Meet Erik Prince, X-Navy SEAL, Blackwater Founder, Special Ops Private Contractor

Urban Sprawl: What Is It? How To Measure?

Published on Jun 19, 2017

Views: 48,785

Urban sprawl — we’ve all seen it — the strip malls, residential subdivisions, clogged streets. But which U.S metro area sprawls the most? Is it Los Angeles, a city built around the car? Or is it another sunbelt city like Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Antonio, or Atlanta?

Resources on this topic:

Ewing, R., Pendall, R., & Chen, D. (2003). Measuring Sprawl and Its Transportation Impacts. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 1831, 175–183. https://doi.org/10.3141/1831-20

Sutton, P. C. (2003). A scale-adjusted measure of  Urban sprawl using nighttime satellite imagery. Remote Sensing of Environment, 86(3), 353–369. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0034-4257(03...

New York Times: "Seattle Climbs but Austin Sprawls: The Myth of the Return to Cities" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/up...

Media sources:
- Google Earth
- Flickr user Daniel Ramirez
- Flickr user

Social media:

Website/Tumblr: http://citybeautiful.city
Instagram: citybeautifulcity

The Latest Installmenr |Star Wars: The Last Jedi Trailer (Official)

Published on Oct 9, 2017

Views: 9,096,947

Watch the new trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi and see it in theaters December 15. Get your tickets now: http://www.fandango.com/lastjedi

Hmmm...Creepy > What Goes " Bump" Here In Mesa????

More than a few things make your MesaZona blogger feel creepy and Go Bump - like Bump Stocks used in the Las Vegas Massacre.

Some in the middle-of-the-night during the rapid-eye movement subconscious, and others in the stark crazy daytime hours - like this report today about Bump Stocks, an issue under-reported in the newsabout gun sales and gun dealers who do business here in Mesa.
It's all legal, folks
This post is a reaction to a report by an Arizona Republic reporter [and videographer] on a site named "GeoBiz" who talked to David Beaty, shown in the featured post image above and owner of Sun Devil Manufacturing in Mesa, Arizona, who demonstrated what exactly the bump provides to the operator of a semi-automatic rifle.
His company makes aluminum rifle parts and accessories. He took the time to demonstrate
three weapons at an outdoor range in the southeast Valley, wearing earmuffs and protective goggles - that's after he posted an advertisement for selling a bump stock on Backpage.com, asking for $500, as "an experiment" to gauge market demand. HUH?
As reported in the article on 09 October he owns ten.
Beatty said he was scared to check his email Friday because it didn’t take more than five minutes after he posted the ad before someone asked him about it.
To quote reporter Victoria Ritter, "Beaty said he may sell a couple bump stocks but hadn’t as of Friday. He said the typical price for one is between $250 and $350, so he wouldn’t sell the device for his experimental price. The ad was just that, an attempt to gauge the interest of the market, he said." HUH ??
Believe or not, read what the reporter has to say about the bump stock attachment and her opinions about it and what Dave Beaty says about "gun control"
Here's the link >
http://gearsofbiz.com/heres-the-difference-a-bump-stock-makes-when-firing-a-rifle/115095

 

 

Believe It or Not: Mesa Connects To Extra-Terrestial Life

It's exciting to know that more news keeps getting posted even after months later from the Astrobiology Science Conference held here in Mesa in April 24-28 2017.

How thrilling is that when what happened here gets out ??

Sessions were live streamed, and the recordings of AbSciCon 2017 are now available on the NASA Astrobiology YouTube channel.

Conference website: http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/abscicon2017/.

AbSciCon 2017 is part of a series of conferences organized by the astrobiology community.

The theme for AbSciCon 2017 is “Diverse Life and its Detection on Different Worlds.”

Mars and icy worlds in our solar system are increasingly recognized as habitable, even as increasing numbers of exoplanets in their stars’ habitable zones have been discovered. The focus is shifting from identification of habitable worlds, to detection of life on them.

Among other topics, the conference presented the following, with the question remaining is there life out there? . . . and maybe we are not alone in the universe

 

Setting the Stage for Geochemistry

Setting the Stage for Biochemistry

Biomarkers of Life in Anaerobic Ecosystems and Different Evolutionary Stages

Biomarkers of Anaerobic Ecosystems

Biogeochemical Cycles on Water Worlds Near and Far

Biosignatures on Exoplanets

Preparing for Life Detection:  Astrobiology Education and Public Outreach

If that's all too technical for you to wrap your heads around, here's the latest news posted just a few hours ago:

A 'Pale Green Dot': Why Proxima Centauri b May Have a Shiny Tint

By Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor | October 9, 2017 07:00am ET

In August 2016 astronomers announced that a potentially Earth-like planet orbits Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun.

 

Learn about the exciting discovery in this infographic.See our full infographic here

 

Attendees @ AbSciCon 2017 April 2017 

". . . According to Luger, who presented the results at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Mesa, Arizona, in April, if Proxima Centauri b is a terrestrial world with an Earth-like atmosphere and a magnetic field, the green light of the oxygen auroras would grow 100 times stronger than on Earth.

Read more > https://www.space.com

 

 

Mesa Arts Center Provides A Stage For Alt-Right Conservative Politics

Some people might call this event "A Theater of The Absurd" with a big cast of characters (600) appearing on-stage and otherwise - with little or no publicity-in-advance locally. It was promoted as the Phoenix Freedom Summit and did take place inside the Ikeda Theater @ MAC over last weekend on Saturday, Sept 30.
A good site selection for sure here in the most conservative city in America. But instead of any other choice of venue [like the convention center or amphitheater] the sponsors paid for staging this event in an "arts complex" supported financially by residents/patrons, event ticket-buyers and taxpayers.
MAC is owned and operated by the City of Mesa.

Blogger Note: An announcement for the event was made as "other presenters" on the Mesa Arts Center official website https://www.mesaartscenter.com/index.php/shows/other-presenters/freedom-summit that yours truly happened to miss except for a coincidence . . .

Your MesaZona blogger would have missed this story except for having his quiet enjoyment of the peaceful water-feature flowing through the public space interrupted by a security guard escorting an SUV sporting a 960ThePatriot.com logo to park 10 feet away. . .
Let's just say yours truly was not "on-the-beat" looking for a story. It wasn't any assignment to "cover the news" since there's no chain-of-command in this independent journalistic endeavor, but an internal reporting instinct took over seeing "The Patriot" on the sides of a media-owned SUV with two guys stationed @ MAC. The event with few details, was memorialized on this blog dated Saturday, Sept 30th
https://mesazona.blogspot.com/2017/09/here-in-mesa-tonight-freedom-summit.html   
Like some media outlets here in Mesa, your MesaZona blogger does not - as has never claimed - that only "good news" is reported.
That would totally distort real life no matter the slant or bias of those other publications in their so-called mission to deliver the news. However, at times this journalist has perhaps become over-sensitive to some criticism for being "a Rabble-Rouser" and "a Trouble-Maker" but that's the way it goes when some officials want to control and dictate who and what is published, oftentimes "spoon-feeding" news they want regurgitated and made public to selected reporters in mainstream media. That's not happening here.

Going Back To School? No > First Fix Systemic Failures In Education

Too bad there's not a Money-Back Guarantee that can be applied to the dismal dysfunction of Arizona's publicly-funded education bureaucracy - it's failing K-12 students for basic 3 R's achievement, failing in learning life-skills, and failing in workforce development that jeopardizes economic development.

How low can we go to the bottom of national rankings by throwing more money at the same bureaucracy that created the problem? We'll just create another bureaucracy to deal with students who need "remediation" when they can't even read and write when somehow they get admitted to "higher education" . . .
What's the matter with that, folks? 

Even in community colleges we get this:

Too poor for college

March 27, 2017 by Joanne

Millions of Americans start college, but never finish a degree. Why not? Poor preparation and too many competing responsibilities, conclude Michael Lawrence Collins and Joel Vargas.

"Close to two-thirds of community college students work to support themselves and their families while in school, and they may be facing homelessness and hunger. Many are single parents, and more than 1/3 are the first in their families to attend college.

National LISC published this online

Going Back to School to Get Back to Work

Chris Walker 10.05.2017

Developing the right skills to compete in growing employment sectors is critical to families and to local economies.
But what really works to build up long-term financial stability? LISC’s Chris Walker takes a look at the outcomes of research on workforce development programs—especially those that bundle education, training and placement with a broader array of financial counseling—and finds compelling evidence for how to help low-wage workers move past employment barriers and into new opportunities.". . . In one way or another, we are constantly sharpening our skills and building new capabilities. Many of us are lucky to have mentoring and continuing education programs to support that growth. They help us open new doors, both personally and professionally.
I wish the same were true for unemployed and underemployed workers.
Half the American workforce earns less than $15 an hour, and more than 75 percent of low-wage workers lack the technical skills they need for better paying jobs. But there are too few resources to help them develop their talents. Indeed, it seems as if the national narrative around creating good jobs is disconnected from the reality of preparing people to take advantage of them.
We have seen this in our research at LISC . . ."
READ MORE > Source from this feed > http://www.lisc.org/our-stories 
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What's this? A different source has this: Go figure!