Sunday, November 17, 2019

The World on Two Wheels



  • Almanac: Dostoyevsky on martyrdom

    “Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Constance Garnett) ... read more
    AJBlog: About Last Night


    Thunderrush. Mousehole. Pig Trough. Shower Cliff. Devil's Hole. Double Fall. Sidewinder. The names of the various twists and churns of Tasmania's wildest river leap off the page like paint and poetry. It's hard to imagine a more dramatic start to a friendship between two artists.
    "We had met very briefly, in passing," says Paul Kelly, "but we properly met when we went down the Franklin River on a trip organised by [writer] Richard Flanagan. So we spent 10 days together. Dawn to midnight."
    "In a blow-up dinghy," Ben Quilty elaborates. "No phone reception, carrying all our own food. Amazing. Intensely amazing."
    "It's a cold dangerous river unless you know what you're doing," Kelly says. "If we tried to go down there by ourselves we wouldn't have lasted one day. But we were in good hands. Really well organised. Great food. We cooked each night and of course we had plenty of Armagnac to drink. We even managed to bring my little holiday guitar."
    Wild rides: The creative journeys of Paul Kelly and Ben Quilty

    everybody  gardens: “…Deer have become one of the biggest problems for gardeners, mostly due to the way they forage on our treasured plants. The first line of defense is always some kind of physical barrier. In my garden the vegetable garden is a fenced haven, which has seen additions of lilies, hydrangeas and many other plants the deer love. There are shrubs bordering the garden surrounded by deer netting throughout the landscape, too. The next step is to use a repellent

Working from a variety of interviews and articles about the chef, writer, and TV star, the crew at Far Out magazine compiled a playlist of Anthony Bourdain’s favorite songs

 NOT NEARLY AS MUCH AS WE’D LIKE: How Effective Are Flu Shots? “Here’s the thing: The efficacy of the shot varies drastically from year to year, ranging from 10% to 60%. It all depends on whether the vaccine ends up aligning with the strains of the virus that appear.” 60% as a best-case scenario isn’t great. But there’s also this: “The vaccine can decrease the length of having the flu, decrease the risk of complications and the severity of the flu, and decreases the risk of spreading it to others.”
I’M SORRY, BUT HASN’T THIS BEEN THE NERD LIFESTYLE FOREVER? Dopamine fasts: Why Silicon Valley tech workers are avoiding food, TV, sex, music, exercise and eye contact.

 Cows swept off island during Hurricane Dorian found after swimming for milesGuardian




PETER HITCHENS ON “BIG DOPE:” How marijuana benefited from one of the slickest PR campaigns in history.

Loughner’s supposed political views are incoherent drivel of the sort that makes the average Klansman sound like Socrates. He had no politics worth the name, and if he had, the murder of six people including a nine-year-old girl could not possibly have advanced them.
For the killer was officially crazy. Or at least not officially sane. Pima Community College, where he was a constant menace, eventually asked him to get a certificate showing he was mentally OK. He never did. It took this bizarre step after he repeatedly caused noisy and worrying disruptions. One classmate, Lynda Sorensen, told friends that Loughner was ‘mentally unstable’ and ‘scares the living crap out of me’. She added that he was the sort of person ‘whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon’.
For the PBS show he produced, The Mind of a Chef, Bourdain shared a 25-song playlist called Anthony Bourdain’s Music to Cook By.

 These Animals Are Made Possible by Fallen Leaves -The Humane Gardener  – You can have all the native plants you want, but you won’t have nearly as many wild visitors unless you also leave the leaves – “I opened the October issue of Consumer Reports with a feeling of mild dread. Every autumn, the magazine publishes an article extolling the virtues of leaf blowers, mowers, and other tools of destruction.A piece debating the pros and cons of vacuum functionality warned that leaf blowers might damage plants. But not to worry, the writer noted in the online version of the article: You can always switch to the vacuum mode instead! “If you have a small yard and are diligent about keeping up with leaves as they fall, or if you want to surgically suck up leaves from around bushes and flower beds, the vacuum mode on your leaf blower can save you time and effort.” Time, effort, money—these are the shortsighted reasons often cited for deploying weapons against nature. I could list dozens of reasons why leaf blowers and vacuums are counterproductive to all three of those goals…In an era of compounding losses, we need to focus not on saving ourselves from inconvenience but on saving lives instead. As I watch plants go to sleep for the winter, I think of all the animals who are doing so too, especially the ones who’ve been able to make a life here because we have enough leaves to help them through every season. From the luna moth to the wood frog, many of our wild residents need the ground layers that so many of our human neighbors are intent on blowing away. Some of the species featured here were new to our habitat this year—a testament to what can happen when we adopt an ethos of minimal disturbance to the land…”
CULTURE: I moved from LA to a town of 2,300 people — here were the biggest culture shocks I faced in small-town America.




LOOKING AROUND, I WONDER IF THIS CAN HAPPEN AT A SOCIETAL LEVEL, TOO: Man reveals how testosterone deficiency caused ‘brain fog’ and put a strain on his marriage.


AND THAT’S JUST ONE OF THE BENEFITS: Exercising Every Week For At Least Three Hours May Help Prevent Prostate Cancer

Don’t Hear As Well As You Used To? Here’s Why


“There have been a couple of studies done with populations of indigenous people who live in places where there is very little background noise and elderly people in those populations tend to hear as well as infants do.” – NPR


In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.
Brainpickings – The Writing of “Silent Spring” Rachel Carson and the culture-shifting courage to speak inconvenient truth to power. “Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others,” philosopher Alan Watts wrote in the 1950s as he contemplated the interconnected nature of the universe. What we may now see as an elemental truth of existence was then a notion both foreign and frightening to the Western mind. But it was a scientist, not a philosopher, who levered this monumental shift in consciousness: Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964), a Copernicus of biology who ejected the human animal from its hubristic place at the center of Earth’s ecological cosmos and recast it as one of myriad organisms, all worthy of wonder, all imbued with life and reality. Her lyrical writing rendered her not a mere translator of the natural world, but an alchemist transmuting the steel of science into the gold of wonder. The message of her iconic Silent Spring (public library) rippled across public policy and the population imagination — it led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, inspired generations of activists, and led Joni Mitchell to write lyrics as beloved as “Hey farmer farmer — / Put away the DDT / Give me spots on my apples, / but leave me the birds and the bees. / Please!”


13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings


More fluid reflections on keeping a solid center.
On October 23, 2006, Brain Pickings was born as a plain-text email to seven friends. It was then, and continues to be, a labor of love and ledger of curiosity, although the mind and heart from which it sprang have changed — have grown, I hope — tremendously. At the end of the first decade, I told its improbable origin story and drew from its evolution the ten most important things this all-consuming daily endeavor taught me about writing and living — largely notes to myself, perhaps best thought of as resolutions in reverse, that may or may not be useful to others.




 Overlooked No More: Annie Londonderry, Who Traveled the World by Bicycle – She cycled away from her Boston home and into stardom, leaving a husband and three small children for a journey that came to symbolize women’s independence. Intrigued by what little he knew of his great-grandfather’s sister, Peter Zheutlin, a journalist, decided to write “Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride.” Here’s what he learned..”

 McClatchyDC: “Drivers overtaking bike riders are the biggest cause of death among cyclists, says a study released Tuesday by the National Transportation Safety Board. Bike safety is a growing problem that appears to be getting more worrisome, and, the board reported, “current available data likely underestimate the level of bicycling activity in the United States.” In 2017, 806 cyclists died in crashes with motor vehicles, which it found “was comparable to the deaths resulting from railroad or marine accidents and more than twice the number of deaths resulting from aviation accidents in the same year




Study says ‘specific’ weather forecasts can’t be made more than 10 days in advance


WashingtonPost.com: “Imagine someone telling you the weather forecast for New Year’s Day today, two months in advance, with exact temperature bounds and rainfall to a hundredth of an inch. Sounds too good to be true, yes? A new study in Science says it’s simply not possible. But just how far can we take a day-by-day forecast? The practical limit to daily forecasting – “A skillful forecast lead time of midlatitude instantaneous weather is around 10 days, which serves as the practical predictability limit,” according to a study published in April in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. Those limits aren’t likely to change much anytime soon. Even if scientists had the data they needed and a more perfect understanding of all forecasting’s complexities, skillful forecasts could extend out to about 14 or 15 days only, the 2019 study found, because of the chaotic nature of the atmosphere. “Two weeks is about right. It’s as close to be the ultimate limit as we can demonstrate,” the study’s lead author told Science Magazine. The American Meteorological Society agrees. Their statement on the limits of prediction, in place since 2015, states that “presently, forecasts of daily or specific weather conditions do not exhibit useful skill beyond eight days, meaning that their accuracy is low.”.. 
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