The Information Super-Frog

The Gulf oil slick is just the tip of the iceberg:

New York Times: Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf.

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water”

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Meanwhile here in the city, remember something about the Army Corps of Engineers having this project to fix up flood control?

Fix the Pumps: The lakefront hydraulic pumps are rusting to bits, and have been since they were installed. Some have already fallen apart. The Corps was warned all of them would do the same thing "imminently" in mid-2009, and did next to nothing for nearly the entire 2009 hurricane season.

Read the whole post if you can stomach it.

I'd really like to be able to stop calling them the "Army Corpse of Engineers". Really, I would.

(And remember ACOE has chosen not to use an existing local pump design with a long term proven track record of being high efficiency, low maintenance, and incredibly long lasting and resistant to extreme conditions. There are no inherent technical problems in designing the pumping system that weren't already solved back before World War I.)

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Since my recent posts have been harbingers of doom and gloom for South East Louisiana, here's something more cheery.

YouTube: Circa 1968: This is New Orleans! Sleepy by day. Psychedelic by night.

Plorkwort mentions the film "In the Shadow of the Moon" about the Apollo moon missions.

In my teens I was surprised to find out that I was the only one of my high school class to have memories of watching the moon landing on tv. Little Froggy evidentally thought it more attention worthy than his peers.

I recall feeling some disappointment while watching the returned astronauts' ticker-tape parade through Manhattan on t.v.; Walter Cronkite mentioned that it was the second largest turnout for such a parade in history, after Lindbergh's. Up to that point, I'd been feeling pride in having lived through a moment of history equal to those experienced by my grandfather, but that statistic gave me doubt.

Wikipedia has an article on ticker-tape parades, according to which the largest was actually that for General Douglas MacArthur in 1951. Apparently they still have "ticker-tape parades" on occasion, but as ticker-tape is no longer used, I don't see how that could be considered authentic. What would a good 21st century equivilent be?

Did AOL stop sending out those cds, or is that just one of the the things that the Post Office no longer gets to New Orleans post-K?

New Yorker article on Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina in New Orleans:

High Water: How presidents and citizens react to disaster