(I’m not dead!)
This is just about the most amazing thing I’ve read all year. It’s a post at Cosmic Variance about Pando, the largest, and almost certainly the oldest multicellular, organism on Earth. Pando weighs over 6600 tons, occupies 107 acres, and is estimated to be 80,000 years old or more. Pando is, depending on how you look at it, either an entire forest of Quaking Aspen, or a single tree: all the trunks share an enormous root system and are genetically identical.
My mind, it is blown.
Snow is gone.
Just a quick note. I mentioned earlier that there’s a free mp3 download of a song from Neko Case’s upcoming album at her label’s site. Turns out, you can also listen to the entire album streaming at NPR, until March 3rd (when it hits stores). It’s as good as I expected, and I highly recommend you buy this album.
Some lucky soul was my 5,000th visitor today. Congratulations! Whoever you are, you win…uh…the warm, fuzzy, internal glow of the knowledge that you were my 5000th visitor!
I’m a few days late on this, but there’s a donation match going on until March 15th at Scarleteen, which is an invaluable resource for sex and sexuality education for teenagers. Heather Corinna and the rest of the team do fantastic work over there, but they operate pretty much on a shoestring. If you can afford it, consider helping them out.
Neko Case, one of the best singer-songwriters I know of and owner of the most amazing voice of probably any living musician, has a new album, Middle Cyclone, coming out soon. Case is a strong advocate for humane treatment of animals, and she and her label, Anti-, are offering an mp3 of a song on the subject, “People Got A Lotta Nerve,” from Middle Cyclone as a free download. For every blog that links to the download, Case and Anti- will donate $5 to the Best Friends Animal Society.
There’s also an extended profile of Case at the New York Times, which is a worthwhile read.
[Update: oops! Apparently the promotion (despite being mentioned in the Times piece, which was published on February 13th) actually ended on February 3rd. Should have read the Anti- blog post more carefully. At any rate, the mp3 is still available.]
And if you’re not familiar with Case’s music, please allow me to humbly suggest you rectify this matter post-haste.
So apparently I completely failed to notice the first anniversary of my first post at Fineness & Accuracy…a month ago.
Oops.
Quick, someone find a fatted calf, the prodigal blog is back!
I don’t mean that title as it might be interpreted, in the “Web Triumphalist” (thanks, H2otown!) sense; I don’t particularly believe in such nonsense — indeed, I’m opposed to nationalism in all its forms, with the possible exception of Red Sox Nation. It would probably be clearer to adopt that Munroe kid’s pronunciation: “blagnation” would better convey what I mean.
Point being, of course, that I have shamefully allowed F&A here to sit stagnant (though I might prefer to think of it as “lying fallow”). I’ve got a longer post in the works, but I haven’t been having much free time to, well, work on it. So there may be a bit of filler now and again, either dull ruminations of this sort or the dreaded link posts, before I get to it, but I hope to keep it not entirely devoid of interest.
Coming up, probably some more posts about beer; I really don’t intend for Matters Zymurgical to so predominate, but it’s often easier to write about, as I’m typically just describing stuff I do rather than attempting to marshal strong arguments for a position.
