Welcome to Thursday! We have beautiful weather today and tonight is Drinking Liberally! We’ll be gathering at Iron Hill Brewery in Wilmington starting at 7 PM. Hope to see you there!
The oil spill off the shore of Louisiana is much worse than first thought. It’s leaking 5 times faster than they thought and it’s mulitple leaks, not just one. Nothing they’ve done so far has helped to stop the leak.
The oil spill from last week’s deadly rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico has increased to 5,000 barrels a day — five times more than the original estimate, said Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry.
A third underwater oil leak has been located in the pipeline that connected the rig to the oil well, said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP.
…
CEO Tony Hayward told CNN’s Brian Todd in an exclusive interview that Transocean’s “blowout preventer” failed to operate before the explosion. A blowout preventer is a large valve at the top of a well, and activating it will stop the flow of oil. The valve may be closed during drilling if underground pressure drives up oil or natural gas, threatening the rig.
“That is the ultimate fail-safe mechanism,” Hayward said. “And for whatever reason — and we don’t understand that yet, but we clearly will as a consequence of both our investigation and federal investigations — it failed to operate.
The oil slick is now the size of the state of Delaware. Right now officials are doing a “controlled burn” of the spill. Grill, baby grill!
In the blogosphere, the left still rules:
In this paper, we revisit these findings by comparing the practices of discursive production and participation among top U.S. political blogs on the left, right, and center during Summer, 2008. Based on qualitative coding of the top 155 political blogs, our results reveal significant cross-ideological variations along several important dimensions. Notably, we find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation across political blogs. Sites on the left adopt more participatory technical platforms; are comprised of significantly fewer sole-authored sites; include user blogs; maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content; include longer narrative and discussion posts; and (among the top half of the blogs in our sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization as well as discursive production.
The difference between left-right in solo-authored blogs vs. multiple-author blogs seems very stark.
