Now here’s an odd one. Reports say that a 2,000 year-old date seed recovered from the famous archaeological site of Masada in Israel has successfully germinated. This breaks the old record for an old germinating seed previously held by a 700 year-old lotus seed recovered in China. I have heard apocryphal stories of corn or …
Month: June 2008
Grease Rustlers
A couple of weeks ago, a post of mine mentioned in passing that demand for biofuels seems to be driving an increase in thefts of used kitchen grease in New York. Today’s Denver Post notes the same phenomenon occurring here in Colorado. In 2000, used fryer oil was trading for 7.6 cents per pound. Recently …
Bird Update
They grow a lot in four weeks, don’t they?
Sheep Herding
It has been snowing on Cat Urbigkit up in Wyoming (and Peculiar on the river in Utah) but it makes the steppes green. The puppies are bonding with the sheep, and all is right with the world.
Links
A liberal university prof, female, decides to find out about guns and is both sane and fair, though some friends are predictably horrified. This is the fifth in a series and all are worth reading, as I suspect future installments will be, as is her regular non- gun blog, particularly good on reading and writing, …
HSUS Targets Tiny Non-research Universities in Pushover Campaign
At least, that’s the idea. Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Humane Society of the United States has shifted the focus of its ongoing campaign to eliminate the use of animals in the nation’s research institutions by encouraging smaller, teaching-based universities to sign pledges “not to subject any research animals to ‘severe’ unrelieved …
Book Reviews
A Childhood by Harry Crews (also re-read: Florida Frenzy.) Harry Crews is probably in his seventies, a professor of writing in Florida, and grew up among the rural poor of north Florida and southern Georgia.A Childhood is his memoir of that. Somebody in the NYTBR said that it is “..about a part of America that …
Apologies
… for non- existent bloggage. I have been busy, ill, overextended, and probably depressed, though too much A, B, and C to take notice. I am involved in a lawsuit over last year’s work (if it is ever resolved it will be a splendid tale for Michael Blowhard’s critiques of modern publishing); am trying to …
Happy National Pigeon Day
Who knew?
The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stoopid?
This article by Nicholas Carr in the current Atlantic Monthly has been engendering a fair amount of discussion around the web, mostly centering on the following passages: “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My …