Yearly Archives: 2003

You know how to whistle, don’t you?

Just put your lips together and blow…

Back in the 1980s, I had a video about research into dolphin communication put together by Jacques Cousteau. In it, there was a section on Silbo, a whistling language used in the Canary Islands off Spain to communicate long distance (it was meant to show that you could communicate effectively through whistling. Well, bless the Canary Islands, because they’re making sure that Silbo sticks around. Nice article, and it has an audio file of an interaction in Silbo, plus its translation.

[ updated the link to the same story on CNN. ~c ]

Space Links

From Spaceman Glen. These are very cool. The first one has a giganto java applet and I had trouble getting it to load, but if you have a decent-sized computer, it’s worth it – It’s Molecular Expressions’ Power of Ten. It’s basically a site that starts you out in the Milky Way 10 million light years from earth, then moves you 10 times closer and 10 times closer and you eventually get subatomic inside a leaf on earth.

The other one also rocks, if you like space and stuff. It’s from Australia and it’s called The Best of Hubble. It takes you on a tour of some amazing Hubble images with some neat spacey music. Very cool. Very, very cool.

A Good Farmer

by BARBARA KINGSOLVER
from the November 3, 2003 issue of The Nation

Sometime around my fortieth birthday I began an earnest study of agriculture.
I worked quietly on this project, speaking of my new interest to almost no
one because of what they might think. Specifically, they might think I was out
of my mind.

Why? Because at this moment in history it’s considered smart to get out of
agriculture. And because I was already embarked on a career as a writer, doing work that many people might consider intellectual and therefore superior to anything involving the risk of dirty fingernails. Also, as a woman in my early
40s, I conformed to no right-minded picture of an apprentice farmer. And
finally, with some chagrin I’ll admit that I grew up among farmers and spent the
first decades of my life plotting my escape from a place that seemed to offer me almost no potential for economic, intellectual or spiritual satisfaction.

It took nigh onto half a lifetime before the valuables I’d casually left
behind turned up in the lost and found.
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