Malaria No More: Dream Big for Africa
Text DREAM to 85944 to donate $10 to Malaria No More and be entered to win a trip to Africa with NBC Smash star Katharine McPhee. Read the full details at http://www.malarianomore.org/Dream.
Malaria No More is a charity working to end the suffering and deaths caused by malaria – an illness that’s both easy to prevent and relatively easy to cure, as long as there is access to information, diagnosis and treatment. Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year in Africa.
As part of the global Roll Back Malaria Partnership, Malaria No More aims to bring the death rate from malaria down to near-zero by 2015. There’s a vaccine being developed right now to help stop the spread of malaria. But they need our help.
Text DREAM to 85944 to donate $10 to Malaria No More. You’ll be entered in the competition to win a trip to Africa with Katharine McPhee. Make sure you read the full details at http://www.malarianomore.org/Dream.
Related articles
- Malaria deaths reducing year on year (telegraph.co.uk)
- Malaria may kill more people than we thought (newscientist.com)
First Signs of Spring [Photo]
We found little flowers blooming over the road on our long walk yesterday.
Despite the current cold snap [do you see how many layers Mini-MI's wrapped in?] the plants have decided it’s sunny enough to get growing. Spose they know best.
Related articles
- Look to nature for early signs of spring (guardian.co.uk)
Parents Who Hid Child’s Gender for Five Years Now Face Backlash
When Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper had their son, Sasha Laxton, five years ago, they decided that rather than make a big splashy “It’s A Boy!” announcement, they’d keep the news to themselves. Instead, they only told a select number of relatives that little Sasha was a he; to everyone else the child was referred to as “the infant” and described without gendered pronouns. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge …
Graze: snacks delivered to your door [get a box free!]
This is how bourgeois I’ve become. These snack boxes are nifty!
You give them your info via their website & tell them which of their snacks you like the sound of; they pack a selection in a recycled cardboard box and post it to you.
My first graze box
All the snacks in your box are listed on a little leaflet with ingredients (fairtrade, organic & so on), some nutritional health info, calorie counts (often lower than a slice of buttered toast), etc. It’s ace.
Get a Free Graze Box
I got a voucher code for a free Graze box [thanks, Ocado], and then I got a free trial link from the Graze people to share with my friends, so you can get a free box too.
Click here to order your free Graze box, and type this free trial code in if you’re asked for one: XF1RCB8
Oh, and don’t get confused if the Graze website calls me Sophie – that’s my real name.
If you like your free box & want another one, they may well still be offering the 2nd box half price, too. Get in!
Science Says: Santa’s Reindeer Probably Girls
Just had a text from Vix asking me whether Santa’s reindeer are boys or girls so that she can answer the question posed in her 7 year old daughter’s note left out for the Fat Man.
The answer, fact fiends, is this:
Most male reindeer tend to lose their antlers by early December, so there’s a good chance that the majority of Santa’s reindeer are female.
We should probably have guessed this from their ability to take Christmas multi-tasking to an entirely new quantum level in delivering all those presents in one night. I am knackered and going to collapse on the sofa with the cheese board very soon. How do they do it?
Merry winter stuff, everyone.
Winter Gingerbread Porridge Recipe (for Toddlers and Grown-Ups)
This porridge is lovely on a cold day because it’s warm and fruity and biscuity. It’s a special happy winter recipe that makes you feel all glowy and full of solstice cheer.
You can add pretty much anything you like to it; this recipe is reasonably healthy, though if you’re an adult trying to lose body fat then you might want to use lower fat milk and go easy on the sweet bits. Sorry, did I just type that? Call an exorcist; I may not have much time.
To serve 1 hungry toddler, we used:
- About 40 g of porridge oats
- About 125 ml of full fat milk
- About 20 or 30 g of gingerbread (we used Organix mini gingerbread men)
- A small handful of raisins or sultanas
- About a teaspoon of apple with the peel left on, chopped into fairly small bits
- About half a teaspoon of orange or lemon peel, grated
- A pinch of ground cinnamon
What to do:
- Put the oats and fruit stuff and cinnamon into a microwaveable bowl [Note: if you don't like microwaves, put it in a pan instead] and stir it all together a bit.
- Set 2 or 3 gingerbread men/pieces aside, and break the rest up into toddler-bite-sized chunks. Throw the chunks into the bowl and stir them in.
- Add the milk and give it another quick stir.
- Microwave it for a minute on full power; stir it, then nuke it again for another 30-60 seconds. [If you're using a pan, bring it to the boil and keep stirring for 2-3 minutes.] Watch it in case it overboils, but don’t panic – it will bubble a lot, but it thickens up as it boils and is unlikely to spill over unless your bowl is really full.
- Take it out of the microwave [or off the stove] and stir it for a good minute while it cools.
- Stick the spare gingerbread men/pieces in the top for decoration.
- Check the temperature’s OK, then eat it.
Image of the Week: Butterfly Blue Rest by Shannon Kringen
I have a bit of a thing about blue butterflies, and this one is just gorgeous. It lives [lived?] in the Seattle Science Center’s butterfly house.
I particularly like the contrast between the glowing soft-edged wings, the precision of the wing vein structure [I once obsessively drew butterfly wing vein patterns for days on end to perfect a tattoo design], and the stony textures in the background; I’ve seen a few too many butterflies photographed on green leaves and flowers.
You can see more of Shannon Kringen’s images on Flickr.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Image of the Week: Habitable Exoplanet Classification by PHL
The PHL (Planetary Habitability Laboratory) at University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo, have made this lovely Trek-styled chart of classifications of habitable planets beyond our solar system.
You can see more on the PHL website.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Related articles
- Pack your bags: suns like ours may have lots of habitable planets (dvice.com)
- Gamers Help Scientists Discover New Planets (escapistmagazine.com)
Image of the Week: Untitled by Or Hiltch
This photo was taken only yesterday, which for some reason makes me like it more.
I’ve been trying to work out what I was doing at the time – the photo tags say 18 hours ago and it’s 10 a.m. here now, so it would’ve been 8 hours before midnight: 4 p.m. yesterday, then. We’d just got home from Mini-MI’s swimming lesson, so I was probably feeling knackered, eating crisps & thinking about getting back to work. Meanwhile, somewhere in the world, a golden leaf drifted on calm water…
You can see more of Or Hiltch‘s images on Flickr.
And you can see golden leaves almost anywhere in the Northern part of the globe by now. Collect some, or take your own photos, or whatever. They’re pretty and they’re free.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Ants raise other insects to eat their meat!
There’s an African species of ant called Melissotarsus insularis (along with 3 other related species) that appears to farm or domesticate other insects to maintain a fresh supply of their meat, as if they were cattle.
These tiny ants live burrowed under tree bark – apparently they even have a pair of legs that point up instead of down, so that they can grip the ceiling of their tunnels as well as the floor. Various types of armoured scale insects share this habitat with the ants.
These scale insects don’t provide any honeydew for the ants to eat, and they don’t produce edible scale either. So… the best guess of researcher Scott Schneider at the University of Massachusetts is that the ants eat the scale insects’ meat! It may be that they chose scale insects without a hard, waxy scale on purpose, for easier butchering and consumption.
Nobody’s actually seen an ant chowing down on a scale insect’s flesh yet, but Schneider plans a follow-up experiment to measure stable isotope levels in the ants and use these observations to determine whether they are primarily vegetarian or carnivorous.
If that’s got you all mad science excited, you can read the whole Zoologger story at New Scientist.
Image [another species of Melissotarsus] credit: semant2006
Image of the Week: The Sombrero Galaxy by NASA
This is an old favourite infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope & NASA. I love the Sombrero Galaxy (M104); it’s so floaty-looking at these enormous distances that I like to imagine the texture of it close up.
Not very close, obviously, or I’d be inside it. And there’s a black hole in there and all sorts of cool stuff.
You can see more images at the NASA website.
And you can see more of the Sombrero Galaxy in the sky: look towards Virgo through a reasonable sized telescope.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Image of the Week: A Rainbow of Fruity Flavor by Micky Zlimen
I love this because it makes Skittles look so much tastier than they really are… all rainbowy and shiny and speckled with tiny dings. Sweets are usually more appealing to me in the abstract than they are in the real world consumption. And well-composed macro shots are awesome (though I still don’t always get them right).
A Rainbow of Fruity Flavor by Micky Zlimen
On a side note, I think they should make giant Skittles, the size of those mini eggs you get in bags at Easter.
Here’s another of Micky’s photos that I liked a lot, too. She seems to have a talent for making the most of colour, and gives what might have been rather pedestrian images a lovely bright hyperreality.
Fall Sampler by Micky Zlimen
You can see more of Micky’s work here.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
Image of the Week: Curtains of Rain by Polly Nance
I really like how nicely this captures the heaviness and haze of flat-out grey needles of rain. It makes me feel I can sense-imagine the day.
You can see more of Polly’s work at WatchingThePhotoReels.
Want to Win Image of the Week?
Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must. I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image. That’s it.
[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word. But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]
“You will keep getting older, and then you will die.”
I’ve been a bit of a mess lately, with the broken rib and the dodgy customer in Belgium [I didn't tell you about that. I'm probably not going to, either] and daily news reporting and the baby swimming lessons [yes, we do those - tell you later] and the family and well, everything you normally have to do but sorer because of the rib.
I looked at my feeble attempts to engage with The Tao of Awesome, and figured I could do better, so I decided to run it again from the start. Then I failed to start.
Today I got an email with a new post from Johnny B Truant. It was long and said a lot of epic shit. But the one thing that stood out the most was this:
You will keep getting older, and then you will die.
I want that on a fucking T-shirt. Printed normal and with a vertical flip so I can read it in the fucking mirror.
Know how temporary you are. Know that you are running out of time every nanosecond. Know how irrelevant you are to almost every other force and particle in the universe. Know that this means two things:
- You must act now.
- If you fuck up, it’s not the end.
Figure out what you really REALLY WANT and then go after it with every fucking piece of you, right now. Repeat. Don’t stop. Ever. There isn’t time.
You will fuck up, repeatedly, for definite. No way around that for anybody. But unless it literally kills you, you will by default survive and keep on rockin’.
Time is running out. Now. It isn’t “Do or die,” it’s “Do *then* die.”
Get on with it.
Image credit: chim0
Animal Intelligence: Crows learn who to mouth off at
This is awesome. New Scientist says there are crows on the Uni of Washington campus who were subjected to an experiment 5 years ago in which they were temporarily captured & released by someone wearing a particular mask. They learned to recognise the mask and flashmobbed anyone wearing it; they followed the wearer around, cawing at top volume.
Nifty thing is, only 26% of the crows did that 2 weeks after the start of the experiment. After almost 3 years, 66% of the crows exhibit the same behaviour when they see the mask. That includes birds who weren’t even born yet when the trappings happened – they simply learned who to ‘scold’ from their parents.
This struck me as amazing and even cute, but then I had to think: what if instead of following people and cawing at them, the birds had turned to terrorism? If we’re not the only species that can learn a behaviour from others around us, we’d better hope they never learn to copy the ways that humans react when we feel oppressed by sinister external forces.
As people and especially as parents, we need to remember the crows before we display prejudice, anger, hatred and aggression. Let’s not have our children grow up screaming at masks only we’ve taught them to fear, when they don’t even know what’s underneath.
Just a thought. Yours?
If you want to read the whole paper, it’s here.
Image credit: crowdive
uPVC God
We’ve been getting a lot of visits recently from god botherers. Except that they’re not bothering god – I understand their own is quite pleased with them, and I don’t think the other gods give a toss. They’re bothering me.
The ones that came this morning looked like double glazing salesmen – the suits, the briefcases, the earnest-faced older man and the slightly dodgy sidekick with the skinhead and stocky build. But they had pamphlets with something about light and truth written on the front. I’ve had doorstep debates with the older one before, during which he tried to convince me that
- eternal life isn’t against the laws of nature that his god allegedly designed
- there’s no reason to think our Sun will ever run out of fuel
- I should do a bunch of stuff I don’t want to do now, so that I can have an eternal life I don’t fricking want later.
I have no idea what religious group they’re affiliated with. I didn’t check.
Now I’ve sold double glazing myself in the past, for the evil Anglian Windows. Almost everyone I know has worked for them at one time or another, usually as briefly as possible. None of us enjoyed bothering people who didn’t want or expect to hear from us, interrupting their day, and then trying to sell them something they rarely needed or could afford. So why is it an approach that appeals to religious groups?
I much prefer the Jehovah’s Witnesses who call on me. Those nice friendly middle-aged ladies never directly tell me that my beliefs are wrong or that I’m going to be frowned on by their god and not allowed into the dead people’s party, or that I should do what their god says. They just bring me interesting-yet-unlikely reading material about intelligent design and stuff.
And I say that I’m happy to accept nobody knows what happened in the gaps in the fossil record, and we don’t know for sure exactly how non-living stuff produced living stuff; I just doubt (for a plethora of reasons) that what happened was a personal intervention by the hand of their god. But I’ll read whatever they put through my letterbox anyway, I tell them, because they mean well. I do wonder, though, about their conversion rates. You’d think a god would have figured out a more effective marketing mix by now.
But maybe he’s making good profits [if you think that's an amusing pun, kindly look in a mirror & give yourself a scathing eyebrow raise] already. Self-help shit sells by the bucketload, no matter how vague, ill-conceived or poorly expressed. People will pin their hopes on it, they’ll pay for it, and they’ll follow its instructions, and they’ll blame themselves when it “doesn’t work” for them (i.e. they don’t become perfect beautiful beings with perfect beautiful lives).
Now that just makes me sorry for all the lonely, gullible, needy, vulnerable people who open their door to two smiling faces with all the glib answers they need to realise there’s a big hole in their lives, and that hole can be filled with uPVC. I mean god.
uPVC god.
Machiavelli Id does Echternach
Just spent a week in a medieval tower built into the old town walls of Echternach (northeast-ish Luxembourg, right on the German border) with the Animal, Mini-MI and her grandma.
Gods, I’d forgotten how peaceful it is. Lovely walks, amazing food (steak de cheval, fresh asparagus, a fresh apple juice with lime at Apple A Day in Luxembourg city) and an all-encompassing sense of calm and order. Everything was… nice. Really just nice. Pleasant. Open wi-fi was a scarce commodity, yet I was surprisingly non-twitchy. I answered my emails on 2 occasions, but did no work. I had time to read a whole book on the way there, and most of another on the way home. I went to bed before midnight. Bliss.
Of course we had hiccups and arguments. Mini-MI fell out of her stroller and smacked her head on the cobblestones; we lost her bedtime bear for a whole 2 days; we failed miserably in our attempts to stop smoking; the bells of the basilica drove us nuts during the night. But we also walked a gorge through the forest without seeing another human being, and sat talking at night on top of the old defense walls that branch out of the tower like it was our own little castle (btw Luxembourg has some impressive castles).
Notes for parent travellers:
- Don’t take a young child to a 4 storey tower for your holidays. Just don’t, it’s silly. We kept her in her playpen on the upper floor most of the time, but we had to carry her up and down the spiral staircase for every shower or trip or change of clothes and it was a bloody pain in the arse. Wait til they’re walking, eh.
- DFDS Seaways line from Dover to Dunkerque has compact & bijou ferries that are surprisingly easy to get around with a buggy.
- Our 1 year old liked eating our steak and stuff so much, she’s turned into a food snob now.
I’m too knackered to attempt further description right now, so here’s a cheesy video instead:
7pm UTC/GMT Saturday: Supermoon
7pm UTC/GMT Saturday, the moon is its closest to earth this year – and on the night of the full moon :) one to watch…. http://ow.ly/4hDmA
MI does the Wicker Man at Butser Ancient Farm
Every year, the folk at Butser Ancient Farm celebrate Beltane (May Day) by burning a giant man made of twigs and straw. It’s a Gaelic tradition, with equivalents in Celtic & neopagan cultures, to mark the start of the summer. More importantly IMO, it’s a reason and a place to gather with people who like that kind of thing and celebrate the increasing warmth and light of evenings (in the Northen hemisphere anyway) at this time of year.
Aside from the fascination & mild amusement I feel when I see a field full of people dressed up as druids/green men/maids marian and such, I like the Butser festival because of its wicked cool location – it’s a reconstruction Iron Age farm, used for experimental archaeology. There are pre-Roman style roundhouses and agricultural stuff, and if it rains there’s a roaring fire in the largest roundhouse to go and sit around.
This year the Wicker Man was built in the form of a shepherd, complete with a Shaunesque sheep under one arm. Perhaps he’s supposed to guide and preserve us through this recession shit. Regardless, he looked great and I was most impressed, not to mention keen to watch him burn.
For Beltane there’s always some kind of craft stuff to do at Butser, and free face painting in bright “woad” blue. I decided to join the people making five-pointed star wands/staves out of long willowy sticks. It wasn’t too difficult and I was childishly proud of the result…
While we waited for torching time, we ate a tasty hog roast [insert swine flu joke of your choice here], had a couple of ciders, and watched the belly dancers do their thing. Then we wandered past the birds of prey on display in one of the paddocks, and went to stand by the Wicker Man. The Morris dancers accompanied the priest & priestess to the Man’s feet, and the lottery was held to choose which of us revellers would be lucky enough to set the fire.
Then the flame was touched to the Wicker Man’s feet and he burned fierce and beautiful. He lit the fields with gold and bronze, warming our skin like the Sun. Shaun was toast from the moment the flames licked his feet, but the Man burned for several minutes before his legs crumbled into glowing stacks of embers and he fell to the ground. Twere lovely.
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