...but hardly surprising since it was one of the largest quakes in modern times.

1. The US doesn't need Jack Sparrow running a pirate hospital ship, just get rid of the morbid leaches in the system with a reasonable UHC scheme.

2. Virtually every state capital city on the Aussie mainland now has a massive desal plant, they were all commissioned and built in the final years of our last major drought. Sure they come with higher costs than just collecting rainwater but when your reservoirs of drinking water are hovering at around 10% capacity and there's not a cloud in the sky, it becomes a very affordable option for a first world city. Of course LA would need 4-5 such desal plants due to its unusually large population but these things scale well from an economic POV.

Aussie turf grass (mainly cooch) good at stopping sandy soil from eroding and is kind to bare feet (but may contain funnel web spiders). The worst weed to have in an aussie lawn is the bindi, it has a large seed that no matter which way it lands has a thorn pointing upwards. Still, most (not all) people here in Oz fall into the "lazy" camp, we just mow whatever grows and maybe throw a box of seed mix around after a severe drought has turned it to dust. During a drought there are severe restrictions on water use for everyone with harsh penalties for breaking them, watering lawns (if permitted) is 2hr window on two or three days a week, sprinklers are generally banned. We aussies really do take water rationing very seriously during a drought, people or companies who flaunt the heavily advertised water rationing rules are about as popular with the general public as arsonists and pedophiles. All but the most dedicated gardeners see their laws disappear in the first or second February.

Having said that, wild grass is incredibly resilient, my house is near the beach, during the last major drought the yard was bare sand for several years, the lemon tree died in the second of five of our driest summers on record, the handful of native bushes and trees I have took it in their stride, two weeks of good rain in mid autumn then BOOM a carpet of green shoots across the entire yard, not an ounce of fertilizer, not a single seed sown. The easiest way to thicken it up after a drought is as you say cut high and often but also leave the catcher off the mower, this holds in the moisture, allows more species to reseed themselves, and gives pollinators a better chance of surviving the mower.

Flowers are not the only interesting feature of a wild lawn, we have a local grass that puts up a fast growing stem like a dandelion and at roughly the same time as dandelions are turning to seed. A narrow seed pod forms on top of the steam and when ripe explodes shooting hundreds of pinhead sized seeds waist high.

Disclaimer: I am an average (Aussie) post-war suburban grandparent :)
When there's enough rain to have a lawn I pay someone $50 to mow it and trim the edges every 3-5 weeks depending on the season, he does a great job. I am however a little odd (ok very odd) in that I don't mow it in early spring because it is covered in weeds (wild daisies) or late summer ( dandelions and grandpa's exploding grass :). Happily the road people seem to have also noticed the daisies since the drought broke and now appear to time their spring mowing so as to be just the right height when the 6-8 inch tall daisies flower (roughly a 2 week window in early spring). Makes the freeway commute feel like a spring meadow and doesn't cost them a cent.

Are they planning to retire in Montana too?

There's no ice in Queensland, the prevailing ocean currents go south and are replenished by clean water from the coal sea. However fertilizer runoff has been the barrier reef's #1 enemy for decades. We don't get red-tides so much but the runoff triggers the regular crown of thorns plagues whose larvae eat the algae, then as adults eat the coral. The plagues can and do occur naturally, usually after floods from cyclones. The fertilizer both amplifies and increases the frequency of the plagues to the point were the reef does not have enough time between plagues to fully recover.

The reef's in the Caribbean and mediterranean were already heavily damaged when Jack Cousteau was swimming around taking notes in the 60's. Since then Science has discovered that a healthy reef actually has the majority of its biomass stored in large fish such as sharks, a severely degraded reef has the majority of its biomass stored in small fast growing invertebrates and weeds. The only reason the filthy Ganges river has not destroyed the Seychelles and other pristine reefs nearby is that it's mouth is clogged with thousands of acres of mangroves that act as a natural (and extremely efficient) water filter.

Nearly all marine biologists will tell you the answer to the serious problem of collapsing fisheries is to set aside marine parks in specific locations that would cover approximately 5% of the world's coastline and some specific deep sea ridges, virtually everyone else will say there's "plenty of fish in the sea".

A meta-conspiracy.

Damned organ music, I missed it because I was waiting for something dramatic to happen!

TFA doesn't say what caused the dam break, sometimes it's actually nobody's fault, ie: "shit happens". However the cause should be thoroughly investigated by forensic engineers and if it was negligence, then jail the negligent, which in the eyes of law is normally the principal engineer who signed off on the construction, "following PHB orders" is not a valid excuse in the eyes of the law.

We have no idea what gravity.is, only how it behaves, same deal with dark matter. Perhaps there's no matter in dark matter, perhaps we are seeing a naked gravitational field. Technically all we are observing is a gravitational field, the "matter" itself has never been observed we just assume that all gravitational fields require some sort of matter to bend space, nature is under no obligation to comply to our rules, perhaps space is capable of bending by itself via local fluctuations in the expansion rate.

Seals eat squid, squid is full of ammonia, that means I can fuel my SUV with baby seals and still call myself an environmentalist, right?

I worked at a rubber latex factory during the 80's. We had a 44 gallon drum of liquid ammonia in a corner, I was the high school drop out who was hired to do all the dirty work, part of my job was to carefully fill an old baked bean tin with the stuff, climb a ladder holding the makeshift wire handle behind me as far as my arm would stretch, then carefully pour it into a 13 ton mixing vat of latex. Liquid latex normally smells of ammonia with about the same intensity as supermarket "ammonia" and yet the ammonia content is just one bean can of the stuff in 13 tons. I've never smelt anything as powerful, it's like sticking heat rub up both nostrils, you don't dare take a deep breath.

Is a fucking TV series, the reason it's popular is the same reason Shakespeare has lasted so long, it paints a compelling and simplistic picture of human behaviour. Humans are apes, they have a complex hierarchical social structure. Like most of us here you're nowhere near the top of that structure and never will be no matter how much you rant about how the current rules stopping you from owning your own court and dealing out your personal idea of justice via your own personal jackbooted militia. Be honest with yourself and your readers, come out and tell them straight you desire to be their demi-god.

From memory you're in your 40's and have been posting your incoherent garbage for years, isn't it about time you grew up, got over yourself, and cheered the fuck up!.

The entire planet has been dusted with plastic, even the Antarctic interior, we've known this for 40yrs. If there's any "alarmism" here it's not coming from the researchers. Back in Issac Newtons day only peasants ate the oysters that carpeted the shores of the UK. We've spent 250yrs raping the ocean in very obvious ways and are paying the price in collapsed fisheries and expensive mercury laden seafood, plastic dust has yet to be shown to have a significant impact on marine life but OTOH there has been little research on what is a major environmental change to the surface of the planet, those two simple facts make it a very worthy subject of research in my book.

The momentum is conserved as inertia. A force of some kind is required to change the inertia into momentum or vica-versa, the kinetic energy is (mainly) conserved as heat and sound, as you implied, heat and sound can be thought of as the kinetic energy of moving atoms. However the momentum/inertia is a property of matter, so it remains with the original object, regardless of whether the atoms are solid and falling or colliding and vapourising. And yes, no matter what happens the system as a whole will gain entropy (become more randomised).

The odd bit about all this is that nobody has a clue what "causes" momentum or gravity, they are amongst a handful of "fundamental properties" of the universe that we are forced to accept at face value, in our efforts to understand the universe these "fundamental properties" serve a similar utilitarian purpose as the fundamental axioms of mathematics.

The measure of a person's character is not found in the way they handle success. The guy who writes the SWAB blog is usually pretty good, been following him for years. If he has read the comments here, I'm pretty sure he's (re)reading the paper now.

Disclaimer: I've never heard of this device but I'm stocking up on popcorn in anticipation of Ethan's follow up blog.