Still, we’re all pretty accustomed to it, no? In LOLing e-mail forwards and cobbled-together personal websites, that kind of thing.

I was browsing through some PDFs of evidence from the November 17th Congressional hearing on Solyndra (weekend reading) and saw this e-mail from George Kaiser:

Much hay was made of these e-mails by Republican partisans. George Kaiser, according to Forbes, is worth some $10 billion, and is the 89th richest man on the planet. He’s also a major Obama supporter, and his foundation reportedly owned a third of the famously failed solar panel manufacturer Solyndra. The conspiracy-minded among us (and you don’t even have to be all that suspicious) might see the potential for inappropriate benefits when it came to the federal government’s pre-bankruptcy support of Solyndra.

In any case, there are a few Kaiser e-mails sprinkled throughout the evidence that House staffers threw online. Yet the partisans failed to point out the detail that would have dealt the most devastating blow: His e-mails are all in Comic Sans.

If we were to go to a hydrogen fuel cell economy and we produce a lot of hydrogen, and some fraction escapes (because it’s notoriously difficult to contain that small molecule), then we might see emissions equal to or greater than what’s produced naturally. Because it’s such a reactive gas…that could change the balance of chemistry in our atmosphere.

You can read it here.

It’s the stuff that runs big engines, like in an oil tanker or cargo ship. And it’s cheap, which is why these high volume users use it.

Last year, I interviewed Dave Culp, an engineer who designs ship sails (he started Kiteship), and we talked a little about bunker fuel. According to him, this is residual fuel–stuff that’s “left over after everything’s distilled out of crude. So sulfur, palladium, iron, even sand stays in the stuff that gets sold and burned in these ships. There’s 900 times as much sulfur in a gallon of residual fuel than in gasoline.”

“But ships don’t really have a choice because the industry is built around this cheap, plentiful fuel source,” he added.

It’s highly viscous. Imagine this thick, black, grainy shit. That’s what’s out there, in addition to the lighter gas or oil that’s slicking on the surface and covering the birds. Sfist is doing a good job of updating what’s happening on the beaches, where I’ve not made it yet. But I figure that’s what has washed up on shore, as seen in this photo from Sfist:

A huge cargo ship bumps into the Bay Bridge and spills 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel–not just oil, but bunker fuel–and this is the Chronicle’s headline? Is it supposed to be a joke? 

When I looked at my copy this morning, I originally thought this was a feature recapping some little disaster that I hadn’t heard about. But, no. This is breaking news.

Below, a photo I took of damage from underground coal mining in the home of a villager.

A few more pictures here. More available soon, I hope.

In 1962, the people of Perth, Australia, turned on all their lights at the same time to say hello to John Glenn floating by in his Mercury.

PG&E must be breathing a corporate sigh of relief with the onset of cold temperatures. This winter, it’s offering customers a 20 percent rebate on their home heating bills if they reduce their natural gas consumption by 10 percent. Continously warm weather might have wreaked havoc with Pacific Gas & Electric’s billing department.

In an effort to find a related news story to link to, I noticed KRON 4 has put up a page devoted to sports reporter Gary Radnich’s ad-libbing last week when a fire alarm went off during his live broadcast. Radnich, who basically ad libs his daily sports segment, anyway (and does a good job: funny, sometimes bullying, with a Hemingway-style shockproof bullshit detector), struck a nice balance between exasperation and amusement as he talked with the anchors and the remaining crew. I found it entertaining, and was hoping others could see it in a low-quality Windows Media Player stream. Turns out you can! Right here.
Below: Radnich photographed for a Chronicle article about his 20 years on the air.

The US Geological Survey’s Western Coastal and Marine Geology Group released a big report on the area around the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary when I worked at the Survey: “Beyond the Golden Gate—Oceanography, Geology, Biology, and Environmental Issues in the Gulf of the Farallones.” A few years earlier, CMG had been involved in looking at how material dredged from the Bay Area’s harbors and waterways could be disposed of on the Farallon Slope (where the continental shelf ramps downward), and in the process devised a potential method for identifying drums of radioactive waste. The Farallones are a group of islands about 19 miles from the San Francisco coast with great biological diversity. The Farallones include the largest seabird breeding area in the contiguous U.S. and are a popular spot for great white sharks.

There are about 47,500 55-gallon radioactive waste drums scattered over 350 nautical square miles around the Farallon Islands. The radiation is low-level according to the Navy, but it declines to specifically describe what the radioactive material is. One seaman who accompanied the disposal barges from the nuclear laboratories at Hunter’s Point in the 1950s admitted to SF Weekly that he was ordered to shoot barrels that did not sink right away. Below is a map from USGS showing the dump sites and areas that may contain waste in relation to the Bay Area. It is unfortunate that these happen to coincide geographically with some of our local fisheries. The inset photo is of a crab crawling on one of the drums.

One of the interesting pieces of that radioactive waste is a huge, irradiated Navy ship, believed to be the USS Independence (pictured here in San Francisco Bay in 1943). Remember those photos and films of mushroom clouds in the South Pacific? If you look closely, near the stem of the cloud are sometimes dozens of ships. The Navy anchored them nearby to see how they’d be affected by the explosion. The Independence was one of those ships, located about 560 yards from the first “Operation Crossroads” Bikini Atoll atomic test explosion on July 1, 1946. She didn’t sink, so the Navy anchored her nearby for the July 25 follow-up (pictured below). She was still floating. After that, the Independence was retired.

The Independence, mangled by the blasts and dosed with intense radiation, was later used in radiation experiments at Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco. Eventually, the Navy decided to get rid of her. She is supposed to have been packed with radioactive materials before being scuttled. The Navy says it sunk the ship 200 miles from the coast, but surveys show no shipwreck at the avowed location and a large shipwreck near the Farallones that seems to match the Independence.

(Note the two sailors standing in one of the gashes in the hull near the right edge of the photo. Click on the photo to get a bigger view.)