- I’ll Give You Fifteen Thousand Dollars to Stop Asking Me to Go Hiking, by Anavel Mingke.
Last time you took me on an “easy walk,” we crossed three rivers, climbed a wall made entirely of roots, and celebrated reaching a place called False Summit.
- The story of Granby Rock.
Category: Fun
Some links: 114
A double shot of Some Links this month.
- And thus passes away the world’s only palindromic demonym: Nauru is now Naoero.
- To-do list management tips from T. Rex.
- The perspective of Reid Walker, a Native American, on land acknowledgements: too much and too little.
The practice has roots in Indigenous protocol, but the modern institutional version came through Australia and Canada. In Australia, a “Welcome to Country” can be delivered only by a member of the nation whose territory you’re on, usually an elder — a host’s gesture. An “Acknowledgment of Country” is what non-Indigenous people offer in return, as guests. The American version collapsed the two, so non-Native institutions now perform what was originally a host’s role.
- Anthony Conwright: Stop calling it the Civil War.
The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.
- The usual crap from 47: Trump administration moves to block public from enforcing environmental protection laws; Donald Trump accuses The Washington Post of treason.
- Jerry Cayford on a framework for eliminating gerrymandering.
- A Letter from Mick Jagger to the Devil on the First Draft of “Sympathy for the Devil,” by John Moe.
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- James Harbeck continues fighting the good fight for epicenter.
- Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead. Maybe my first experiment should be acting on some of the Personal Development links that I’ve posted, instead of just sharing them.
Meterstones, 2025
Small accomplishments during the year, not otherwise accounted for. Not major milestones, but bigger than inchstones.
- I completed 1000 hours of service as a Virginia Master Naturalist.
- I repainted my front door, using a color match of the paint under the kickplate: alas, my cluster association palette calls for a paint color no longer offered by any vendor. My paint job looks OK from the curb, but not that great close up.
- I’m wrapping up my fifth Christmas Bird Count (CBC) as a sector leader in the Seneca count circle.
- I earned a Grognard Mirabilaire badge with Wikipedia. Still no barnstars.
By Jimmy Van Heusen: 1
YouTube has been feeding me scratchy videos of Jay Ward’s Fractured Fairy Tales, and I’ve been eating them up. In “The Ugly Almond Duckling,” Edward Everett Horton’s narration opens with a joke that, in the hands of lesser makers, would be the punch line to a shaggy dog story involving Chinese hydrology. It’s a riff on a page from the Great American Songbook that hardly anyone sings any more, “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)”.
Sunshine and lollipops
Lightning talks, walk-up songs, and poster sessions out of doors: Josie Glausiusz reports from June’s Woodstock.Bio2 + Night Science conference.
“We are trying to reimagine science in a non-bureaucratic, non-boring way,” [conference organizer Oded] Rechavi said as the Turtles’ song ‘Happy Together’ played in the background at Soběšín.
Some links: 107
- “‘He was once somebody’s baby boy…'”: Critical appreciation of ten film performances by Gene Hackman.
- John D. Cook shares a graph of Voyager 2’s speed as it achieves Solar System escape velocity. “In a gravitational assist, the velocity of a spacecraft with respect to the planet doesn’t change, but the velocity relative to the sun changes greatly.”
- Increasingly Inconvenient MTA Service Advisories, by Tom Smyth.
Trains are being held due to an investigation at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. They’re trying to figure out how to pronounce “Schermerhorn.”
- What better name can we give to the realm of music that we call (ill-advisedly) “classical”? My girlfriend in college preferred the term “art music,” but I think that term is too limiting. I’ve also heard “Western concert hall music,” which is getting closer. Matthew Aucoin has some thoughts.
- I’m not a big fan of our commonwealth flag (just the seal slapped on a field of blue), but there’s one element that I’ll speak up for: Texas schools nix lesson over Virginia state flag’s exposed breast.
“I see her as an Amazon,” said Virginia Senate Clerk Susan Clarke Schaar, recalling how a little girl summed up the motto during a tour of the Capitol: “Take that, big boy.”
- Early 20th-century home economics researcher Inga Allison experimented with baking at high altitudes to achieve the perfect Fort Collins brownie.
- I found eighty cents in my sofa cushions, how’s that? Fyre Festival’s embattled founder is selling the brand: ‘It’s time to pass the torch’.
Puzzle time
Connections
Puzzle #645
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
The purples: obscure or not?
No wave
Can we at least use “modern” to refer to the same time period across all media and disciplines? Utahraptor says no.
Some links: 106
Some posts about gratitude and the big picture:
- Day One, by Tim Sommers.
- Gratitude Monday: well, okay, by Bas Bleu.
- Not just heat death: Here are five ways the Universe could end, by Paul Sutter.
[A] phase transition would start in some random spot in the cosmos and race outward at the speed of light, containing within it a brand new kind of universe almost certainly incompatible with the kind of life, chemistry, and even atomic physics that our Universe has managed to concoct.
Because this phase transition bubble expands at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival. One day, we would simply be going about our business and then blink: The new Universe takes its place. Whatever particles had composed our bodies and whatever forces held them together would vanish, to be replaced with a new quantum configuration.
Sleep tight.
- Process, process, process: Dwelling in the Doing: A New Year’s Resolve, by Gary Borjesson.
So, here’s to dwelling in the doing, learning how to love the very things we spend most of our time doing. Happiness itself is like this. It’s not the surge of joy we feel when we find what we’ve been searching for, cross the finish line, or finish building the boat. It is, rather, a way of living in active engagement with the good, meaningful things that make up our life. Your friends, for example.
And one simple way to make a time machine: Dinosaur Comics #4283, by Ryan North.
In other news
TIL that Merv Griffin got his start singing on the radio.
Some links: 100
- Walter Shawlee, slipstick reseller, has passed.
Over time, his customers included a weather station in Antarctica, where many electronic gadgets could not take the cold; photo editors responsible for adjusting image sizes (they like slide rules for their clear displays of different values for the same ratio); an archaeologist who found that calculators got too dusty to work properly during digs; the drug company Pfizer, which gave away slide rules as gifts during a trade show; slide rule enthusiasts in Afghanistan and French Polynesia; and “guys from NASA,” Mr. Shawlee told Engineering Times in 2000.
- Sorry, overwintering turtles don’t breathe through their butts.
The notion that cloacal gas exchange helps North American turtles survive long winters trapped under the ice is pervasive in pop science, but to date, there is no solid evidence that hidden-necked turtles use cloacal gas exchange. The skin and mouth lining are where gas exchange happens during winter hibernation.
- The Old English for spider is gange-wæfre (“walker-weaver”).
- From Zack Stanton for McSweeney’s, “Morrissey or Trump?”
This could only happen to me / Who has been through anything like this?
- Guest column for Washington Business Journal by Alan Berube and Tracy Hadden Loh: “Caps and Wizards moving to Virginia isn’t ‘regionalism.’ It’s gaslighting.”
Some links: 97
- Ooh, shiny, shiny.
- Hilary Howard visits the Jewel Streets neighborhood of Brooklyn/Queens, at 4 feet above MSE. It’s not often that you see Phragmites australis growing on a street corner.
- Yes, outdoor cats are a problem. Probably worse than you think.
Just the amount of different insects and invertebrates that they are eating in their diet. We know that they eat insects. That wasn’t necessarily new, but we didn’t really have an idea that they were eating so many things. And I think our concern there is that most scientists that have done these studies in the past were not really looking for insects and they’re not taxonomists trained to understand insects.
- Mary Pipher makes brightness in the dark. “We cannot stop all the destruction, but we can light candles for one another.”
Autry not Autrey
“Nasal bioluminescence in reindeer, Rangifer tarandus rubens,” by Martin Kemp.
I’m thinking that Kemp might have invented some of his references. Google Scholar says, “Sorry, we couldn’t find this article.”
Oh, the weather outside is frightful
Be advised that I will do what I can to make “colder than Harry’s todger” a thing.
More pix
- The last time with horses: backstage photos by Sinna Nasseri at the Metropolitan Opera. Joshua Barone reports on his experience as a supernumerary in Aida.
- Post-bougie: six decades of Barbie’s Dreamhouses. Analysis by Julie Lasky, photos by Evelyn Pustka.