A study published by the US Forest service values the State of Tennessee’s urban forest at $80 billion thanks to its contributions to the environment. With an urban population of 284 million, that equates to a mean value of $282 per tree.
View Link [arst.ch]
And if a blogger in those days dared to criticize Congressman Paul for, say, taking money from card-carrying neo-Nazis or claiming authorship of a newsletter that talked smack about, oh, black people (“I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal”) she was roundly creamed by organized commenters.
I know, because this happened to me. I’d give a link to my interrogation of the Paul scene from the waning days of 2007, but it doesn’t exist. My editor at the New York Times fully expunged the record after hundreds of Paulians swarmed the site—like bacteria or antibodies—and sowed the comments section with vitriol.
View Link [news.yahoo.com]
C’mon! It’s only been tried once, that’s hardly scientific.
A dead whale with a large gash on its side has washed up on the beach in Skegness.
View Link [bbc.co.uk]
Sifrhippus shrank from about 12 pounds average weight to about eight and a half pounds as the climate warmed over thousands of years, a team of researchers reported in the journal Science on Thursday.
The horse (siff-RIP-us, if you have to say the name out loud) lived in what is still horse country, in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, where wild mustangs roam.
View Link [nytimes.com]
Photographs of variously mutated brown trout were relegated to an appendix of a scientific study commissioned by the J. R. Simplot Company, whose mining operations have polluted nearby creeks in southern Idaho. The trout were the offspring of local fish caught in the wild that had been spawned in the laboratory. Some had two heads; others had facial, fin and egg deformities.
Perhaps a dinner party for Mr. J. R. Simplot is in order?
View Link [nytimes.com]
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Unfortunately, this seems to be predicated on having time for not only two four-hour sleep blocks but also one or two hours between presumably not involving lots of lighted stimulation…not practicable in the modern world.
The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too.
That certainly seemed to be on of the primary drivers of my insomnia experiences.
View Link [bbc.co.uk]
He would actually turn 100 on June 23rd.
Everyone sees a different Turing. A molecular biologist might surprise you by saying that Turing’s most important paper is his 1936 work on the ‘Turing machine’ because of its relevance to DNA-based cellular operations. A biophysicist could instead point to his 1952 work on the formation of biological patterns — the first simulation of nonlinear dynamics ever to be published.
Beneath it all, Turing was driven by the dream of reviving — possibly in the form of a computer program — the soul of Christopher Morcom, perhaps his only true friend, who died abruptly when they were both teenagers.
View Link [nature.com]
Alex the parrot’s final experiments suggested that he could perform simple addition using arabic numerals.
View Link [nature.com]
Pygmies with PDAs is certainly on the “Extreme” end of the spectrum, but I think harnessing interested amateurs, particularly in field science, is not just a great way to spread science, but I think a way to offer people a more rewarding life than watching television or collecting chotchkies.
View Link [nature.com]
“Steven Waller’s intriguing idea is that ancient Britons could have based the layout of the great monument, in part, on the way they perceived sound.”
Fun, but real?
Archaeoacoustics: Tantalizing, but fantastical
Nadia Drake at Science News is unimpressed.
View Link [bbc.co.uk]
Cue the “big mushroom” jokes, but I can’t help but notice the two…bulbous outgrowths at the…base.
“Plant-eating dinosaurs had not yet evolved to trample Prototaxites’ to the ground. ‘It’s hard to imagine these things surviving in the modern world,’ Boyce said.”
View Link [reuters.com]
How is this not already on Boing Boing? Is it because they’re not playing ukuleles?
“The accordionists will be playing a leading role in the Barents Spektakel festival that Mr Traavik is organising over the weekend in north-east Norway near the Russian border, itself an isolated, militarised area during the Cold War. “
View Link [ http]
“Without wishing to overstate my case, everything in the observable universe definitely has its origins in Northamptonshire…”
View Link [bbc.co.uk]
Maybe. “[They] recognise this in their study, and my hunch is that there is not a single explanation and that many factors are involved in the zebra’s stripes.”
View Link [bbc.co.uk]
Anyone else bothered by their “present day” map?
View Link [nature.com]
Just got this letter from poor Imus Geographics…I bought two after the BoingBoing link to the Slate article, but that was days later, as it took that long for their server to be available.
Hello from Imus Geographics!
So many of you have sent questions about your orders that we feel it is
time to send a blanket email to answer the question we get most often –
“Dave, when will my map ship?” Rather than answer individual emails –
which is always our preference – we are contacting you all at once, hoping
you will understand.First, thanks again to everyone for your patience as our fulfillment
house, Raven Maps and Images, sends your orders as quickly as possible.Raven is able to ship about 2000 maps per week, and as of 1/18/12 had
shipped through order number 6500. Those orders should be there already or
within a few days.For everyone whose orders are above 6500, your maps go out at the rate of
about 350-400 each day, which means that all of the outstanding orders
will be shipped within two weeks, with the majority done in the next ten
days. Below is a rough estimate of the date maps will ship, based on our
progress to date:Orders ——- Ship
Through —– Date
6500 ——- 1/18/12
6900 ——- 1/19/12
7300 ——- 1/20/12
7700 ——- 1/23/12
8100 ——- 1/24/12
8500 ——- 1/25/12
8900 ——- 1/26/12
9300 ——- 1/27/12
9700 ——- 1/30/12
10100 —— 1/31/12
10500 —— 2/1/12
10900 —— 2/2/12Again we appreciate the opportunity to talk or communicate with each of
you directly, but the volume of questions on delivery – more than 50 a day
– is leaving us with this blanket solution for answering this question as
efficiently as possible. Thanks for understanding.Dave Imus, Cartographer
View Link [imusgeographics.com]
