jack and jenny

Camping at the end of the travel season in Normandy, H and I had a little fright late one night at a campgrounds that we had nearly to ourselves. There was an awful clanging of a metal trash bin from over by the restroom building.

H peered out the window to investigate and saw these long and lumbering shadows. In this empty place, it would have been too much to bear had I not mentioned that there was a pair of donkeys corralled at the far end of the camp, which was set back from the coast by just a few grassy dunes and shared the land with a golf range—which looked tended but was also sleepy and deserted. The donkeys had escaped and were conducting the nightly rounds. Reading this article from Modern Farmer about the virtues of these sentinels and their advantages over traditional guard animals made me remember how gingerly we tried to shoo them away from the Bulli—in case they did get spooked and decide to kick a big dent in the side of the bus. Apparently, we needn’t have worried about that.

impulse engines

Wired! Magazine’s science desk has an interesting profile on the research of two astrophysicists from Harvard aimed to identify theoretical hypervelocity stars.

Our Sun and Solar System churns through the Milky Way at seven hundred thousand kilometres per hour, but this is a relative snail’s pace compared to rogue stars that have been clocked with speeds millions of kilometres per hour hurling away from galaxies. Scientists believe that such ejections happen when a pair of stars waltzes too close to a black hole and one gets flung away. The astrophysicists believe that there’s no reason to believe that stars could not be travelling much faster even, and that there could be a trillion stars in the universe shuttling from galaxy to galaxy at just under the speed of light. Of course, there might also be a planetary system in tow on this grand tour—implying mechanical space-travel might not be the only means of reaching other worlds. Capturing a lone star streaking across the void of the intergalactic medium is outside the competency of today’s telescopes, however.

santa’s little helpers

Writing for The Daily Beast, columnist Sally Kahn reminds us how big warehouse distributors exploit workers, especially those brought on to take up the holiday slack, with a telling decision upheld in the courts.
Though happily in Germany, these elves can go on strike—and over lesser injunctions—for America’s sweat-shops there seems to be little hope, and no great change of heart for these grinches seems forthcoming. This stint is not an insignificant one, not paying workers for the time at the end of each shift they spend being subjected to mandatory screenings and searches to make sure that they are pilfering any merchandise, especially considering that this same company will be awarded (for its tracking and logistics expertise) government security contracts and help maintain that list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.

load of guac

The avocado is not only, like the tomato, a fruit and not a vegetable also known—apparently—as the crocodile pear, it is also the cultivar of an evolutionary anachronism. The avocado, like cherries or berries to lesser creatures, developed as a to spread its over-sized seed by way of mega-fauna, such as giant sloths loping about on the pampas of South America, which are long-since extinct. Fortunately, the humans that displaced the intended distribution system are still around for tending.