5 Intriguing Things
1. A visit to China's shale gas country.
"The clouds faded as we climbed, revealing a quilt of farmland dotted with pingfang, or flattop houses. We drove down a road lined with new hotels, small restaurants, and hardware stores—the markings of a boomtown. Roughly the size of Minnesota, the Sichuan Basin—where many of China's experimental fracking wells are located—is home to some 100 million people, many of them farmers. It's not the only part of China with shale gas, but fracking requires a lot of water, and with a subtropical climate and proximity to the mighty Yangtze River, Sichuan has that, too, making it the nation's first fracking frontier." (motherjones.com)
2. How the Smithsonian preserved Martha, the last passenger pigeon, when she died in 1914.
"After Martha was skinned, her internal organs were stored in jars of ethyl alcohol. (The Smithsonian still has those, too. They're kept off-site in the museum's fluid collection.) Then, according to Schufeldt's account, a taxidermist named Nelson R. Wood prepared the skin on an artificial body most likely made from wire, shredded bits of wood, and tightly wound bundles of string. 'You wrap the skin around it, sew it shut, and run wires or whatever else you have to do to make it solid and tight,' Milensky says. Once a mounted specimen is sewn shut, it's set for good. From that moment in 1914 until the day her skin inevitably breaks down—whenever that may be—Martha will remain perched on that stick, head cocked at a harsh angle to the side." (theatlantic.com)
3. Is there a single US technology company that has this proportion of women in its leadership?
"About the only thing Wall Street didn’t hype in the run-up to Alibaba’s initial public offering is the Chinese tech giant’s remarkable track record for populating its top ranks with women. A third of Alibaba’s 18 co-founders are women, and a similar percentage constitute the company’s powerful new partnership group, which essentially controls the company by nominating a majority of its directors. Among them are CFO Maggie Wu and Lucy Peng, head of Alibaba’s HR and the affiliated Small and Micro Financial Services Co., which owns Alipay, an online payments system—the top female stars at the company who each have wide influence." (fortune.com)
4. Satellite Lamps.
"[T]he project uses 'a set of lamps that contain GPS receivers, that change brightness according to the accuracy of received GPS signals. When we photograph them in timelapse, they reveal how the accuracy changes over time.' You're basically watching the indirect effects of signal drift, transformed here into ambient mood lighting that acts secondarily as a graph of celestial geography. In what the group calls a 'selective history of how a piece of the Space Program has ended up in our pockets,' they explain that the everyday reception of signals coming down from the constellation of GPS satellites is always subject to temporary errors, inaccuracies, and misalignments; this can be seen easily enough by glancing at nothing more than your own physical location, as mapped on your cell phone." (bldgblog.blogspot.com)
"Mr. Saakashvili said the charges proved nothing more than that he is the target of a political witch hunt. 'If you cannot find, for somebody who has been in power for nine years in a post-Soviet country, anything connected with corruption or enrichment or finding like you know businesses or offshore accounts,' he said, adding, 'That makes me very proud.'" (nytimes.com)
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
come-at-able, get-at-able. Keep the hyphens. Come-at-able was made as long ago as 17th c., but except in get-at-able, the experiment has not been successfully repeated & probably will not be (cf. US stick-to-itiveness).
Keep the Hyphens