an aural noise
some of the things I read in antisocial isolation
DIRT: Soil Scientists Dig Deep to Understand the ‘Skin of the Earth’
What’s beneath our feet is crucial to life on the planet—don’t you dare call it dirt.
Thin layers of peat and silt capture the aesthetic nature of soil horizons in this artistic rendering. Embiggenable. Excavate at home.
STEPHAN MANTEL WAS ON A quest. As he disembarked from the third flight since leaving Amsterdam, the tropical heat enveloped him. He had arrived in Putussibau, in the heart of Borneo, Asia’s largest island.
A local guide and two hired helpers joined him for an hour-long journey along tributaries of the Kapuas River. Their boat, made from a hollowed-out tree trunk, sat so low that Mantel could trail his hand in the water. They docked and trekked deeper into the wilderness, where a thick layer of leaf litter and decay on the forest floor emitted a faintly rotten smell. Mantel searched for the right place to dig. He bored into the earth with an auger at various promising spots, only to abandon the location when the tool hit rock. This was no expedition for artifacts or hidden treasure. Mantel was intent on extracting the earth itself, in a vertical slice of soil.
If the team’s effort succeeded, the sample would end up as a meticulously preserved, five-foot-long slab, or monolith, at the World Soil Museum in Wageningen, Netherlands, which Mantel heads. The museum is the public face of the research institute ISRIC World Soil Information, with the most diverse soil repository of its kind: some 7,000 soil samples, including 1,200 monoliths from 85 countries collected over more than five decades. The museum is the most comprehensive of more than 100 similar collections worldwide, ranging from modest, single rooms to permanent exhibits within larger natural history museums. All of them aim to give visitors a better understanding of soil and how it is essential to life on Earth.
“Most people don’t know anything about soil,” says Dominique Arrouays, a soil scientist at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment in Orleans, France. “In the city, they never see the soil, unless there’s construction. It’s all pavement. They don’t realize that everything depends on soils.”
At a public works site in northern Rwanda, women and men build terraces to prevent soil erosion, which can threaten safety, ecosystem health, and agricultural productivity.
Soils grow the food that provides an estimated 98.8 percent of our daily calories, according to a 2019 paper in Environment International, and house more than 25 percent of the world’s biodiversity. Soils also store massive amounts of both fresh water and carbon. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Soils are in trouble.
UKRAINE CRISIS: Putin Really Could Nuke Us
Americans must come to terms with the reality of a nuclear holocaust.
The American media is significantly underplaying the probability of the conflict in Ukraine eventually escalating to nuclear war. I wouldn’t yet call it a likelihood, but it is a possibility — a very real one.
The supposition that nuclear disaster is a far fetched nightmare scenario is based largely on three assumptions:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin’s objective in invading Ukraine is to retake control of the former Soviet republic, possibly as the next step in a gradual re-assemblage of the former Soviet Union under his totalitarian rule.
- Putin, like Soviet leaders before him, doesn’t actually want a nuclear conflict. He wants power, the conventional wisdom goes, not mass destruction. What’s the use of being emperor if you’re presiding over a fiefdom in ruins?
- Putin has options. Should his Ukraine incursion prove too costly, either financially or militarily, there are myriad escape hatches through which Putin could either withdraw his troops or negotiate a deal with NATO.
I reject all three assumptions. Here’s why.
It’s not about the former Soviet republic
To me, it appears Putin’s actions since his return to power suggest a goal far bigger than simply reconstituting the Eastern Bloc. His objectives appear ideological, existential even, with his eye trained squarely on the West.
Election meddling. Propaganda peddling. The stoking of racism and xenophobia to exacerbate internal divisions in the most prominent and powerful western democracies. Virtually every move Putin has made over the last decade appears aimed at undoing western democracy and its institutions. …
Ed. EVERYBODY PANIC!!!
RELAX: What You Can Learn With the 8 Least Stressful Cities in The World
Good weather is important, but far from being everything.
Author at one of the least stressful cities in the world — Innsbruck, Austria.
Do you live in a large city and always wondered how stressful is your life compared to residents of other metropolises?
Back in 2011, while stuck in a traffic bottleneck in São Paulo, Brazil, I wondered if residents of other mega-cities had similar problems. Because life in São Paulo was stressful: noise, pollution, traffic, floods, pickpocketers, and the awful smell in certain places. All these little things contribute to a sense that this is not the life you should be living.
In the end, this added to my decision of moving out from São Paulo (and Brazil). Later in my life, it turned out that the other large cities that I lived in (Santiago, Doha, Warsaw, etc) had similar problems, but in different dimensions and with different causes.
Days ago, I found a ranking of the least and most stressful cities in the world, and to my surprise, all the mega-cities that I lived had similar positions — that explained why I felt that life, in all of them, were not really as good as it could be — or at least as peaceful as in my homeland, in the Brazilian countryside.
Santiago, Doha, Sao Paulo, or Warsaw are almost equally stressful. So are London, or Paris, or San Francisco. But it doesn’t need to be like that. …
Man In Germany Gets 90 Covid Vaccine Shots To Sell Forged Passes https://t.co/CbBT4NXMbu pic.twitter.com/36UkjHIojj
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 11, 2022
Honoring Giles, The Badass Wrongly Executed For Being A Wizard
We’ve all heard about women put to death for being witches, and we know that these were innocent victims of persecution. But let’s also spare a thought for the occasional men caught up in this same anti-magic panic.
Take the case of the penis-snatching wizards of Ghana. Some countries practice/fear witchcraft even into the modern age, and in 1997, a mob in Accra, Ghana, put to death seven sorcerers, accusing them of stealing men’s penises. It is possible that the accusers were simply suffering from the normal temporary phenomenon known as “shrinkage.” It’s also possible that the panic was manufactured by those who wanted to use a riot as an excuse to pick people’s pockets.
Side note on nomenclature: Friends inform us that, despite what Hogwarts says, “wizard” is not really the correct word for a man who practices witchcraft. A male witch is a warlock, while wizardry refers to something else. However, sources refer to the real accused men as wizards, so we’ll stick with that term. The men in question probably wouldn’t be happy with being called warlocks either.
The other of these men we want to mention is Giles Corey, executed during the Salem witch trials. Yes, about one-fifth of those convicted of witchcraft in Salem were men, and Massachusetts executed several of them, including a couple pastors. Most were hanged. Giles suffered a different fate. …
Financial Advisor Recommends Fraud https://t.co/3RksenE9Pj pic.twitter.com/xTUY4rx1aO
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 11, 2022
FAMILY: How Homeownership Changes You
It’s not just a financial commitment. It can alter people’s relationships to a community, a place, and even time.
Growing up, Erin Nelson used to make fun of their dad for spending so much time looking out the window at what the neighbors were up to. “Now I’m that person,” Nelson, a 31-year-old who bought their first house a year ago in Portland, Oregon, told me. “I’m always peeking out the window … That’s like my new TV.” Nelson, who uses they/them pronouns, has realized that as a homeowner, their life is bound up with the people next door in a way it never has been before.
Buying a first house is, for those who can afford it, among the largest financial decisions someone makes in their life, and lately, the process has only gotten more stressful: During the pandemic, home prices have shot up, and shopping for a house has become intimidatingly competitive in many places. But even some winners of the competition have buyer’s remorse. In a recent survey from the real-estate site Zillow, roughly one-third of respondents reported regretting how much work or maintenance their home required, and roughly one-fifth concluded that they had paid too much.
Perhaps forgotten amid the bidding wars and the rush to lock in a mortgage as interest rates rise is the fact that this transaction has a way of changing people as well. In addition to buying an assemblage of wood, glass, and other materials and committing to a host of unfamiliar chores, homeowners are also buying a psychological grab bag of new stressors, time sucks, comforts, perks, and trivial fixations—such as the neighbors’ comings and goings. Homeownership can change your mental time horizon, your conception of your community, and your stakes in a physical place.
For starters, homeownership alters people’s relationship to the tangible stuff that makes up their house. “When I [rented] an apartment, I was like, ‘I’m hanging this photo on the wall. Whatever—not my wall!’” Maia Bittner, a 34-year-old in the Seattle area who works at a financial-technology company, told me. “Now I’m like, ‘Good God, I put every dollar I have into the down payment and this drywall is like a shrine.’” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
I’ve published a lot of these Ukraine war videos as short Reels on FB, IG and as Tik Toks. This Mega Compilation is voluntarily demonetised at my end. I hope this tragedy ends soon. Please check out my interviews with Ukrainian citizens HERE: https://youtu.be/KE7T7i7jjPg
まるが乗っただけでふみふみしちゃうのは、このふわふわクッションだけ！ When Maru gets on the fluffy cushion, he can’t help kneading it.
THE LAST TAB . . .
I Was Wrong — This is Actually the Most Whackadoodle American Shit Ever
Florida Man — proof that the citizens of the USA do have a sense of humour.
Embiggenable.
I thought…
But I was wrong. A. McNabb ommented I’d forgotten the many tales of Florida Man.
Who?
Florida Man is a meme. He’s taken from unrelated news articles about Floridians, their crackpot behaviour, crimes, and occurrences.
Florida is notorious for strange and unusual events.
Oh, boy! I had some fun researching these. 🤣🤣🤣
Florida man arrested after calling 911 to report his methamphetamine was fake
Seriously?
This middle-aged guy buys drugs and suspects they have sold him bath salts. So he calls the police to report the dealer. Except, when they tested it, it was the real (illegal) deal.
On being arrested, he gripped his chest and feigned a heart attack. They took him to the hospital, where the doctors said he was fine.
Two counts of stupid.
Pissing into the wind
Gun owners in Florida vowed to respond to Hurricane Irma by “shooting at” the storm.
As Hurricane Irma bore down on Florida, tens of thousands of people joined in an event, advertised on Facebook, to shoot at the storm.
When asked what he was doing, a Florida man said, “We shoot first”.
Here’s an idea — let them keep their guns, but charge them $100 per bullet. Maybe they’d think twice about killing a cloud if it got expensive.
If you are going to get caught with your pants down
…
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Ed., etc. I didn’t have time to do this today.
