I-4 Corridor from Tampa to Orlando to Daytona will be the focal point of possibly severe storms on Sunday, January 22, 2017
The highly progressive parade of upper-level storms that’s been racing across the United States in recent days will continue this weekend. Several quick-hitting rounds of heavy rain and mountain snow are expected in California, including what could be the biggest deluge and highest surf to hit southern California in years. As much as 6” of rain could fall in coastal locations, including Los Angeles, and up to 9” in foothill and mountain areas, according to the NWS/Los Angeles office. Waves of up to 30 feet could crash into the central California coast from Friday into Saturday, with 15-foot waves possible along LA-area beaches. Waterspouts and hail are possible on Friday as short lines of thunderstorms, and perhaps low-topped supercell storms, swing across the southern California coast.
|
 |
| January Record Low Sea Level Pressures Some of these records may fall if the southern storm drops below 990 mb (lower pressure equals stronger storm) |
Farther downstream, a very intense surface low will spin up over the Southern Plains and push into the Southeast by early next week. NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center is highlighting an enhanced risk of severe weather on Saturday over parts of the lower Mississippi Valley (with some potential for tornadoes) and on Sunday across northeast Florida and southeast Georgia. The surface low’s central pressure is expected to dip below 990 millibars, possibly challenging some local records for the all-time lowest pressures observed in January. Keep an eye on the barometer readings from your local NWS office and can compare the observations as they come in with this handy NWS guide to month-by-month surface pressure records.
The Water in Your Glass
Might Be Older Than the Sun
All the photos below were taken this week in Ichetucknee Springs State Park or in the nearby Fort White Wildlife Preserve along the banks of the Ichetucknee and Santa Fe Rivers
Earth is old. The sun is old. But do you know what may be even older than both? Water.
It’s a mystery how the world became awash in water. But one prevailing theory says that water originated on our planet from ice specks floating in a cosmic cloud before our sun was set ablaze, more than 4.6 billion years ago.
As much as half of all the water on Earth may have come from that interstellar gas according to astrophysicists’ calculations. That means the same liquid we drink and that fills the oceans may be millions of years older than the solar system itself.
The thinking goes that some of the ancient ice survived the solar system’s chaotic creation and came to Earth. To demonstrate that, researchers analyzed water molecules in oceans for indicators of their ancient past.
The clue comes in the form of something known as “heavy water.” Water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. But some water molecules contain hydrogen’s chunky twin, deuterium. (It contains a neutron in its nucleus, whereas regular hydrogen does not.)
Deuterium-rich water is found on other planets and moons, even here on Earth, but researchers are not sure where it came from. One idea is that much of the heavy water formed in the interstellar cloud and then traveled across the solar system.
Using a computer model, the scientists showed in a 2014 paper that the billions-of-years-old ice molecules could have survived the sun’s violent radiation blasts, and gone on to bathe a forming Earth and its cousins.
They concluded that remnants of that ancient ice remain scattered across the solar system: on the moon, in comets, at Mercury’s poles, in the remains of Mars’ melts, on Jupiter’s moon Europa — and even in your water bottle. Now that’s something to raise your glass to.
Plants Remember if You Mess With Them Enough (Too Much?)
Many North American plants are dormant now, but in Florida, spurred by summer-like warm temperatures and increased light plants are budding and blooming, in January. This could be dangerous if cold weather were to suddenly materialize.
But are plants smarter than we give them credit? Do plants “remember” what to do, when to sprout and when to remain dormant? Maybe so. In 2014, Dr. Monica Gagliano and colleagues at the University of Florence in Italy decided to see if they could train a plant to change behavior.
The researchers chose Mimosa pudica, more commonly known as the touch-me-not, which curls up its leaves in response to physical stimulation. Test plants in their pots were dropped onto foam from a height of about six inches to elicit the flinching response.
After repeated exposure with no major harm, the plants no longer recoiled. Even after a month left alone, the plants “remembered” the falls weren’t harmful and ignored them. Dr. Gagliano, now at the University of Western Australia, concluded from the experiment that plants could “learn” long-lasting behaviors, sort of like memories.
But a review published last year in Science Advances suggests that one can look at it another way as well: the mimosa pudica could be learning to forget. Peter Crisp, a molecular plant biologist at Australian National University and author on the review, suggested that plants “forget” to flinch when it turns out that the threat does no harm. Forgetting has a purpose, Dr. Crisp and his colleagues say: It allows plants to save energy.
You Are at the Center of the Universe, Even if Your Surname is Not Trump
Misconception: The universe started someplace.
Actually: The Big Bang didn’t happen at a place; it happened at a time.
“Where did the Big Bang happen?” I am often asked, as if the expansion of the universe was like a hand grenade going off and the solar system and our Milky Way galaxy were shards sent flying.
The universe didn’t start at a place, it started at a time, namely 13.8 billion years ago, according to the best cosmological data. It’s been expanding ever since — not into space because the universe by definition fills all space already, so much as into time, which as far as we know is open-ended.
Our Eyes are Time Machines
It is true that everything we can see now, out to 13.8 billion years of light-travel time, was once the size of a grapefruit, buzzing with hideous energies, but that grapefruit was already part of an infinite ensemble with no edge, except one made up of time. When we look out, we look into the past, the farther we look, the more deeply into the past we see. At the center is the present. Alas there is no direction in which we can look to see the future — except perhaps into our own hearts and dreams. All we know is right now.
So where is the center of the universe? Right here. Yes, you are the center of the universe.
When Albert Einstein married space and time in his theory of relativity back in 1905, he taught us that our eyes are time machines. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit, and so all information comes to us, to the present, from the past.
Everywhere and Nowhere
And so Einstein’s relativity teaches us that the center of the universe is everywhere and nowhere. It is the present, surrounded by concentric shells of the past. History racing at you at 186,282 miles per second, the speed of light, the speed of all information. Your eyes are the cockpit of a time machine, filmy wet orbs looking in the only direction any of us can ever look: backward. Everything we see or feel or hear — now that gravitational waves have been discovered — took some time to get here, and so comes to our senses from the past. The moon, hovering over the horizon, is an image of light that left its cratered surface traveling at the speed of light a second and a half ago. The sun that burns your skin is eight minutes and nineteen seconds in the past.
The Jupiter we see, glowering orange at the zenith these nights, is about 414 million miles out there as of this writing, or 37 minutes away in the past. The light from the center of the Milky Way, hiding behind the thick star clouds and dust lanes of Sagittarius, takes 26,000 years to get here. While it was on the way the first primitive ice age villages grew into skyscrapered metropolises. Your lover, brushing your lashes with his or her breath, is a nanosecond gone.
This is more than poetry. Mathematically, in Einsteinian terms, all the information and history available at any one place in the universe is known as a light cone. Everybody has one and everybody’s is slightly different, which means in effect that everyone’s universe is a little different.
There will always be some piece of information that has reached your lover but not yet you, let alone E.T. over in the next galaxy. It gives a new definition to being alone with your thoughts.
As T.S. Eliot put it:
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
As a result every spot in the universe is unique. There will always be a piece of it you haven’t seen yet and a piece that you have seen but that nobody else has. There is no place to stand if you want to claim universal knowledge. We all need each other in order to overlap our knowledge. We don’t have to stay in our prisons. Working together and sharing, we can know everything.
Or as Bob Dylan once put it, “I’ll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours.”
Cryptothecia rubrocincta lichen (aka Christmas Lichen) is in the Arthoniaceae family of fungi. Found in subtropical and tropical forests in the Southeastern USA. The red pigment, called chiodectonic acid, is one of several chemicals the lichen produces to help tolerate inhospitable growing conditions.
We've Watched:
Phillip's iPhone videos
on YouTube
on YouTube
Join Cher's Anti-Inaguration Campaign and Turn Off The Nonsense
Instead Check out These Two Alternate Realities
Thankfully we have Homeland. The Showtime Series new season is set during a transition to a female president whose relationship to intelligence advisers is dicey. But poor Quinn, what more could they do to this guy? We want to see him break out this season.
(two episodes currently available on demand)
The show examines what it means to have absolute power and be extremely handsome.
Sunday's premiere of The Young Pope showed a whole lot of its title character.
Notice the attention to little detail in the shower scene. The crucifixes are used as towel (or robe) holders.
Jude Law's full bum is put on display not once, but twice within the first five minutes of the first episode.
The 44-year-old actor stepped into the villain-you-love-to-hate role effortlessly, and looked good doing it during the show's debut on January 15. Now we know what's underneath the robes, and it looks pretty good. Notice later in the episodes that the Papal robes are at times see-through on Jude and he appears to be going au natural underneath. Love it!
In what eventually is revealed to be a dream sequence, American-born Lenny Belardo — who, through divine intervention or woeful human error, becomes pope of the Catholic Church at the tender age of 47 — is seen taking a shower, his silhouette illuminated in the glass panel.
The smoking, rule-breaking, breath-of-fresh air character played by Law was created by Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, who directed and wrote the 10-episode series.
No comments:
Post a Comment