Tag Archives: new york times

Japan

I have nothing helpful to add to the Japan story, although I’ve been heartened to see that pretty good articles giving context for what’s going on have been going up around the net. New York Times on building codes, for example, and Boing Boing on how reactors work – and fail. (Bonus: The Atlantic on how this contrasts with Three Mile Island and a NYT visualization of the buildings at Fukushima.)

And then there’s this:

ABC in Australia took aerial photos from before and after the tsunami, and arranged them so you can move your mouse across the before image to reveal the damage—and, heartbreakingly, move it back again, an option available only online.

Squirrels Lie Like Us

Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, the Steele team showed that when squirrels are certain that they are being watched, they will actively seek to deceive the would-be thieves. They’ll dig a hole, pretend to push an acorn in, and then cover it over, all the while keeping the prized seed hidden in their mouth. “Deceptive caching involves some pretty serious decision making,” Dr. Steele said. “It meets the criteria of tactical deception, which previously was thought to only occur in primates.”

And many other squirrel facts of interest in Nut? What Nut? The Squirrel Outwits to Survive.

PEACHES!

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The other day I overheard someone quoting “really like your peaches, wanna shake your tree,” and it’s been going through my head ever since. Really just because it’s funny. Then I saw this article in the New York Times about William Eggleston’s work, illustrated with the photo above, which now looks even more wonderful to me than usual.

Eggleston took pictures of “nothing” and “nobodies” in color when art photography was very serious and very monochrome. He also did this in the Mississippi delta. Now that the country is engaging in an extra helping of hand-wringing over regional divisions and, here in California, a new crisis of civil-rights, his intimate, loving photography of a deep South in transition is helpful and humanizing.

More about Eggleston at the Eggleston Trust site.