America’s Beer Belt
The red dots are the areas with a higher ratio of bars to grocery stores.
(via)
Faking It
Among the many trends covered by the NYT Freakonomics blog, this is certainly one of their most interesting:
We are agnostics living deep in the heart of Texas and our family fakes Christianity for social reasons. It’s not so much for the sake of my husband or myself but for our young children. We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended. Thus started the faking of the religious funk.
Do our resident Texans attest?
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
Sky
Sky from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
Read more about the project HERE.
reg’lar day
Lookin’ out my back door.
It’s kind of wimpy for this time of year, as we had a big thaw a few days back.
What Cindy Just Said
Well fuck my rubber anus under the fold.
Happiness by U.S. State
The state-by-state list, from happiest to least cheery:
1. Louisiana; 2. Hawaii; 3. Florida; 4. Tennessee; 5. Arizona; 6. South Carolina; 7. Mississippi; 8. Montana; 9. Alabama; 10. Maine; 11. Wyoming; 12. Alaska; 13. North Carolina; 14. South Dakota; 15. Texas;
16. Idaho; 17. Vermont; 18. Arkansas; 19. Georgia; 20. Utah; 21. Oklahoma; 22. Delaware; 23. Colorado; 24. New Mexico; 25. North Dakota; 26. Minnesota; 27. Virginia; 28. New Hampshire; 29. Wisconsin; 30. Oregon;
31. Iowa; 32. Kansas; 33. Nebraska; 34. West Virginia; 35. Kentucky; 36. Washington; 37. District of Columbia; 38. Missouri; 39. Nevada; 40. Maryland; 41. Pennsylvania; 42. Rhode Island; 43. Ohio; 44. Massachusetts; 45. Illinois; 46. California; 47. New Jersey; 48. Indiana; 49. Michigan; 50. Connecticut; 51. New York.
Grain of salt and all that.
Happy Huexoloti Day Y’all
Yet another great food whose origins lie in Mexico, not Turkey as the misplaced name might lead you to think…
“The Aztecs had named these too-fat-for-flight birds huexoloti (Meleagris gallopavo). But that complicated moniker was virtually left behind on Central American terrains when some of these permanently grounded birds were transported to Spain and Portugal and beyond. As they came from what was thought to be the Indies somewhere near what became India, their initial names in Europe contained some form of the term “indi.” Even when they were quickly taken across the trade routes of the Mediterranean and pathways connecting the population centers of the Middle East, they retained a name that connected them to islands on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. It was only when some of their fattened offspring were transported from Islamic farms at the eastern end of the Mediterranean to England that they acquired an entirely new name that connected them with the Middle East and not with America. Bearing in England the name “turkey,” they were transshipped to pilgrim settlers in North America where they displaced their wild cousins and eventually became the favored Thanksgiving bird for virtually all Americans.”
mapping the deep ocean
A ten year census of marine life found 17,650 species living below 656 feet in complete darkness.
“The deep sea was considered a desert until not so long ago; it’s quite amazing to have documented close to 20,000 forms of life in a zone that was thought to be barren,” said Jesse Ausubel with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a sponsor of the census. “The deep sea is the least explored environment on earth.”
Chart Showing the Aggregate Number of Idiots and the Proportion of Males and Females, White or Colored, Native or Foreign, at the Ninth Census 1870; also the increase since 1860.
Excerpted from the Statistical atlas of the United States based on the results of the ninth census 1870 with contributions from many eminent men of science and several departments of the government Comp. under the authority of Congress by Francis A. Walker, M. A., superintendent of the ninth census.
(by way of Eminent Man of Science and Art Graham Parker; entire census report at loc.gov)
islands seen from space
blast from the past
Recent tremors in the Midwest may be aftershocks from earthquakes that occurred 200 years ago.
The New Madrid Earthquakes, which struck between December 1811 and February 1812, are some of the strongest seismic events ever to occur in the contiguous United States in recorded history. The largest quake is estimated to have been 8.0 in magnitude and was powerful enough to temporarily make the Mississippi River flow backwards. The heart of the seismic activity was near the town of New Madrid, Missouri, close to the Kentucky and Tennessee borders.
that’s how the light gets in
A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.
The map that changed the world
The first map that ever had America on it.
John Cale talks about his work at Venice Biennale, Wales Pavilion
Big Bend National Park
From an article on the world’s quietest places.
Big Bend is a kind of acoustic greatest hits record. Because the park, located in southwest Texas, has such a diverse landscape — mountains, deserts, river, with more species of birds, bats, and cactus than any other park in the country — only a few minute’s change in location can dramatically change what you hear. And one of the best things about Big Bend? It’s not on very many airplane flight routes. In fact, the sound of planes is still very rare here. And that makes it one of the most unusual, noise-free environments anywhere in the world.
And, for Renner, the island of Yap.
Yap’s entire culture is built on adherence to social peace, so that, according to resident Richard Flow, even playing your car radio too loud when you drive simply isn’t done. “Do it,” he says, “and you’ll come back the next day to find your windshield broken.”
American Homicide
It’s especially interesting on how the South evolved to be the most murderous region of the United States. “There’s just a whole lot of people there who need killin’,” I recall one man (in another book) opining about Texas and its high murder rate.
Tweetle Dumb
I live in the city of stupid.
Renner on Weather | From the Archives
From his 2007 travel log, to be precise.
It was about 11:20, and it was partly sunny. Now most of you live in parts of the world where it is mostly to completely sunny on many occasions throughout the year. But you don’t live in Britain, where mostly sunny is as rare as the return of the monarch butterflies and completely sunny is a phrase that occurs only in novels of other worlds. Partly sunny is marvelous, and–to tell the truth–even though gray clouds blew across from time to time and the temperature dropped 5 degrees every time they covered the sun, it is quite possibly mostly sunny right now, at 7:20 p.m., if you don’t count high haze as cloud. What if it were to be mostly sunny tomorrow? Oh my, oh my. I hope it is mostly sunny in London. London has been the warmest place I have been while in the British Isles, but this afternoon I was actually able to take the windbreaker off and actually wander about wearing only two short-sleeve shirts. At about 5 p.m., back at Aldemiro, I sat out in the garden with a cup of tea and read. Yes, outside; yes, in short-sleeves. For a while. Marvelous.
Phil, does this answer your question?
When Did Your County’s Jobs Disappear?
Chicago?
I’m going there for two days, week after next. Never been. What should I do there? Where should I eat?
Bonus:
Useful and Beautiful Devices
Skinner’s July 2009 auction of Science, Technology & Clocks features the most comprehensive collection of scientific instruments to come to market in a long time. From a private collection, offerings include several important pairs of globes by Newton, a sextant by Ramsden, an octant by George Jones, equinoctial dials, astrolabes, chronometers, microscopes and nautical antiques.
A view of the Poles
10 years of high-resolution spy satellite images of both Poles have been released to the public and scientists.
A grievance
From Rudolph Delson’s1 Open Letter to Senator Clinton, December 3, 2008:
Above the Texas Montage, with its picture of cowboys and steer, appears a long quote by Lyndon B. Johnson, which concludes:
Is a new world coming? We welcome it—and we will bend it to the hopes of man
Yes! What better emblem than the beef industry for a world ecologically bent to the hopes of American men? Similarly, accompanying the image of a locomotive crossing a hill-country trestle is a quote taken from the inscription on the famous “Golden Spike,” which in 1869 completed America’s first transcontinental railroad:
May God continue the unity of our country as the railroad unites the two great oceans of the world.
Again—yes! In 2008, what better symbol for our national unity than our adamantine national railroad infrastructure?
There is only one pairing of quote and image from which I must dissent. Accompanying the Alaska Montage, with its grizzly and its salmon, is this quote from the “Thanksgiving Address, Mohawk version”:
We send thanks to all the Animal life in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We are glad they are still here and we hope it will always be so.
I am relieved to hear that the State Department, like the Mohawk nation, aspires to preserve “all the Animal life in the world.” Still, to cite the extirpated grizzly and the decimated salmon as examples of animal species from which humanity ought to learn something? This is dark indeed.
Have you seen2—actually handled, in person—the new U.S. passports? They are outrageous. Appalling. Embarrassing. And, above all, fugly. My passport expires next summer, and I sincerely hope that the design will have been revised before then; otherwise, I may have to stop traveling overseas. People, what can we do to make this happen?
- Rudolph Delson is the author of the novel Maynard and Jennica, as well as of the very fine “An Open Letter to John E. Potter, Postmaster General” (PDF, 127 KB), which I highlighted earlier today on my own blog.
- A ray of hope, or merely another instance of institutional inconsistency? The US State Department appears to no longer include photos of the current passport design on its website. Have they become embarrassed by it? Are they in the midst of revising it to be less horrendous? Or did they just move the page and forget to update their links?
View from the ISS
Roads and circular fields in the desert in Egypt.