Drought Causing Valley To Sink

The drought impacts everyone and everything. Watch the concerns of “subsidence” as shared by the Vlot Brothers Dairy and Calf Ranch in Chowchilla, California.

Man Behind “Split California Into Six States” Strips Off His Clothes

(San Jose Mercury) – Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper’s proposal to split California into six states has raised eyebrows across the country.

Some eyebrows are now being raised higher at a video in which he performs a partial striptease as he declares his support for women in technology.

The 2 1/2 minute clip shows Draper’s acceptance speech for an award he won in 2008 from Astia, a venture capital firm that invests in female-led companies.

After declaring “the sky is the limit” for companies he supports, Draper removes one article of clothing for each female-led firm in which he invested.

The striptease ends with Draper wearing only pants and singing a song he wrote called “Riskmaster.”

Steve Maviglio, co-founder of One California, a group opposed to Draper’s plan, said he thinks the video will cause viewers to question Draper’s judgment.

“He’s somebody who has a lot of time and money on his hands and is not in the mainstream of California thinking,” Maviglio said.

Roger Salazar, a communications consultant for Draper, declined to comment.

Too Much Water In Jamestown?

Don’t you hate it when you own a mine that continues to produce too much water during the middle of a drought?

I guess you just have to purposefully evaporate it. After all, that’s what the state requires.

Tokyo To SFO In 83 Seconds

Last week, an air passenger documented his flight from Tokyo to San Francisco. Thanks to technology and a Go-Pro camera, the trip only appeared to take 83 seconds. This is an impressive showing, considering it takes about 10 hours to fly between the two cities.

According to the creator, it took 3,400 separate images (timed every 10 seconds) to make the time-lapse video, which starts at Narita Airport in Tokyo and ends at SFO. Some of the middle-of-the-night footage was eliminated to help speed up the section where the viewer can no longer see a single thing.

As you begin to see the impressive sunrise, you’ll also notice the appearance of the planet Venus.

Sit back and enjoy the flight!

Swimming With Anchovy

A huge school of anchovy amassed near Scripps Pier in La Jolla, California Tuesday and a few graduate students from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego used a GoPro camera to capture video of the rare event.

Millions of the finger-sized fishes prized on pizzas and in animal feed — also called Northern anchovy — created a dark-blue band in shallow waters just off the coast when first spotted Monday.

Scripps scientists say they haven’t seen such an aggregation in more than 30 years, but were unclear why the large school moved into shallow waters off the coast.

Phil Hastings, a marine biology professor and curator of the marine vertebrate collection at the UC San Diego-connected Scripps, had no explanation for the huge swarm 15 meters to 100 meters wide and extending from Scripps Pier to a distant point north. But he noted that the water temperature at Scripps Pier hit 74 degrees on Tuesday which is, “pretty much the warmest water the species has ever been reported in.”

Hastings said he doubted the mystery of their appearance will be solved.

“I don’t think we’ll be able top ferret it out,” he said. But for history’s sake, Scripps has collected specimens for preservation.

The band of 6- to 7-inch fish, which feed on plankton, was first spotted Monday by lifeguards.

Photos showed surfers paddling out for a view below, and video was posted on the Scripps website.

Northern anchovy is harvested mainly for use as bait in other fisheries and sometimes processed into fish meal, “but it once supported a multimillion-dollar fishery as catch was sold for human consumption, for bait, and for reduction into meal, oil and soluble protein,” according to the NOAA.

Northern anchovy has been fished off the West Coast since at least 1916, the agency says.

Watch the video and you’ll see what the gigantic anchovy school looks like up-close.

Read more: http://fox5sandiego.com/2014/07/08/anchovy-school-at-scripps-pier-july-8-2014/#ixzz37AuUfGqp

Google Glass Wearer Demonstrates Stealing Passwords

Google Glass wearers can steal your passwords without even seeing them. And they can do it from up to 15 feet away.

Such tricks require a bit of extra machinery — namely, software that the researchers invented to trace the shadows of fingertips as they type a password into a phone. That digital “fingerprint” gets processed through an algorithm and mapped back to the individual keys that the fingers were touching.

From there, it’s easy for the Glass-wearer to hack the device and get access to your entire personal information storage house.

Researchers say the Glass spying software is far more effective than, say, standing behind someone and watching as they type a password into email, or lingering over someone’s shoulder at an ATM. (At the very least, the person lingering would cast a shadow.)

Granted, this isn’t the first time that outsiders have questioned the surveillance properties of Google Glass. Congress is investigating privacy risks posed by the new technology. A coterie of inventors already filed a patent for shielding devices that would protect the average person from video surveillance.

According to SF Weekly, Google representatives insist that Glass is too brightly-lit, and obtrusive, to serve as a spying gadget.

This demo from KRON 4 television seems to prove them wrong.

Man With Knife Chases People At Union Square

It’s a zoo in the big city. We’re not really sure what’s going on here, but someone caught video footage of an unidentified knife-wielding man who was seen chasing a group of guys around Union Square in San Francisco.

No word on what exactly started this incident, but watching the video, you’ll see the driver get out of his silver pickup truck and chase a few guys around as they taunt him a bit. It appears he’s holding a knife or at least something sharp, but that doesn’t stop the other guys from provoking him — and then hitting him.

According to SF Weekly, Officer Albie Esparza says he’s seen the video but no report was ever filed related to this incident.

This is a good time to offer advice. When an angry man is chasing people around with a knife, don’t egg him on. Someone could get hurt.

Yosemite Celebrates 150 Years

On June 30, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law legislation enacted by Congress that established Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove as the first protected wild land in the history of the planet.

It wasn’t until that 1890 that the land around the two tracts was designated as Yosemite National Park. Sequoia also became a national park the same year, joining Yellowstone and Mackinac as the United States’ first four national parks.

In 1906, at the urging of California’s most famous woodsman, John Muir, President Theodore Roosevelt and state authorities combined Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove with Yosemite National Park.

About 3.5 million visitors visit Yosemite, according to the NPS.

MSNBC Host Warns Viewers That Harry Reid Says “Redskins”

While showing video of an NFL team from Washington DC, an MSNBC host says that their name is “a racial slur that I won’t say here”. Then as she is about to introduce a video of Harry Reid commenting on the team, she feels obligated to WARN viewers that Harry Reid will say the name of the team. There is no word yet if parent network NBC (which broadcasts Sunday Night Football) will offend the ears of MSNBC viewers this Fall by saying the team’s name.