mypubliclands:

The Bureau of Land Management’s St. George Field Office and the Washington County Habitat Conservation Plan Administrator’s Office  are cooperating to reduce the potential for wildfire in the Red Cliffs NCA, using a unique tool – targeted grazing by domestic goats.

The “D Goat Ranch” from Fielding, Utah, has been contracted to supply 150 goats to graze for a few weeks this spring along the road shoulders of Cottonwood Road. This road extends through the heart of the NCA, from just north of St. George to the boundary of the Dixie National Forest, and receives a lot of traffic. The goats will eat the non-native brome grass, aka “cheat grass”, along the roadway, but will avoid the native shrubs, such as creosote, as they are very bitter.
 
Dry cheat grass is very flammable and a contributing factor to the large wildfires that have burned many acres in the NCA and elsewhere in Washington County. Wildfires frequently start along roadways, from vehicle sparks or other human causes.  Reducing the amount of flammable grass along the Cottonwood Road will help to protect habitat and populations of the threatened Mojave desert tortoise, as well as other resource values in the NCA.

Herders from the D Goat Ranch use light nylon electric fences to create temporary pens, keeping the goats together in a dense herd.  The goats are moved from one pen to another every few hours, with the herders leapfrogging past the goats to build new pens in a steady march from south to north.  In a few weeks, when the cheat grass has cured and is no longer palatable to the goats, they will be loaded on trucks and returned to D Goat Ranch, fatter and happier for a “job well done”.

-Story and photos:  Iris Picat

I fucking love goats

Anonymous asked: Please help me solve this conundrum: I read on your blog, "There are no facts, only interpretations." If this statement is a fact, then it is not true. In order for it to be true, there must be at least one fact. Help! I'm so confused!

Language in itself is an interpretation! So there are no objective facts. But I think your slip in logic here is the assumption that interpretations cannot be true.

robot-heart-politics:

One year, I managed the summer intership programs for my department. The previous summer, IBM research had wound up with an intership class consisting of 99% men. (That’s not an estimate: that’s a real number. That year, IBM research hired 198 summer interns, of whom 2 were women.) For a company like IBM, numbers like that are scary. Ignoring all of the social issues of excluding potentially great candidates, numbers like that can open the company up to gender discrimination lawsuits!

So my year, they decided to encourage the hiring of more diverse candidates. The way that they did that was by allocating each department a budget for summer interns. They could only hire up to their budgeted number of interns. Only women and minority candidates didn’t count against the budget.

When the summer program hiring opened, my department was allocated a budget of six students. All six slots were gone within the first day. Every single one of them went to a white, american, male student.

The second day, the guy across the hall from me came with a resume for a student he wanted to hire. This was a guy who I really liked, and really respected greatly. He was not, by any reasonable measure, a bad guy - he was a really good person. Anyway, he had this resume, for yet another guy. I told him the budget was gone, but if he could find a good candidate who was either a woman or minority, that we could hire them. He exploded, ranting about how we were being sexist, discriminating against men. He just wanted to hire the best candidate for the job! We were demanding that he couldn’t hire the best candidate, he had to hire someone less qualified, in order to satisfy some politically correct bureaucrat! There was nothing I could do, so eventually he stormed out.

Three days later, he came back to my office with another resume. He was practically bouncing off the walls he was so happy. “I found another student to hire. She’s even better than the guy I originally came to you with! She’s absolutely perfect for the job!”. We hired her.

I asked him why he didn’t find her before. He had no answer - he didn’t know why he didn’t find her resume of his first search.

This was a pattern that I observed multiple times that year. Looking through a stack of resumes, without deliberately excluding women, somehow, all of the candidates with female names wound up back in the slushpile. I don’t think that anyone was deliberately saying “Hmm, Jane, that’s a woman’s name, I don’t want to hire a woman”. But I do think that in the process of looking through a file containing 5000 resumes, trying to select which ones to look at, on an unconscious level, they were more likely to look carefully at a candidate with a male name, because we all learn, from a young age, that men are smarter than women, men are more serious than women, men are better workers than women, men are more likely to be technically skilled than women. Those attitudes may not be part of our conscious thought, but they are part of the cultural background that gets drummed into us by school, by books, by movies, by television, by commercials.

Actually, studies have shown that this actually does happen in hiring.  Male and female managers see a woman’s name at the top of the resume and, even when all other things are equal, will shuffle the woman to the back of the pile or rate her differently than her identical male colleague because…well…she’s a she.

It happens for race, too.

Not surprising at all.

(via streetetiquette)

salesonfilm:

Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012)

rawr…

newyorker:

Matthew McKnight writes about a case challenging the N.Y. Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy: “The relationship between law enforcement and communities that the N.Y.P.D. has determined contain high concentrations of crime—thus requiring a heightened police presence—is a complicated, quarrelsome one”: http://nyr.kr/Zy8Rsb

Here, see a selection of photojournalist Nina Berman’s work documenting community outrage around the N.Y.P.D.’s controversial stop-&-frisk policy: http://nyr.kr/NWEGWY

iinventedeverything:

youngandrecklessteenager:

sexypandaalex:

gods-nips:

I AM SO FUCKING DONE WITH THIS WEBSITE LIKE I CANNOT.

I’VE BEEN LAUGHING FOR LIKE 5 MINUTES STRAIGHT.

Rule 1 of Tumblr: Don’t go on Tumblr when you are waiting for your brother to get out of the loo and need a wee.

the bitch on the left doe

i can’t even with that guy in the hilfiger shirt. there’s always one who likes to pretend they’re not sitting next to the rest of us. lolololololol

holydicksbatman:

joebagofdoughnuts:

I can’t really explain why, but abandoned places like this have always fascinated me. Maybe it’s the stories they can tell. So much more interesting than the cut and paste type of architecture that has become the norm today….

hnnnnng

(via holydicksbatman)

vvenis:

new zealand’s wikipedia page

oh man. Carl and Eunice GOT IT ON in 2013

(via afternoonsnoozebutton)

blueskyalltheway:

howtobeterrell:

They’re both such tools its sickening

The people’s faces around her lollllllllll, especially this guy on the left’s eyebrows

loooooool holy hell. yeah even that woman in the back going ‘oh my gawd’