Fields of Blue

The clip I'm thinking of has homer in a hot air balloon somewhere over Europe (I think). He looks down and sees the earth as it would appear on a map, with country labels, geographic boundaries & a compass, and says to himself "Hmm, I never knew it looked like that." (Something along those lines)

I would love to use share the clip with my geology class.

I'm preparing to build a new 70 gallon freshwater aquarium for my foyer and would really love to make it Illinois native themed. I've chosen four aquatic plants to use in the setup which really make up a large amount of the most common aquatic flora. The list includes:

Sagittaria Latifolia (Common Arrowhead)

Potamogeton Illinoensis (Illinois Pondweed)

Elodea Canadensis (American Elodea)

Nelumbo Lutea (American Lotus)

I'm sure these plants could survive in an aquarium with some tropical fish and a fertile substrate, but I'm just not sure where I could find and harvest them. I live near Joliet and some of the local waterways are in park districts but they do not hold these types of flora.

Any ideas?

I just got Team Fortress 2 for PC and I was up pretty late playing it. I built this computer myself and It's not even a year old. It has 5 interior case fans and is always under 100 degrees F ambient temperature. It's been working fine forever until yesterday when I finished playing TF2 and shutoff my PC right away. Right away meaning that I quit the game, hit the power button on the PC case and walked away. The actual game process might have still been active in the computer as it shutoff.

The game makes my computer fans run kinda loud because of the graphic load, but only at quick intervals. When I turned my PC on today, I noticed it was significantly louder and the fans are now running consistently louder. I don't think it's caused by too much dust in the PC because the ambient temperature is as low as 83 degrees whereas it's usually around 88. I suspect that the game caused some kind of anomaly in my computer which is telling it to run the fans faster more constantly. I'm going to open the PC up and spray out any dust regardless, but I'd like to know if there might be anything else I should consider checking.

Thanks for the help.

Welcome to my first question, lol.

I'll get right to the point here. I've recently come to posses a beautiful 70 gallon aquarium with all the bells and whistles used for a very good price. I've been keeping fish for less than a year, but in that time I've become very learned in the ecology of an aquarium environment and I plan to make this 70 gallon a naturally planted type aquarium based on Diana Walstad's model. I run a 10 gallon aquarium with the same concept and the results are so beautiful and low maintenance that I couldn't imagine making anything else.

So the question is, should I fill my new tank with Discus or Rainbowfish? I'm a little weary with discus because they are notorious for needing very clean water and specific parameters in water quality (even though I've also read that modern domestic discus are much more hardy then their previous generations).

Although my experience is fairly low, I know that I could keep these fish successfully. I also don't want to end up staring at a PH gauge all day stressing about the health of my fish.

On the other hand, Rainbow fish are an attractive and active fish which fit well in a community and can tolerate many water parameters from mineral content, PH, etc. They also lack the certain docility that discus have which I find interesting and entertaining in fish. I specifically have a great desire to keep forktail rainbowfish because of their interesting look and personality.

So I'll point out my plans for each scenario and hopefully some of you can give me advice :)

With discus

~Group them with a large school of harlequin rasboras (20+). They share similar needs in water quality and will make a good peaceful addition to the tank.

~2 Honey Gourami

~1 Betta? (Likely the same one I have in my current 10 gallon tank)

~3-5 discus total will be the centerpiece fish of the aquarium.

~The tank will be filled with more small grassy plants and less tall stem plants to accommodate the discus' taller body structure.

With rainbowfish

~Keep a large variety of different types of rainbowfish including turquoise, boesemani, forktail, australian and madagascan.

~Include some platys (6+). My local mom and pop pet shop has some really pretty sunburst platys.

~1 Betta. I'm confident that my betta will fit in just fine with all the rainbowfish whereas I'll have to be more cautious with the discus.

~Include a larger background of tall stem plants to help hide the tank background and provide stuff for the fish to swim around including amazon swords and flowering lotus plants.

~Add a powerhead or two to the tank for the rainbowfish to swim against a little.

So as you've already found, I've thought about this quite a bit already. Although the filling & aquascaping of my tank is a far off thing (At least two more months) I'd love to hear some info and opinions from people who have kept any of these fish.

Thanks for any advice :)