Ask Jerves

Hilarious. George Monbiot questions the credentials of the Daily Mail’s weather forecasters. Turns out, they’re all just props. Literally fictional props. 

So who are they? A picture search suggests an impressive range of talents. Take “Serena Skye”, for example, listed by PWS as a “contributing weather forecaster”. She also turns out to be a mail-order bride, a hot Russian date and a hot Ukrainian date. How she finds time for it all we can only guess.

“Emma Pearson”, as well as working as PWS’s assistant weather forecaster, also features on 49,800 hairdressing sites, modelling an emo hairstyle. (Emo, m’lud, is said to be a form of music, popular with certain members of the younger generation).

“Kelly Smart” has a remarkably busy life: as an egg donor, a hot date, a sublet property broker in Sweden, a lawyer, an expert on snoring, eyebrow threading, safe sex, green cleaning products, spanking and air purification. Perhaps more pertinently, she’s also a model whose picture is available via a company called istockphoto.

“Charlotte Haines”, another assistant weather forecaster, has achieved rather less in life. She is listed only as a “pretty blonde woman”. But she does have a qualification that might have appealed to Positive Weather Solutions: her photo is labelled “royalty free”.

Do the weather forecasters used by the Daily Mail actually exist? | George Monbiot

kateoplis:

Mannahatta, a map of Manhattan in 1609, at the newly opened S. Street Seaport Museum 

Saw this exhibit when it was uptown at the Museum of the City of New York. If it’s presented the same, and it looks to be, then it’s well worth checking out. That relief map of the island is awesome. You can explore the map and pick up the book and donate to the ongoing work of good folks at the Wildlife Conservation Society (who created this whole thing) as they push out to the outer boroughs here. 

Someday. [Franz Josef Land]

paulbrady:

My employer on the perils of helicopter travel.

I don’t know that I’d call this “#firstworldproblems” so much as “1% too fucking rich to even know that most residents of the ‘first world’ could never afford any sort of private aircraft transit” problems. 

onearth:

Congratulations to Marshall Curry and the team behind “If a Tree Halls for the Oscar nomination. Here is our blog editor Ben Jervey’s review of the film, which he calls “evenhanded” and “conflicting” from back in August.

Even during these politically-charged times, when Tea Party activists stomp on the heads of opponents and conservative media moguls take pies to the face, the radical and destructive actions of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) still seem pretty extreme.

Don’t remember the ELF (by name anyway)? You’ll probably remember them as the “eco-terrorists” that torched a whole bunch of buildings in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1990s. They were radical environmental extremists who made the nightly news by setting ablaze a Forest Service ranger station, a slaughterhouse, a timber company office, an SUV dealership, a $12 million resort in Vail, and on and on and on.

It’s a short, volatile period in the history of the environmental movement that most mainstream environmentalists would probably prefer to remain forever swept under the rug. (And, it should be noted, most environmental activist groups and organizations, including NRDC, which publishes OnEarth, immediately and vehemently renounced these actions at the time.) Indeed, many mainstream environmentalists probably aren’t thrilled that there’s a new documentary out about the explosive rise and sudden fall of the ELF.

And that’s a shame. Because If A Tree Falls is a powerful and fascinating film, and one that could and should be instructive for participants in any social movement.

Read more.

Wrote this review back in August. Really good flick. 

Congrats to the great dudes of Situ Studios. | Interior Design)

lukehackney:

Cartographer David Imus spent 6,000 hours making “the greatest paper map of the United States you’ll ever see.”

discoverynews:

huffingtonpost:

A big hello to our newest section: HuffPost Science. Boldly going where no lolcat has gone before. 

HuffPost Science! Yay!

So does this mean that HuffPo will stop publishing and giving front page promotion to anti-science, anti-vaccine quackery? 

isslaw:

Do the right thing.

Yes, Vermont. 

Comet Lovejoy is visible near Earth’s horizon in this nighttime image photographed by NASA astronaut Dan Burbank, Expedition 30 commander, onboard the International Space Station on Dec. 22, 2011 [Revkin]