gotham

The marvellous property-scout Nag on the Lake invites us to a rather breath-taking viewing of a unique bell-tower penthouse on Centre Street of Manhattan—where for price, the happy new tenants could enjoy panoramic views from the cupola of New York City. The Beaux Arts style building was built to purpose as the New York City Police Headquarters and served this role from 1909 to the early 1970s when the department outgrew its operations centre. In the late 1980s, the structure at the heart of the metropolis was converted into posh condominiums. This would be a pretty swank hideout for a brooding and mysterious superhero.

story hour

Via Neatorama, the Humane Society of Missouri is inviting young children into an animal shelter so that they can practise their reading-skills on an audience of dogs. Not only does the attention help acclimate and calm the animals, who may have been mistreated, back into the company of humans, the pilot-project also benefits the young narrators by giving them not only a highly receptive interlocutor that’s non-critical but also teaches them empathy and compassion, since we take in every stray ourselves. The Humane Society is hoping to expand this programme to all shelters in the state and bring cats into the conversation as well.

decodence or raygun gothic

I admit that the whole disappointment over hover-boards which didn’t actually hover and were powered by less than premium batteries that tended to explode underfoot, the paperless office that’s still of the future, but it’s easy to get excited over the heralding of flying cars.
Past the headlines, one realises quickly, however, that these vehicles of the future-past are not only airborne but also driverless. I suppose present that we have delivers the future that (no matter how unbidden) that we deserve, full of mass purveyance, skies already over-crowded with airliners unromantically shuttling people to and fro and relatively autonomous drones eavesdropping, delivering meals on demand (plus a few other clever missions), continued reliance on fossil-fuels, Big Data, Bigger Pharma, tele-presence instead of teleportation, contractual obligations to property no longer owned but licenced to us—and so on and so forth. I hope that our flying-cars don’t go down the same rabbit-hole and it is probably the responsible thing to leave the soaring up to machines less prone to pilot-error or dare-devil stunts, but I hope these aces don’t take us away from the controls altogether, making the experience just some expensive thrill-ride. What do you think? Please keep limbs inside the carriage at all times.

garden switchboard

For more than a century, botanists have known about the symbiotic partnership between fungi and plants—the networks of fungal mycelium bundled with the roots of shrubs and trees described as a “mycorrhiza” association that is mutually beneficial in helping the other extract certain nutrients from the soil. What researchers are just discovering, however, is the breadth and depth of those connections and the nature of that relationship that’s akin to a subterranean vegetable information superhighway: the long tendrils of the fungal mycelia link individual plants in myriad ways and are the lines of transmission for chemical signals through garden plots and whole forests.
In a fascinating overview from BBC Earth magazine’s archive, featured recently on Dave Log 3.0, ecologists examine how this fungal internet allows plants over great distances to not only warm one other of intruders, it facilitates the sharing of nutrients and even allows the older generations to aid new spouts with sustenance, sabotage of unwanted neighbours and even parasitic behaviours. I feel a little guilty for my potted companions now, who might feel essential restricted to solitary confinement. I suspect, however, there are other modes of plant communication. After seeing more devastating wildfires for Australia in the headlines, I learnt that not only are the eucalyptus trees evolved to be explosively flammable—not unlike the strange venomousness given to everything there—and many of the seeds of other trees will not germinate without a periodic scorched-earth policy (or alternatively, arson by self-immolation), further prior to the settlement of Europeans, the stretches of eucalyptus forest that are a familiar sight today did not exist. The Aborigines, who had been landscape artists for tens of thousands of years, were careful cultivators and kept the forests pruned back, favouring grasslands that acted as fire-breaks and foraging grounds for game. It seems the Aborigines knew the risk of letting Nature run its favoured course, and that begs the question: what is Australia’s (or any land’s) natural state—wild or tamed, either by exception or by tradition?