Eighty miles inland and west of the epicenter, Baton Rouge took little abuse from Hurricane Katrina. The storm’s worst effects were felt in waves of people, hundreds of thousands chased, bussed, boated or airlifted from New Orleans and into our laps. Our emergency was mainly of supply and demand. Demand came first for food, fuel …
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Evil Foie Gras
From the NYT courtesy of of Margory Cohen: “Fresh from a victory in Chicago, where the City Council voted last week to ban the sale of foie gras, animal rights activists have set their sights on Philadelphia, where they are collecting signatures on a petition to ban the delicacy there. Their influence on Whole Foods …
Jaguars
Reid sent this story on collaring border jaguars. “A team of government scientists has voted to capture one of a handful of jaguars known to live in the United States, drawing protests from environmental groups. “The scientists want to follow the jaguar’s movements, along river corridors or through mountain ranges, to help authorities figure out …
Can Starlings Speak?
This NYT story suggests that the way Starlings process and arrange sounds may illuminate the origins of speech. Some prominent linguists, including Noam Chomsky, disagree (and Chomsky’s linguistics make a lot more sense than his politics). But a defender of the experiments dismisses Chomsky. “Chomsky may find this trivial, but that is a bit like …
“Grolar”
A hybrid between a grizzly and a polar bear has been shot in Canada– species that have been separated for more than 200,000 years. Nervous about warming in the arctic yet? “”Everybody thought it was a polar bear, and then they started looking more and more and they seen [sic] other features that resembled some …
Genghis and other amusements..
While I try to get “things” done– not just fun things, either– O & P have been digging up things to delight their readers. Peculiar tells us how certain parts of Mt. St. Helens have been growing four to five feet a day! Meanwhile, Odious has encountered a song about Genghis Khan’s genetic legacy: When …
Loved to Death
The LA Times also brings the sad report today that the fabulous Peruvian archeological site, Machu Picchu, is showing signs of wear from the thousands of tourists who come to visit it each year. Visits are up since the end of the Sendero Luminoso rebellion. There’s not much you can do to prevent this unless …
Communication with the Future
I found this piece in the LA Times on the burial of radioactive waste in a salt mine in New Mexico fascinating from an anthropological point of view. How do we warn people 100,000 years from now that what is buried in the mine is dangerous? They obviously won’t speak our language and what are …
Porumbeii
Palomas, palombe, palumbus….. a Romanian pigeon site. Because Romanian IS a Romance language. Someone told me this was “Portuguese”. I went to it and more or less understood a lot, having French and some Latin, Spanish, Italian. But it looked… weird. Then I saw the “ro” in the url…. The “Carunculat”– the pigeon in the …
Iraq Iran
Re Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Con, a remark from Alan Dershowitz: “History may well conclude that America and Britain fought the wrong preventive war against a country that posed no real threat, and that fighting that wrong war stopped them fighting the right preventive war against a country that did pose a danger to world peace.” …