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Weekly Meanderings, 18 July 2015

Weekly Meanderings, 18 July 2015

Last updated on: July 18, 2015 at 12:02 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 18 July 2015 2015-07-16T10:10:35-05:00 Scot McKnight

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Memories, but not too many things at once, from Chris Benderev:

It argues that when we let multiple memories come to mind simultaneously, those memories immediately lock into a fierce competition with each other. The milk and the phone call fight to each be remembered more than the other.

“When these memories are tightly competing for our attention the brain steps in and actually modifies those memories,” says Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, a neuroscientist at UT Austin.

The brain crowns winners and losers. If you ended up remembering the milk and forgetting the phone call, your brain strengthens your memory for getting milk and weakens the one for phoning your friend back, so it will be easier to choose next time you’re faced with that dilemma.

Previous research has demonstrated this competition-based weakening of memories over very short periods of time, but Lewis-Peacock and his colleagues recently put it to the test again, to see if it could cause long-term forgetting. They decided to force two memories to compete: pictures of human faces and pictures of scenes.

Do you like the smell of rain?

Do you love the good smell of rain? If so, you’re not alone.

In fact, some scientists believe that people inherited their affection for the scent of rain from ancestors who relied on rainy weather for their survival.

But what makes rain smell so nice? There are several scents associated with rainfall that people find pleasing.

One of these odors, called “petrichor,” lingers when rain falls after a prolonged dry spell. Petrichor — the term was coined in 1964 by two Australian scientists studying the smells of wet weather — is derived from a pair of chemical reactions.

Some plants secrete oils during dry periods, and when it rains, these oils are released into the air. The second reaction that creates petrichor occurs when chemicals produced by soil-dwelling bacteria known as actinomycetes are released. These aromatic compounds combine to create the pleasant petrichor scent when rain hits the ground.

Another scent associated with rain is ozone. During a thunderstorm, lightning can split oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere, and they in turn can recombine into nitric oxide. This substance interacts with other chemicals in the atmosphere to form ozone, which has a sharp smell faintly reminiscent of chlorine.

When someone says they can smell rain coming, it may be that wind from an approaching storm has carried ozone down from the clouds and into the person’s nostrils.

Could MLB go back to 154 games? (I’m all for it.)

It could be baseball’s most drastic scheduling change in more than half a century.

It likely would assure that no one would ever breakBarry Bonds’ single-season record of 73 home runs.

The record 262 hits by Ichiro Suzuki in 2004 probably would stand, and it might be another century before another team wins 116 games.

For the first time since 1960, Major League Baseball could be going old school on us, reverting to a 154-game schedule from the current 162 games.

No Barry? No one needs to guess on that one:

CINCINNATI — In a lovely ceremony before the 2015 MLB All-Star Game on Tuesday, Hall of Famers Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays gathered in front of the pitcher’s mound and acknowledged the crowd. All four were amazing baseball players, some of the best of all time, and should be honored as national treasures, for sure. No one’s here to pick on Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax or Willie Mays.

But the foursome were voted by fans and introduced as the game’s “Greatest Living Players,” and that’s just not true. Mays might have a legit claim to the throne of greatest, but there’s really no way anyone should reasonably argue that there are four living baseball players better than Mr. Barry Lamar Bonds….

I’m not so silly as to pretend I don’t know why Bonds was excluded from the group celebrated at Great American Ball Park. But the proceedings occurred just moments after Pete Rose took the field to thunderous applause as a member of the Reds’ “Franchise Four.” And Rose’s crimes against the sport, no matter what anyone says,threatened its integrity in ways Bonds’ never did.

Josh Barro:

It reads like a dry, 1,184-word memorandum about fiscal projections. But the International Monetary Fund’s memo on Greek debt sustainability, explaining why the I.M.F. cannot participate in a new bailout program unless other European countries agree to huge debt relief for Greece, has provided the “Emperor Has No Clothes” moment of the Greek crisis, one that may finally force eurozone members to either move closer to fiscal union or break up.

The I.M.F. memo amounts to an admission that the eurozone cannot work in its current form. It lays out three options for achieving Greek debt sustainability, all of which are tantamount to a fiscal union, an arrangement through which wealthier countries would make payments to support the Greek economy. Not coincidentally, this is the solution many economists have been telling European officials is the only way to save the euro — and which northern European countries have been resisting because it is so costly.

The price of attending weddings:

When I contacted a bunch of financial planners, several responded that they had seen people go into debt over attending friends’ weddings. It’s what you might call an “irregular expense,” says Dayana Yochim, a consumer finance columnist for the Motley Fool, a financial services company in Alexandria, Va. “Most of us don’t think ahead and budget for friends’ weddings.”

But we should. A recent study from American Express found that 79 million Americans will attend a wedding in 2015, and they plan to spend an average $673 on each one. That’s $225 for airfare, $170 for a hotel, $116 for dining out and $95 for dressing up. Once you factor in a gift or multiple gifts — and a bachelor or bachelorette party — the cost of attending can easily exceed that average.

The water companies need to make containers that are bio-degradable but they appear to be For Profit Only, Lisa Rein:

Park Service Director John Jarvis’s goal seemed logical enough when he issued a memo to the system’s 407 parks, national monuments and historical sites in 2011, allowing them to eliminate sales of disposable plastic water bottles. The bottles were clogging the waste stream, he wrote, eating up recycling budgets at a lot of parks.

“We must be a visible exemplar of sustainability,” Jarvis wrote. “When considered on a life-cycle basis, the use of disposable plastic water bottles has significant environmental impact compared to the use of local tap water and refillable bottles.” The impact is magnified in remote parks, which pay a premium for litter removal and waste disposal, he wrote.

In an interview, Shawn Norton, the Park Service’s branch chief for sustainable operations and climate change, said: “We came to realize we were in a sea of plastic water bottles. The garbage cans at some parks were overflowing.”

The more goats, the better, by Fritz Hahn:

The world’s most adorable lawn mowers are coming back to Southeast Washington.

Historic Congressional Cemetery, which employed a herd of goats to remove poison ivy, honeysuckle and other vines from an acre of woods in August 2013, announced today that 30 goats would arrive on August 6 to eat their way through a different acre of land. “It’s a very similar area,” says cemetery program director Lauren Maloy. “There’s a lot more for them to focus on – a lot of invasive species, like poison ivy and kudzu, that are threatening the trees.”

The goats, which come from Prosperity Farms in southern Maryland, “might be here for up to a couple of weeks,” Maloy says, depending on how quickly they devour the plants in the designated area, which is located at the eastern end of the 207-year-old cemetery.

Goats proved to be a popular attraction last time, with parents bringing their children to watch the animals work. (They even had their own hashtag: #goatmower.) Maloy expects a similar response this time, and is even talking about planning some special events, including a happy hour, to coincide with the goats’ visit.

The more trees, the healthier, by Chris Mooney:

In a new paper published Thursday, a team of researchers present a compelling case for why urban neighborhoods filled with trees are better for your physical health. The research appeared in the open access journal Scientific Reports.

The large study builds on a body of prior research showing the cognitive and psychological benefits of nature scenery — but also goes farther in actually beginning to quantify just how much an addition of trees in a neighborhood enhances health outcomes. The researchers, led by psychologist Omid Kardan of the University of Chicago, were able to do so because they were working with a vast dataset of public, urban trees kept by the city of Toronto — some 530,000 of them, categorized by species, location, and tree diameter — supplemented by satellite measurements of non-public green space (for instance, trees in a person’s back yard).

Women playing Base Ball!

Jim Sleeper on our common Puritan past:

Americans can learn a lot about themselves and their society by revisiting—but not by reverting to—their republic’s distinctive Puritan origins, which anticipated its present dilemmas and strengths far more acutely than is often acknowledged. Puritan premises and practices gestated and channeled some of the liberal-capitalist premises, practices, and paradoxes that are now embraced and reviled the world over. They shaped much of the American republic and, arguably, sustained it through the New Deal and through the civil-rights, anti-Vietnam War, and Watergate confrontations. Puritan conceits and hypocrisies certainly seeded some of these messes, but Puritan principles and virtues clarified and rescued the republic from the very worst of them, as they had done in the Civil War.

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