#Pacific Four

[canadachronicles]

Oh, what a terrific game of rugby! What a momentous win for Canada! I knew, watching them play at the World Cup, they were capable of rivaling the best; but to beat the Black Ferns for the first time and on their home turf of Christchurch is absolutely amazing. They've been ruthless in this competition and they're already crowned Pacific Four Champions, with the game between New Zealand and Australia to be played next weekend. And they are the Number 2 ranked team in the world, as well!

[zeldahime]

A collection of facts:

David Tennant was a super fan of the Fifth Doctor, played by Peter Davison

He met Davison’s daughter Georgia on Doctor Who and married her

Georgia and David have 5 kids including actor Ty Tennant of House of the Dragon fame

Ncuti is a fan of Ten, played by David Tennant

British actors all tend to wind up on Doctor Who eventually

A logical conclusion:

Ty Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa have the opportunity to be fucking hilarious.

[orofeaiel]

Grazing

[andromeddog]

ack ack

[bloomingdarkgarden]

but what if i release dark academia elriel chapter one tonight.

[ungoliantschilde]

some more Barry Windsor-Smith in black and white.

[fatehbaz]

Tallying every single tree in the kingdom. Endangered South Asian sandalwood. British war to control the forests. European companies claim the ecosystem. Failure of the plantation. Until the twentieth century, the Empire couldn't figure out how to cultivate sandalwood because they didn't understand that the plant is actually a partial root parasite, so their monoculture approach of eliminating companion species was self-defeating. French perfumes and the creation of "Sandalwood City".

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Selling at about $147,000 per metric ton, the aromatic heartwood of Indian sandalwood (S. album) is arguably [among] the most expensive wood in the world. Globally, 90 per cent of the world’s S. album comes from India [...]. And within India, around 70 per cent of S. album comes from the state of Karnataka [...] [and] the erstwhile Kingdom of Mysore. [...] [T]he species came to the brink of extinction. [...] [O]verexploitation led to the sandal tree's critical endangerment in 1974. [...]

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Francis Buchanan’s 1807 A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar is one of the few European sources to offer insight into pre-colonial forest utilisation in the region. [...] Buchanan records [...] [the] tradition of only harvesting sandalwood once every dozen years may have been an effective local pre-colonial conservation measure. [...] Starting in 1786, Tipu Sultan [ruler of Mysore] stopped trading pepper, sandalwood and cardamom with the British. As a result, trade prospects for the company [East India Company] were looking so bleak that by November 1788, Lord Cornwallis suggested abandoning Tellicherry on the Malabar Coast and reducing Bombay’s status from a presidency to a factory. [...] One way to understand these wars is [...] [that] [t]hey were about economic conquest as much as any other kind of expansion, and sandalwood was one of Mysore’s most prized commodities. In 1799, at the Battle of Srirangapatna, Tipu Sultan was defeated. The kingdom of Mysore became a princely state within British India [...]. [T]he East India Company also immediately started paying the [new rulers] for the right to trade sandalwood.

British control over South Asia’s natural resources was reaching its peak and a sophisticated new imperial forest administration was being developed that sought to solidify state control of the sandalwood trade. In 1864, the extraction and disposal of sandalwood came under the jurisdiction of the Forest Department. [...] Colonial anxiety to maximise profits from sandalwood meant that a government agency was established specifically to oversee the sandalwood trade [...] and so began the government sandalwood depot or koti system. [...]

From the 1860s the [British] government briefly experimented with a survey tallying every sandal tree standing in Mysore [...].

Instead, an intricate system of classification was developed in an effort to maximise profits. By 1898, an 18-tiered sandalwood classification system was instituted, up from a 10-tier system a decade earlier; it seems this led to much confusion and was eventually reduced back to 12 tiers [...].

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Meanwhile, private European companies also made significant inroads into Mysore territory at this time. By convincing the government to classify forests as ‘wastelands’, and arguing that Europeans would improves these tracts from their ‘semi-savage state’, starting in the 1860s vast areas were taken from local inhabitants and converted into private plantations for the ‘production of cardamom, pepper, coffee and sandalwood’.

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Yet attempts to cultivate sandalwood on both forest department and privately owned plantations proved to be a dismal failure. There were [...] major problems facing sandalwood supply in the period before the twentieth century besides overexploitation and European monopoly. [...] Before the first quarter of the twentieth century European foresters simply could not figure out how to grow sandalwood trees effectively.

The main reason for this is that sandal is what is now known as a semi-parasite or root parasite; besides a main taproot that absorbs nutrients from the earth, the sandal tree grows parasitical roots (or haustoria) that derive sustenance from neighbouring brush and trees. [...] Dietrich Brandis, the man often regaled as the father of Indian forestry, reported being unaware of the [sole significant English-language scientific paper on sandalwood root parasitism] when he worked at Kew Gardens in London on South Asian ‘forest flora’ in 1872–73. Thus it was not until 1902 that the issue started to receive attention in the scientific community, when C.A. Barber, a government botanist in Madras [...] himself pointed out, 'no one seems to be at all sure whether the sandalwood is or is not a true parasite'.

Well into the early decades of twentieth century, silviculture of sandal proved a complete failure. The problem was the typical monoculture approach of tree farming in which all other species were removed and so the tree could not survive. [...]

The long wait time until maturity of the tree must also be considered. Only sandal heartwood and roots develop fragrance, and trees only begin developing fragrance in significant quantities after about thirty years. Not only did traders, who were typically just sailing through, not have the botanical know-how to replant the tree, but they almost certainly would not be there to see a return on their investments if they did. [...]

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The main problem facing the sustainable harvest and continued survival of sandalwood in India [...] came from the advent of the sandalwood oil industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. During World War I, vast amounts of sandal were stockpiled in Mysore because perfumeries in France had stopped production and it had become illegal to export to German perfumeries. In 1915, a Government Sandalwood Oil Factory was built in Mysore. In 1917, it began distilling. [...] [S]andalwood production now ramped up immensely. It was at this time that Mysore came to be known as ‘the Sandalwood City’.

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Text above by: Ezra Rashkow. "Perfumed the axe that laid it low: The endangerment of sandalwood in southern India." The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Volume 51 (2014), Issue 1, pages 41-70. First published online 10 March 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0019464613515533 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[orbmanson7]

my wrist is killing me today, so have another redrawn doodle that I wanted as a sticker

[kadala1]

GRAVITY FALLS NEXT SUMMER IS BACK! redoing refs but here are the canon 4 (minus Apollo because he’s an oc sadly)

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Gideon actually gets a growth spurt when it enters season two- and dipcifica is bi4bi idc idc

[veganthranduil]

Last Watch

They lose funding. They lose Jaegers. They lose friends. They try not to lose hope.

Sequel to First Principle.

[lonestarflight]

The HS-4 Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King 'old 66' landing on the flight deck of USS HORNET (CVS-12) before it was moved down to the hanger deck.

"Donned in biological isolation garments, the Apollo 11 crew members, (L-R) Edwin Aldrin, Neil Armstrong (waving), and Michael Collins exit Old 66, the recovery pick up helicopter, to board the USS. HORNET (CVS-12) after splashdown."

"The Apollo 11 crewmen, wearing biological isolation garments, arrive aboard the USS Hornet during recovery operations in the central Pacific. They are walking toward the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF), in which they will be confined until they arrive at the Manned Spacecraft Center's (MSC), Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL). Apollo 11, with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, command module pilot; and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., lunar module pilot, onboard, splashed down at 11:49 a.m. (CDT), July 24, 1969, about 812 nautical miles southwest of Hawaii and only 12 nautical miles from the USS Hornet to conclude their historic lunar landing mission."

Date: July 24, 1969

source, source

U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command: Apollo 11 Recovery Photo 11

NASA ID: 6900595, S69-41573, link, 6901201, 6901225, 6900607

[coldarena]

we criticise lt spiers' terrible "we're already dead get used to it" advice to blithe compared to winters fatherly words of wisdom and care, but we seriously dont badmouth hillbilly jones' "lol idk just remember ur training" enough

[vertigoartgore]

1998's Shadows & Light Vol.1 #2 cover by cover artist Lee Weeks.

[orofeaiel]

Columbian Black-Tailed Deer | MRNP

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

In the beginning, the episodes were released 24 times per year.

Then twelve, then six, then two each year.

The last one was a year ago.

In four years, we could be seeing an episode every eight years, until they are coming every four decades.

Inspectators, we should witness a single episode within a century.