jadero

When we moved from the city to the middle of nowhere, our commute went from 8 km to 22 km each way. It still took about 20 minutes. But "rush hour" was the occasional herd of deer or elk instead of a bunch of drivers who were either too aggressive or too passive. A "traffic jam" was one vehicle, ours, waiting for a piece of farm equipment to move out of the way a few times a year instead of the weekly transformation from roadway to parking lot.

Even when I switched over to driving school bus, I could count on one hand the number of other vehicles I interacted with each week.

It's impossible to express how much that improved our mental states.

Thanks. Sometimes overviews are the most important things to create. It's tough to know where to start without a map!

I read the introduction (linked page) in detail and skimmed the next two chapters. That's not enough to form a concrete opinion, but plenty to judge this worthy of my reading list.

Permafrost, yes, but I don't know if the land under glaciers had been included even though it might still be permafrost.

When I hear "permafrost", I think not of land under glaciers, but the underground layer of ground that stays below freezing even when the topsoil thaws in summer.

This is an aspect of sea level rise that I started to think about after moving to the shore of a large reservoir created by damming a river.

The difference between high water (late spring or early summer) after spring runoff and low water (late winter or early spring) is frequently 5 metres or more. The steep, sometimes vertical, terrain is just deeper water at the shoreline. The beaches and low lying terrain might see the shoreline move as much as 100 metres with maybe 5 times that incursion along seasonal creek beds.

If the water gets higher than usual, it can overtop a small rise and fill a basin, adding a hundred meters to the extent of a shoreline overnight.

I read that as:

For decades, Nestle has been patenting milk proteins.

They've been doing it for a long time, not somehow getting extra-long patents.

My favourite is the idea that it takes time to build out the "infrastructure" that allows for life. Basically, no supernovae, no life, not enough supernovae, extremely low probability of life. Even if that doesn't put Earth's life near the leading edge, we may be on the leading edge of technological civilizations.

Interesting. That page says "few vertebrae", but the image makes it look to me like a full set.

On the other hand, if I found an animal with no ribs and pelvis and only the rudimentary limbs typically found in fish, I'd tend to say that the skeleton was missing. Or at least, ahem, skeletal.

Thanks. My first impression was that there was some funny business, but then I found what I thought was a decent article.

Are you serious? They really have what amounts to an exoskeleton? Or maybe it's more accurate to call it a whole-body rib cage?

Just searched and found this fun article. Not really a skeleton but a collection of really stiff hairs or feathers (loosely: the genes are the same ones responsible for "other skin appendages" in vertebrates).

All great things start in a bar. Or coffee shop. Or in the shower. Or in a dream. But never in a meeting.

New word! Thanks.

I made a half-assed guess as to its meaning based on the fact that I've heard of an elite basketball player by that name. I got pretty close, according to urban dictionary.

All roads lead to PIE. Or is that from? Oh, and maybe not "all."

But seriously, I went through a linguistics phase in my reading and came away with the sense that Proto Indo European is a lot closer to us than it seems at first glance.