Tag Archives: Ancient

President Trump Won’t Take the Cable Car Up to Masada

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This is getting a lot of snarky play today:

President Donald Trump has canceled a planned visit and speech at the ancient mountain fortress of Masada in Israel after authorities told him that he could not land his helicopter on top of the UNESCO-listed site….Unlike former presidents who have made the trip, such as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Trump declined to land the helicopter at a base of the historic site and then take the cable car up, preferring to cancel the visit altogether.

Trump’s Razor, of course, suggests that Trump is just being an asshole. But it’s also possible that he has acrophobia in some form or another, and doesn’t like the idea of swinging in the air from a cable for three minutes. I don’t suppose Trump would ever admit to such a weakness, so we’ll never know unless someone leaks about it. And what are the odds of that in this buttoned-down administration?

Anyway, it’s possible there’s a benign explanation for this. Just saying.

Read More – 

President Trump Won’t Take the Cable Car Up to Masada

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on President Trump Won’t Take the Cable Car Up to Masada

The Wild Trees – Richard Preston

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Wild Trees

A Story of Passion and Daring

Richard Preston

Genre: Earth Sciences

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: April 10, 2007

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees , Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored. The canopy voyagers are young–just college students when they start their quest–and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air. The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.” Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death. Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees –the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself. From the Hardcover edition.

Link:  

The Wild Trees – Richard Preston

Posted in alo, Anchor, Crown, FF, GE, ONA, Presto, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Wild Trees – Richard Preston

This is likely when people started eating chicken

This is likely when people started eating chicken

By on 21 Jul 2015commentsShare

It’s meat month here at Grist, and we’re talking about everything from the sustainability of meat to the morality of meat to the butchering of meat to the future of meat (stay tuned). But have you ever wondered who was the first to gnaw on a juicy chicken leg and declare the inaugural “Tastes like chicken!”?

Well today, NPR reports that those culinary geniuses might have lived sometime between 400 and 200 B.C. in what is now an archaeological site called Maresha. Here’s more from NPR:

“The site is located on a trade route between Jerusalem and Egypt,” says Lee Perry-Gal, a doctoral student in the department of archaeology at the University of Haifa. As a result, it was a meeting place of cultures, “like New York City,” she says.

Not too long ago, the archaeologists unearthed something unusual: a collection of chicken bones.

“This was very, very surprising,” says Perry-Gal.

The surprising thing was not that chickens lived here. There’s evidence that humans have kept chickens around for thousands of years, starting in Southeast Asia and China.

But those older sites contained just a few scattered chicken bones. People were raising those chickens for cockfighting, or for special ceremonies. The birds apparently weren’t considered much of a food.

In Maresha, however, the archaeologists found thousands of well-preserved chicken bones, many of which had knife marks on them, and most of which came from female chickens. All of that, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that these people were raising chickens for food, not cockfighting.

It’s less clear, however, why these people decided to pick up that juicy leg. Here’s more from NPR:

Perry-Gal thinks that part of it must have been a shift in the way people thought about food. “This is a matter of culture,” she says. “You have to decide that you are eating chicken from now on.”

In the history of human cuisine, Maresha may mark a turning point.

Barely a century later, the Romans starting spreading the chicken-eating habit across their empire. “From this point on, we see chicken everywhere in Europe,” Perry-Gal says. “We see a bigger and bigger percent of chicken. It’s like a new cellphone. We see it everywhere.”

Now that we find ourselves buried up to our faces in chicken (and cellphones), perhaps we can take comfort in knowing that such drastic shifts are possible. Perhaps we can just decide that we’re not gonna raise animals in horrific conditions just so we can have our all-you-can-eat buffets and cheap burgers. Perhaps we can just decide that we’ll start eating insects or lab-grown meat or weird veggie-based imitation meat simply because it’s better for the planet. Now, before you call me a dewy-eyed optimist (I’m not — I think we’re pretty much all going to hell in a handbasket), stick around for the end of meat month, when we dive into all of these futuristic meat alternatives and assess their feasibility.

Source:
The Ancient City Where People Decided To Eat Chickens

, NPR.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work. A Grist Special Series

Meat: What’s smart, what’s right, what’s next

Get Grist in your inbox

Link: 

This is likely when people started eating chicken

Posted in Anchor, eco-friendly, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This is likely when people started eating chicken

The Strange History of Tacos and the New York Times

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Neil Irwin does a bit of interesting gastronomic sleuthing today using a New York Times tool that counts the number of mentions of a word in the archives of the Times. The question is, how fast do new food trends go mainstream? Take, for example, fried calamari:

Now, of course, every strip-mall pizza place and suburban Applebee’s serves fried calamari. But not all that long ago it was an exotic food. The term “fried calamari” did not appear in the pages of The New York Times until 1975, according to our nifty Times Chronicle tool, and didn’t show up frequently until the 1980s. Lest you think it is only a change in vocabulary, the term “fried squid” made only a couple of scattered appearances before that time.

Fried calamari made a voyage that dozens of foods have made over the years: They start out being served in forward-thinking, innovative restaurants in New York and other capitals of gastronomy. Over time, they become more and more mainstream….In the last decade alone, the list includes tuna tartare, braised short ribs, beet salad and pretty much any dish involving pork belly, brussels sprouts or kale. In an earlier era, the list might include sun-dried tomatoes, pesto and hummus.

Fascinating! But readers with long memories will recall that I was surprised at how recently tacos became mainstream. In 1952 they were apparently uncommon enough that the Times had to explain to its readers what a taco was. So how about if we use this nifty new search tool to get some hard data on taco references? Here it is:

Sure enough, there are virtually no mentions of tacos in the 40s and 50s. There’s a blip here and there, but they don’t really get commonly mentioned until the 70s.

But that’s not what’s interesting. Back in 1877, a full 3 percent of all Times articles mentioned tacos! In fact, tacomania was a feature of the Times during all of the 1870s and 1880s, before suddenly falling off a cliff in 1890. What’s up with that? Why did tacos suddenly become verboten in 1890? Did a new editor take over who hated tacos? And what’s the deal with the blip from about 1917 to 1922? Did World War I produce a sudden explosion of interest in tacos?

This is very weird. Does anyone have a clue what’s going on here?

UPDATE: On Twitter, Christopher Ingraham suggests that this is an artifact of bad text recognition of ancient microfilm. I don’t have access to the full version of Times Chronicle, but a look at some of the summaries of articles that allegedly mention tacos makes this seem like a pretty good guess. It’s quite possible that there are no genuine mentions of tacos until the 40s or 50s.

This is a sadly boring explanation, but it seems pretty likely to be right. However, I’m still curious about the sudden dropoff in 1890 (did archive copies suddenly improve? did the Times start using a different font?) and the blip after World War I.

See original article here:

The Strange History of Tacos and the New York Times

Posted in alo, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Sprout, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Strange History of Tacos and the New York Times

Will Everyone Please Quit Bitching About Passwords?

Mother Jones

The Wall Street Journal has yet another article today telling us how terrible it is that we’re all still using passwords:

“Passwords are awful and need to be shot,” says Jeremy Grant, head of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, a task force created by President Barack Obama in 2011 to bolster online security.

Despite all their flaws, passwords are so ubiquitous, cheap to use and entrenched in the architecture of websites and the rhythm of human behavior that efforts to supplant them have barely budged. “It’s the only piece of technology from 50 years ago we’re still using today,” says Brett McDowell, a senior Internet security adviser at eBay’s PayPal unit.

First things first: McDowell is wrong. We still use keyboards. We use monitors. We use hard drives. We use integrated circuits. Now, you might argue that we use way better versions of those things (except for keyboards, which inexplicably keep getting worse), whereas passwords are mostly just as primitive as they were in 1964. But that’s as far as you can plausibly go.

Anyway. Why do we still use passwords? Answer: for the same reason front doors still use simple locks. They may provide weak security, but they do provide some security, and they’re the only solution that’s both cheap and universal. So if you think it’s scandalous that we’re still using passwords 50 years after they were invented, then prepare to be even more scandalized by front-door locks. That technology is centuries old!

And then prepare to be even more scandalized, because none of the proposed replacements for passwords (fingerprint scanners, gesture identification, face detection, etc.) are either cheap or ubiquitous, and they’re not going to be anytime soon. No matter what your preferred solution is, it needs to become a standard and then get rolled out on every computer in existence. Please note: Not every PC. Every computer. Not every American computer. Every computer in the world.

So quit moaning about all this ancient technology. Passwords are going to be around for a while, no matter what the security gods of Silicon Valley would prefer. In the meantime, if you’re a user, use strong passwords. If you’re a corporation, encrypt your hash databases. If you’re a technology guru, put away the retinal scanners and alpha wave detectors and figure out a clever way to make passwords more secure. Passwords may be here to stay for a while, but they don’t have to be the Achilles’ heel of the entire internet.

Excerpt from – 

Will Everyone Please Quit Bitching About Passwords?

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Cyber, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will Everyone Please Quit Bitching About Passwords?

Study Finds Setbacks in Carbon Capture Projects

The number of large projects to capture and bury carbon dioxide has fallen, a report says, even though scientists say such projects are needed to fight climate change. Originally posted here –  Study Finds Setbacks in Carbon Capture Projects ; ;Related ArticlesBy 2047, Coldest Years May Be Warmer Than Hottest in PastDot Earth Blog: Your Dot: On Walking Dogs and Warming TrendsBy 2047, Coldest Years May Be Warmer Than Hottest in Past, Scientists Say ;

Link:  

Study Finds Setbacks in Carbon Capture Projects

Posted in alo, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Study Finds Setbacks in Carbon Capture Projects

Greenpeace Leader Offers Himself to Aid Detainees

The offer by the executive director of Greenpeace International aims to help win the release on bail of the activists who are being held by Russia on piracy charges. Original post –  Greenpeace Leader Offers Himself to Aid Detainees ; ;Related ArticlesAs Drilling Practice Takes Off in U.S., Europe Proves HesitantStudy Finds Setbacks in Carbon Capture ProjectsBy 2047, Coldest Years May Be Warmer Than Hottest in Past, Scientists Say ;

Jump to original – 

Greenpeace Leader Offers Himself to Aid Detainees

Posted in alo, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Greenpeace Leader Offers Himself to Aid Detainees

Report Says a Shortage of Nuclear Ingredient Looms

The Government Accountability Office is to release a report indicating that the supply of lithium used in most United States nuclear reactors is drying up. See the original post:   Report Says a Shortage of Nuclear Ingredient Looms ; ;Related ArticlesIn a Hot, Thirsty Energy Business, Water Is PrizedUnease in Hawaii’s CornfieldsSearching for lettuce that can withstand climate change ;

Visit site:

Report Says a Shortage of Nuclear Ingredient Looms

Posted in alo, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Report Says a Shortage of Nuclear Ingredient Looms

In a Hot, Thirsty Energy Business, Water Is Prized

Electricity generators need water for cooling, but competition with other interests is growing, and the plants do not always win. Continue reading:  In a Hot, Thirsty Energy Business, Water Is Prized ; ;Related ArticlesUnease in Hawaii’s CornfieldsSearching for lettuce that can withstand climate changeBooks: Four Books Explore Humans’ Relationship With Water ;

Visit source: 

In a Hot, Thirsty Energy Business, Water Is Prized

Posted in alo, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In a Hot, Thirsty Energy Business, Water Is Prized

A Balancing Act Around Lake Tahoe

A development plan satisfies some environmental groups and political leaders in California and Nevada, but critics say it will open the door to more development than proponents claim. See the original article here: A Balancing Act Around Lake Tahoe Related Articles Zoos Aim to Ward Off a Penguin Killer Fuel From Landfill Methane Goes on Sale Dot Earth Blog: A Budget Distress Call – ‘Please Pay Us’ – Hidden in a Federal Weather Forecast

View this article – 

A Balancing Act Around Lake Tahoe

Posted in alo, Anker, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Balancing Act Around Lake Tahoe