I think I have a blister on my foot

I think I have a blister on my foot … πŸ‘£

It’s totally my fault for not putting on fresh socks before walking on the rail trail yesterday, or maybe for not wearing my muck boots while hiking up at Partridge Run. I guess if my foot hurts too much, I can just spend more time at home on the exercise bike.

Senate passes ‘Save Our Seas 2.0’ bill focused on plastic waste | Waste Dive

Senate passes ‘Save Our Seas 2.0’ bill focused on plastic waste | Waste Dive

  • A multi-pronged piece of federal legislation known as the "Save Our Seas 2.0 Act" (collectively S.1982) recently made multiple advancements, despite recent opposition. Two bills (S.2260 and S.2372) were passed in their respective U.S. Senate committees last week, while a third (S.2364) awaits action by the Senate Commerce Committee. 
  • The legislation intends to reduce plastic pollution in the environment, namely waterways, through means such as innovative clean-up efforts and finding new uses for existing plastic waste. It has bipartisan backing in Congress, along with support from the American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association, but is controversial among environmental groups.
  • Last week, more than three dozen groups sent a letter of opposition to the co-sponsors, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), saying the legislation does not provide a "comprehensive approach to solving the growing problem of plastic pollution and certain provisions of the bill will make the problem worse."

The Trouble with Crime Statistics | The New Yorker

The Trouble with Crime Statistics | The New Yorker

The first problem with understanding crime is that measuring it is harder than it sounds. The Department of Justice approaches the problem in two ways. The F.B.I.’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, or U.C.R., solicits data from about twenty thousand law-enforcement agencies around the country. Simultaneously, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, or N.C.V.S., interviews about a hundred and fifty thousand nationally representative citizens, asking them whether they have been victims of a crime.

Both datasets have problems. An obvious one is that there’s no consensus about what counts as criminal activity. In some jurisdictions, only offenses worthy of incarceration are considered crimes. In others, fined infractions also count. (Is speeding a crime? What about manspreading, for which one can be fined seventy-five dollars in Los Angeles?) Because the U.C.R. draws its data from investigators, and the N.C.V.S. relies on victims, they can present starkly different pictures of crime. According to the U.C.R., the incidence of rape nearly doubled from 1973 to 1990. The N.C.V.S., by contrast, shows that it declined by around forty per cent during the same period. Researchers at Vanderbilt University looked into the discrepancy; they found that the upward trend in the U.C.R. data correlated with upticks in the number of female police officers, and with the advent of rape crisis centers and reformed investigative styles. It could be, in short, that a modernized approach to the policing of rape drastically increased the frequency with which it was reported while reducing its incidence. But coherent stories like these only sometimes emerge from the conflicting data.

Athens Generating Plant

One of the new natural gas generating plants built under the now expired Article X law that allowed power plants to be built without normal environmental reviews.

Taken on Saturday January 16, 2010 at Olana.