Using a formula that relies mostly on the floor count of a cities skyscrapers, skycrapers.com (AKA Emporis) ranks the cities of the world by the impressiveness of their skylines. Fun, utterly useless and irrelevant (and also debatable) trivia.
(Pittsburgh weighs in at #60, Philly at #35, and Boston at #43 [nestled in between Montréal and Calgary].)
https://www.swordbilled.com/tallest-highest-best/
…is a new, open-access journal available online. Only online, in fact.
In its own words,
Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy is a new peer-reviewed, open access journal that provides a platform for the dissemination of new practices and for dialogue emerging out of the field of sustainability.
I hope to see some interesting—and, ideally, useful—things come out of this venture.
(via Waterboro Library Blog)
https://www.swordbilled.com/sustainability-science-practice-and-policy/
This is not new news, nor is it relevant in the sense of being anything anyone needs to worry about, but it certainly is curious:
Seattle police launched an investigation on Friday to determine how a patient undergoing emergency heart surgery caught on fire at a local hospital in 2003.
The male patient, who was not identified, went up in flames after alcohol poured on his skin was ignited by a surgical instrument.
(Reuters: “Man Catches Fire During Surgery.” [April 18, 2005]; the original Reuters link is no longer available, though you can find postings of the article by searching for it.)
https://www.swordbilled.com/fire-medicine/
Local Harvest lets you find organic food grown close to where you live. Browse/search for farmers’ markets, restaurants, farms, co-ops, and the like.
https://www.swordbilled.com/eco-tools-part-ii/
https://www.swordbilled.com/astounding-new-scientific-advantages/
Check the facts on power generation with EPA’s eGRID database. Get info on regions, states, individual power plants, etc. Find out the mix of power generation (i.e., wind power [ha!] vs. nuclear vs. coal, etc.). Find out how dirty the plants are. And all sorts of other useful info.
(via Gristmill)
https://www.swordbilled.com/eco-tools/
The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler
Kunstler is as proficient a thinker as he is a writer, so it comes as a surprise that his newest book doesn’t quite work. The topic—society’s reliance on oil, and the problem of what happens when it runs out—is certainly an important one. Part of the problem undoubtedly stems from the fact that the book covers massive grounds; from time to time, Kunstler steps out of his field of hsi realm of knowledge, sapping credibility from the entire book. Generally speaking, he does well when the issues are more down-to-earth and less speculative. Speculation needs to be done, but Kunstler somehow doesn’t manage to pull it off. Still, this is an important book, with important ideas worth discussing.
Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami
Murakami is excellent, as always. Dance Dance Dance is possibly a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, and one of the most entertaining aspects of it (though there are many) is how the main character offhandedly refers to all that happend in the previous book. There are about five or six consecutive paragraphs in the novel that disappoint, so on the whole you will not be disappointed. Murakami manages, yet again, to remain both morbid and optimistic. How, I don’t know.
https://www.swordbilled.com/now-reading/
The idea is that additional stops—for, say, coffee—tacked onto already painful commutes translate into even more gridlocked traffic and a powerfully negative ecological impact. The idea’s originator is one travel behavioral analyst by the name of Nancy McGuckin, who based her ideas on a survey of 70,000 households. It might not actually make that much of a difference—there’s possibly some debate—but, you know, it could.
(WaPo: “Pursuit of a Grande Latte May Be Stirring Up Gridlock,” by Katherine Shaver [April 18, 2005]; via PLANETizen)
https://www.swordbilled.com/the-starbucks-effect-gridlock/
Execution by lethal injection may not be the painless procedure most Americans assume, say researchers from Florida and Virginia.
They examined post-mortem blood levels of anaesthetic and believe that prisoners may have been capable of feeling pain in almost 90% of cases and may have actually been conscious when they were put to death in over 40% of cases.
My question is, do most Americans assume being put to death is a painless procedure? I honestly have no idea, and in a cursory search I was not able to find anything relating specifically to the pain aspect of the death penalty; it seems, however, that pain is probably not first and foremost on people’s minds. It’s probably something they simply do not think about. Is my guess. The death penalty involves killing, and in anything involving killing, we try not to think too hard (e.g., factory farming, wars abroad, genocide, etc.).
Will it make any difference if we have concrete knowledge of the pain caused by lethal injection?
(New Scientist: “Execution by injection far from painless,” by Alison Motluk [April 14, 2005])
https://www.swordbilled.com/the-point-of-death/
PostSecret collects people’s secrets. People with secrets, who seem to be curiously artistic. Have secrets? Mail in yours today!
https://www.swordbilled.com/shhh-tell/