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The Endangered Species Act's biggest experiment
Will an unprecedented collaborative effort and lots of tax dollars be enough to finally save sage grouse?
Jodi Peterson
Image credit: USDA/NRCS
Aug. 17, 2015 From the print edition
Update: On Sept. 22, 2015, the greater sage grouse was declared to be no longer in need of Endangered Species Act protections. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell made the announcement for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
In late April, the hills of Cross Mountain Ranch, near Craig, Colorado, are already dry; the only snow in sight caps the higher peaks on the horizon. A pond sparkles in the sun, and to the west, where the land rises in ridges, dark patches of juniper finger down the draws. On the crest of the hill where I stand, something catches my eye in a pile of rocks. It's a greater sage grouse egg, buff-green with brown speckles.
Peering into its sand-crusted interior, I imagine a tiny striped chick emerging, toddling hopefully after its mother in search of food. But biologist Chris Yarbrough sets me straight: A raven probably devoured this one, he says, turning the shell over on his palm. A hatchling would have pushed out the egg's large end; here, the middle is crumpled inward. I look again, my cheerful fantasy replaced by a scene from Jurassic Park — the one where the T. Rex shoves its head into a Land Rover to try to extract screaming children.
Aside from this particular chick, though, Cross Mountain's grouse seem to have it pretty good. Last winter, a federal program called the Sage Grouse Initiative helped permanently protect 16,000 acres of prime habitat here through a conservation easement. The property's abundant sagebrush provides food and cover for grouse, and its thick grass helps camouflage nesting hens. Ranch manager Rex Tuttle, a slight, soft-spoken 45-year-old, points out the pipes he installed from the pond to watering holes down valley; they feed wet meadows, where grouse chicks can fatten on insects. In the far distance, sheep graze; Tuttle says he'll shift them to higher pastures in June to let the grass here go to seed, so it can shelter grouse this year and grow lush again next year.
He'll do the same on the neighboring ranch, where he grew up and where another 15,000 acres have been under easement since 2012. Add in a third easement and neighboring federal lands, and a quarter-million acres here are now protected to support grouse and other wildlife.
It's a conservation outcome that few could have imagined in the 1990s, when biologists first realized that sage grouse were in trouble across their range. Before European settlement, sagebrush covered more than 500,000 square miles; today, oil and gas development, renewable energy projects, subdivisions, wildfire, invasive species and poorly managed grazing have whittled it down to about 250,000 square miles scattered across 11 states. Perhaps 400,000 grouse survive, down from as many as 16 million.
Timeline of the sage grouse saga
Tracking grazing's impacts on bugs
But in 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a decision that set in motion what many are calling a landmark transformation in how the nation recovers imperiled wildlife. Ordinarily, the sage grouse's situation might land it on the federal endangered species list, ushering in much-feared land-use restrictions. But the agency declined to list the bird, not because it didn't need protection — listing was warranted, it declared — but because other creatures needed it more. Instead, the agency promised to make a final call on sage grouse by Sept. 30 of this year.
That court-ordered deadline has been a galvanizing force for grouse conservation like no other. The federal government and the states have partnered with industry, landowners and environmental nonprofits to protect places like Cross Mountain, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on everything from setting aside vast swaths of sagebrush to cutting down junipers and poisoning ravens. The Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service are cooperating with each other and with the states to protect habitat across tens of millions of acres. If they succeed in doing a good enough job, they may prove that the Endangered Species Act works best when it never goes into effect at all.
"I see a lot of people working hard together. Relationships have formed among people who never used to talk," says John Freemuth, professor of public policy at Boise State University. Still, it remains to be seen whether those relationships will survive once crisis mode has passed, or whether the feel-good collaboration will be enough to save the long-suffering grouse. "This is a pivotal Western moment," Freemuth says. "In 30 years, how will we be writing about this? How did the trajectory change?"
A male sage grouse displays in the sage country south of Pinedale, Wyoming, at the base of the Wind River Range.
Mark Gocke
A sage grouse lies dead in the Jonah Field area of natural gas development in Wyoming.
Jeremy R. Roberts/Conservation Media
Battling male sage grouse.
Rick McEwen/Sage Grouse Initiative
Journalists walk the largest lek in northwestern Colorado, looking for feathers lost by greater sage grouse males.
Theo Stein/USFWS
Vinyl fence markers are installed in Montana to help prevent collisions that injure or kill sage grouse and other birds.
Cattle and sage grouse coexist on the Big Creek Ranch in Idaho, which works with the Sage Grouse Initiative to maintain grazing practices that improve habitat for sage grouse and other wildlife.
Rosana Rieth/USDA/NRCS
A greater sage grouse lies dead on the side of a road that services gas wells in the Jonah Field area of Wyoming.
Mitigation efforts like this one, which removed piñon and juniper from grouse habitat in the Smith Valley near Minden, Nevada, helped stave off the listing of the bi-state sage grouse.
USDA/NRCS
Many species, when shouldered off their preferred habitats, can make a living elsewhere — robins, coyotes, mule deer. But sage grouse are exceedingly sensitive — disturbed by human activity near breeding areas; alarmed by trees and tall structures where raptors can perch. They're loyal to the places they know, even if those places are no longer suitable. Matt Holloran, chief scientist at Wildlife Management Research Support, describes how one female grouse in western Wyoming laid eggs in the same general spot each year as a major natural gas field rose up around her. When a well pad replaced her nest site, she finally moved –– but just 30 feet away.
This sensitivity makes greater sage grouse a strong indicator of ecosystem health: If they're not thriving across the vast Interior West, then things look bad for the region's 350 other species, from sagebrush obligates like the sage thrasher and pygmy rabbit, to seasonal migrants like sandhill cranes and elk. Says Jennifer Hayward, Pinedale district conservationist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service –– the umbrella agency for the Sage Grouse Initiative –– "I don't know why they don't just list sagebrush itself."
Listing the plant, though, might run up against the same limitations as listing the grouse. Under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is supposed to evaluate imperiled species' circumstances and determine what level of protection they need based on science, exclusive of politics and economics. The law works best when used to protect a species from a single, controllable threat; peregrine falcons, for example, bounced back after DDT was banned.
But the sage grouse's huge range and lack of adaptability complicate things, and the myriad threats it faces — many related to industries that define Western rural economies and identity — make wielding the law a much trickier prospect. Conservative politicians have for years sought to gut the act, and many conservationists worry a sage grouse listing would provoke fiercer attack — a prospect underscored by recent congressional attempts to boot several creatures off the list altogether and block funding for others.
That political grandstanding fuels fear and misinformation about what would actually happen if the bird were listed, says Pat Deibert, the Fish and Wildlife Service's national sage grouse coordinator. "It's like this big black hole," she says. "People think the world would end, that they'd lose the ranch. But most would be relatively unaffected."
More than one-third of sage grouse range is on private land, where the Endangered Species Act holds little sway. The law prohibits harming protected species, for example, but it can't force landowners to undertake conservation projects that might help those species recover. Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service is plagued with tight budgets and has a long line of species waiting for recovery. There are more than 1,200 on the list, and 250 candidates await final determinations, some for more than a decade.
States, on the other hand, can move faster, and have greater on-the-ground expertise than the federal agency. Former Idaho and Colorado wildlife department biologists Jack Connelly and Clait Braun were among the first to raise the alarm about grouse declines. In the mid '90s, as mounting threats became clear, they put together "all the data we could get our hands on," says Connelly, and brought it to the attention of wildlife managers. In 1995, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies convened the states with grouse populations and nudged them into action. They began creating conservation strategies; some took a bottom-up approach, first developing local working groups, then rolling those results up into statewide plans. Idaho's came in 1997, Nevada's in 2001.
Wyoming — home to roughly 40 percent of the nation's remaining grouse — mounted the most comprehensive effort. While other state plans relied almost entirely on voluntary efforts, a state statute gave Wyoming regulatory authority over oil and gas development, the primary threat facing grouse in the state, across federal, state and private jurisdictions. The state created a policy in 2008 to protect what it determined to be the most important chunks of habitat. Ranchers, miners, oil and gas companies, environmental groups, state and federal agencies all had a place at the table. They capped the amount of surface disturbance allowed inside these "core areas" and instituted seasonal work stoppages. Wind development was discouraged in those areas, and oil, gas and transmission lines were restricted.
But as environmentalists' court battles to list the bird intensified over the same timeframe, it was becoming clear that, range-wide, grouse conservation efforts still weren't cutting it. Oil and gas were booming again, and wind turbines popped up like mushrooms. In the Great Basin, severe wildfires devoured sagebrush and invasive cheatgrass moved in, fueling more big burns. Livestock grazing continued to degrade land in some areas, while in others, drought dried up water supplies and withered plants. The Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service weren't doing enough to stop habitat loss, while many states weren't effectively implementing their plans. Nobody had made enough sacrifices to ensure the bird's long-term survival.
In some ways, little seemed to have changed since High Country News ran a cover story assessing the situation in February 2002. "Several years into a Westwide effort to conserve the grouse and the sagebrush ecosystem," author Hal Clifford wrote, "there are only modest results."
Just after dawn, Yarbrough indicates that I should peer through a spotting scope aimed at a gravelly area at the base of a draw. I kneel on a red plastic placemat in front of the scope to keep from getting muddy, and about 50 male sage grouse pop into focus, their wings held vertically and their spiky tails fanned wide.
If sagebrush makes up the grouse's universe, then this is the center of its solar system. It's a lek, where male grouse return each year to dance for females and scuffle with rivals. Most stories about sage grouse open with a scene of clichéd majesty — the ancient ritual of the dancing birds. But when the males puff their white chests and inflate their yellow air sacs, the result looks disconcertingly like a halved hard-boiled egg. Whup whup sounds drift through the chilly air. Several males strut boldly in the lek's center, but most lurk in the shrubs, as if half-hoping no one sees them. "They're like the less-popular boys at the high school dance," comments Chris West, then executive director of the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust, as he takes a turn with the scope. "Kinda standing against the wall with their hands in their pockets." The hens seem unimpressed.
This particular lek is on a ranch several miles east of Cross Mountain. Most other leks are on or near private land, too: A Sage Grouse Initiative study suggests they're almost always within six miles of the wet summer habitats where grouse raise chicks. These meadowy areas are overwhelmingly in private hands, because they also attracted human settlement.
That's where the Sage Grouse Initiative comes in. Tim Griffiths, the program's national coordinator from 2010 until July 2015, knows from experience how endangered species struggles can breed mistrust. He was a Fish and Wildlife biologist in Klamath Falls, Oregon, in 2001 and 2002, when farmers' irrigation water was turned off to protect salmon — prompting a near-insurrection — and then turned on while salmon fry died by the thousands. "Wildlife was pitted against agriculture," he recalls, "and in the end, nobody won."
He remained convinced that the two could be reconciled, and in Montana in 2004, he got the chance to prove it with a fish called the fluvial Arctic grayling, which was headed for an emergency listing. Griffiths and State Conservationist Dave White, now both working for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, helped channel Farm Bill dollars into efforts to keep more water in a stretch of the Big Hole River and improve its quality by helping ranchers move feedlots and restore riparian areas. It was the first time that the NRCS had set aside a dedicated pool of money from its own wildlife habitat incentive programs to help with a broader species conservation initiative.
Those voluntary efforts worked so well that the agency decided to apply the approach to a species with a much bigger range: The greater sage grouse. Taking a card from Wyoming's deck, Montana's Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department mapped out the areas containing 75 percent of the state's birds. Then, in one of those core areas near Roundup, the NRCS developed conservation plans with 10 ranchers to test the approach. Because the agency works with agricultural producers as a partner rather than as an enforcer, it lacks the political baggage of the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. "Folks saw we weren't coming out with black helicopters, and heard through coffee-shop talk about the benefits," says Griffiths. "Healthy rangelands support sage grouse and also support vibrant agriculture." Eventually, 90 percent of the 200,000-acre core area was covered with conservation plans.
So the conservation service extended the program to the rest of Montana's core areas, and then began scaling up to the other 10 sage grouse states, which each mapped key grouse habitat. By the time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reached its "warranted but precluded" decision in March 2010, the Sage Grouse Initiative was ready to go, with White as NRCS chief. "We launched the very next day," Griffiths recalls.
Now funded with Farm Bill money through 2018, the Sage Grouse Initiative works with more than 75 partners, including state wildlife departments, energy companies and nonprofit groups. Most came on board through a migratory bird project called the Intermountain West Joint Venture, which contributed $15 million to help put "boots on the ground" in rural areas to work with landowners. Today, about 30 biologists are stationed in small towns like Randolph, Utah, and Burley, Idaho. All are jointly employed with partner organizations, including Yarbrough with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. "They're 10 percent of (the initiative's) work force," says Griffiths, "but they account for 50 percent of our accomplishments."
So far, the initiative and its partners have invested about $425 million in projects involving 1,200 landowners, with greater reach than an endangered species listing could achieve. Participants receive a compliance check once every three to five years, says Jason Weller, head of NRCS, and most follow their conservation plan.
The stats seem impressive: 400,000 acres of important grouse range have been cleared of encroaching conifers, which provide perches for predators and crowd out sagebrush. Ranchers now maintain taller grass on 2.6 million acres — which the initiative says bumps up nesting success by 10 percent. At least 500 miles of fencing have been moved or marked, reducing often-fatal collisions with wires by more than 80 percent. And more than 450,000 acres have been placed in conservation easements, permanently protecting most of them from subdivisions and wind farms, and substantially reducing the threat of oil and gas development.
Back on Cross Mountain, Chris West says that the conservation easement the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust placed on the ranch wouldn't have been possible without the Sage Grouse Initiative. It contributed half of the $5.6 million paid to the ranch's owners; a private donor and Colorado Parks and Wildlife covered the rest. Initiative dollars have made more than a dozen other Trust easements possible.
Under Endangered Species Act "candidate conservation agreements with assurances," landowners who implement certain conservation measures are protected from further restrictions if that species is listed. In a similar way, initiative signatories get 30 years of certainty that if the bird is listed and they continue approved conservation practices, they won't be asked to change those practices, nor will they be prosecuted if they accidentally harm or kill a grouse.
They also get a lot of federal dollars to make improvements on their land that benefit their bottom line as well as the bird. But 80 percent of the ranchers involved rely on BLM and Forest Service grazing allotments, so the Sage Grouse Initiative hopes to figure out how to extend approved conservation plans to cover those acres, as well. "(The whole program) is truly the biggest experiment in the history of the Endangered Species Act," says Griffiths. "Nothing this big, this orchestrated, has ever been attempted."
Video: Cornell Lab of Ornithology
On a windy May afternoon, I stroll along a wall of red shipping containers lined end to end. A tall metal structure rises behind them, and the groan of diesel engines and clank of pipes fills the air. This could be an industrial shipping yard on Seattle's Puget Sound. But it's a terminal on a very different sea: Sagebrush rolls in green waves eastward all the way to Wyoming's Wind River Range. Here on the Pinedale Anticline, managed by the BLM, the infrastructure of natural gas extraction lies thick — well pads, pipelines, roads, compressor stations, built by Shell, Ultra and other companies.
The shipping containers, which are set atop earthen berms, are one company's response to BLM limits on drilling noise, which can cut lek attendance and breeding success. It's part of a much more sweeping effort to change how business is done on the federal land that is home to two-thirds of the remaining grouse habitat, in order to avert an endangered species listing.
But the most important part of that has less to do with how energy companies develop resources than with regulations governing where they're allowed to do it. That was a significant shortcoming of previous federal efforts to safeguard grouse. The lack of regulatory certainty that habitat would be protected was one of the primary reasons the Fish and Wildlife Service decided in 2010 that federal protection was warranted.
In response, the Interior Department and Agriculture Department have thrown a huge amount of muscle and money into a comprehensive strategy to manage BLM and Forest Service lands, developed in close cooperation with the states. "These (federal) plans are unprecedented — they're collaborative, landscape-level and science-based," says Jim Lyons, deputy assistant secretary with the Department of Interior. "This is really the first attempt to implement the Endangered Species Act as it was intended — by conserving habitat so listing is not needed."
The centerpiece of the federal effort came out this summer, when the agencies unveiled 14 near-final plans that will usher in much more stringent protections than previously existed on 66 million acres of federal grouse habitat. They'll also set in motion large restoration and mitigation efforts to compensate for unavoidable development, and, perhaps most importantly, institute range-wide monitoring frameworks to determine how conservation strategies are working. Those frameworks include specific trigger points: If the number of male birds attending leks declines by a certain percentage, for example, then protections will be ratcheted up.
All the plans take a tiered approach to habitat protection, similar to the strategies favored by Wyoming and the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The tightest restrictions apply to "focal areas" critical for grouse survival; next is "priority" habitat. Existing energy leases and rights of way are grandfathered in, but both designations limit additional surface disturbance. "General" habitat offers the least restrictions. Though grazing, properly managed, is not generally considered a major threat, the plans prioritize reviewing allotments within high-priority habitat; some may also allow for the permanent retirement of certain allotments.
Many conservation groups, especially the large mainstream ones, regard the federal plans as a huge improvement. "It's achieved a lot of what we hoped it would achieve," says Nada Culver, director of The Wilderness Society's BLM Action Center. "Compared to other planning efforts we've seen, these plans provide more certainty, more landscape-scale cooperation and more actual protection."
The federal plans differ from each other in significant ways to better mesh with state strategies, which have also generally gotten more rigorous as the deadline nears. In 2011, then-Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar convened the State-Federal Sage Grouse Task Force and encouraged states to step up their efforts. Some governors issued executive orders requiring state agencies to consult with wildlife departments before doing anything that might harm grouse, while others revised and strengthened earlier plans, often with input from the Fish and Wildlife Service.
In Idaho, for example, Republican Gov. Butch Otter assembled legislators, industry representatives, ranchers, sportsmen, county commissioners, and members of conservation groups. "At first, it didn't look like the all-star team," says grouse biologist Connelly, who advised the team along with other experts. "But they incorporated the best available science, even when they didn't like it." The plan prohibits wind development, transmission lines and other energy development in the most important sage-grouse habitat. If that habitat is lost to wildfire or otherwise destroyed, or if large numbers of birds die off, additional protections kick in. The BLM incorporated Idaho's plan as a preferred alternative for its Idaho and Southwest Montana regional plan.
In Wyoming, federal plans hew closely to the state's core-area strategy, which has garnered both praise and criticism. Endangered species advocates believe the state plan, despite multiple updates, remains too friendly to industry, and indeed, significant new development has been allowed inside some core areas. And the BLM's plans adopt Wyoming's lek buffers, which forbid surface occupancy for drilling only within a .6-mile radius — much less than the distance that scientists recommend. Even so, the Fish and Wildlife Service supports the state plan, citing its breadth and regulatory force. Federal plans covering Colorado and Nevada, meanwhile, extend the no-surface-occupancy restriction across priority habitat and enforce a three-mile buffer around leks.
Over the past five years, says San Stiver, sage grouse coordinator for the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, a lot of horsepower has been added to state efforts, as every Western governor has endorsed plans and every state legislature has dealt with the issue. Now, he says, "their credibility is on the line. There's an earnest attempt to make sure things get implemented."
Yet despite all the plans, projects and collaborations, it's hard to tell if the conservation actions undertaken by states, the Sage Grouse Initiative or any other group will bump up grouse numbers over the long haul. The birds are fairly long-lived and reproduce slowly, and their populations tend to cycle, hitting natural highs and lows over many years.
A recent study for the Pew Charitable Trusts, for example, found that bird numbers dropped a whopping 56 percent between 2007 and 2013. In August, though, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies reported that they've climbed by two-thirds since that time. It may take decades to average out such spikes and dips; many biologists think the overall trend is either stable or downward. "Sage grouse declines are not as dramatic as they were 70 years ago," says Holloran, who's studied grouse since the '90s. "But overall there still seems to be a decline."
"In Wyoming, you're not going to stem losses," adds Griffiths. "But with policy and easements, you're going to greatly curb those losses. And in other places like Oregon and Idaho — there, you're actually building birds up and building range up. We're hoping this will even out over the range."
However, critics argue that the focus on preserving just the best remaining habitat means that the bird will get considerably less protection across its range than it needs. If it were listed, most of the land it occupies would, theoretically at least, be designated as "critical habitat" and legally safeguarded. In late July, WildEarth Guardians released a report showing that, compared to draft versions, the near-final BLM and Forest Service plans have dropped protections for about one-quarter of the priority habitat that the Fish and Wildlife Service had specified as vital to recovery. "How is that agency now going to say with a straight face that these plans are adequate to protect the species and prevent a listing?" asks Erik Molvar, who directs the group's Sagebrush Sea Campaign. (As of press time, the Interior Department hadn't responded to the report.)
Clait Braun, the biologist who helped raise early alarms about grouse, is similarly skeptical. "I have no confidence that anything anyone is doing is working," he says. Wildlife species need connectivity to maintain healthy genetics, and scattered areas of high-priority habitat are not enough to provide that. Nor do any plans set aside large permanent reserves, protected from all development. Voluntary conservation efforts fall short, since many, especially those undertaken by industry, aren't measured to see what they're actually accomplishing. Braun sees the Sage Grouse Initiative as less an effective way to conserve grouse than a taxpayer-funded subsidy program for ranchers. "It's a slick PR effort, but I fail to see the results. There's no data to show that grouse numbers have increased or that their distribution has increased." Within 30 years, he predicts, the birds will persist only in tiny, widely dispersed populations.
And despite strong monitoring and adaptive management, in which the federal plans change course whenever trigger points are hit, others fear that the land agencies' own pinched budgets and political inertia will sabotage the effort. "Monitoring is expensive, and it has to be implemented in the long term," says former BLM biologist Steve Belinda. "And what happens if you don't turn things around for grouse? BLM's history on adaptive management is poor to fair at best."
At least 200 protests have been filed against the plans, from every direction. The Western Energy Alliance says oil and gas development is unduly restricted, while Colorado and Montana complain that the plans don't give them enough authority over protections for the bird. Earlier this summer, Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead praised the federal plans in appearances with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. But now he's backed away, citing numerous issues that he claims have gone unaddressed. Idaho Gov. Butch
Otter has expressed similar reservations.
Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians and other environmental groups have protested as well, claiming that the plans' provisions are far weaker than what's needed to avert a listing. And at this point, listing is an outcome that few want to see — even on the environmentalist side. "We wouldn't be as engaged (in sage grouse conservation) if it was a listed species," says The Wilderness Society's Culver. A listing would make conservation actions more piecemeal, as individual projects are proposed and the feds evaluate how each one might affect the grouse. "That's a lot more challenging," she says. "We have a big scope, but we don't have endless resources."
Tom Christiansen, Wyoming's lead sage grouse scientist, puts it more bluntly: "What message would it send to our society," he asks, "if the largest conservation effort ever undertaken failed?"
So what would a sage grouse listing actually look like? Ask an endangered species activist or lawyer, and you're likely to get generalities, accompanied by reminders that nobody has a crystal ball. A "threatened" designation allows for more flexible management than an "endangered" listing. The activist would tell you that either adds public accountability — opening the door for lawsuits if the government isn't doing enough — and both experts would mention additional restrictions on economic activity and prohibitions on injuring or killing a sage grouse. Furthermore, the Fish and Wildlife Service would have to be consulted about any federally funded or permitted activity — drilling or grazing, say — that might harm the bird or its habitat, which can cause significant and costly delays.
But even if the grouse is listed, it doesn't mean that "the largest conservation effort ever undertaken" has failed, because the effort itself is likely to define the terms of the listing — possibly even making it stronger than what the agency would have developed on its own. The Fish and Wildlife Service would lean heavily on the existing work when it puts together its own recovery plans. And the private land agreements designed to help grouse would remain in place. The sage grouse, in other words, has already flown.
This scenario has played out with the sage grouse's cousin, the lesser prairie chicken, which lives mostly on private land in Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. When the bird landed on the "warranted but precluded" roster in 1995, collaborative efforts sprang up; the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies developed a range-wide plan, and a Lesser Prairie Chicken Initiative followed later. Fish and Wildlife still listed the bird as threatened in March 2014, after worsening drought knocked its numbers to perhaps 18,000. But the agency noted that the collaborative efforts were similar to the kind of formal recovery plan it would normally create several years after a species' listing, and developed a special 4(d) rule meant to soften the blow for businesses and landowners by honoring existing efforts.
As a result, the listing has been far from catastrophic. "We heard a dull thud. Nothing happened," says Terry Riley, director of conservation for the North American Grouse Partnership. "Energy companies haven't gone out of business, ranchers haven't lost their operations. That was a surprise to a lot of people."
With sage grouse, too, the threat of a listing has mobilized conservation work much more quickly than an actual listing probably would have done. What's more, says Ya-Wei Li, senior director of endangered species conservation with Defenders of Wildlife, "the restrictions imposed under these (federal) frameworks are far more significant than what we've seen for many other species that have been listed for decades."
Still, the risk of alienating stakeholders is very real, and state buy-in, like landowner buy-in, is vital. "Several governors have told me that if it's a federal bird, then it's a federal problem, and the feds can fund it and the feds can deal with it," says Audubon Society Vice President Brian Rutledge, who has long been involved with Wyoming's efforts. "We would much rather have the sage grouse managed at the local level," adds Fish and Wildlife's Deibert, "(so people) can make decisions relevant to their landscape. That's very difficult for us to do looking across 11 states."
That kind of local management is now the rule for at least one small group of sage grouse — much to the relief of ranchers, Washoe Tribe members, and the many other stakeholders who had been working since 1999 to save the bi-state population of greater sage grouse.
On April 21, Interior Secretary Jewell, along with Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and other officials, stood on a stage outside the Nevada Department of Wildlife's headquarters to announce that the 2,500 to 9,000 birds on the California-Nevada border no longer warranted federal protection, thanks to voluntary conservation efforts. It was a hot, sunny day, and most of the chairs arranged on the grassy lawn were empty. But a big round of applause went up from under the surrounding trees, where dozens of attendees had sought shade. The bi-state birds had been added to the candidate list in 2010, and three years later the agency proposed to list them as "threatened"; now, provided populations remain strong, they won't be listed at all. "It's a great feeling of accomplishment, and of enthusiasm to keep moving forward," says Shawn Espinosa, a state biologist who's been part of the collaborative efforts. "Now we won't have that specter (of potential listing) lurking behind every working group meeting."
If the same thing happens with greater sage grouse, it could add momentum to, rather than undermine, the ecosystem-wide efforts the bird's predicament has inspired. "This is the start of something bigger," says Holloran. "It has the potential to evolve into the process under which all wildlife is managed," at least for landscape-scale species that range on private land.
Indeed, that's already happening at the Natural Resources Conservation Service. "There's a big shift in the wind here that's really good," says agency chief Weller. Within the past year, the Oregon chub was delisted and the Louisiana black bear was proposed for delisting — both of them saved by voluntary landowner conservation that the NRCS helped foster. As with sage grouse, protecting these species protects other creatures that share the same habitat — an approach that the agency has continued to concentrate on.
In 2012, the conservation service created the Working Lands for Wildlife Program, expanding Sage Grouse Initiative-style efforts to six other umbrella species across the U.S., including the southwestern willow flycatcher; Griffiths was just named Western regional coordinator for the program. Working Lands for Wildlife and the Fish and Wildlife Service recently released an ecosystem-wide biological opinion for the flycatcher that covered 83 other species that are either listed as threatened or are candidates for listing — the first time the agencies had issued a collective opinion for multiple species. Landowners who sign conservation plans for the flycatcher will work to remove invasive species and restore the riparian habitat that all those creatures — including the yellow-billed cuckoo, Chiricahua leopard frog and New Mexico jumping mouse — rely on. If any are later added to the list or upgraded to endangered, the ranchers will have the same 30-year certainty that the Sage Grouse Initiative offers. "Now we have predictability for the whole riparian ecosystem," says Weller.
Still, it's unclear just how well that approach will work. Dealing with dozens of species at once does add "layers of complexity," says Griffiths. "We'll have to test drive this for a year or two and see what needs tuning."
The Fish and Wildlife Service itself realizes that this kind of effort, with engagement from landowners, industry, and every level of government, can result in the kind of landscape-scale conservation needed to preserve not just a single species, but entire ecosystems. "The success is in the partnerships," Deibert says. "I'm hopeful that eventually, even if folks don't agree a particular species is of value, they'll realize it's a good business decision for them to do conservation."
Bouncing down a dirt road on Cross Mountain Ranch in his white pickup, Rex Tuttle gestures toward a large black-and-white border collie sitting in the back of the crew cab. "Don't try to pet Junior," he warns me; the dog doesn't like to be bothered by strangers, a sentiment that might apply to Tuttle as well. The ranch manager looks anxious, reflecting the apprehension pervading the sagebrush steppe about Fish and Wildlife's upcoming decision on Sept. 30.
But things are unlikely to change on Cross Mountain or anywhere else, anytime soon. Thanks to a budget rider Congress passed last December, the agency will be able to announce only whether the sage grouse is or is not still a candidate for listing. If the bird warrants protection, the agency is blocked from developing a rule to protect it as threatened or endangered for at least another year.
Still, Tuttle is clearly worried about the future of his own neighboring ranch, which he hopes to pass down to his sons, now 15 and 17. The conservation easement reduces the ranch's value and hence the eventual inheritance tax, in addition to benefiting wildlife. "We've done all we can to help grouse," Tuttle says, "but we can't force other ranchers to do the right thing." If the grouse is eventually listed, Tuttle wonders if his operation can remain viable — especially since it relies on hundreds of thousands of acres of public-land allotments where grazing might be curtailed. Ranching is already dicey enough, he says, citing difficulties with hiring sheepherders and fending off predators like black bears. "I told my boys they both need to plan to go to college and get degrees," he says, sounding resigned. "That way they can do something else if the ranch doesn't work out."
Jodi Peterson is a senior editor at High Country News, and writes from Paonia, Colorado. Follow @Peterson_Jodi
The videos in this story were provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology from their film "The Sagebrush Sea" which originally aired on the PBS series Nature in May 2015. You can see the entire film on Nature's website.
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Home Helpful tips What year did the drinking age change from 19 to 21?
What year did the drinking age change from 19 to 21?
Helpful tips Alice Hardie 18/08/2020 comments off
1 What year did the drinking age change from 19 to 21?
2 What was the drinking age in 1940?
3 When did the US lower the drinking age to 18?
4 What states allow drinking at 18 2021?
5 What country smokes the most?
7 Why was the drinking age changed from 18 to 21?
8 What's the lowest drinking age in America?
9 What states can minors drink with parents?
10 When was the minimum drinking age raised to 21?
11 What was the legal drinking age in the United States before 1984?
12 When did the legal age become 21?
13 How old do you have to be to buy alcohol in the USA?
14 When did D.C. raise drinking age to 21?
15 Why drinking age should remain at 21 years?
16 Should the legal drinking age be increased to 21?
17 Why is 21 the legal drinking age?
Unbeknownst to many, however, something did happen back in 1984 that affects a lot of us: The National Minimum Drinking Age Act was passed, establishing the legal drinking age at 21.
What was the drinking age in 1940?
' In August of 1940, Vichy or Nazi France introduced, for the first time in French history, a minimum legal drinking age. It prohibited drinking by anyone under the age of 14.
When did the US lower the drinking age to 18?
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 (23 U.S.C. § 158) was passed by the United States Congress and was later signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on July 17, 1984….National Minimum Drinking Age Act.
Effective July 17, 1984 37 years ago
Public law 98-363
Statutes at Large 98 Stat. 435 aka 98 Stat. 437
What states allow drinking at 18 2021?
Plus, in North Carolina, you can pour beer and wine at eighteen, but not liquor until you are 21. As you can see, it quickly gets confusing when it comes to the minimum legal age and liquor. There are only five states with no exceptions to the federal law: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire, and West Virginia.
What country smokes the most?
Kiribati has the highest smoking rates in the world at 52.40%. As with many other countries, smoking is lower among women than it is among men. More than 200 people die in Kiribati each year from tobacco-related causes.
States were allowed to make their own alcohol laws once again, and most imposed a drinking age of 21, with a few mostly southern states setting it at 18. At the time, 21 was still the age of majority, so this made sense.
Why was the drinking age changed from 18 to 21?
Organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving began agitating for a uniform national drinking age of 21 to help eliminate these blood borders and keep alcohol out of the hands of supposedly less-mature 18-year-olds. As a result, President Reagan signed the aforementioned National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984.
What's the lowest drinking age in America?
A Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) of 21 saves lives and protects health. Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) laws specify the legal age when an individual can purchase alcoholic beverages. The MLDA in the United States is 21 years.
What states can minors drink with parents?
Family members able to furnish a minor with alcohol in 31 states: Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland.
When was the minimum drinking age raised to 21?
The enactment of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 (56 KB) prompted states to raise their legal age for purchase or public possession of alcohol to 21 or risk losing millions in federal highway funds. By 1988, all 50 states had raised their MLDA to 21.
What was the legal drinking age in the United States before 1984?
The MLDA in the United States is 21 years. However, prior to the enactment of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, the legal age when alcohol could be purchased varied from state to state. 1 States that increased the legal drinking age to 21 saw a 16% median decline in motor vehicle crashes. 6
When did the legal age become 21?
The Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in 1984, establishing 21 as the minimum legal purchase age.
How old do you have to be to buy alcohol in the USA?
Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) laws specify the legal age when an individual can purchase or publicly consume alcoholic beverages. The MLDA in the United States is 21 years. However, prior to the enactment of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, the legal age when alcohol could be purchased varied from state to state.1.
When did D.C. raise drinking age to 21?
Drinking age. In response to the National Minimum Drinking Age Act in 1984, which reduced by up to 10% the federal highway funding of any state which did not have a minimum purchasing age of 21, the New York Legislature raised the drinking age from 19 to 21, effective December 1, 1985.
Why drinking age should remain at 21 years?
The drinking age should stay at 21 because by this age we have grown some responsibility and most of the growth of the brain has stopped by this age. Remember: This is just a sample from a fellow student.
Should the legal drinking age be increased to 21?
Raising the drinking age to 21 will reduce consumption amongst young people because it will be harder to buy alcohol. Also, young people are the most likely group to misuse alcohol; e.g. drinking to excess, which causes accidents, death and health problems.
Why is 21 the legal drinking age?
Legal drinking age was established to promote responsible drinking, safety, and to prevent minors from accessing and/or abuse the use of alcohol. Most of the countries accepted the age of 18 as already legal. But in some studies, age 21 should be the ideal drinking age.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


A strong theme of Bear Skin is how narrative both reflects the world and shapes it. Story is educative, story asserts a view, story informs and we viewers and readers engage, and re-tell and become.
Deeply truthful stories are vital to good and strong society. This wonderful TED talk by Christopher Bell sums up the importance of this fact by addressing the place of strong female role models in narrative, not only for little girls, but also for little boys.
But here's the question that I have to ask. Why is it that when my daughter dresses up, whether it's Groot or The Incredible Hulk, whether it's Obi-Wan Kenobi or Darth Maul, why is every character she dresses up as a boy? And where are all the female superheroes? And that is not actually the question, because there's plenty of female superheroes. My question really is, where is all the female superhero stuff?Where are the costumes? Where are the toys?
Because every day when my daughter plays when she dresses up, she's learning stuff through a process that, in my own line of work, as a professor of media studies, we refer to as public pedagogy. That is, it is how societies are taught ideologies. It's how you learned what it meant to be a man or a woman, what it meant to behave yourself in public, what it meant to be a patriot and have good manners. It's all the constituent social relations that make us up as a people. It's, in short, how we learn what we know about other people and about the world.
J G Ballard's 1984 novel Empire of the Sun was made into a Hollywood film in 1987. In his article, published in The Guardian he reflects on 40 years of memories and how story re-wrote them.
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed. Hauling them into the daylight can be risky. Within a few hours, a precious trophy of childhood or a first romance can crumble into rust.
I knew that something similar might happen when I began to write Empire of the Sun, a novel about my life as a boy in Shanghai during the second world war, and in the civilian camp at Lunghua, where I was interned with my parents.
Coming to England after the war, and trying to cope with its grey, unhappy people, I hoarded my memories of Shanghai, a city that soon seemed as remote and glamorous as ancient Rome. Its magic never faded, whereas I forgot Cambridge within five minutes of leaving that academic theme park, and never wanted to go back. The only people I remembered were the dissecting room cadavers.
During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. But how could I raise this Titanic of memories? Brought up from the sea bed, the golden memory hoard could turn out to be dross. Besides, there are things that the novel can't easily handle. I could manage my changing relations with my parents, my 13-year-old's infatuation with the war, and the sudden irruption into our lives of American air power. But how do you convey the casual surrealism of war, the deep silence of abandoned villages and paddy fields, the strange normality of a dead Japanese soldier lying by the road like an unwanted piece of luggage?
I waited 40 years before giving it a go, one of the longest periods a professional writer has put off describing the most formative events in his life. Twenty years to forget, and then 20 years to remember. There was always the possibility that my memories of the war concealed a deeper stratum of unease that I preferred not to face. But at least my three children had grown up, and as I wrote the book I would never have to think of them sharing the war with my younger self.
In fact, I found it difficult to begin the novel, until it occurred to me to drop my parents from the story. We had lived together in a small room for nearly three years, eating our boiled rice and sweet potatoes from the same card table, sleeping within an arm's reach of each other, an exhilarating experience for me after the formality of our prewar home, where my parents were busy with their expat social life and I was brought up by Chinese servants who never looked at me and never spoke to me.
But I needed to move my parents out of the story, just as they had moved out of my life in Lunghua even though we were sharing the same room. They had no control over their teenage son, were unable to feed or clothe him or pull those little levers of promise and affection with which parents negotiate domestic life with their children. My real existence took place in the camp, wheedling dog-eared copies of Popular Mechanics and Reader's Digest from the American merchant seamen in the men's dormitory, hunting down every rumour in the air, waiting for the food cart and the next B-29 bombing raid. My mind was expanding to fill the possibilities of the war, something I needed to do on my own. Once I separated Jim from his parents the novel unrolled itself at my feet like a bullet-ridden carpet.
Even then, I had to leave out many things that belong in a memoir rather than a novel. Lunghua camp, with its 2,000 internees, was a grimy bidonville, a slum township where, as in all slums, the teenage boys ran wild. There were unwatched screwdrivers or penknives to be snaffled, heroic arguments with a bored clergyman about the existence of God, buckets of night soil to be hoisted from the G-block septic tank and poured into the tomato and cucumber beds that were supposed to keep us alive when the Japanese could no longer feed us. In a bombed-out building I found a broken Chinese bayonet, sharpened the stump of blade and used it to prise away the bricks of the kitchen coal store, filling a sack with precious coke that would briefly break the chill of our unheated concrete building. My father said nothing, feeding the coke into a miniature brazier as he rehearsed his lecture on science and the idea of God. I ran off, and nagged the off-duty Japanese guards in their bungalows until they let me wear their kendo armour, laughing as they thumped me around the head with their wooden swords.
In 1984 the novel was published, a caravel of memories raised from the deep. Enough of it was based on fact to convince me that what had seemed a dream-like pageant was a negotiated truth. Curiously, my original memories of Shanghai still seemed intact, and even survived a return trip to Shanghai, where I found our house in Amherst Avenue and our room in Lunghua camp – now a boarding school – virtually unchanged.
Then, in 1987, like a jumbo jet crash-landing in a suburban park, a Hollywood film company came down from the sky. It disgorged an army of actors, makeup artists, set designers, costume specialists, cinematographers and a director, Steven Spielberg, all of whom had strong ideas of their own about wartime Shanghai. After 40 years my memories had shaped themselves into a novel, but only three years later they were mutating again.
Coincidences were building strange bridges. Thanks to the film studios in Shepperton, many of my neighbours worked as extras, and now called out: "Mr Ballard, we're going to Lunghua together." Had some deep-cover assignment led me to Shepperton in 1960, knowing that one day I would write a novel about Shanghai, and that part of it would be filmed in Shepperton?
Spielberg, an intelligent and thoughtful man, generously gave me a small role as a guest at the opening fancy-dress party. Warners had rented three houses in Sunningdale to stand in for our Shanghai home. When I arrived at the location I found an armada of buses, vans and coaches that filled entire fields and resembled the evacuation of London. Bizarrely, it also reminded me of the day we were bussed into Lunghua from our assembly point at the American club near the Great Western Road. I can still see the huge crowd of Brits, many of the women in fur coats, sitting with their suitcases around the swimming pool, as if waiting for the water to part and lead them to safety.
The Sunningdale house where the fancy-dress party was filmed closely resembled our Amherst Avenue home, but this at least was no coincidence. The expat British architects in the 1930s who specialised in stockbroker's Tudor took the Surrey golf course mansions as their model. Past and present were coming full circle. The Warners props department filled the house with period fittings – deco screens and lamps, copies of Time and Life, white telephones and radios the size of sideboards. In the drive outside the front door, uniformed Chinese chauffeurs stood beside authentic Buicks and Packards. A 12-year-old boy ran through the costumed guests, a model aircraft in one hand, racing across the lawn into a dream.
Surprisingly, it was the film premiere in Hollywood, the fount of most of our planet's fantasies, that brought everything down to earth. A wonderful night for any novelist, and a reminder of the limits of the printed word. Sitting with the sober British contingent, surrounded by everyone from Dolly Parton to Sean Connery, I thought Spielberg's film would be drowned by the shimmer of mink and the diamond glitter. But once the curtains parted the audience was gripped. Chevy Chase, sitting next to me, seemed to think he was watching a newsreel, crying: "Oh, oh . . . !" and leaping out of his seat as if ready to rush the screen in defence of young Bale.
Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live – and it's now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp – the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg's film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it's all only a movie.
JG Ballard – The Guardian, 3 Mar 2006.


An inline drum with tapered edges and high curb clearance sits ahead of an oscillating articulation joint, providing precise and agile compaction capabilities in tight spaces. The drum delivers 10,566 lb. of centrifugal force and is assisted by standard features such as dual frequency and auto vibration stop, which (when activated) will turn off vibration in neutral to reduce the risk of divots.
The kneading action of the four rear pneumatic tires results in fewer voids, a smoother surface and a better seal, and can be complemented with an optional ACE Force Intelligent Compaction System for on-the-spot measurements and documentation. To reduce the risk of asphalt pickup, a pressurized water system with two-stage filtration provides reliable and constant flow to the drum and tires.
The DV26CD utilizes an efficient Tier 4 Final solution that requires minimal involvement from the operator. There is no additional fluid to add and no regeneration downtime. It's compliance made simple.
An ISO-mounted operator platform minimizes vibration, much to the praise of backs everywhere, and with a lateral-sliding, spinning seat, operators have clear, comfortable sightlines to front drum edges, rear tires and both sides of the machine. Functions such as vibration control, sprinkler on/off and horn are built into the operation lever on the seat so that operators won't have to take their eyes off the pavement to reach for the dash. The sensitivity of the electronic control lever can also be adjusted to the operator's liking. And to help combat sun, rain and cold, a canopy and heated seat are also available.
Maintenance is made easy with an engine hood that flips forward for full access to all daily checkpoints, fill ports, drains and engine service items, all of which are conveniently located on one side of the machine. A lockable external fuel cap saves time with each fill-up and the Teflon articulation joint provides long-lasting life.
Purchased Protection Plan is an extension of the factory base and extended coverage available at an additional cost. Your CASE dealer can help you determine the plan that fits your needs. Plans are available up to six-years / 7,500 hours on CASE Compaction Equipment.


The video(s) brought to you by Dominik Hildebrandt (www.G-WORKOUT.de) are offered to the public for information and entertainment purposes only.
These video(s) are copyrighted by Dominik Hildebrandt (www.G-WORKOUT.de) and is protected under all applicable international, federal, state and local laws, with ALL rights reserved. No part of this may be copied, or changed in any format, sold, or used in any way other than what is outlined within this under any circumstances without express permission from Dominik Hildebrandt (www.G-WORKOUT.de).


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Father and son sport forehead tattoos
Mark Frauenfelder 10:11 am Wed Mar 19, 2008
These mug shots of 48-year-old Floyd Bebees and his 21-year-old son, Justin, were taken on different dates.
If you look closely, you'll notice that each gentleman sports a forehead tattoo.
In [Smoking Gun] interview, Floyd Bebee, a father of eight, said that he has a tattoo on the back of his head reading "Got-R-Did." The ink on his forehead cost $125 and took about 45 minutes to complete, Bebee said, adding that he was the family trendsetter when it it came to such head art. Bebee, who does odd jobs like home remodeling and demolition, said that his wife has a succinct response to his forehead ink: "You crazy," she said. Bebee noted that since his son's eyes are open in his mug shot, the photo does not reveal a hidden surprise: Justin has the words "Fuck" and "You" tattooed on his eyelids.
Forced by shortages to sell chipless ink cartridges, Canon tells customers how to bypass DRM warnings
Printer ink company Canon was forced by the silicon shortage to sell cartridges without the DRM chips used to dissuade customers from using third-party tanks. Accordingly, it is reportedly telling customers how to bypass its "genuine" ink bullshit. (translation) We value you as a customer and a constant user of Canon products. Due to the… READ THE REST
Retiring "Lena", the Playboy nude used to calibrate imaging tech
Losing Lena is a 2-minute film about a nude photograph from a 1972 issue of Playboy, an image often used by software and hardware developers as a test card. It's long past time to retire it. It's a poor-quality photograph no good for its overt use, and its covert use—sneaking a nude into the workflow—highlights… READ THE REST
Big names flee Consumer Electronics Show as Omicron variant bites
The Consumer Electronics Show, where some 100,000 industry and media folk mingle as they coo over next year's gadgets, is still scheduled for early January 2022. But many big names have pulled out and the shelves are beginning to look threadbare. The latest to withdraw are chip maker AMD and PC manufacturer MSI. Amazon, Facebook,… READ THE REST


Students become familiar with the art and architecture and history of the Chicago World's Fair. In this public arts project lesson plan, students compare and contrast fine art and public art through a study of the exhibits at the Chicago World's Fair. Students examine and discuss neoclassical design and modernist design. Students complete worksheets after examining pictures.
What is texture? This video shows the difference between textures, as well as shares different types of textures.


Have you been told by a dentist or specialist you need oral surgery? Have you delayed receiving surgery because you do not trust your current dentist, or you are afraid to undergo the procedure? Our Comfort Care Dental dentists, Dr. Peterson and Dr. Henry, have undergone extensive training and continuing education to offer patients skilled oral surgery in Royse City. Nearly all of our dental procedures are performed in-house in our welcoming dental office, including most of our oral surgeries. Whether you would like a second opinion, or if you're seeking a trustworthy dentist to perform your surgery, we can be of assistance.
Call Comfort Care Dental at (972) 544-4339 to schedule a consultation.
With more than 75 years of combined dentistry experience, our staff can confidently perform nearly any type of oral surgery. We are patient-oriented and truly care about you and your family, so we invest in state-of-the-art equipment and cutting-edge education to give you the highest quality services. We believe that the best dentistry is the least amount of dentistry possible, so we will never try to pressure you into procedures you don't really need. We strive to always be looking out for your well-being.
We treat patients of all ages, including children and senior citizens. Prior to any surgery, we will discuss your condition and any alternative treatments with you to make sure surgery is your best and safest option.
Trust our highly qualified team at Comfort Care Dental for all of your oral health needs. We pride ourselves on our honest and skillful dentistry services and strive to give every patient the healthy smile they deserve. We accept most major insurance plans and have several special offers available. We look forward to caring for you and your family.
Contact our office today at (972) 544-4339 for more information about our oral surgery in Royse City.


Looking for a quality investment with a long trading history, strong brand and high profits. If you are then look no further.
This business, located in the Northern Suburbs, is a brand leader in its field and has become a first choice for homeowners in WA.
Mananufacturing a product for home owners in the home improvement / window treatment industry the business has performed very successfully over the past 20 years. With a simple manufacturing process the business is ideal for owners of all backgrounds.
The owners are ably supported by long serving and highly qualified management staff that could easily operate the business themselves should a new owner be looking for more of an under management opportunity. Equipped with a full sales team doing all the hard work all an owner needs to do is steer the ship.
Currently showing a healthy return to an owner of $545k (2018 financial year) and increasing in the 2019 year already, the business is well placed to take advantage of the next upswing in the residential property market in WA. During the last boom the business was generating profits to the owners of over $950k!!!!
The brand is very strong and a huge database of happy clients over the years really gives a strong platform to grow from.
For a detailed information memorandum please contact Reece O'Sullivan on enquirieswa@finnbusinesssales.com.au.


Change can be scary, but Assured Aggregates Company realized less than a year ago that sometimes change is exactly what a business needs to reach the next level. We sat down with Sharon Chapin to hear all about their experiences during their first year with Axon.
"I'm Sharon Chapin, Corporate Secretary and Operations Manager of Assured Aggregates Company. We are a local transportation company offering transportation and materials, generally within a 100-mile radius, although we do venture outside of that. We are located in Salinas, California.
Tell us about your experience with Axon.
"I was on the previous system for 24 years, so that was a little bit of a culture shock when I went out and started looking for a new system. Although I was quite nervous about the transition after 24 years on the same program, Axon really opened my eyes quite quickly that 'Wow, I should have probably made this change several years ago!' A lot of things have changed, and again, we are very pleased with the product.
"I can really see a difference in the streamlining of the payables …. I know my payables person is finding that process much easier and much smoother," says Sharon Chapin, Assured Aggregates.
What sort of problems did Axon help you solve in your business?
"We process an incredible amount of paperwork. We also sell a lot of different materials and commodities. We use a lot of independent contractors.
"This is the first time that I have all of the systems together – the dispatch, the billing, and the payables. Before, we had two separate systems. Our dispatch operated on one, the accounting on the other.
"I think pulling all of that in as one has been a major plus as far as reports and access to everything. Axon has helped us solve a lot of billing issues, dispatch issues, and everybody is working on the same sheet of music, so to speak.
"I have a staff member that is going to retire at the end of the year possibly, and I'm not going to be filling that position. I feel that with the Axon system everybody should be able to more than keep up on the paperwork.
Do your owner operators like the driver settlements?
Has Axon helped you consolidate your invoicing?
"We are able to go in there and customize things a lot more to be what we're looking for. We definitely did not have that in our old system, so I think that is a real plus.
Has equipment revenue reporting given you a better idea of what is going on?
"Yeah, it definitely has, and we probably aren't utilizing it fully yet, such as adding the component with the shop in our maintenance facility. We will probably do that down the line.
Has the custom report creator helped you in your business?
Has Axon reduced the amount of entries you have to make?
"I can really see a difference in the streamlining of the payables. Whether you want to run just one check or you're going to run multiple checks – I know my payables person is finding that process much easier and much smoother.
Has Axon helped you with your billing?
What do you think your return on investment is with Axon?
"Do I think I'm going to see 100% return on investment on Axon? Absolutely, yes. If I'm not going to replace one person and then you look at that salary, well, the system just paid for itself.
"I feel like this was a great investment. I looked at a lot of systems. I looked at a lot of software. I talked to a lot of people, and I was really impressed from the first phone call when the salesperson called me back and we started this conversation.
How do you feel about the support?
Do you find the software fairly easy to use?
"I thought it was going to be a real challenge and we started off a little bit rocky, but I connected with the folks at Axon. They said, 'We won't cut you loose. We will make sure you know the system.' They really did, and that spoke volumes to me.
If someone in the industry would ask you about your experience with Axon, what would you say?


Contact this reporter at kensuke.seya@buzzfeed.com.
In Japan, job applicants are compelled to attach shomei-shashin or ID photos to their resumes when they send them in. Could we get hired for our own jobs in Japan?


The transition to new cloud native technologies like Kubernetes has dramatically altered how applications are architected and deployed. For quite some time, monolithic applications were deployed to a set of long living servers, receiving rather infrequent and incremental updates over their lifespan. With the rise of cloud native technology has come a rise in microservice architectures running with ephemeral containers on infrastructure that is quickly evolving. Adding to the complexity, these applications are regularly deployed to multiple availability zones, regions, or even multiple clouds.
This approach to application architecture has come with many advantages, but it's also required significant shifts in supporting technologies like monitoring. Cloud native systems are generally more stable and highly available, often including some kind of auto failover components. Unfortunately as these architectures get more complex, so do the potential failure modes. The more components that are involved, the more ways things can break. With that in mind, it's more important than ever to have an effective monitoring strategy.
In a cloud native world, the traditional monitoring we've become accustomed to simply can't keep up with these more modern architectures. It can't provide the level of insight into our applications that we need to fully understand what's happening.
The most effective monitoring strategies will take a multifaceted approach, covering four different areas: External polling, centralized logging, custom metric collection, and request tracing. Although not every architecture requires each of these components, each of them can provide a unique and complementary level of insight. The best monitoring strategies rely on a combination of approaches to provide a comprehensive system overview.
There's a broad category of monitoring often referred to as "black box" monitoring. This refers to polling a system from the outside in to measure its health. An example of this would be polling a web endpoint every minute to ensure the uptime of your application. One of the most traditional forms of monitoring there is, this likely still has a place in a monitoring strategy. This approach to monitoring is highly effective at detecting problems that are already visible to your users.
To fully understand your systems, the base set of traditional metrics often don't cut it. With custom metric collection, applications can expose metrics that are a better measure of application health.
In contrast to black box monitoring, many of the newer approaches are referred to as "white box" monitoring. This involves monitoring from the inside out and can provide a level of insight that black box monitoring generally can't. This approach can often detect problems before they become externally visible and can provide valuable information for in-depth debugging. Each of the following approaches is a form of white box monitoring.
Logging is nothing new. Just like polling, it's been around for quite some time. Cloud native architectures don't just require local logging though, they really need some kind of centralized logging system. With traditional monolithic architecture running on long-lived servers, logs sometimes never left the server they originated from. Centralized logging was not always seen as a necessity. Debugging sometimes meant logging into a specific server and sifting through logs to find a problem.
Of course with cloud native infrastructure, containers and servers are ephemeral, and it becomes more important than ever to ship logs to some kind of centralized logging system. ElasticSearch, often deployed with Logstash and Kibana to make up an "ELK" stack, has become one of the most popular open source solutions for centralized logging. The components of an ELK stack combine to provide a very compelling set of open source tools that simplify log storage, collection, and visualization respectively.
Having all system and application logs in a single place can be an incredibly powerful component of your monitoring system. When things go wrong, centralized logging allows you to quickly see everything happening in your system at that point in time, and filter through logs for specific applications, labels, or messages.
Additionally, these centralized logging systems can be configured to alert for anomalous behavior. This could be as simple as significantly increased log volume, or potentially an unexpected influx of error messages coming through.
To fully understand your systems, the base set of traditional metrics often don't cut it. With a custom metric collection, applications can expose metrics that are a better measure of application health. These kinds of metrics can provide much more precise information than the kind of metrics derived from polling data from outside of the system.
Open source tools like Prometheus have transformed this space. At its core, it is a monitoring and alerting toolkit that stores metrics with a multi-dimensional time series database. Each time series is identified by a key-value pair and tracks the value of that metric over time. The simplicity of this model enables the efficient collection of a wide variety of metrics.
Prometheus has become especially popular in the Cloud Native ecosystem, with great Kubernetes integration. The ease of tracking new metrics with Prometheus has resulted in many applications exposing a wide variety of custom metrics for collection. These are usually well beyond the standard resource utilization metrics we'd traditionally think of when it comes to monitoring. As an example of what this could look like, the popular Kubernetes nginx-ingress project exposes metrics such as upstream latency, process connections, request duration, and request size. When Prometheus is running in the same cluster, it can easily collect the metrics exposed by the many applications like nginx-ingress that support Prometheus out of the box.
In addition to all the tools that have Prometheus support built in, it's rather straightforward to export custom metrics for your own application. Having these kinds of custom metrics monitored for your application can provide a great deal of insight into how your application is running, along with exposing any potential problems before they become more outwardly visible.
With cloud native architectures, requests often end up triggering a series of additional requests to supporting microservices. When looking at an individual request, it is helpful to see all the related requests to other microservices. Traditional monitoring solutions didn't have a great way to find this information. This led to a new form of monitoring, request tracing, a means of connecting all related requests together for better system visibility.
There are some great open source tools focused on request tracing, including Jaeger and Zipkin. These tools allow you to see detailed information about all requests that spawned from an initial request, providing end to end visibility across your microservices. This kind of insight can be invaluable when trying to diagnose any bottlenecks in your systems.
There have been some incredible advances in monitoring technology that help us better understand our systems in a cloud native world. As system architecture evolves, so must monitoring strategies. Open source tools like Jaeger and Prometheus can provide a great addition to traditional monitoring solutions, with all components working together to provide a cohesive approach to monitoring. With great monitoring comes better and more reliable systems, it's an investment worth making.


Our CEO, Bill McDermott, has thrown down the gauntlet on enterprise complexity so to speak and issued a challenge to every single SAP employee: Make our valuable products and solutions simple to understand, simple to discover, simple to deploy, simple to use and simple to support. Do that, he promises, and our customers will be successful. There is no more noble pursuit for SAP than that as far as I am concerned!
Before we get there, I think it's worth contemplating our passion at SAP. What we LOVE doing, put simply, is to enable customers to run their businesses, end to end in the simplest and most agile manner possible. To that end, we put the people who use products and solutions from SAP first and will enable them to run their business from their phone, anywhere, anytime through the cloud. Bill articulates this often as "The Cloud Company Powered by HANA"…which in itself is a simple but profound statement. How I interpret that as an SAP employee goes something like this: "Hey Steve, you need to make our products easy to use, run and love" and I am up for that call to action!
That depends on your point of view and what you need from SAP. On the one hand, if a business user just wants something like a simple tool to visualize data and nothing more from SAP, then said individual can go to saplumira.com, download Lumira for free and have a great experience. Done! And frankly that end user shouldn't have to talk to anyone at SAP to have that great experience.
With HCP, all required software to build a solution, including user portal, analytics, data integration, identity, mobile, collaboration, API management, document management, data management and much more are pre-integrated and ready to run in the cloud. (In other words, "no assembly required"… just start making an app!) If you want to see real apps in action, talk to people like @_bgoerke, @prakashdarji and a number of SAP Mentors including @wombling who are doing a great job building apps such as "Enterprise Jungle socialgraph" using the HCP platform.
On the subject of accessibility, you've also told us we need to make it easier to learn more about how to use our portfolio of products, ranging from ERP and HANA to Fiori and Lumira. Consequently, beyond making our tools just flat out easier to use, we've made free and low-cost, accessible education a top priority. We live in the age of Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity – online education, both free and paid options is now the norm. Tools like SAP HANA Academy and SAP Learning Hub, are driving continuous education (remember the cloud world has frequent & rapid releases) whether you are in Silicon Valley, India, China or anywhere around the world.
Lastly, we know that your success is a journey and your targets evolve over time. We want to make it easy to understand how to best leverage SAP so we can help you on that journey… so we've created journey maps that articulate in 5 simple steps how customers can explore customer success stories, identify use cases, try, deploy with easy cookbooks and experience our products. We've begun the journey with dozens of easy to access software evaluation editions via SAP HANA Marketplace, including BW on HANA, ERP on HANA, CRM on HANA, Cloud for Sales, and Customer Engagement Intelligence on HANA.
Great article, well written, concise, simple. However, for me as a simple mortal user of SAP products, it's difficult to understand your effort to make things simpler. As a I see it, your effort is like to see Ferrari trying to change his red color to blue or to see McDonalds trying to cook exotic and glamorous meals.
Today companies are complex entities (indeed this is the main reason to use sophisticated software like yours), and I think this is great, I mean if we realize that our company has complex processes, it would be incongruous if we use a simple tool to manage them. So this is why it's difficult for me to see your products as a simple ones. I guess IT guys would appreciate this more than users like me, but anyway I appreciate your efforts too.
those are decent points, but casting SAP as "Ferrari" isn't fair given we've acquired Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, BusinessObjects, Sybase, etc – ALL of which have different operating models with different levels of engagement, adoption requirements, etc.
The Volkswagen group actually owns Lamborghini, but doesn't try to make a VW work like a Lamborghini.
I was just trying to convey that SAP has elements of simplicity in it's model and creating more consistency and commonality it our model, founded on the SIMPLE elements of our business vs the complex ones is what we're aiming for.


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Pali Momi Utilizes Natural Power of Steam to Treat Benign Prostate Hyperplasia
Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is a condition that affects nearly 50% of men ages 51-60, and upwards to 90% of men age 80 and older.
This enlargement of the prostate gland can compress the urethra and reduce the flow or urine from the bladder, sometimes blocking it completely.
BPH also can include symptoms such as:
Urinary frequency.
Irregular flow.
Urgency.
Weak stream.
Straining.
Getting up at night to urinate.
"BPH and prostate problems have caused issues for men for centuries," says Dr. Franklin Lee, a urologist at Pali Momi Medical Center, noting that treatment for these issues previously was limited to medication or more-invasive surgery options.
However, a new option is available for millions of men living with BPH, and Pali Momi is the first medical center in Hawaii to utilize this technology.
"Rezūm allows an alternative to the standard TURP for treatment of men with BPH in a noninvasive manner," says Lee, who is the only physician in the state performing the procedure (as of publication date).
A Brief History Lesson
"Decades ago, treatment for BPH involved larger incisions. Urologists would even remove the entire prostate to alleviate urinary problems for men. As technology has improved, our understanding of prostate disease and the ability to treat prostate problems have evolved as well. Now many treatments for BPH are less invasive and are often done endoscopically," Lee says.
According to Lee, the most durable and effective treatment for BPH is a TURP, or a transurethral resection of prostate.
The gold standard for BPH treatment, the standard TURP is an invasive procedure that involves anesthesia and often an overnight stay in the medical center.
"Sexual side effects, such as retrograde ejaculation, may affect men in ways they don't expect," Lee adds.
A New Wave in Treatment
Using the natural energy stored in steam, Rezūm relieves symptoms associated with BPH during a simple in-office visit.
The urologists here at Pali Momi are excited to bring this new technology to Oahu and provide an innovative and new service to our patients."
During each nine-second treatment, sterile water vapor is released throughout the targeted prostate tissue. When the steam turns back into water, all of the stored energy is released, causing the enlarged prostate cells to die.
"Steam is a really innovative way to cause tissue destruction without the formation of scar tissue. The prostate tissue is simply resorbed, which creates a cavity allowing unrestricted urine flow and improved urination," Lee explains.
"The procedure itself is performed in the office under local anesthesia," he continues. "Patients can drive themselves in and out of the office and get their procedure performed in under an hour. The downtime for the procedure is also very minimal as opposed to the downtime for a standard TURP. Furthermore, Rezūm also preserves all the sexual function of men and does not cause retrograde ejaculation."
Lee says patients have experienced relief in as little as two weeks following treatment, but most should expect to see maximum results within three months.
"We have been using the technology here on Oahu for only three months, but many longer-term studies have been published from the mainland that show the effectiveness of Rezūm is similar to the standard TURP and that the results have lasted for at least four years. My own experience with Rezūm has been positive overall, and patient feedback has been overwhelmingly positive," Lee says.
"It is always tempting to try out new technologies, but as a physician, I am always cognizant that our primary duty is to prevent harm and provide a service to our patients," Lee adds. "Rezūm is a technology that I have known about for many years and as the years pass, it remains a safe and effective technology. We want to be able to provide new and comparable services to our community that is offered in the mainland. The urologists here at Pali Momi are excited to bring this new technology to Oahu and provide an innovative and new service to our patients."
To schedule an appointment or for more information, contact the Pali Momi Urology Clinic at 808-488-3400 or by clicking here.
Published on: June 7, 2019
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In spite of the heat and a crappy event site, it was great to see a lot of our friends show up and share cake with us. Sorry, we were so distracted with visiting and catching up with everyone, that we forgot to take pictures!
The event site was located across the highway from the Bremerton International Airport. We came to find out, later, that it was a former landfill! There were no trees for shade and a driving wind that blew our tent over twice. The first time was when I was sleeping in it Saturday morning.
We set up on the archery range, thanks to the camp-o-crat which was great for Ali. The problem was that we were one level up from the food merchants and they used very loud generators all day Friday and Saturday. The only time they turned it off was around 6 PM until early the next morning. Needless to say, the constant drone drove me out of my skull.
Ali was going to stay with me over-night on Saturday but after thinking about how hot Sunday was going to be, plus the hurricane force winds and the thought of listening to generators all day prompted me to pack up and bug out. I was majorly broken at this point but as much as it killed us, we had to do it. I couldn't take one more day. If Dragon's Laire holds an event there again, we're not going. As far as sites majorly sucking (on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being suckiest) this site rates a 5.
It took us 3 hours to pack but we were home by 1 AM. The only thing we took out of the truck was food items. Little by little we unpacked the truck and everything's finally inisde the house. Now it's a matter of going through it to see what I need to purge. I'm not going through this again for Honey War.
We have a 4 x 8 utility trailer that we're brainstorming about to see if we can turn it into a tourney trailer so we don't have to pack/unpack and haul a buch of heavy boxes all over around camp.


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We are not the enemy; borough, Press & Journal agree to settle lawsuit over advertisements: Editorial
This July 17 letter was signed by Major James H. Curry III and six of seven council members.
Posted Tuesday, March 26, 2019 4:02 pm
CLICK HERE to read the settlement agreement between the borough and Press and Journal
Many elected officials, from small-town mayors to presidents, are not fond of the media. Let's face it, politicians criticizing the press is nothing new. Middletown is no exception.
Mayor James Curry III mocks and insults our newspaper on social media and has resolved to limit our access to the borough's police department. Many borough council members refuse to respond to our reporter. By shutting our journalists out, these elected officials are responsible for shutting off Middletown taxpayers from crucial truths about their town.
Holding elected officials accountable for their words might give the impression that we are out to get them. It's simply not true. However, letting questionable actions go unchallenged for the sake of favorable public relations goes against every respectable newspaper's reason for existing.
Curry and the Middletown Borough Council punished the Press & Journal for articles and editorials they deemed "detrimental to the efforts and initiatives of the Borough" by withdrawing all their advertising dollars. On July 17, they issued an official Policy Letter signed by the mayor and six of seven council members (all but one of whom are still serving) stating the borough's decision to terminate its placement of public notices in the Press & Journal was motivated by our reporting and/or editorializing. The letter stated the borough would resume its commercial relationship if our newspaper would "professionally and responsibly report" on matters of borough governance.
In short, the letter was evidence of an unapologetic retaliation aimed at speech protected by the First Amendment. Additionally, and perhaps just as alarming, council's actions then and now demonstrate an unwillingness to subject the affairs of Middletown's government to public scrutiny — something that is always in the public interest.
On receiving the letter from the borough, we knew it was time to stand up to the assault by Curry and the council on one of the key tenets of our democracy — a free press. On Oct. 23, the law firm of Mette, Evans & Woodside filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the borough on our behalf. The suit asserted violations of the Press & Journal's rights to free speech and free press under the First Amendment.
To be clear, we attempted to work toward a cooperative (zero-cost) solution with the borough well before our suit was filed. On Sept. 18, our attorney, Aaron Martin, appeared before council to read a letter requesting a retraction of the Policy Letter. Any hope of a reasonable solution was dashed when Curry childishly tore our letter into pieces and tossed it.
In the absence of meaningful communication from the borough, we took action.
Within days of filing our lawsuit, Council President Angela Lloyd issued a press release stating, "The global services offered by the Press and Journal do not meet the Borough's needs." She also charged our suit had "no merit in fact or law." U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Conner disagreed, and the borough's attempt to have our suit dismissed was denied.
Fast forward to March 19. The borough voted to agree to settlement terms negotiated over the past several months. Under the terms of our settlement, the borough was required to spell out their criteria for placement of advertising on bases that are "content-neutral and viewpoint-neutral consistent with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."
As a result, at the same meeting, council approved the adoption of Resolution #2019-10. The resolution publicly established the borough manager has the discretion to place public notices using the following criteria of services:
a) The availability of multiple weekly publications for the convenience of the borough and ability to satisfy timing requirements for submission.
b) The ability for public access, and ease of access to, previously published legal notices.
c) The general availability of the publication to residents and owners of property and business in the borough and interested parties from surrounding communities.
In their resolution, the borough briefly touched on budgetary considerations for placing notices not required by law. Those notices will be made "through the Borough's social media outlets or other free services and platforms." Interestingly, for notices that are legally required to be published in a newspaper, budgetary consideration is not part of the resolution. (It is worth noting that Middletown's public notices are currently advertised in the Patriot-News at a cost significantly higher than in the Press & Journal.)
In the settlement agreement reached with the borough, the Press & Journal continues to assert the borough acted unconstitutionally in violation of its First Amendment rights and the borough continues to deny it. In the world of litigation, this is just how things work. Few litigants in civil suits publicly admit to guilt these days. Let's be real. It's settled out of court, chiefly to avoid expensive court costs and/or being held accountable for statements which could prove embarrassing under scrutiny.
We did not ask for damages in our lawsuit. However, the settlement requires Middletown to pay $22,000 to our law firm for legal costs.
Whether council and the mayor use this opportunity to move forward and temper their antagonistic attitude toward our newspaper remains to be seen. The court will retain jurisdiction to enforce the terms of the consent decree if the borough should violate its terms in the future.
In a broader perspective, our suit paved the way for other newspapers to protect their First Amendment rights. We're proud of that. "Judge Conner's decision will likely provide support to other media outlets facing retaliatory action by government for their reporting and editorializing," Martin said regarding the court's decision to deny the borough's motion to dismiss our suit.
Our goal in negotiating a settlement with the borough has been to move forward for the betterment of the community. Meaningful dialogue would have been preferable. It's unfortunate our only avenue for communication was through the borough's well-paid attorneys.
We are not the borough council's enemy. And we are not its PR firm.
What is the skill in a 'skill game'? It's akin to Tic-Tac-Toe, Simon Says


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Turns Out You Can Turn Old Blu-Ray Players into Microscopes
For those who need more resolution than an optical microscope offers, but on a hacker's budget.
Andrew Liszewski
Gif: YouTube - Doctor Volt
Optical microscopes typically max out at anywhere between 500x to 1,500x magnification, at which point you need to switch to a scanning microscope to zoom any closer. They come with some functional compromises, and they're not cheap, often costing tens of thousands of dollars, unless you're clever enough to repurpose the optics in an old Blu-Ray drive into a surprisingly effective laser microscope.
I'm a Designer—Here's What I Think of the Surface Studio 2
In a way, CD-ROM and Blu-Ray drives already function like microscopes, using lasers to read the microscopic dots on the surface of a CD or DVD. In the case of a Blu-Ray drive, an ultra precise blue (technically closer to violet in color) laser with a wavelength of 405 nanometers is focused on the surface of a disc, and how effectively that light is reflected back to the drive's optical pickup unit determines whether a one or a zero has been detected.
But the sensors in the optical pickup unit can actually measure a wider range of light intensities—not just on or off—which facilitates a Blu-Ray drive's error correction capabilities, and allows for the hardware to be repurposed for other uses.
DIY Blu-Ray Laser Scanning Microscope Part 2: Shooting Images
YouTube's Doctor Volt repurposed a Blu-Ray drive, which are now easy to find on the cheap in the era of streaming content, to build a simple scanning laser microscope. A couple of custom-designed and manufactured plastic parts were added to the mix to create a scanning bed for a sample that could move back in forth in one direction, while the laser itself shifted back and forth in the other.
Unlike an optical microscope, where the entirely of an object is imaged at once, a scanning laser microscope takes light intensity measurements in increments, moving across an object in a grid and assembling a magnified image pixel by pixel. In this case, given the limitations of the Blu-Ray drive's spindle, which moves the sample being viewed back and forth, the image is assembled from 16,129 measurements (a 127x127 grid) and then scaled up to a 512x512 image.
A browser-based user interface written in Java allows focus adjustments and the scanning speed of the microscope to be modified, but at the slowest possible speed, the results are surprisingly good and recognizable. Certainly not comparable to what you'd get from lab equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars, but for a re-purposed Blu-Ray drive you could get for less than $20 on eBay, this is an impressive hack.
Just be careful around those lasers.
TechGadgets


This homely yet stylish selection of one-bedroom apartments are perfect for any length of stay, complete with fully equipped kitchens and free wireless internet access throughout. Other facilities include air conditioning, flat-screen TVs and iPod docking stations. The added benefit of your own laundry facilities will provide you with a home from home experience. A weekly housekeeping service will ensure a relaxing and enjoyable stay with the space and freedom of your own apartment.
The Gloucester Place Apartments are perfectly located in northern Marylebone, within walking distance from Regent's Park. The area is home to a vast selection of high-end restaurants and trendy boutiques, as well as some of London's best attractions including The Sherlock Holmes Museum and Madame Tussauds. Baker Street tube station is just a five-minute walk from the apartments providing links via the Bakerloo, Circle, Hammersmith & City, Jubilee and Metropolitan Lines. For regional, national and international travel, Euston, King's Cross and St Pancras train stations are all also close by. London Heathrow Airport is just 17 miles away.