Understand the Constitution

Kevin Kelly likes this comic book style explanation of the U.S. Constitution. Get one for the “tenther” on your shopping list:

This lively graphic novel adaptation of the Constitution is by far the best aid I’ve found to deciphering its code. It is the comic book version, but rather than dumbing it down, it smartens it up. The graphic novel goes through the Constitution article by article, and explains what each bit means, why it is there, and how it came to be.

Social disease, social media. It all intersects here.

Pestival:

80% of creatures on earth are bugs – that’s more than a million insect species – without whom humans would not survive. Yet insects are frequently misunderstood, reviled or, at best, ignored by the majority of the human population.

This is where Britain’s Pestival festival comes into play. Think about bugs. Interesting photos here.

Spaceweather.com answers a question that was posed last night driving home from the football game. Was that the Harvest Moon we were gazing upon?

The full Moon of September is often called the “Harvest Moon” because farmers pre-Edison used its light to harvest crops late into the night. But tonight’s full Moon is not the Harvest Moon. It occurs too many days before the autumnal equinox, Sept 22nd, to have that name. Instead, the Harvest Moon of 2009 will be on Oct. 4th.

Slowing down the next ice age: There used to be a slow cooling trend underway in the Arctic, leading scientists to suspect a new Ice Age in the making. That’s a “many milleniums in the making” sort of cooling trend. Now, as we know, it’s warming in the Arctic and permafrost is softening:

The reversal of the slow cooling trend in the Arctic, recorded in samples of layered lakebed mud, glacial ice and tree rings from Alaska to Siberia, has been swift and pronounced, the team writes.

Earlier studies have also shown that the Arctic, more than the planet as a whole, has seen unusual warming in recent decades. But the new analysis provides decade-by-decade detail on temperature trends going back 2,000 years — five times further than previous work at that detailed a scale.

Palo Alto is thinking ahead to electric days. Electric automaker Tesla is putting in a powertrain factory in the area and electric cars may be blooming in the future:

In some areas, the report suggests, larger transformers and overhead wires could be needed. The research parks and the Stanford Shopping Center area, for instance, aren’t equipped to deal with a heavy concentration of electric vehicle charging stations.

Posted in It's life.