I don’t fly often, but now, with a child in Miami, I’ve taken in more airplane travel than in the past seven or eight years, probably. When I fly, I’m at the window looking down. I love it, but it’s so frustrating to get lost so quickly.

I was looking at a Google map today and thinking how this would be the perfect travel companion - if only there was internet service in the air. I would know what river was snaking along below. I could identify a lake or a city. So what would be the best Google magnification to match a typical jet flight? There are 20 levels of magnification and it looks to me like 12 or 13 up from the bottom is the best match.

I think the crazy geography shown here is around the West Virginia/Virginia border. I remember seeing that and wondering.

From Interesting Thing of the Day, a report on the black tulip:

In his 1850 novel The Black Tulip, French author Alexandre Dumas (père) describes a competition, initiated by the Dutch city of Haarlem in the 1670s, in which 100,000 florins (150 florins being the average yearly income at the time) would be given to the first person who could grow a black tulip. Although Dumas’s story is fictional, it is based on a very real phenomenon that took place in the Netherlands in the early 17th century.

An article at the History News Network website discusses the importance of religion in American politics. Not Afghanistan or Iran, but the U.S.A. The authors trace it back to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The authors conclude with this:

This new age is one that many past presidents would hardly recognize. One can’t help but wonder what would become of a candidate today who, like John Kennedy in 1960, “believe[s] in a president whose views on religion are his own private affair.”

How’s your volume of spam these days? Probably rather large:

email messages delivered to large enterprises in November were spam, according to the latest stats from Proofpoint. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based data security company released its Proofpoint Spam Index and found that while overall spam levels dropped slightly (from 89% in October to 88% in November), large companies were still receiving an extremely high volume of spam–with an upsurge in attachment-based spam of almost every kind.

With powerful instruments scouring the heavens, astronomers have found more than 240 planets in the past two decades, none likely to support Earth-like life.

But what if aliens were hunting life outside their own planet? Armed with telescopes only a bit bigger and more powerful than our own, could they peer through the vastness of space and lock in onto Earth as a likely home to life?

Read here to learn the answer is “yes.”

If you could redesign a body part:

Let’s redo the lungs, shall we? They are toxicologist’s nightmare. First, let’s point out what’s great about our airway systems: the filtration provided by our nose, nasopharynx, pharynx and larynx; the clearance of foreign substances by dual layer of mucous in the airways (a thin layer in underneath the thick so the cilia can beat in the thin and move the thick layer up and out); and the generally competent immune function of the lungs. Let’s see how things go wrong.

Read the rest of this entry »

Inhabitat reports on what will become the world’s largest building:

Moscow’s rapidly growing skyline will soon feature an eye-popping new addition: Crystal Island, which will be the world’s biggest building when completed. Sir Norman Foster’s mountainous 27 million square feet spiraling “city within a building” will cost $4 billion and it is scheduled to be built within next 5 years.

The Crystal Island will be Lord Foster’s second large scale project in the Russian capital, and his third new building design that resembles a volcano (we’re talking about his two mountainous buildings in Astana, Kazakstan). Although many people are calling this design the ‘Christmas Tree’ of Moscow - we can’t help but be reminded of the utopian and also rather volcanic X-Seed 4000 design for Tokyo.

There’s a nice collection of presidential candidate photos available at TMZ.com. There are two pages so don’t quit early. I think my favorite is the afro’d Sam Brownback.

Have you guessed who that is smiling at you here? It’s none other than Ron Paul.

Click on this bird. It’s a very handsome bird, indeed. But there’s more than just good looks to this Polynesian foul. It’s related to one of the top 10 archaeological finds of the year, according to Archeology magazine.

Scholars have long assumed the Spaniards first introduced chickens to the New World along with horses, pigs, and cattle. But now radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a chicken bone excavated from a site in Chile suggest Polynesians in oceangoing canoes brought chickens to the west coast of South America well before Europe’s “Age of Discovery.”

Check out the other big finds from last year, ranging from chimp tools to early squash seeds. It was a good year.

Juan Cole recently published his top 10 myths about Iraq in 2007, as a counter to the often heard statement about how well the surge is working.

As one commenter says, the biggest myth remaining is the belief that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attack. Cole’s list is printed below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hurry - time is running out in the Oxford University Press advent calendar contest. Find the seasonal theme common to the last 10 books of the calendar.

Jessica Harlan in her Food for Thought blog talks about how essential parchment paper is in her kitchen duties. That’s a new kitchen item to me. She lists it as one of the seven tools she can’t live without:

I am constantly finding new uses for parchment paper. I use it to line sheet pans to prevent cookies or roasted vegetables from sticking. I sift flour onto a sheet of it, then roll it like a funnel to pour it into a mixing bowl. I use strips of it to skim grease off the surface of a pot of soup. I wrap fine cheeses in it to store in the refrigerator. It’s like the Duct Tape of the kitchen.

She goes for color-coded flexible plastic cutting mats, too.

A story at Mongabay talks about a proposed deforesting of a Malaysian island in order to grow palms for biofuels.

While biofuels are being grown across Asia—deforesting countless hectares—it has been shown in several studies that palm oil plantations grown on what was once tropical forest release 8 to 21 times more carbon than diesel. So, in this case, biofuels actually cause more global warming than SUVs.

While obviously concerned about environmental damage, Dr. Damon is even more worried about how the palm plantations will affect the unique island culture. He describes the island as one in which humans and animals have lived together in synthesis for millennia.

From ClimatePics.org:

Yorkshire photographer and artist, Jason Elliott, has taken a tongue-in-cheek look into the future with a series of images of what the Calder Valley may look like after a few years of Climate Change.

A variety of scenes have been transformed by tropical vegetation and exotic wild animals making the familiar seem strangely unfamiliar. From tropical storms over the Co-op to parrots flying down New Road… expect the unexpected.

“I wanted to draw attention to the fact that Climate Change is happening, but to get the message across in a more light-hearted way than we are used to. It’s an extremely serious issue, particularly in areas like ours that can be prone to flooding, but it’s good to engage people in a way that doesn’t make them feel they are being preached to” said the artist.

To see how the British half lives, follow Benji Lanyado on his Boxing Day stroll.

A few weeks ago I had one of the most enjoyable walks I can remember, finishing off in a quintessential British boozer, which, for me, is the vital ingredient in any decent outing.

His conclusion: “Who needs the through countryside, I thought? Urban walks rule, ok. Don’t they?”