"A mile below the village, and 153 miles from its beginning at Provincetown on Cape Cod, U.S. 6, the longest highway under one designation in America, passes on its way to Long Beach on the coast of California." [I see a comment on the Wikipedia entry that "Route 6 runs uncertainly from nowhere to nowhere, scarcely to be followed from one end to the other, except by some devoted eccentric."] (16)"By the time a calf is an hour old it can often outrun a man." (41)"The life span of a gray tree frog may extend for as much as seven years; that of a bullfrog for as much as sixteen." (111)"More than once we have caught a faint low "Gur, Gur" coming from the water. It has been the voice of the pickerel frog. This grating sound is often produced when the frog is submerged and resting on the bottom of the pond. In the midst of this spring chorus of the frogs there rises the most beautiful of all our batrachian sounds, a pure sustained trill that goes on and on. It is the mating-time music of the American toad." (112)"On our 130 acres, I found, the combined length of these massive stone fences totals almost five miles. Each begins about two feet below the surface to provide a solid foundation below the frost line." [I was surprised to learn that these walls were countersunk. It would make sense, but I wonder how much of the depth is secondary to the formation of new soil from leaf litter since the walls were set up?] (144)[Re the elderly naturalist stocking her mind with pleasant things to remember before going blind, see my post "What a wonderful attitude".]"When he was nearing seventy, this mild-mannered collector of insects was following a lonely road on Staten Island with his net in his hand when he encountered three young thugs who blocked his way. One pulled out a gun and demanded his money. This so infuriated the naturalist... that he swung his net, whacked the thug over the head with the brass ferrule, then pursued the three down the road flailing them with his butterfly net. Later a friend asked him: "But weren't you taking an awful chance?" "I suppose I was," he replied. "I didn't think of it at the time. But I might have injured them severely." (221)"I dug down through the snow to the rosette of a mullein plant. I brought it home in a paper bag. Sitting that afternoon beside the fireplace, I made a census of the small creatures that were hibernating between the woolly leaves as though between thick soft blankets. My magnifying glass revealed a minute spider and a number of tiny brownish beetles. But the real population of the mullein plant consisted of springtails. I counted eighty-two snugly protected within the hibernaculum of this one rosette." (230) [English spelling of wooly]"... a young buck was observed feeding on pussywillow catkins. It would wrap its tongue around the base of a branch and then strip off all the aments at once with a sidewise sweep of its head." (251) [new word for me]"But of all the creatures that have been attracted to the ground-up corn, the most unexpected were the honeybees. Before the end of winter, in their earliest days abroad, when skunk cabbage flowers and pussywillow catkins were the main source of pollen, we found them crawling over our little piles of corn in search of a pollen substitute... On one small mound of grain, less than six inches in diameter, I counted thirty-five honeybees. Continually they moved back and forth, gathering corn dust, the pale-yellow vegetable powder which they packed into the pollen gaskets on their hind legs." (278)
"Among all those we have heard about and known, among all the past and present dwellers in the village I think the most remarkable was the blind naturalist, Annie Edmond. Even when she was past ninety, by feel and smell, she would identify wildflowers brought to her. By hearing she would identify birds. By feeling their bark and listening to the sound of the wind in their foliage, she would identify trees.....She was nine years old when the blizzard of 1888 stuck and she remembered vividly how great rollers, pulled by oxen, packed down the snow to open the roads for sleighs. Her memory for details of long-past events was particularly clear and accurate. This proved a great boon during the last twenty years of her life after unsuccessful eye operations had left her in darkness."In my life," she said, "I am so glad I stocked my mind with pleasant things to remember and think about."Many of those things concerned nature. From time to time Nellie and I used to take her "olfactory bouquets" made up of sweetfern, spicebush, yarrow, catnip, sassafras, bayberry, and other leaves and plants whose fragrance would bring back recollections of her earlier days in the out-of-doors...
A new version of the world’s first raspberry-picking robot, a four-armed machine powered by artificial intelligence and able to do the job at the speed and effectiveness of a human, is to be employed on farms in the UK, Australia and Portugal over the coming 12 months.The developers claim that Fieldworker 1, nicknamed Robocrop, can detect more accurately than previous models whether a berry is ripe, and can pick fruit faster because its grippers have greater reach and flexibility...“It has superhuman vision capabilities, and what we’re doing with that is detecting the spectral frequency of the state of berry ripeness,” said David Fulton, chief executive of Fieldwork Robotics. “Depending on the state of the berry ripeness, it emits a particular spectral range that allows us to get improved accuracy.”..Moving along rows of bushes, the wheeled machine’s four arms pick berries simultaneously and drop them into punnets, ready to be transported to supermarkets. The robot, close to 2m tall, can now harvest between 150 and 300 berries (more than 2kg) an hour – the same rate as a human picker – but can run day and night.
During the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian Serb fighters took roughly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys to predetermined sites before killing them and throwing their bodies into mass graves. In a vast landscape of murder that, as the judges acknowledged, included horrors like the systematic torture, rape and beatings of Bosnians in detention camps and the expulsion of thousands of non-Serbs, this episode alone appeared sufficiently genocidal to the judges. Only there did the perpetrators explicitly display the dolus specialis, or specific intent, “to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such” required for a killing to be considered an instance of genocide. Killings elsewhere in Bosnia may have been war crimes or crimes against humanity — acts that were equally grave — but the decision argued that wherever there were any other plausible reasons for why the killings took place, the court could not rule that genocide definitively occurred. In a dissenting opinion, Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh of Jordan chastised his colleagues for failing to appreciate the “definitional complexity” of genocide by interpreting the intent requirement so narrowly...Ever since the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the word in 1944, by combining the Greek word genos, meaning “race or tribe,” with the Latin cide, or “killing,” it has been pulled taut between languages — Greek and Latin, legal and moral...After years of contentious deliberation and diplomatic negotiation, the [United Nations] convention limited genocide to five categories of acts: killing members of a group; causing group members serious bodily or mental harm; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children from one group to another; and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Each one of these acts could constitute genocide only if and when committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group...To invoke “genocide” is to immediately conjure up the memory of the destruction of the Jewish people and its associated architecture of murder: concentration camps and deportation trains, ghettos and gas chambers. This relation has at once augmented genocide’s moral force and undermined its legal uses. The Holocaust is viewed both as the awful standard against which all modern atrocities must be measured and as a supposedly unrepeatable catastrophe to which they must never be compared. The Genocide Convention effectively enshrined this paradoxical understanding of the Shoah and established a nearly impossible bar for genocidal intent based on its example. As a result, international courts have rarely recognized more recent mass killings as instances of the crime, and peoples seeking to have their suffering recognized as such have been bitterly disappointed...Not long after it was adopted, genocide allegations began to flood diplomatic channels. In 1951, the American Civil Rights Congress presented a paper titled “We Charge Genocide” to the United Nations, arguing that the United States was indeed guilty of genocidal actions against African Americans...The strict legal interpretation of genocide has meant that courts might never recognize many of the worst atrocities of the past several decades as genocide. These include but are not limited to the killing of some 300,000 people in the Darfur region of Sudan, the murder of more than a million during the Nigeria-Biafra war, the Iraqi government’s mass deportation and killing of an estimated 100,000 Kurds in the late 1980s and the Yazidi massacres by ISIS in 2014. If Lemkin were alive today, he would most likely recognize the Chinese effort to indefinitely detain, re-educate, imprison and torture Uyghurs, and to destroy their mosques, confiscate their literature and ban their language in schools, as precisely the kind of cultural and physical genocide that he hoped his convention would eliminate. While China is a party to the Genocide Convention, it has refused — like the United States, France and Russia — to recognize the jurisdiction of the I.C.J., shielding itself from the court’s authority...Yet in its remarkable parsimony, the 2007 ruling also reinforced the status of “genocide” as a somewhat inscrutable and unimaginable crime, underscoring the gravity of the offense while establishing such a high bar for genocidal intent that it would become virtually impossible to hold states responsible. It effectively meant that unthinkable atrocities could fail to satisfy the convention’s requirements if they were not accompanied by an overt statement of intent to wipe out an entire people, such as the written plan for a “final solution” that the Nazis adopted at the 1942 Wannsee Conference...
"Wildlife officials in Missouri rescued what they thought was an injured and flightless bald eagle... Rangers from the Missouri department of conservation, working with National Park Service staff, captured and transported it to Dickerson Park Zoo for examination and X-rays.Veterinarians expecting images of broken wings or other trauma instead found themselves looking at a succession of photographs of the remains of the eagle’s most recent meal, namely a raccoon’s leg and paw in its distended stomach."
"JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate and US senator from Ohio, attacked teachers who do not have children in newly resurfaced remarks from 2021.In the resurfaced clip, Vance, who was speaking at a forum held by the Center for Christian Virtue, attacks “leaders on the left” and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, for not having children.“So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me,” Vance can be heard saying in the clip.“Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”"
"More than 260 footprints were discovered in Brazil and in Cameroon, showing where land-dwelling dinosaurs were last able to freely cross between South America and Africa millions of years ago before the two continents split apart.“We determined that in terms of age, these footprints were similar,” Jacobs said. “In their geological and plate tectonic contexts, they were also similar. In terms of their shapes, they are almost identical.”"
Hirayama is content with his simple life cleaning toilets in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Unexpected encounters reveal more of his story in a deeply moving and poetic reflection on finding beauty in the world around us.
Hirayama’s ascetic existence is stripped back to basics: music, played on cassette tapes collected, we assume, in his long-ago youth; secondhand books bought from the budget section of the local bookstore; a point-and-shoot film camera with which he captures the things that please him; the interplay between the sky and the trees...He listens to 60s and 70s American and British rock – the Velvet Underground, the Kinks, Otis Redding, Patti Smith – and Japanese folk from the same period. The song choices – in particular the Lou Reed track that gives the film its title and Nina Simone’s Feeling Good – are windows into his soul at any given moment. Hirayama has found harmony...
