Love hurts, especially when you are 3000 years old and dressed in rags. Thank you musician Josh Ritter and puppeteer Liam Hurley for the best mummy video I have ever seen.
I really don’t know how much longer Thag will survive.
At least 40 million people worldwide have been prescribed Prozac, but how many of them know that they may be sharing their medication with a crowd of shrimp? The poor shrimp aren’t any happier, either: the antidepressant prompts them to swim upward toward the light, which makes them more likely to be eaten by predatory fish or birds.
It’s summer. The perfect time to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Or, if that proves too taxing, just flop onto the grass and watch all the little invertebrates toiling away: an ant carrying a crumb or a seed, a beetle scurrying over grains of sand, a grasshopper leaping. Beneath the surface is a vast city of small creatures: insects, spiders, springtails, nematodes, earthworms, lichens and fungi, and as many as 10,000 to 50,000 species of bacteria per gram of soil.
http://abstrusegoose.com/231
As soon as I got over the fainting spell from looking at the Planck satellite’s map – and if you haven’t seen it, look now, faint, and then click – showing the Milky Way, I had a burning question.
Okay, true, the Planck satellite wasn’t intended to map the Milky Way. It was supposed to map the background of microwaves left over from the Big Bang (the reddish stuff above and below), but the Milky Way was between the Big Bang and Planck, and it got in the way. And true, that map doesn’t look like the Milky Way which I always thought of an uneven splash of stars across the night sky. But the Planck picture is the zoomed-out view of that night-sky splash, and we see the splash because the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy and we’re inside it, seeing it edge-on, looking toward the center. I grant that this is a confusing number of reference frames and I apologize for digressing.
Back to the subject: my question was about the Planck map and those lovely wisps of gas. Gas can turn into stars. Were those wisps really streams of stars, or were they maybe tracing out where streams of stars ran, or were they maybe streams of stars not born yet? Continue reading
In 1909, 20,000 garment workers in New York City went on strike, demanding a 52-hour workweek, paid overtime, and union recognition. The “uprising,” as described in Susan A. Glenn’s marvelous book Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation, began a cycle of labor organization that helped build the garment industry unions.
I’ve always had a keen interest in bold women garment workers, especially since my grandmother left school in 1920, at the age of 14, in order to go and work for a court dressmaker in London for a weekly wage of six shillings. (She was sacked after a week for “insolence” after complaining that she had spent all her time picking up pins, not learning a trade.) Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that it’s not just humans who demand reasonable working hours: bumblebees also adhere to a strict working day, packing up and flying home even during the constant light of the Arctic circle summer. Continue reading
