Nate Barksdale

Bad news for wood boats

ScienceDaily:

The dreaded shipworm is moving into the Baltic Sea, threatening artifacts of the area's cultural heritage.

Apparently the shipworm is no worm at all, but rather a very elongated clam—and one whose anatomy inspired the first men to tunnel successfully under the Thames.

The culture-bound concept of culture-bound syndromes; Dorothy Day on how her childhood experiences of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake inspired her later life of service; considering earthquakes as cultural artifacts; Rebecca Solnit on the gift of giving; and a 20th-anniversary nod to those great contemporary culture-makers, the Simpsons.

Culture-making.com is a blog founded by Andy Crouch and co-designed/curated by me. I post there most weekdays, joined by Andy, Christy Tennant, et al.

Behold, the planimal!

Wired Science:

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body...

I'm not sure why, but this news has been the source of untold instant-messaging-expressed joy among certain of my friends this week.

A religio-nationalistic-historical theory as to why carrots are orange; some thoughts on eating dirt; the first of likely several excerpts from Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell; a look at the premodern skyscrapers of Yemen's capital city; and some studies about the importance of grit, sticktoitiveness, and such.

Culture-making.com is a blog founded by Andy Crouch and co-designed/curated by me. I post there most weekdays, joined by Andy, Christy Tennant, et al.

I marveled at an 800-year-old Anasazi storage jar, quoted Martin Luther King on power and love, David Foster Wallace on the faith of a child, got lost in the wonders of Google Patents, pondered the soul-piercing implications of name-"whitening" for African Americans, posted William Blake's poem "To Winter," iron car and all, and joined the Pomplamoose-adoring throngs.

Counter-terrorism ... for kids!

Finally, a use of comic sans that I can get wholeheartedly behind.

Know thyself

Graham Greene once entered a Graham Greene parody contest. He won second prize. I'm not sure to chalk that up to his greatness or to his limitations as a writer.

 

I excerpted a pro and con on Christmas consumerism (though by the end the two positions are getting together for eggnog, how nice); found a sublime image of winter winds, Southern California style; got rained on indoors with The Swell Season; offered fodder for the "Good design will save us all" crowd; and opened the door on a new fivequestions topic: What do Advent Calendars make of the world?

Culture-making.com is a blog founded by Andy Crouch and co-designed/curated by me. I post there most weekdays, joined by Andy, Christy Tennant, et al.

Fall in the 'hood

This fall I've been out and about with the phone camera, taking pictures of all the colors—some on the leaves, some on the pavement utility markers.

This is why I subscribe to the invasive species twitter feed

Dog flies into action against ants

The Cairns Post, Monday, November 30, 2009

OFIRA the labrador's keen sense of smell may help Far North Queensland win the war against electric ants. For eight months, the playful dog from Brisbane has been trained in the fine art of detecting the invasive ant species, and has so far been able to find as few as 10 ants in a vial hidden several metres away.

I emailed a friend about this, and she replied: "I know I'm not the first person to have thought about it, but imagine what it must be like for a lab to live in our world - it is terrifying for them to be assaulted by our overwrought smells all the time? On second thought, the labs I've know haven't seem very terrified - maybe they just breathe through their mouths or something."

You can tap in to all this wonder too: @invasivespecies.