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Weekly Meanderings, 25 October 2014

Weekly Meanderings, 25 October 2014

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:24 pm by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 25 October 2014 2015-03-13T22:24:47-05:00 Scot McKnight

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The dogs of the Canadian slain soldier paying tribute.

A Texas-sized spider in Guyana:

(NEWSER) – Strolling through a Guyana rainforest one night, a scientist heard some rustling and thought he’d encountered a furry mammal.

Well, he was right about the furry part.

The creature was actually a Goliath birdeater spider,LiveScience reports — the world’s biggest type of spider, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. It can weigh up to 6 ounces. For comparison, National Geographic reports a black widow weighs roughly .035 ounces; that’s 170 times lighter.

Scientist Piotr Naskrecki writes its weight is “about as much as a young puppy,” while its leg span can be a foot long, comparable with a kid’s forearm, notes LiveScience. The body itself is fist-sized, Naskrecki says. The fangs? Two inches long. The thing won’t kill you, but its bite feels “like driving a nail through your hand.”

And when it rubs its legs on its body, it can fire out hairs carrying tiny barbs, which can really hurt and itch if they get you in the eyes. Ultimately, however, it seems the spider is just unpleasant, and not too common: “A chicken can probably do more damage,” Naskrecki notes, adding that he’s only seen one three times in as many as 15 years spent working in South America.

Global warming and your backyard bird feeder.

To get a good look at the effects of climate change, look no further than your own backyard: There might be some unexpected birds among the flock you’re used to seeing hovering around the birdfeeder, lured north by winter’s warmer temperatures. A new study finds that warm-adapted species — birds that prefer the warmer winters typically found in southern states, such as cardinals and Carolina wrens — are now wintering farther north than they did 20 years ago.

One of the best fingerprints of global warming is the poleward movement of the world’s animals. But few studies have looked at more than a single species at a time.

Ashlea Ebeling:

The Treasury Department has announced inflation-adjusted figures for retirement account savings for 2015, and this year there’s extra room for savings for wage and salary types and the self-employed. If you have a 401(k), a SEP-IRA, or a SIMPLE, pay attention and if you can swing it, bump up your contributions to the new max. You can stuff $18,000–or $24,000 if you’re 50 or older–into a 401(k), for example. Here are the details.

Amazon and “incumbent” publishers:

Here’s a little real talk about the book publishing industry — it adds almost no value, it is going to be wiped off the face of the earth soon, and writers and readers will be better off for it.

The fundamental uselessness of book publishers is why I thought it was dumb of the Department of Justice to even bother prosecuting them for their flagrantly illegal cartel behavior a couple of years back, and it’s why I’m deaf to the argument that Amazon’s ongoing efforts to crush Hachette are evidence of a public policy problem that needs remedy. Franklin Foer’s recent efforts to label Amazon a monopolist are unconvincing, and Paul Krugman’s narrower argument that they have some form of monopsony power in the book industry is equally wrongheaded.

What is indisputably true is that Amazon is on track to destroy the businesses of incumbent book publishers. But the many authors and intellectuals who’ve been convinced that their interests — or the interests of literary culture writ large — are identical with those of the publishers are simply mistaken.

Speaking of selling books, here is a story about the world’s best bookshops.

Grade school and play:

“There is no evidence-based research that I know of that ensures these privileged kids success later on,” she says. But there is research about poor, at-risk kids and early childhood education, some of it from FPG; those in high-quality play-based preschools do better in grade school and on standardized tests and have higher educational achievement as adults.

“These preschools that claim to get children into Ivy League schools…would they get in anyway?” she wonders. “It’s hard to tease this apart.”

What’s sad here is not so much Imprescia’s litigious bent, but the state of affairs in the Big Apple and elsewhere that has led to early childhood becoming steeped in the rigors of academia rather than the joys of dressing up and building block castles. (More on Time.com: “Mompetition”: Why You Just Can’t Make Mom Friends)

“Play is the best context in which children learn,” say Gallagher.

But the Times describes “costly consultants and test preparation materials” for preschoolers, many of whom attend programs that dangle promises of test scores “high enough to catch the attention of elite private schools.”

I have a preschooler of my own who has been tasked with a bit of quiet time as I write this. She’s in the room next to me, so I can hear her “reading” We’re Going on a Bear Hunt to her stuffed dog, Cooper. Her preschool is proudly play-based. On Friday, when I dropped in and stayed for a while, they were vigorously mashing potatoes for snack and creating spin art. The kids dance, they sing, they read books and act out stories.

When my oldest started preschool six years ago, I distinctly remember asking the preschool director what I could expect my son to learn. She gently but firmly set me straight: He will learn about self-control, taking turns and following instructions, about make-believe and making friends and making messes. He will not be drilled on his multiplication tables or pushed to learn to read. Um, okay, I said. What did I, a first-time parent, know anyway?

I’ve since become a disciple of the power of play, which just happens to be the title of a 2007 book by David Elkind, professor emeritus of child development at Tufts University.

Quirky Portland may be but it is a cool kind of quirky:

PORTLAND — Of all the Very Portland things that exist in Portland, there is a plot of land next to City Hall, right outside the building’s front portico, where the city is growing its own Swiss chard.

“And on a place that used to be a parking lot!” exclaims Mayor Charlie Hales, adding a detail that actually makes this story even more Portland.

When Hales was first elected as a city commissioner in 1993, the ground in front of City Hall that has become a vegetable garden contained a parking lot with reserved spaces for the mayor and city commissioners. “Those of us on the council then said, ‘that’s not consistent with our values and our rhetoric,'” Hales recalls.

And so they gave up their spaces for a bit more of the city’s famed green space. “That’s not the only place in Portland,” he adds, “where we took out a parking lot and put in a little piece of paradise.”

Those sugary drinks and aging:

You knew that drinking sugary sodas could lead to obesity, diabetes and heart attacks — but, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, it may also speed up your body’s aging process.

As you age, caps on the end your chromosomes called telomeres shrink. In the past several years, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, have analyzed stored DNA from more than 5,300 healthy Americans in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from some 14 years ago. And they discovered that those who drank more pop tended to have shorter telomeres.

The shorter the telomere, the harder it is for a cell to regenerate — and so, the body ages.

What to know about people who want to be alone.

The Bishop steps up his game:

Dallas Bishop Kevin J. Farrell said that he followed the teaching of Christ and stepped in to house the fiancée of Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan and three others for several weeks at a diocesan facility when no one else would.

The bishop’s acknowledgement on Oct. 20 coincided with the lifting of the 21-day quarantine for nearly four dozen people being screened for the Ebola virus with none showing any signs of the disease. It also capped nearly a month of a scrambling by local, state and federal officials in trying to both combat the virus and calm the public’s fears about its spread.

Nicholas Farrell:

An Italian government that really meant business would make urgent and drastic cuts not just to the bloated, parasitical and corrupt state sector, but also to taxes, labour costs and red tape. Yet even now only Beppe Grillo, a modern comic version of Benito Mussolini, and the separatist Northern League advocate Italian withdrawal from the euro. Most Italians still don’t get it: the euro is the problem, not the solution — unless, that is, they go for real austerity in a major way, which they will not do unless forced to at gunpoint.

Italy, more even than France, is the sick man of Europe — and it is also the dying man of Europe. Italian women used to have more children than anyone else in Europe. It is common to meet old men called Decimo (‘Tenth’). Yet for decades the birth rate in Italy has been among the lowest in the world, and if it were not for immigration the population would be in decline. When Italian women refuse to make babies, it is a clear sign of a terminally sick society.

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