A painted bunting in Florida. Painted buntings are about 5in in length, dine on seeds and insects and prefer to construct nests in dense foliage. Photograph: Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
If we had been close by, no doubt we would try to see it:
Hundreds flock to Maryland park to view ‘exceptional’ rare bird
Birders headed to Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park to view brightly coloured painted bunting Continue reading
Costa Rica
Lehigh Gorge State Park with River and cyclist on Lehigh Gorge Rail Trail path, Poconos Mountains, near Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Jumping Rocks / Universal Images Group / Getty ImagesBy Natalie Marchant
Thanks to Natalie Marchant for this news posted on EcoWatch:
The U.S. Is Building a Bike Trail That Runs Coast-to-Coast Across 12 States
The Great American Rail-Trail will be almost 6,000km when complete, and will serve 50 million people within 80km of the route. Continue reading
San Gerarda de Dota, Costa Rica
Last month a magazine article was published about the origins of Organikos. We have told bits and pieces of the story in these pages, but Carol Latter was the first person to tell the story from a perspective outside of our family. The online version of the story has two photos, whereas the tangibly published version has ten; in both cases we were happy that a magazine from the state I grew up in, and where Seth has been living since 2018, was interested in sharing this founding story.
Today, reading Marella Gayla’s story about founders trending younger (and why), plenty to ponder. My takeaway is that for whatever reason ambitious young people see an important link between entrepreneurship and positive social outcomes, we can count that as a good thing:
Is Every Ambitious Teen-ager a “Founder and C.E.O.”?
Forget Model U.N. and the SATs. Kids today want to tell college admissions officers all about the companies they’ve started to save the world.
One striking innovation of modern meritocracy is the teen-age executive. High-school students used to spiff up their college applications with extracurriculars like Model U.N. and student council. Today’s overachievers want to grace their résumés with the words “founder and C.E.O.” When schools in Fremont, California, shut down in March, Jagannath Prabhakaran, a sixteen-year-old, seized the opportunity to join the ranks. Continue reading
Sierra de la Laguna Biosphere Reserve, Baja California Sur, Mexico
Thanks to Sarah Kennedy and ChavoBart Digital Media for this story at Yale Climate Connections:
The surprising link between wine corks and climate change
Give a toast to cork forests, which store a great deal of carbon pollution.
If you open a bottle of champagne or wine this New Year’s Eve, take a look at the stopper.
In recent years, plastic stoppers and screw tops have come on the market as alternatives to natural cork, but cork can be better for the climate.
Cork is harvested in the Mediterranean from the bark of cork oak trees. The process does not harm the tree, and the bark regrows. But the first harvest cannot begin until the tree is about 25 years old. Continue reading
St. Andrae, Austria
General Electric’s Haliade-X wind turbine at Rotterdam Harbor in the Netherlands. Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
Stanley Reed has been our go-to expert on turbines for a few years. The photos and illustrations are particularly helpful to understand the scale of these new models. Thanks to the New York Times for giving him prime space on the front page on the first day of the new year for this story:
A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
G.E.’s giant machine, which can light up a small town, is stoking a renewable-energy arms race.
Twirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam’s harbor is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the mainland of Western Europe. Continue reading
male – Costa Rica
The math teacher at the center of “Miyamoto and the Machine” believes that a well-crafted puzzle can tell a story in numbers.
A poetic closure to a year of challenges, this film looks at one man’s quest to conquer the world with elegant presentation of numbers-as-stories:
The Puzzle Inventor Who Makes Math Beautiful
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An elementary-school math teacher silently paces his classroom in a pin-striped stockbroker shirt, his mouth full of braces. Continue reading
Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary, Arunachal Pradesh
Because, why not?
Baja California Sur, Mexico
It started with “a meteorological phenomenon that is caused by reflection, refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a spectrum of light appearing in the sky. It takes the form of a multicoloured circular arc.” Amie sent this image of the view outside one of our shops, and I suddenly realized I had no idea what a rainbow is. Reading that definition got me wondering where superstitions come from, like the one that makes you think of good fortune when you see a rainbow. Certain that there is a well-documented answer to that, a random turn led to the last photo of that location that we posted on this platform. Which led me here:
Minutes after that rainbow snapshot I was in the kitchen with a few hundred recently picked fruits from the first trees planted when we decided to rehabilitate this long-ago coffee farm. The antique green glass juicer in the photo above was my companion for the next couple days.
The fruit on the counter is about half the original wheel barrow full, what I now have left to complete after making a few gallons of juice and freezing it. Making lemonade out of life’s lemons is easier said than done, and using a hand-powered tool rather than a modern electricity-powered one is an exercise in curiosity.
After the lemonade what about the remaining organic material? Of course it will be composted, but what else? My sister had one answer. Make art.
And while you are at it, make more art.
Curiosity and diligent work can be excellent companions.
Costa Rica
Researchers said that the blue whale song that crackled through the team’s underwater recordings was unlike any they had heard. Robert Baldwin/Environment Society of Oman
Thanks to Katherine J. Wu for this, especially for sharing the recordings of the whale song, and the musical reference for how to think about the difference between this whale population’s song and the that of other whale populations:
A New Population of Blue Whales Was Discovered Hiding in the Indian Ocean
The whales in the group seem to sing a unique song.
Weighing up to 380,000 pounds and stretching some 100 feet long, the blue whale — the largest creature to have ever lived on Earth — might at first seem difficult for human eyes and ears to miss.
But a previously unknown population of the leviathans has long been lurking in the Indian Ocean, leaving scientists none the wiser, new research suggests. Continue reading
Ooty, Tamil Nadu
Whether you ride a bicycle or not, the story below is a perfect discovery in the final days of 2020. It was published in March and presumably Kim Cross wrote most of it prior to the pandemic becoming a focal point of life for most people in the world. It is a reminder of the randomness that comes with nomadic life, in my case best exemplified by a chance encounter at an airport in 1983. It is also a reminder of a bicycle journey Amie and I took in 1988, prior to my starting graduate school, which is a welcome reminder considering the stationary nature of our lives since March.
We were completely inexperienced at distance riding, but going from Missoula, Montana to Jasper, Alberta still seemed like a good idea at the time. And it was. The first couple hundred miles, until we got to Going-To-The-Sun Road, were strenuous but not beyond our capacity. Then, that road made us wonder if we had made a huge mistake. Somehow we made it to the top, with the cheering support of the group we were riding with, all experienced distance riders.
The next 500 miles included plenty of other challenges, including headwinds so strong at the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park that we pedaled harder downhill than we had going uphill at Going-To-The-Sun. The support we got from, and brief friendships we made with total strangers on the journey is the reason why Kim Cross’s article resonates. Whether you have lived a nomadic life, or wish you had or could, this story is full of reasons to read. Or just look at the pictures and let your imagination ride:
What Happens When Two Strangers Trust the Rides of Their Lives to the Magic of the Universe
LEON HAD BEEN RIDING WEST FOR 309 DAYS. NOEL HAD HEADED EAST FOR 176. THEIR MEETING IN THE DESERT WAS A SMALL MIRACLE.
Once upon a road in Kazakhstan, two men converge in the desert. Strangers born an ocean apart, riding bicycles burdened like camels, they emerge from either horizon, slowly approaching a common point. Day by day, hour after hour, they make their way through a land as flat and featureless as a page without words. Thousands of miles spool out behind them. Thousands more lie ahead.
One rides east. The other, west. Continue reading
Lake Georgetown Russell Park, TX
Organikos 