you've got it all wrong
The deadly truth about cicadas.
The deadly truth about cicadas.
"The story in this country is that wealth concentrates," he says. "That's unstable. We need smaller operations, local processors, more evenly spread out capitalism."
Vanguard of Brood X Marks Its Spot: All Over (washingtonpost.com)
In isolated pockets across the Washington area, periodical cicadas have begun to emerge in heavy numbers, the silent beginning of an infestation of black-bodied, red-eyed insects that is going to get a lot more intense and a lot more noisy before it ends next month.
It's happening. I'd seen about 8 holes before this weekend, but now they're obvious. You glance downward, holes. Moving cinderblocks for the compost pile, I uncovered one guy who had tunneled all the way up, only to hit the block and say, "shit" while another tougher nymph had tunneled up and was now traveling horizontally, but was in the throes when I lifted the block.
Ehrlich Calls Multiculture Idea 'Bunk' (washingtonpost.com).
These kinds of comments from leadership, from people who are in high-level positions, are really fueling an environment that is very dangerous and negative. It says it is okay to consider people who are different as something less.
Which echoes what Zagg has said about the racism inculcated in our troops and our culture flowing from the very top. It's not difficult to see, once you know what to look for.
Metafilter remembers 1987 better than I do. I'm starting to remember how loud it was, though. The buzz is holy.
I used to fill buckets with the exoskeletons too, Witty. I'd go out in my backyard and there'd be a hundred of them clinging to the wooden fence. I'd look down the cracks in their backs through their "eyes".
My sister and a friend of hers used to go downtown with a handful of them and hang them on people's backs as they walked behind them.
The Search field is disabled in iTunes 4.5’s Party Shuffle list. This could be improved: the Party Shuffle display should have a third horizontal pane for search results.
After paying $500 a year for auto insurance, camper living is incredibly inexpensive, Mr. Hines said. Except for extreme hot or cold weather, he pays about $10 a week for propane, for which he must drive the camper to Nassau County for refills. He pays $25 a week in gasoline for the generator.
He spends $7 a day on cigarettes, $4 on coffee and the rest on food.
Jimmy Hines, 50, lives rent-free in New York City.
The New York Times > National > Prisoners: Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S. "Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates."
You hear them, but you don't see them everywhere. They're in the trees. It's not like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. People talk like we have to come to work in a Kevlar and flak jacket. It's not like that. It's media hype.
Fort Meyer Pentagram: Cicadas gnaw on imagination.
Johnson's advice on what to do with cicadas: children can tie sewing string to them and walk with them around the block.
I had never experienced such a thing. I thought I was living out a scene from The Birds or something. I got that clear plastic umbrella and carried it with me day and night. People laughed at me, but then they'd say, 'That's a really good idea.'
Until the arrival of European settlers, most of the area the cicadas inhabit was forest — on the face of it, a good habitat for the insects. But Dr Clay's early research suggests that "suburban savannahs" (leafy avenues, lawns with the odd sapling growing in them, and golf courses) are actually better for the insects than the forests which preceded suburbanisation. Suburban trees tend to be younger and healthier. They also have to compete less fiercely for resources than trees in dense forests. And younger trees probably have tastier roots as well. The ancient forests of pre-Columbian America would not have provided such sumptuous dining.
baltimoresun.com - Today's cicada update: Beilenson says it's not the end of the world. In addition to that reassurance, The Baltimore Sun offers an infographic, an audio clip, photos from 1987, 1970, and 1936, and an interactive Swat the Cicada game (which may be a bit more gratifying in a week or so). The special section on the periodic cicada features Sun articles from 1987 as well.
Their slow, lumbering flight carries them into buildings, cars, people and ultimately into the six arms or legs of a receptive mate.
Hampshire College Student Uses J.K. Rowling's Quidditch as Basis for Artificial Intelligence Experiment: "Crawford-Marks now calls his earliest work 'kiddy Quidditch,' as it evolved teams that played like he thinks six-year-olds might. But, now well past the 50th generation it starts to look a little more like Rowling's game, with a practically uncatchable Snitch."
Appearing Friday in the Rose Garden with Canada's prime minister, President Bush was answering a reporter's question about Canada's role in Iraq when suddenly he swerved into this extraneous thought:
"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern."
What does such careless talk say about the mind of this administration? Note that the clearly implied antecedent of the pronoun "ours" is "Americans." So the president seemed to be saying that white is, and brown is not, the color of Americans' skin. He does not mean that. But that is the sort of swamp one wanders into when trying to deflect doubts about policy by caricaturing and discrediting the doubters.
George Will: Time for Bush to See The Realities of Iraq (washingtonpost.com). Will goes on to conclude, somehow, that a) Bush is not racist and b) people who practice the Muslim faith cannot self-govern, but I thought it was a quote worth sharing.
An excercise to find the worst songs on the iTunes Music Store and compile them all together in one handy playlist. Those with a strong stomach can now preview all the songs together through the Dumpster Diving iMix.
Macworld's Jonathan Seff reports that, according to Apple, the big difference between ALC and FLAC is speed -- Apple says ALC is faster. Apple says ALC is not based on FLAC, but was created by Apple itself.
I've not seen anything else about the Apple Lossless Encoder yet.
There are some things going on here that I can't live with.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US military in torture scandal
Inside the psychedelic, rave and harm-reduction communities, Earth and Fire are considered leaders, even heroes. But they insist they’re just a pair of librarians — archivists and "Internet dorks" who believe that better access to better information just makes for better decisions in the long run. "Basically, we act as if there isn’t prohibition," says Earth. "We are trying to publish this information as if the world were already making rational choices around this complicated area."
The LA Weekly explores the Vaults of Erowid in Don’t Get High Without It by Erik Davis.
The Slashdot: Apple Releases Major iTunes Update discussion includes the following gems (unattributed, because I'm lazy):
Lastly, and this is a feature of the entire music library, not just playlists or Party Shuffle, the same "arrow" icons that show up in the iTMS when you search for a song are present in iTunes. This means you can click an arrow for a song name, album, or artist and it will launch a search on iTMS. But say you don't like that feature? Well you can of course turn it off in preferences, but you may also hodl down "option" and click it. The result? it searches only YOUR library, not the iTMS.
You can now use other playlists as criteria for a Smart Playlist. Create one playlist that is a combination of several other playlists.
Question: I was pulling the onion grass out of one of my beds and decided to pull up the weed barrier (the black meshy sheet that we laid under our mulch last year to stifle the weeds) and sure enough there were about 25 large, somewhat hibernating cicadas. I guess my question is, we laid that weed barrier all around our beds. Will the cicadas be trapped under there? Is that a bad thing?
Adrian Higgins: The cicadas will be trapped under your barrier. They have waited 17 years for this moment, and you are preventing them from attaining their destiny. For 17 years, they have nibbled together on tree roots, enduring the hardships with the knowledge that one day, they would smell the fresh air, feel the warmth of the sun on their bodies, experience the thrill of flight, and of true love. If you leave the weed block down, these cicadas will never live their dream. But you be the judge.
Bear with me, it's a good story: heraldsun.com: The buzz: Cicadas get ready to emerge
The Brood X bugs, red-eyed cousins of the larger annual black-eyed late-summer "Dog Day" green cicadas, will begin emerging from their underground holes in western North Carolina later this month. They don't devour vegetation the way locusts do, and they don't bite or sting. But they sure do sing.
Like many human adolescents, periodical cicadas spend umpteen years in their dirty rooms, indulging in sweet stuff and oblivious to much of the world outside themselves. Then, suddenly, as if a hormone switch were flipped, they emerge with a single-minded commitment to find favor with whatever peer they deem sexually appealing.
The bug nymphs live all that time on tender hardwood tree roots until they finally get the hots. Well, it's more like the "warms," because their signal to go forth and mate is a rise in the soil temperature to 64 degrees Fahrenheit.
Once in heat, millions of them push their way to the surface and climb onto new branch growth on nearby trees and shrubs, according to entomologist Stephen Bambara, who works with the N.C. State Cooperative Extension Service in Raleigh.
The males get together in choruses and harmonize in a unique doo-wop that strikes humans as a decidedly un-sexy metallic screeching. But cicada females respond to it with abandon, making clicking sounds and wing flips -- their version of an air kiss and a toss of the hair.
After 13 or 17 years of underground obscurity, periodical cicadas emerge to a multi-week Mardi Gras, a party thrown by nature solely to ensure that what goes around comes around, generation after generation. Like most such reveries, it's noisy, it's not pretty, and many participants meet violent fates from predators. But in this case, it gets the job done, according to Bambara, because the weird life cycle itself offers a form of protection for the species.
"Cicadas go 13 or 17 years between life cycles because it's to their advantage," said Bambara. "It throws possible predators off track. Seventeen years is a long time to wait between meals if that were your prey. So I think that's where they got their niche. A lot of them are consumed and die when they come out. But their sheer numbers also help ensure their survival. Even if a lot of them get eaten, a lot of others are still left to reproduce."
Birds are periodical cicadas' main predators, he said, plus other omnivorous ground-dwelling animals such as opossums, skunks, raccoons and foxes. Fish, too, eat cicadas that fall into the water.
Cicata Field Guide: Cicada (“Si-Kay-Duh”) Common Name: Periodical Cicada Scientific Name: Magicicada Aliases: 13 or 17 Year Cicada; 13 or 17 Year Locust; Satan’s Parakeets
You think just because the words are garbled in his mouth, they're garbled in his mind?