Yesterday the American Kennel Club released the Top Ten Breeds list and it confirmed what I’ve known since 2001, that the Labrador Retriever is the top dog! The Bulldog is new from last year and the other breeds aren’t much of a surprise (except Shi Tzu – at least to me.)
Well, apparently the AKC is smarter than I am because the Lab has been the top breed since 1991…oh well. But not just any Lab is top dog, I think our dog Gracie is the tops. You see, I’m not really much of an animal person, but I am a Gracie person and that’s the trick. Here’s a portrait of our top dog, Gracie!
Artist’s Rendering of ROUS
Image Credit: AFP/GUSTAVO LECUONA
Via
Yahoo News:
PARIS (AFP) – Fossil hunters have uncovered the greatest rodent that ever lived — a one-tonne behemoth that bestrode the swamplands of South America some four million years ago.
The newly-identified species is the greatest-known member of the order Rodentia and by comparison makes the biggest rodent alive today, the 60-kilo (132-pound) capybara, look like a pygmy shrew.
The skull of the extraordinary beast was found in a broken boulder on Kiyu Beach on the coast of Uruguay’s River Plate region, palaeontologists reported in a study on Wednesday.
Measuring a whopping 53 centimetres (21 inches), the skull has massive incisors several centimetres long.
Read more…
Guess the Princess Bride wasn’t all fairy tales! Of course, the largest rodent of unusual size roaming the planet currently is the Capybara – I wonder what it is about the South American rainforest….
Well, the week is only 2 days old and there are deals aplenty, VMWare announced another acquisition yesterday (of Thinstall) and this morning, BEA has finally given in to be assimilated by the borg in Redwood Shores, Oracle for $8.5B. Finally, Sun Microsystems has finally made good on its threat to enter the database market agreeing to acquire MySQL for $1B.
All in all, an interesting set of developments. I think it’s a clear signal (among others) that we’re entering a downward cycle. In in the cleantech market, consolidation is running amok too and one only has to look at the ethanol segment to see what’s forthcoming for solar and wind in the not too distant future…
Via Earth2Tech:
Demand management, the business of intelligently managing power use, especially during peak energy-use hours, can pay for itself in a matter of months. But now with some utilities offering incentives to commercial and industrial power users, demand management systems can give a return on investment almost immediately.
That’s the case with a $250,000 energy management system from Powerit Solutions, for which PG&E has given produce processor Guadalupe Cooling Company a grant. Powerit President Bob Zak told Earth2Tech that “using the California incentives that are demand response-based… [our] systems can be 100 percent paid for upon installation.â€
Read more…
We continue to believe that demand management is a part of the solution with respect to our transition to an electric economy (from a fossil economy.) Sure, it’s essential that efficient generation from renewable resources continues forward to increase capacity, but there is also an opportunity to manage demand such that the capacity we currently have can be utilized more effectively and consumers can make decisions about their utility bills. How does this work? Powerit has provided a nice diagram that shows the key components:
