A lot of amazing things this week. First there's the story of the family that was boating on the north end of Vancouver Island when they saw something swimming by. At first their guide thought it was an otter but after a bit they realized it was a full grown mountain lion crossing the inlet, about 500 meters of ocean. They circled around and got some video before the cat climbed out and disappeared into the forest. It shouldn’t be a surprise though, this is how they got to Vancouver Island in the first place. It does bring into question though, about the whole cats hating water thing. I think it’s a myth. The next time Marsha’s in the shower I think I’ll test it by tossing Geiger in.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/07/25/bc-cougar-swim-youtube-video.html

Then there were the guys diving off the coast of California filming sardines. Suddenly the fish went crazy and then without warning a couple of whales explode out of the water right next to them. They were feeding on the fish and nearly got the the divers in their mouthful. Now remember back when you were a kid. You’d be swimming along and something like an inner tube seemed so tall. A canoe would seem huge? Now look at the picture of the whale next to the diver. That must have seemed like a mountain coming out of the water. The jaws also look so alien. It must have been terrifying.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/07/23/sci-whale-diver-almost-swallowed.html

But not all the amazing things were in the ocean. In downtown Vancouver this guy owned one building and was thinking of buying the one next door to expand. He was walking through the vacant structure and he noticed it was in worse shape than he expected, much worse shape. Some of the walls were actually buckling. Suddenly he realized the only thing keeping the building from collapsing completely was that it was leaning on his building. A quick call to the city resulted in an evacuation of one building and the demolition of the other. A close call, imagine what might of happened next winter when a full gale hits this part of the coast. It could have been really bad.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/07/24/bc-vancouver-building-buckles-demolition.html

Many of you may have heard of the Alberta Tar Sands. It’s the source of the oil that is supposed to flow through the Keystone pipeline. There has been a lot of controversy about how much pollution and environmental damage the extraction of this oil has caused. One of the methods they are trying to use to mitigate this is steam extraction. They pump high pressure steam into the oil bearing bed to liquify the petroleum, which is then pumped out through another well. In theory this works well. In practice there are some problems. The speculation is that this spontaneous, ongoing, massive and apparently unstoppable oil leak springing up in the middle of a forest is what happens when the overlying beds fracture because the pressure from the steam.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/07/19/nobody_understands_ongoing_spills_at_alberta_oilsands_operation.html
Bad news all the way around.

Then there is this picture from NASA of the earth taken from Saturn. 
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/07/23/nasas-cassini-spacecraft-takes-a-picture-of-earth-from-1-44-billion-kilometres-away/

What I find most amazing though is that if you live in Australia you can actually see that giant arrow in the night sky.

Thought for the week
If Data from Star Trek were to appear in a Shakespeare play
Would he be obligated to take the title role
In Titus Androidicus?

Seen on a bumper sticker:
Honk if you like noise

Doug & Marsha
PIX: Nanaimo Harbour