via Logan
July 2012
“Cheatgrass is a very insidious kind of biotic virus,” said Stephen Pyne, a Western fire historian at Arizona State University. “It takes over and rewrites the operating system. Because it grows earlier, it can burn earlier,” then in its regrowth “drive off all the other competitors. That makes for a complete overthrow of the system.”
Mike Styler, head of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, said simply: “It’s changed the entire ecology of the West.”
But the black fingers of death — Pyrenophora semeniperda — may help restoration ecologists like Dr. Meyer reclaim some beachheads in the vast swath of land already conquered by cheatgrass.
As best as I can tell, handball is like lacrosse without the sticks, helmets, or Native American origins. The goal is to throw a ball past a goalkeeper and into a net, but shots have to be taken behind a line that sits about 20 feet from the goal. However, offensive players can throw at the goal from inside this line, so long as their feet are behind the line when they jump to throw the ball. This means that most goals which are plentiful, by the way — there are about 50 per game are a result of guys taking off from behind the line and firing the ball towards the goal right before they land. Which kinda makes them look like that dude from 300 who jumped off Leonidas’s back prior to the entire Spartan army being massacred. If that doesn’t sound exciting to you, I weep for your existence. Being a fan of any of the five most popular sports in America but not a fan of handball is hypocritical because it’s basically a mixture of all five.
Yes. But that doesn’t mean it should be mandatory, says Andrew Hacker.
Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interest of maintaining rigor, we’re actually depleting our pool of brainpower. I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers. My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.
The toll mathematics takes begins early. To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.
“I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off.”
“To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.”
— “Game of Thrones” creator George R. R. Martin
via Boing Boing
Timothy Egan celebrates a rare bit of good news—the successful removal of the Elwha Dam:
It defies experience-hardened cynicism whenever any big public works project is under budget and ahead of schedule. But the Elwha has served up something even better: life itself, in the form of ocean-going fish answering to the imperatives of love and death.
Today’s feel-good bear-rescue story:
“When we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”
— Somehow this very innocuous comment from President Obama has become a source of controversy?
Related: “Watch those summates!”