Here are a few shots of leaves on campus this afternoon:
May they never complete their turn. Because you know they will, and that’ll just leave us sticks in the air, the great surrender of the trees to winter.
Fine day today. Lovely, sunny, weather. Béla Fleck played campus this evening. I talked about cover letters in class. There was the ritualistic grading of things and other typical office efforts. I had a baked potato for dinner. It was all grand in its own way.
Things to read … Smithsonian Now Allows Anyone To 3D Print (Some) Historic Artifacts:
The Smithsonian Institution may have hit on one of the best uses of 3D printing to date. Starting Wednesday, the world’s largest network of museums introduced Smithsonian X 3D, a new effort and web portal to create 3D renderings of its vast and fascinating collections of more than 137 million objects.
Amelia Earhart’s flight suit? Done! Wooly mammoth? You betcha! Abraham Lincoln’s lifemask? Creepy, but it can be yours.
We live in the future, and it is going to have awesome tidbits of the past everywhere.
And it will have, finally, maybe, self driving cars. Think of all the things you could get done on a long drive. Has the self-driving car at last arrived?:
His Lexus is what you might call a custom model. It’s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas, and G.P.S. It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work. Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes, or that he belonged to an élite team of ghost hunters. But nowadays the vehicle is clearly marked: “Self-Driving Car.”
[…]
Levandowski is an engineer at Google X, the company’s semi-secret lab for experimental technology.
Closer to home, Archaeologists finding clues to mining communities atop Red Mountain:
“We didn’t know what to expect,” said Forschler-Tarrasch, who first thought the artifacts might be native Alabamian or Native American pottery. “We were surprised that most of the shards are English and American pottery. We identified one as a piece of German pottery. They are absolutely not from this area.
She speculated that either the workers brought them here, or they were purchased in company stores.
“Many of the shards have little marks on them,” she said. “You can date them based on the marks, and they mostly coincide with the dates of the settlement, so these were contemporary, household ceramics. Most of them are pretty average, but there are a few that are fancier, with some gilding that would have cost more. We have yet to determine what that means for the site.”
There’s just something about Red Mountain — the way the houses cling to the side, the way we’ve cut a road through it, its importance to the region’s development, the high quality ore they took out of there, something — that fascinates. This project, at less than 100 years old in places, is more cleaning up than archeology, but really quite cool.
Food stamp cuts in your state — an interactive infographic. The supporting NPR piece:
When you think of Oregon and food, you probably think organic chicken, kale chips and other signs of a strong local food movement. What probably doesn’t come to mind? Food stamps.
And yet, 21 percent of Oregon’s population – that’s one out of every five residents – relies on food stamps to get by.
Oregon has a host of unfortunate and challenging problems. And thanks for pointing out that 21 percent is one out of every five people. How else could I have figured that out?
Another fact that jumps out when looking at the map: While Republicans have led the call to slash the SNAP program in the House, many of the states whose residents are most reliant on food stamps are reliably Republican and located in the GOP’s Southern heartland. About 20 percent of the population in Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, and South Carolina, for instance, receive benefits from the federal food assistance program.
That part, I’m guessing, is where the regional debate in the comments comes from.
No debate here: full day, and so we’ll wrap it up here. Stop by Twitter. And come back here for more tomorrow.
