Interesting things I now know

Living in rural Alaska affords me quite a bit of time to do, well, I guess I would call it nothing if I were living somewhere else. But of course I spend very little time doing nothing. So what am I doing? The simple answer is learning even more random knowledge from a variety of awesome sources.

The first is National Geographic. In my opinion, this magazine should be read by every single person on the planet. Or at least paged through by every single person. Where else can you learn about prehistoric crocodiles, the civil war in Somalia, and see a picture of grieving primates watching the burial of a beloved elder? And did you know that at the turn of the twentieth century 180,000 mummified cats were shipped from Egypt to Liverpool to be used as fertilizer for English fields?

I also spend a lot of time listening to podcasts. These internet packets of audio information have become my TV. To add to my list of things every person should do is to listen to the following programs. Both from the amazing world of public radio. Radio Lab is a bi-weekly broadcast that is amazing and covers many areas of science (parasites, randomness, birth and death), and This American Life is broadcast weekly and features about four stories on a common theme (price fixing, the Devil, the health care, children being cruel). The glory of these programs is their diversity of topics and they means of weaving them into the awesomeness of humanity. I highly recommend both. Here is a nice little video from a recent Radio Lab episode.


The last thing I will mention at the moment is a magazine called Good. The thing is, the magazine is just okay. It's aimed at the neo-greenies in America that frequent Starbucks to get their organic fair trade soy lattes in double walled carboard cups with plastic tops, but each issue has a series of graphics they call Transparencies . This little set has some of the more interesting manipulations of data into graphics I have seen. Here are two examples both on the topic of fuel efficiency. Another point for the efficiency of humans.







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And add a point to biking - the most efficient form of transportation invented. By the way, they have a transparency up stating that Minneapolis is currently one tenth of a percent behind Portland at 3.8 percent for bike commuters. Booyeah.