The founding of Raleigh’s Citizens Advisory Councils (CACs)

I conducted my first East Citizens Advisory Council (East CAC) meeting for the first time in years. It’s been a year since the CAC met but it felt good to be doing something again.

I thought it was prudent to create a presentation about CACs, since there are new neighbors in the area who aren’t familiar with them. I’m also slated to talk to the Wake One Water group (a Wake County board) about CACs this Friday and a presentation could be useful for that call as well.

I slapped some slides together at the last minute, putting in the “facts” that I had assembled over the years of participating in CACs. There were holes in my knowledge, though, that drove me to do some research today on the murky early days of CACs. What I found surprised me.

I was able to finally view archives of the Raleigh News and Observer through the State Library and searched these for mentions of CACs. Of course I found mentions from 1974, the year commonly stated as the birth year of CACs. As I kept digging, I was surprised that more mentions came up. Earlier.

Many of them in 1973.
Continue reading →

The Ikaria Blue Zone in Greece and Its Longevity Secrets – Business Insider

Ikaria, located in the Aegean Sea, is one of Greece’s many islands. What sets it apart is how long its residents live. Known as the island of longevity, one in three of its residents make it to their 90s, and rates of dementia and some other chronic diseases are very low, according to the Blue Zones website.

The island is one of the world’s five Blue Zones, which are regions of the world where people regularly live about a decade longer than the US or Western European average. In Ikaria, people also tend to have lower rates of cancer, heart disease, and depression than in the US, The Guardian reported. The first Blue Zone, Sardinia in Italy, was identified by the researchers Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, and the concept was built upon by Dan Buettner, who named four more and has explored the habits and lifestyles of people in all five locations for the past 20 years.

Ikaria is a tiny island located about 30 miles from the Turkish coast with a population of about 8,400. Due to its geographical location, it has historically been the target of invasions by neighboring nations, which Buettner said forced residents inland, leading to an isolated culture heavily rooted in family life. Remaining active well into your 90s is common there, as well as staying sexually active into old age. A study on Ikaria from the University of Athens indicated 80% of Ikarian males between the ages of 65 and 100 were still having sex.

Source: The Ikaria Blue Zone in Greece and Its Longevity Secrets – Business Insider

Scientists are a step closer to bringing the dodo back from extinction. And it may save existing wildlife on Mauritius – Discover Wildlife

The dodo, a large flightless bird endemic to the small Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, has been extinct since the 17th century. But this poster species for extinction is now one step closer to a return to its island home.

Ambitious plans to bring back the dodo were announced in January 2023, following the news that scientists at the Genomics Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz had sequenced the dodo’s genome from a DNA sample taken from a museum specimen.

Now Colossal Biosciences, the US-based biotechnology and genetic engineering company attempting to resurrect the dodo, has partnered with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF) to restore habitat that will be necessary for its eventual reintroduction.

Source: Scientists are a step closer to bringing the dodo back from extinction. And it may save existing wildlife on Mauritius – Discover Wildlife

Record-Breaking Ocean Heat Wave Foreshadows a Dangerous Hurricane Season | Scientific American

For 421 straight days, a marine heat wave in the North Atlantic broke — and sometimes shattered — daily temperature records.

The hot streak finally ended April 29, but scientists say the length of the marine heat wave wasn’t the only unsettling part. Another alarm bell was that daily temperature records often fell by a significant margin — on several occasions by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit.

“It’s not just that it was a consecutive string of 421 days,” said Brian McNoldy, an ocean scientist at the University of Miami. “But for so much of that time, it was breaking the records by a lot — not even close.”

And the North Atlantic is far from an outlier.

The world’s oceans — as a whole — are heating up. According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, monthly global sea surface temperatures have been at their warmest on record for 13 months in a row. Last year set a new annual record for global ocean heat.

Source: Record-Breaking Ocean Heat Wave Foreshadows a Dangerous Hurricane Season | Scientific American

I am the Costco cart master

Saturday afternoon I made my weekend trip to Costco. Walking into the store, I pulled a shopping cart from the stack as one of the employees – a young kid – struggled with a full stack of carts pulled from the cart corrals.

As I was walking out of the store a little later, the same kid was struggling in the hot sun to fetch another stack of carts. The kid was really busting his ass. I unloaded my cart and returned it to the cart corral, where my OCD kicked in yet again.

The shitty part-time job I had in high school at the Dart Drug in Sugarland Plaza in Sterling, Virginia taught me a lot about working in retail. I will forever remember how to run a register and I will forever remember how to track down errant shopping carts. Needless to say, when I’m at Costco or other stores with carts, I can’t help but want to put them away the right way. It’s a combination of my engineering mindset, a dash of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder thrown in, and a tip of the hat to the young, hard-working store employee I once was.

Thus, on Saturday I could not just carelessly shove my cart into the corral. A full string of carts were parked in the middle of the corral, mostly stacked. I added my cart to the end and then took a moment to shove the whole stack to one side, making room for twice as many new carts to be added. It’s just what I do.

Just as I tamed the cart corral and was walking away, I heard a shout from across the parking lot. The young Costco kid was standing up from the shelter of the store’s shadow and was cupping his mouth and looking at me.

“THANK YOU, SIR!!” he bellowed across the lot with a smile.

We gotta look out for each other. I gave him a big smile and a thumbs up as I walked away.

Chiquita found liable for funding paramilitary group in Colombia – The Washington Post

Banana giant Chiquita Brands International must pay more than $38 million in damages to victims of a Colombian paramilitary group the company was found liable for financing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a federal jury decided Monday.

The decision follows a 17-year legal battle for the victims, sparked after a 2007 sentencing agreement in which Chiquita admitted to the U.S. Justice Department that it paid more than $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a violent right-wing group that committed human rights abuses in Colombia and had been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government. The Justice Department characterized Chiquita’s support to the AUC as “prolonged, steady, and substantial.”

Source: Chiquita found liable for funding paramilitary group in Colombia – The Washington Post

Opinion | The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war – The Washington Post

For several decades, military reformers such as retired Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix have pleaded with the Pentagon to stop buying wildly expensive but vulnerable aircraft carriers and fighter jets and instead focus on getting vast numbers of cheap drones. But nobody seemed to listen.

“Buy Fords, Not Ferraris” was the title of Hendrix’s iconoclastic 2009 polemic for inexpensive survivable systems. Aircraft carriers, he wrote, “have become too expensive to operate, and too vulnerable to be risked in anything other than an unhostile environment.” Similar arguments applied to exquisite systems beloved by all the services.

Source: Opinion | The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war – The Washington Post

Tonga’s volcanic eruption could cause unusual weather for the rest of the decade, new study shows

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (Hunga Tonga for short) erupted on January 15 2022 in the Pacific Kingdom of Tonga. It created a tsunami which triggered warnings across the entire Pacific basin, and sent sound waves around the globe multiple times.

A new study published in the Journal of Climate explores the climate impacts of this eruption.

Our findings show the volcano can explain last year’s extraordinarily large ozone hole, as well as the much wetter than expected summer of 2024.

The eruption could have lingering effects on our winter weather for years to come.

Source: Tonga’s volcanic eruption could cause unusual weather for the rest of the decade, new study shows

Ukraine’s Air Force Wanted Four Squadrons Of F-16s. It’s Getting Them.

Gen. Serhii Golubtsov, the commander of the Ukrainian air force, has said all along he needed four operational squadrons of Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters to have any chance of controlling the air over a single sector of the 700-mile front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.

It’s taken more than a year of intensive diplomacy between Ukrainian, Norwegian, Dutch, Danish and Belgian officials, but Golubtsov is finally getting his four squadrons.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky announced Belgium would donate 30 surplus F-16s—boosting to 85 the total number of the nimble, supersonic fighters Ukraine should receive starting this summer.

Source: Ukraine’s Air Force Wanted Four Squadrons Of F-16s. It’s Getting Them.

Inside Southeast Asia’s Criminal Resurgence | TIME

It all started with a Facebook ad. Rachel Yoong was bored and fed up at work when a job posting for a casino in the Myanmar capital Yangon popped up on her phone. The purported $4,500 monthly salary was seven times what the Malaysian earned as a real estate agent in Kuala Lumpur, so she eagerly applied. Before long, Yoong was invited to two separate interviews with suave, well-attired agents. By July 2022, she was booked on a flight to Yangon and upon arrival told to rest up in a hotel. On the third day a car arrived to take her to her new place of work.

“But when I got inside there were two big, tough guys with guns,” Yoong, 30, tells TIME. “That’s the moment I knew I was in trouble.”

Source: Inside Southeast Asia’s Criminal Resurgence | TIME