What is going on with the oceans? Warming trends are bringing sea creatures further north and for longer periods.
In January, Oliver Milman reported at the Guardian about a sea snake with a suggestive name (“Why you yellow-bellied sea snake, you …!”) that has suddenly shown up in California.
“California beachgoers have been urged to steer clear of a species of highly venomous sea snake following a third, and unprecedented, instance of an aquatic serpent washing up on to the state’s beaches.
“A 20-inch yellow-bellied sea snake was discovered on a beach near San Diego … The sighting was the third reported instance since October of the species, which prefers the tropical waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans, washing up on California’s beaches.
“The only previous verified sighting of a washed-up yellow-bellied sea snake was in 1972. Experts believe the snakes have ridden a warm current of water, fueled by the exceptionally strong El Niño climatic event, farther north than they have ever previously ventured. …
“ ‘It’s been an incredibly interesting year for southern California. We’ve seen tuna and marlin and tropical bird species such as red-footed boobies,’ said Greg Pauly, curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. …
“Yellow-bellied sea snakes are fully aquatic snakes capable of swimming vast distances. Although they are highly venomous, their targets are small fish and it’s thought they have yet to cause a recorded human death. However, Pauly said people should keep their distance if they encounter another washed-up snake.
“ ‘They are fairly docile and it’s unlikely for someone to be envenomated,’ he said. ‘It’s rare for them to bite people, it’s usually fishermen who are carelessly pulling up fishing nets.’ ”
Photo: Carolyn Larcombe/Wandiyali Images Seen in California after el Niño, yellow-bellied sea snakes usually live in the deep waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans.
In a Washington Post story last month, Abby Ohlheiser described how Reddit helped in the identification of a very rare atlas.
“A reference librarian at the National Library of Norway came across an old Ottoman atlas in the collections there that seemed perfect for a Reddit board devoted to the appreciation of maps. Weeks later, he figured out that the map in question was a previously-unknown copy of one of the rarest atlases in the world: the Cedid Atlas.
“The librarian, Anders Kvernberg, otherwise known as Reddit user PisseGuri82, posted an image from the atlas to r/mapporn … He simply identified the map — which he pieced together from scans of different pages from the atlas — as an Ottoman world map from 1803. …
“The atlas went back into the library’s collections, where it would have stayed, ignored, had Kvernberg not seen a post two weeks later from another r/mapporn user who posted an Ottoman map of Africa from the same year. …
“As Kvernberg learned more about the rare book, the Library of Congress’s page scans started to look very familiar. ‘Then I realized this was the very same atlas I had held in my hands a few weeks earlier,’ Kvernberg wrote on Reddit.
“ ‘I ran off to tell our expert on maps, Benedicte Gamborg Briså, that I had something I thought she should take a look at,’ Kvernberg told The Post. …
“Briså told The Post that the National Library of Norway’s copy of the Cedid Atlas is the 15th known surviving copy — 14 others are held by various libraries around the world.”
Read the whole saga here. Three cheers for highbrow Redditors!
Photo: Nikolaj Blegvad, The National Library of Norway
If you walk frequently in the same area, you notice more things.
The other day it occurred to me that Providence has an unusual number of public clocks — and they all have the right time.
The clocks below are in a block or two of one another.
I wondered about the green freestanding clock with curlicue writing spelling out “Shepard.” An Internet search brought up the Providence Architecture website at Brown University.
“A historic, notable element of the Shepard Building is the late 19th century cast-iron clock, which still stands in front of the building on Westminster Street.”
And the Shepard Building? Turns out it’s a former department store that once covered a whole block and now houses the downcity campus of the University of Rhode Island.
The very tall clock is at Johnson & Wales University. My favorite clock is the one that looks like something from Alice in Wonderland. It suggests to me that although “the time is out of joint,” it will all be OK in the end.
The view from my former office included a spectacular sunrise over Boston Harbor, but I also like the more human scale of my current view.
The new office is up two stories. Birds congregate in the tree outside the window. I will be watching as the buds start to open in a few weeks.
I check out the people on the street while I eat my lunch — what they are carrying, what they are doing.
Here is a woman standing in a doorway, having a lengthy conversation on her mobile phone. She has long blond hair and a camel coat. Here is a man clambering from the backseat of a car (an Uber ride?) lugging two grocery bags and several large buckets of what looks like salsa. Here is another man wearing no coat despite the cold weather, remonstrating with someone just ahead of him on the crosswalk.
A woman and man are walking down the side street. They pause. I think they know each other. She seems to be writing something on a piece of paper. She gives it to him.
She touches his arm in a kind way. They separate. Oh. Maybe it wasn’t a note. Maybe it was money. I’m deciding they didn’t know each other. He is looking in the window at Dunkin Donuts, swinging some keys. Will he go in and buy something with the money? No. He crosses the street in a desultory way, addresses a young woman who rushes by, looking back once. He ambles out of my view, swinging the keys.
A man with a yellow puffy jacket and a black cap is sweeping debris into a dustpan near the Dunkin Donuts. I recently saw someone else dressed like him in the neighborhood. I conclude they are part of a city cleanup crew.
I didn’t get a photo of the Providence police car outside the Dunkin Donuts. Perhaps another day.
I really like the architecture in downtown Providence, otherwise known as “downcity.” I like that the façades of old buildings are often preserved to enhance next-generation buildings and that some old buildings are adapted in their entirety for new purposes. Even if a building is rather pedestrian, some artist will add a flourish.
And isn’t it great to live in the time of the Internet and be able to find answers to almost anything that’s puzzling? For example, what’s with the guy wearing a turban on one downcity building?
Well, Wikipedia says that in the early nineteenth century, a shopkeeper called “Jacob Whitman mounted a ship’s figurehead above his store. The figurehead, which came from the ship Sultan, depicted the head of an Ottoman warrior. Whitman’s store was called ‘At the sign of the Turk’s Head.’ The figurehead was lost in a storm, and today a stone replica” is found on Turk’s Head Building’s building’s 3rd floor façade.
Wikipedia also notes that when the 16-story building was completed in 1913, it was the tallest in the area and considered a “skyscraper.”
I often think that malls today are wasted space. Public places sheltered from the elements, they could be used so much better than they are. When Suzanne was 18 months or so, East View Mall was my favorite place for having her work off steam. She loved toddling up and down the aisles and looking at all the sights. Everyone fussed over her, which meant her sometimes wall-climbing stay-at-home mom enjoyed much-needed adult conversation.
Lately, if outdoor walking is too wet or icy, I may choose to take my morning walk in Providence Place. I think other people could consider the mall for walking and toddler entertainment. And malls themselves could promote more uses since they must now compete with online shopping and a renewed preference for small boutiques. Cities could help malls fund certain public activities.
I was quite surprised on my Friday walk to find a traveling exhibition of elaborate Lego creations in Providence Place. Lego is advertising itself while also sharing a little history of government in the United States.
So as unnerving as it was to see our beloved Independence Hall surrounded by flashy clothing stores and run-amok consumerism, I’d rather feel the inspirational vibes from Independence Hall there than not.
In addition to Philadelphia’s most beloved landmark, note the Supreme Court, the Statue of Liberty, and a gigantic recreation of the Rhode Island statehouse. These photos represent only a sample of what is there until the show moves on to another state capital. Meanwhile, there is also a nice Lego play area for kids to make their own constructions.
(Isn’t it funny how a Lady Liberty made of Legos makes my fuzzy photography doubly pixilated?)
I love stories about young people who have an impulse to help people in need. And I like that they often have creative ideas about how to do so that an older person might never have considered.
At the Boston Globe, Astead W. Herndon recently covered a high school student, now at Tufts University, who got her creative idea in a rather unusual way — while watching reality television.
Herndon reports, “Before Hannah Steinberg had a day named in her honor and was recognized by a US senator, the Tufts junior was just another high school student watching reality television.
“On that day about four years ago, Steinberg’s show of choice was ‘Extreme Couponing,’ the cable program that follows discount-obsessed shopaholics who go to supreme lengths to buy ultra-cheap items regardless of whether they need them.
“But as she watched the show’s stars proudly hoard their deeply discounted prizes, Steinberg said she had a thought: What if she could coupon with a conscience?
“These days, the 20-year-old Steinberg has a registered charity that has donated more than $100,000 worth of household items, canned goods, and electronics to homeless shelters and hospitals by using the couponing tricks she observed on the show. …
“Steinberg uses the example of a chocolate bar priced at $1.19. If she finds a buy one, get one free coupon, and pairs it with a buy two, get one free coupon and a $4 off any $10 purchase discount, Steinberg said she can purchase 30 chocolate bars for only $6.
“To fund her purchases, Steinberg solicits donations to Our Coupons Care, her federally recognized nonprofit charity. By mixing that money with her coupon magic, Steinberg said she can make “every dollar count for four to five dollars.” More here.
Although this seems like a lot of work, to me that’s not the point. Here’s a young woman who is transforming a consumerism that has run amok — until it is almost an illness — into something positive. And she is demonstrating that people with kind hearts and compassion continue to be born.
Photo: John Tlumacki/Globe
Tufts student Hannah Steinberg surrounded by the coupons she collects to buy goods to donate to charity.
The semicolons’ mournful racket
is drowned out by surrounding brackets
Maria Popova recently wrote at Brain Pickings about a 1905 poem that playfully imagines warfare among various kinds of punctuation.
She reports that a new edition, In the Land of Punctuation, is “a beautiful and clever type-art adaptation of German poet Christian Morgenstern’s darkly delightful 1905 poem ‘Im Reich der Interpunktionen,’ illustrated by Indian graphic artist Rathna Ramanathan and translated into English by Sirish Rao. …
“Silkscreened on handmade paper with traditional Indian dyes and hand-bound in a limited edition of 3,000 numbered copies, this gorgeous large-format book comes from South Indian independent publisher Tara Books — a small team of passionate book- and art-lovers who have spent two decades giving voice to marginalized art and literature through a commune of artists, writers, and designers collaborating on books handcrafted by local artisans in a fair-trade workshop in Chennai.”
The peaceful land of Punctuation
is filled with tension overnight
When the stops and commas of the nation
call the semicolons “parasites”
I do love the inventiveness of entrepreneurs. A friend of Suzanne and Erik’s is an inventive entrepreneur — an oyster entrepreneur, to be specific. Since oysters are a seasonal crop, he looked for something that might become his winter crop.
“Kelp, you may or may not have heard, is the next super food. It’s nutritious, sustainable and ecologically beneficial,” writes Plain.
He continues with a quote from a recent New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear: ” ‘Seaweed, which requires neither fresh water nor fertilizer, is one of the world’s most sustainable and nutritious crops. It absorbs dissolved nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon dioxide directly from the sea — its footprint is negative — and proliferates at a terrific rate.’ …
“Coincidentally – and quite auspiciously – just as the blockbuster New Yorker article hit the newsstands, Opton-Himmel was gearing up to introduce kelp farming to Rhode Island. …
“Farm-raised kelp is grown on a longline – a submersible thick rope, held in place by anchors and buoys, that is used to hold in place seafood harvesting equipment. A thin string of kelp spores is wrapped around the longline, and the kelp grows toward the bottom. Opton-Himmel, with the help of Scott Lindell and David Bailey from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass, planted 1,000 feet. …
“Unlike oysters, which grow in the warmer months, kelp only grows when it’s cold. That means it could prove an off-season bumper crop for otherwise summertime-only seafood harvesters. Walrus and Carpenter downsizes from 7 to 3 employees in the winter, Opton-Himmel said, and kelp could help him keep the other four on the payroll all year long.
“ ‘I’d love to keep all 6 on year-round,’ Opton-Himmel said.”
Trade shows have been helpful to Suzanne’s birthstone-jewelry company, Luna & Stella, as it branches out from being strictly online to selling to retail outlets like Talulah Cooper Boutique in Providence.
A couple weeks ago, Suzanne took Luna & Stella to the trade show NewYorkNow (“the market for home, lifestyle + gift”). Today, she is making an impression at PlaytimeNewYork — while making friends with other relationship-oriented businesses, like Little Paisley People.
I love how the founder of Little Paisley People describes the origins of her business: “I spent the most memorable summers of my childhood in Amalsaad, a quaint village, in Gujarat, India. … I grew up watching my mom work with the local artisans to hand-make toys that would support the local community. Those are the toys you also see in the Little Paisley People line. And that’s the logo you see – the passing on of the thread over the generations. …
“We create handcrafted lifestyle products for children, never forgetting that kids need to be kids. The handmade nature of these products evoke an understated elegance but are always playful. Social responsibility, the people who make these products, and how they make them are very important to us.”
Here, she and her daughter model Luna & Stella’s mother-daughter heart rings. How nice that new businesses are emphasizing the importance of family and friend relationships!
Suzanne, her son, and I made 50 valentines, and I trotted along Thursday when he carried them in a little striped bag to nursery school. The school had told parents that it was fine if kids didn’t do valentines, but if they wanted to bring any, then they needed to bring them for everyone.
Suzanne reports the cards were a great success: “They decorated bags and then went around putting valentines in each others’ bags. G really liked opening the valentines at home and reading the kids’ names. He particularly liked the one from a boy whose parents didn’t follow the rules and included a lollipop. 🙂 ”
My Valentine is in New York to help Erik with the kids while Suzanne attends the Playtime trade show. The cookies I made are for him when he gets home.
By the way, if you want to see some funny valentine gifs that listeners made at the behest of the radio show Studio 360, click here.
It’s back to the Book of Holidays Around the World to see what Alice van Straalen has to say about Lunar New Year (also called Spring Festival or Chinese New Year).
“A huge dragon — a symbol of good luck — leads the Chinese New Year processions. It’s made of bamboo covered in paper or silk, and more than 50 people may support it underneath, making it weave and wind though the streets. Dancers, acrobats, clowns, and stilt walkers accompany the dragon, and firecrackers go off to scare away evil spirits. In Chinese homes families hang red scrolls printed with wishes for good luck and prosperity, and children receive coins inside little red packets.”
When my husband was working in Shanghai, I went to visit at Lunar New Year and have never seen — or heard — so many fireworks in my life. More recently, at Water Fire in Providence, a summer event, I got to see a fun dragon dance.
(Hmmm, just remembered I had a dragon rug I could use to illustrate this post. Happy Year of the Monkey!)
A couple years ago, I was taken with a newspaper photograph of pink and blue buildings in a lonely North Korean square. So foreign. So melancholy.
I tried to get in touch with the photographer, David Guttenfelder, to see if I could buy a print. That didn’t work out, but I learned quite a bit about him and his special status as an approved photographer for Western outlets in North Korea. I became a follower on twitter and instagram, where I discovered that his photos of everyday life in the isolated country had inspired other Westerners living there. Now I follow posts on instagram by a group of people calling themselves everydaydpk.
So I was intrigued when Studio 360 also took an interest in photographs from North Korea.
Khrista Rypl posts on the radio show’s website, “North Korea’s seclusion makes pictures from inside the country irresistible novelties. But while the country’s borders are tightly controlled, visiting isn’t as difficult as you might expect. Almost anyone with enough cash can book a tour (although the US State Department advises against it) and people even travel there to run in an annual marathon. Officially, North Korea says it hopes to attract two million visitors by 2020.
“One of the tours available is an architectural survey of the nation’s capital, Pyongyang. Oliver Wainwright, architecture and design critic for The Guardian, recently visited the country with that itinerary. He’s been posting photos of interiors of the city’s buildings, and wrote a nice piece about his visit. It’s a fascinating glimpse inside a closed society. The empty interiors look like they’re part of an abandoned theme park from the 1980s.
“Wainwright notes that pastel colors appear everywhere in the city and calls the aesthetic ‘kindergarten kitsch’ — ‘the logical next step for a regime intent on projecting an image of carefree prosperity.’ …
” ‘In every refurbished building we visit, there is a peculiarly consistent style of preschool colour schemes and shiny synthetic surfaces, the pastel palettes and axial symmetry giving an eerie feeling of walking into a Wes Anderson film set, or a life-size Polly Pocket toy,’ [he adds].
“The decor certainly has a child-like quality, both in the color palate as well as in how each room has been pared down to a few essential elements, like a dollhouse.”
Here’s a recent story about how fungi, of all things, may be affecting global warming.
From ScienceDaily: “Microscopic fungi that live in plants’ roots play a major role in the storage and release of carbon from the soil into the atmosphere, according to a University of Texas at Austin researcher and his colleagues at Boston University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The role of these fungi is currently unaccounted for in global climate models. Some types of symbiotic fungi can lead to 70 percent more carbon stored in the soil.
” ‘Natural fluxes of carbon between the land and atmosphere are enormous and play a crucial role in regulating the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, in turn, Earth’s climate,’ said Colin Averill, lead author on the study and graduate student in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. …
“Soil contains more carbon than both the atmosphere and vegetation combined, so predictions about future climate depend on a solid understanding of how carbon cycles between the land and air.
“Plants remove carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis in the form of carbon dioxide. Eventually the plant dies, sheds leaves, or loses a branch or two, and that carbon is added to the soil. The carbon remains locked away in the soil until the remains of the plant decompose, when soil-dwelling microbes feast on the dead plant matter and other organic detritus. That releases carbon back into the air. …
“Where plants partner with [ecto- and ericoid mycorrhizal] (EEM) fungi, the soil contains 70 percent more carbon per unit of nitrogen than in locales where [other] fungi are the norm. The EEM fungi allow the plants to compete with the microbes for available nitrogen, thus
reducing the amount of decomposition and lowering the amount of carbon released back into the atmosphere.
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