Bits and pieces from the internet: steam, meat, and mean edition

Interesting article in The New York Times about a car designed to run on steam, but never did, the Paxton Phoenix from 1960.

A new delicious monkey species have been reported on by the satirical magazine The Onion (funny!)

I am steaming after I discovered that someone stole my ATM card number and the pin too (how?) and have been taking out over $1700 dollars from my bank account.  The bank tells me I will get the money back.  Why are some people so MEAN? 

Apropos mean, they have started to steal human hair from salons.  What is next - cutting of a long braid or ponytail from someone's head in the subway?

In case you missed it, all three nuclear reactors in Fukushima have had nuclear meltdowns and are leaking radioactive water into the ocean.  The Japanese say a total shutdown will be done in 6-9 months (which is questionable if it is even doable).  Let's hope for no more tsunamis or big earthquakes between now and then... 

Poor world, too much is happening to it and us right now - tsunamis, earthquakes, flooding Missisippis, tornados, rain and drought....

Gorgeous: Where the rivers meet

Rio Negro meets the Amazon, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

In the Amazon, the black-water branch called Rio Negro meets the white-water branch of the Amazon near the city of Manaus, in the middle of the rainforest. The river is so wide here that you can barely see the forest along the horizon and ocean liners can come to Manaus all the way from the Atlantic, thousands of km away. The two water masses don't mix until miles and miles downstream since they have different density. Sometimes a clump of floating grass floats by, or a log, or a pink dolphin splashes. The black water is like dark tea, full of humus and acids that gives it a low pH. This is at high water season, six months later the water level is about 6 meters lower. Forests get flooded high up on their stems, people live in houses on stilts or floats, and even the cattle are kept in floating houses and fed the floating grass during the high water. It is a different kind of life, circling around the level of the water.

Bird feeding online

I have search the net for webcams with bird feeding. Here´s some favorites.

Pennsylvania, US: http://bucksbirdcam.com/

Atlantic rainforest, Brazil: Wildlife focus

Dalarna Sweden; winterfeeding

Store Mosse, Sweden: eagle feeding in winter (not active right now)

Estonian website: http://www.looduskalender.ee/en

Yesterday I took some screenshots from Brazil, see more pictures here.

Have fun!

A place to dream about: Itatiaia National Park, Brazil

In southeastern Brazil, not far from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, is a beautiful national Park, called Itatiaia. The park includes rainforest on the side of the mountain range, all the way up to the alpine shrub land and bare peaks. I visited this place in 2005 on a gorgeous spring day.

"This is the birthplace of mountain climbing in Brazil. In 1856 Franklin Massena was the first climber to reach the top of Pico das Agulhas Negras. Standing 2,878 meters above sea level, it that was for decades mistakenly considered the highest mountain in the country." (link)

Pico das Agulhas Negras means Peak of the Black Needles, and this giant rock really looks like its name. Millions of years of erosion has carved out deep furrows in the rock. This is in the tropical part of Brazil, but it is so high up you can get snow storms up here.

There are many trails, like this one, but they are not well-marked and not that well-maintained. We walked over this bridge and nobody got hurt, but I was happy that it was only a meter or two down to the soggy ground below, not a few hundred feet deep over a big river gorge.
The plants you see are mostly a small shrubby bamboo species. It was a strange feeling walking around in this alpine area with bamboos around you. Very different from Scandinavian mountain flora, but still similar!

This is a flowering bladder wort (Utricularia). On its leaves at the base of the plants it has little bladders that it catches insects and other small animals in, so it is carnivorous. The flowers were maybe 2 cm across. Grassy leaves, pretty nice! It might not be grass, because in the tropics there are many other monocot plant families that look like grass but are not.

Mosses, liverworts, lichens and micro plants love the wet ground. This is a Lobelia, a plant related to blue bells (Campanula). The long red flowers are pollinated by hummingbirds, and this plant grew along the road up to the peak, in the rain forest. On the way down from the National Park we passed this road stand with preserves made from local fruits. There were hundreds of kinds. The bags in the front contain limes and a local kind of pine nuts, Araucaria nuts, that are very tasty when boiled.
From our hotel that evening, looking up towards the Itatiaia peaks...

Snapshot: Brazilian roadstand

The bags to the left and right contain Araucaria nuts and the jars have preserves that are locally made in the mountains outside of Sao Paulo. This was a small roadstand, nothing in particular, with an amazong (=amazing) variety of preserves.