Fixing a hole: State regulators say they are issuing a $12,189 fine against a chemical terminal flooded during Hurricane Isaac because it did not notify authorities fast enough about chemical releases. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality issued the fine against Stolthaven New Orleans, a company that operates a chemical terminal along the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish. DEQ says the chemicals—1-octene and ethyl acrylate—leaked out on Aug. 30 but that the company told DEQ about it on Sept. 1. A company is supposed to alert authorities within one hour of a release. DEQ says more fines may be issued against Stolthaven.
Bean counters: Soybean yields are very promising in north Louisiana, where most of the harvest is in; but rains in the south are delaying harvesting in the southwest, and Hurricane Isaac destroyed fields in the southeast, says LSU AgCenter soybean specialist Ronnie Levy. “If it wouldn’t have been for the hurricane, we probably would have had record yields set in Louisiana,” he says. “We still may be able to do that, depending on some of these later soybeans and how they perform.” Statewide, about 60% of the 1.1 million acres have been harvested. Levy says about 5%, mostly in the southeast, was lost to Isaac. The full story is available here.
🙂 30 years ago today, at precisely 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posted the following electronic message to a computer science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: 🙂 Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use: 🙁 ” With that post, Wired reports, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon. Read the full story here.
Today’s poll question: Do you use emoticons in emails and text messages?
