April 27, 2023
Lions thought extinct in Chad reappear after 20 year hiatus
Lions thought extinct in Chad reappear after 20 year hiatus. Lions have not been spotted in Chad's Sena Oura National Park since 2004, but a remote camera has now managed to capture a lioness in her prime.
A model for the world or a cautionary tale.
India's Quest to Build the World's Largest Solar Farms. "Every morning in the Tumakuru District of Karnataka, a state in southern India, the sun tips over the horizon and lights up the green-and-brown hills of the Eastern Ghats. Its rays fall across the grasslands that surround them and the occasional sleepy village; the sky changes color from sherbet-orange to powdery blue. Eventually, the sunlight reaches a sea of glass and silicon known as Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park. Here, within millions of photovoltaic panels, lined up in rows and columns like an army at attention, electrons vibrate with energy. The panels cover thirteen thousand acres, or about twenty square miles—only slightly smaller than the area of Manhattan." [more inside]
Train length has been essential to creating record profits
As Rail Profits Soar, Blocked Crossings Force Kids to Crawl Under Trains to Get to School (ProPublica, 4/26/2023) (CW: pictures of children crawling under freight trains).
Ringmaster, Outrageous, Controversial, Scandalous, The Master of Trash.
Jerry Springer has passed away at age 79. When others went low, he went lower. Cheating spouse reveals. Baby daddy reveals. Teenage stripper reveals. Racists, badasses and brawlers. Springer, who died Thursday at 79, mined the depths and put what he dredged up on his show. [more inside]
"We know that children on the spectrum are some of our biggest fans."
'Enjoy Your Ride!': Kids With Autism Have a Message for Transit Riders Children on the autism spectrum were invited to record public service messages for a number of the biggest transit systems in the US for Autism Awareness Month, and I for one am here for it. [more inside]
"On a Hot August Night When the Dry-Flies Shrilled"
Unlike Hemingway, Dos Passos practiced moderation in most things and valued ideological nuance and evolution. The friends operated at different speeds: Hemingway raced; Dos Passos cruised. Take, for example, the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Dos Passos enjoyed the experience primarily for the spectacle, the food, and the drink. Hemingway saw it as a test of manhood. There “were too many exhibitionistic personalities in the group to suit me,” Dos Passos wrote. “The sight of a crowd of young men trying to prove how hombre they were got on my nerves.” from The World at the End of a Line by John Dos Passos Coggin
Born A Crime
The 2011 documentary You Laugh But It's True [1h23m] is about the blossoming stand up comedy scene in South Africa and Trevor Noah's meteoric rise to fame as he moved toward his "hour", the one-man show which brought him to international fame, The Daywalker. All this predates his tenure on The Daily Show by several years. This movie is available on a lot of streaming services and the advertisement load on this YouTube video is insane, so look elsewhere if that makes you crazy.
Das ist ein Gamechanger!
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All Things Great and Small: Excerpts From A Secret Whatsapp Group Of The Neighbors of Peter Glazebrook, Giant Vegetable Farmer [more inside]
Sapphire & Steel
When I was 6 years old my mind was blown by sci-fi TV serial Sapphire and Steel, with its stories of inter-dimensional slippage, time-shuffling wonkiness, and not entirely logical plot resolution. Revisiting it 40 years later, I'm ready to be disappointed. But it's actually good. Worth watching just for the stars, Joanna Lumley as TV's most fashion-conscious time-manipulating psychic alien, and David McCallum as her permanently-scowling colleague. All episodes are on shoutfactorytv.com (US) and itv.com (UK). Previously.
it's a war between kids, teachers, and the developers
Inside the Chaotic World of Kids Trying to Play Video Games on School Laptops [Waypoint][Games by Vice] “Kids have been trying to play video games on school computers for as long as computers have cropped up in schools, but decades ago, they jumped through those hoops in a dedicated computer lab, or secretly downloaded homemade games to their TI-83 calculators while pretending to crunch equations. But these days, computers are deeply intertwined into education, and many school age children have regular access to a computer, usually a Chromebook or iPad, as early as 1st grade, when kids are only six or seven years old. What exists now is an escalating game of whack-a-mole between students, teachers, and IT departments, as kids hopeful to do anything but school work try to find a way to play games. [...] There’s a whole not-so-underground market for getting around software like GoGuardian, like the YouTube channel IrwinTech, where it’s kids explaining to other kids what to do.”
"I do not recommend the coffee they serve."
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