Awesome...

Proclaims my mom, about this:

Americas More Civilized Than We'd Thought...

Not now, but a long time ago – in the period before 1492...

Over the past ten years or so, scientists have made a number of discoveries about the broader extent and higher population than previously believed in “pre-historic” Americas.  Many of these discoveries have been in South America, particularly in Amazonia.  Here's one that is in the United States, giving strong evidence for a civilization there about 3,200 years ago that was capable of mustering thousands of workers to build a large earthworks.

It fascinates me that the evidence of human activity is so difficult to find and interpret, just a few thousand years after the fact.  I wonder what people a few thousand years from now will think about, say, the human occupation of Southern California?  Our artifacts look so permanent – especially on the time scale of a single human life – but clearly they are not...

The Spread of Religions...

I've long been surprised just how ignorant most people (from anywhere) are about religions – especially about religions other than their own (or the one most familiar to them).  Prominent amongst the topics of ignorance: any sense of the historical context of religions.  So...I predict that this infographic will have many surprises for people:

Cats vs. Birds...

The birds are losing, more dramatically than anyone knew.  It's mostly feral cats causing the problem:

America’s cats, including housecats that adventure outdoors and feral cats, kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds in a year, says Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., who led the team that performed the analysis. Previous estimates of bird kills have varied, he says, but “500 million is a number that has been thrown around a lot.”

For wild mammals, the annual toll lies between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion, Marra and his colleagues report along with the bird numbers January 29 in Nature Communications. The majority of these doomed mammals and birds fall into the jaws of cats that live outdoors full-time with or without food supplements from people.

“The results are remarkable, not only for the big number, but also for the proportion of deaths from feral cats,” says Gary M. Langham, chief scientist for the National Audubon Society. The study assigns 952 million to 3.1 billion bird deaths a year to these wild cats. “These numbers really elevate this threat to a new level.” 

Felines are land sharks...

Potential Downfall of American Society...

Summary: A student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.

Isolated for Forty Years...

A Russian family, afraid of what the Soviets would do to them because of their religion, lives in Siberia cut off from the rest of the world (their cabin is at right) for over 40 years.

Amazing!

Transparency...

Back in the early '80s I worked for a company with what seemed to me a radical policy with respect to employee compensation: everyone's compensation was posted so that all could see.  This had all sorts of repercussions, most of them, I have to say, quite good.  Everybody knew exactly where they stood; there was no worrying about whether you'd negotiated the right salary for yourself.  It made questions about compensation very easy to raise.  Most of all, it made it impossible for the company to sustain any sort of compensation that didn't match the merit. 

I suspect this particular company maintained this unusual level of transparency because there were several relatives and close friends of the founder employed there.  By being completely transparent about compensation, many potentially destructive rumors were quashed.

This morning I read that there's a detectable trend toward such transparency, and more...