The Firefly
Files don't quite contain everything you wanted to know about
fireflies,
but they make a good start. In addition to a gorgeous picture of
mating fireflies, this site includes material on the taxonomy of
butterflies, where they live, how they live, and how they glow.
If that's not enough, there are notes on attracting fireflies.
The US Postal
Service Web site includes instructions on
packing large objects before you move:
from washing machines to hippos to flammable objects. Their advice
about flammables is simple and sound--don't--but I'd consult a
veterinarian before moving a hippo.
Superfluous
technology in action, for our friends at
Plokta: a real-time
Web-based magic 8 ball,
an actual toy shaken by a Lego robot to answer your questions.
Oceans of
Kansas emphasizes the marine paleontology of Kansas, meaning
mostly Cretaceous fossils, deposited when Kansas was covered by
a shallow inland sea. The focus is on mosasaurs. The text is
good, and the drawings are excellent.
Phaedra Hise
has looked at the numbers, and
staying at home
with children is not cheaper than working, not if you want
your sanity, not when you factor in everything from the price of
your own health insurance to the earning potential you'll lose in
those years at home to the cost of swimming lessons and other
activities for the children.
Kevin Kelm
has produced an annotated photo tour of an
abandoned missile
base. It doesn't live up to its claim of being "virtual
reality," but removing the hype produces a very nice set of
quasi-historical photography, a tour of a place that you probably
don't want to visit yourself.
Starting with
the proposal to assume that dead people consented to have their
organs used for transplant unless they say otherwise ahead of time,
Polly
Toynbee asks some hard questions: if we object to buying kidneys
from the poor, why is it morally acceptable to let them starve to
death instead?
You can't
win for losing:
reducing acid rain may increase global warming.
The problem is that the sulfur dioxide that causes acid rain also
forms an aerosol that reflects sunlight and
cools the planet, so removing it could heat things up further.
In response
to the move by George W. "Shrub" Bush, governor of Texas, to grab
all possible Web domain names related to his presidential campaign,
Felix Culpa Associates has registered
littlegeorgebush.com
and put up a parody campaign site, complete with
actual, embarrassing quotes from both Bushes.
I have no
idea who Saint Tecla is, or even if that's her English name,
but a rather nice
virtual chapel
proclaims her as "Patrona dels Internautes Catalans." Here's
a place to confess if you've been visiting warez sites or
not answering email from your friends, or ask for help if your
system is dropping bits or you're having problems with SCSI.
This site is in Catalan, more or less--apparently the Catalan
for "I have mail bombed someone" is "He fet mail bombings."
(Your humble reporter does not speak Catalan, and is interpolating
wildly from her high school Spanish.)
If you've
noticed that we hear more about new drugs for baldness and
sexual dysfunction than about drugs for malaria and
tuberculosis, it's not the media--it's that the drug companies
have concluded that there's
more
money in making the rich comfortable than in keeping the poor
alive.
Today's
Astronomy
Picture of the Day is a nice image of a phenomenon I've been
wondering about for a while, a
sun pillar,
with a good explanation of what causes this visual effect.
In her
annual Fourth of July column, Molly Ivins once again gives
an optimistic appraisal
of the United States today, starting with the simple fact that
"we made it through all of last year, and we're still here" and
then mentioning some other things worth celebrating--and
one or two to regret.
To draw
attention to foot travel, or something, the White House has
issued a list of sixteen
National
Millennium Trails, including Lewis and Clark's route, the
Underground Railroad, the Appalachian trail--and the "International
Express," better known to 8 million New Yorkers as the #7
Flushing train.
Copyright 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.