17 Aug 2012
Chicken of the Trees

We ate squirrel when I was a kid, and I've been squirrel hunting in some of the same southern Indiana woods described in the article. I remember that it took quite a few squirrels to make a meal. It always struck me as a bit like rabbit, but even more rubbery - we always had fried squirrel, not the stews and soups described here.

At some point we stopped eating squirrels in this country. Certainly the very first Americans ate them in abundance, as did the first European settlers, who cleared the ancient forests and issued bounties on the rodent plagues that ravaged their crops; in colonial Pennsylvania authorities offered hunters three pence per squirrel killed. It was the colonists' skill in bagging them with their long-barreled rifles that gave them an edge on the Redcoats during the Revolution.

(link) [Chicago Reader]

16:11 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Finally Broken?

Another 2 inches of rain yesterday. Although we held our position of "extreme" in the latest drought monitor, I'd say that a more normal pattern has re-emerged and the drought of 2012 is broken in Boone County, Indiana. Not so in other locales, but here, we're doing much better.

No rain is forecast for the next six days, but temperatures are slated to be slightly below normal (max high in the eighties) and the weather should stay relatively comfortable for a bit. That's a very Good Thing™.

I think we can safely say that the final toll here was ten chickens, one sheep and a 33% increase in the price of hay. None of which is good, but it's not a complete catastrophe. We'll make it, for now.

11:30 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Humanities aren’t a science. Stop treating them like one.

In short, stop trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Sound advice for any endeavor.

Every softer discipline these days seems to feel inadequate unless it becomes harder, more quantifiable, more scientific, more precise. That, it seems, would confer some sort of missing legitimacy in our computerized, digitized, number-happy world. But does it really? Or is it actually undermining the very heart of each discipline that falls into the trap of data, numbers, statistics, and charts? Because here’s the truth: most of these disciplines aren’t quantifiable, scientific, or precise. They are messy and complicated. And when you try to straighten out the tangle, you may find that you lose far more than you gain.

(link) [Scientific American]

11:23 /Technology | 2 comments | permanent link