#219 March 1: AI and an eyeglass company are experimenting with offering SAP at movie theatres by having patrons wear special glasses that project the dialogue onto the eyewear. You can adjust the placement, size, and color of the text with a handheld device. I would pay an extra $1 or so to have this available.
#220 March 2: I’ve never thought about microplastics until the latest articles about how they are ubiquitous in our water
and even in our bodies. According to an
article in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, simply boiling
water can remove nearly 90% of microplastics. Especially in hard water,
boiling calcium carbonate becomes solid and effectively encapsulates the
plastic particles making them easy to remove through a coffee filter. The strategy may be more or less effective
depending on where you live and the efficiency of your water plant.
#221 March 3: Coffee is making a healthy comeback. Study after study finds that enjoying 2 cups of coffee (my usual) may lengthen your life and lower your risk for chronic disease. The latest is a correlational link between drinking 3-5 cups of coffee and lowering your risk of diabetes by up to 11-17%. Coffee is a rich source of polyphenols – compounds in fruits, veggies, and whole grains. It also has as much fiber as a serving of broccoli. (who knew? Fiber in coffee!!) One researcher said drinking a cup of coffee was the same as a small helping of vegetables! Let’s hear it for my morning “fix”!
#222 March 4: Mecklenburg County had one of the lowest voting turnouts
in the state in the Democratic primary.
Only one small county near the coast had less. Dave and I have said that this year’s
election will be decided by those who DON’T vote.
#223 March 5: I’m not sure what this says
about me. I am so glad that Black folks
have been encouraged (allowed?) to get creative with their hair in the last few
years. Seeing all of the different “dos”
during basketball games is a draw for me.
I like the men’s hair better than the women’s. However, the women are often more elaborate
with extensions and dyes, the men use
their OWN hair!
#224 March 6: The Ringling Brothers Barnum
and Bailey Circus is back! After folding
up in 2017 it has been re-imagined with no animals and their clowns try NOT to
be scary by ditching the face paint for more muted makeup. With no elephants and a focus on human
cannonballs, and BMX riders, is it really a circus? One of my best memories as a mom is taking
the kids to the animal walk through town on the day the circus arrived.
#225 March 7: According to the paper, a “prominent BMW Board Member”, Frank Weber told an Italian magazine, that BMW will “soon” be dropping manual shift as an option. Audi has already dropped it and BMW only offers it on its sportier models. When I learned to drive, my dad made me learn on his VW Bug and the “test” was a stop sign on a slight hill. I had to stop and take off without rolling back. We still have a truck, “Bert” with manual drive. We saw a tire cover with a stick shift logo and it said “Millennial Theft Deterrent”, meaning young people these days don’t know how to drive a stick shift. We have noticed that now that when our townhouse complex gained more young folks, they ask to borrow our truck and then admit they don’t know how to drive it!!
#226 March 8: The first over-the-counter
birth control pill is headed to US stores.
It has already been available without a prescription across much of
South America, Asia, and Africa. Why
does the US have such a hang-up with reproduction!!
#227 March 9: Some interesting crime
statistics: Researchers at Stanford
found that immigrants are 60% LESS likely to be incarcerated than US-born
people and the CATO Institute looked into Texas and found that undocumented
immigrants were 37% less likely to be convicted of a crime. Recent investigations by the NY Times and the
Marshall Project found that there was no link between undocumented immigrants
and a rise in violent or property crime.
#228 March 10: Science Magazine holds an
annual contest called Dance your Ph.D. where grad students are invited to
present their research through dance.
Weliton Costa won it for a dance video about kangaroo personality
research. He also came out as gay during his research and presents this as part
of “What I learned from my Kangaroo time” See it here:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoSYO3fApEc
#229 March 11: I hadn’t heard of
Ramadan until a few years ago, but with the influx of Muslims it has become
more and more common. To greet friends
who are observing Ramadan one can say “Ramadan Mubarak” (have a blessed Ramadan
or “Ramadan Kareem” (have a generous Ramadan).
One of the basketball players in the ACC tournament was observing
Ramadan and couldn’t eat until 7:15.
They had snacks and nutritional supplements ready for him to play at his best.
#230 March 12: The newspaper is starting a new
format where they will mark certain articles “Reality Check” to point out that
they are using investigative journalism.
They will also mark other articles with “Inside Look” when they go
behind the scenes or “Uniquely Charlotte” when highlighting a local story or
personality. I hope this is a new
commitment to increasing local news as I’ve tracked how many local articles are
in the Local section and one day it was just 2 out of 8. Last Sunday was better with 6 out of 11.
#231 March 13: Headline: “EPA bans asbestos, deadly carcinogen still in
use” What? I thought that had been long
ago. According to the article asbestos
is still used in brake linings and gaskets and to manufacture chlorine bleach
and caustic soda. 50 other countries
have already banned it. The EPA banned
asbestos in 1989 (what I remember) but the courts weakened the rule. A 2016 law now makes it easier to put
protections in place.
#232 March 14: Does plunging in an ice bath really help athletes? According to an article in the paper, Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof claims increased sports performance, reduced recovery time, boosted metabolism, improved blood pressure, and pain relief for arthritis, asthma, autoimmune disease, and fibromyalgia. Wow! What a list. The article says that while preliminary results are “promising” the scientific data and methods used aren’t adequate to support their claims. The sample was too small and 86% of the individuals were healthy white males. More research needs to be done on non-healthy individuals and larger; more diverse samples need to be used before scientists suggest you jump into the ice. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if something as simple could really produce those benefits? It would be much better than expensive drugs.
#233 March 15: The Mayo Clinic did a massive data analysis and found
that moving between Daylight Savings Time and Standard did NOT correlate with
higher cardiovascular events. The data
while slightly higher was NOT statistically significant. They are also going to study whether the
rates of motor vehicle accidents are higher and other mental health
effects. Any mother or farmer can tell
you that adjusting to a new time is hard for young children and animals. I just wish they would set a standard time
and leave it alone!
# 234 March 16: It has been 4 years since the Covid pandemic was declared. Here are some interesting facts:
·
The US had a higher rate of
death than Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Spain Sweden, Denmark, Japan,
South Korea, or Australia.
·
30% of Republicans have not
been vaccinated compared to 10% of Democrats.
·
95% of COVID-related
hospitalizations in the U. S. have occurred among people who had not received
an updated vaccine.
#235 March 16: Climate change continues to wreak havoc. According to Jay Banner a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin, 40% of homes in the US are at “extreme risk” from climate change in the form of heat, wind, or air quality. This was using data from the First Street Foundation. This breaks down to 33% at risk from extreme heat, 20% from wind, and 10% from air quality. This also results in a $20 TRILLION in real estate value.
#236 March 17: A consequence of our
politicizing COVID-19 vaccines… fewer children are being vaccinated for once
common illnesses such as measles and this disease, one near eradication is on
the rise. The CDC says that 1 in 5
unvaccinated children contracting measles will be hospitalized and 1-3 per
1000 will die. This is very sad.
#237 March 18: Not only is the sea rising from
ice melting, but the land is sinking!
According to the journal Nature subsidence is the rate the land is
sinking. It varies along the NC coast
from 1.4 to 4 mm per year. While this
seems small it is 5 to 16 inches per century.
This along with the rise in the sea level puts the coast at risk for extreme
flooding. While most are due to
geological factors such as cooling magma, humans can speed up the process by
pumping water from aquifers and oil and gas drilling. This causes subsidence at a much higher rate
than normal.
#238 March 19: AI has come to fast food. Bojangles is now using Bo-Linda a robot to take drive-through orders. Not only does it take your order it can tell you if the restaurant is out of an item and up-sell you to Bo-Size.
#239 March 20: Why do they not
publish where the NCAA tourney is being played past the first 2 rounds on the
brackets? It took multiple searches to
find out that the Sweet 16 is in Glendale AZ but every site had the TV stations
listed.
#240 March 21: NC has its own
state butterfly: the Eastern Tiger
Swallowtail. It can be black with yellow
dots or yellow with black dots and stripes.
Females are most often black. I’m
going to notice the ones we see so much in the mountains and see if they are
swallowtails.
These pictures show the yellow
one both with just black and with blue.
#241 March 22: Mt. Etna puffs perfect smoke rings. These occur occasionally when vents occur in
circles. The gasses vented are primarily
water vapor. I remember seeing Etna “on
fire” from one of Roseanna’s friends' houses when we were in Sicily.
#242 March 23: From Neil DeGrass Tyson: The moon is bigger than Pluto.
#243 March 24: Walmart boasts that 90% of Americans live within 10
miles of one of its stores. I remember being in a town in Kansas that was part of the 10%!! Out in the middle of nowhere. And in Alaska, my students would come into
Anchorage and stock up for the rest of the year because there were no stores
close by when they went back to their villages.
#244 March 25: Cultural traditions around the world are fascinating. The Hindus welcome spring with Holi, a tradition where colorful pigments, called gulal are doused on one another. This festival of colors is rooted in mythology: when Radha complained about his blue skin, wanting to be fair, his mother suggested that he paint his skin any color he wished.
#245 March 26: A brand new beetle has been
discovered in the rainforest in Borneo.
It was discovered by a “citizen scientist” on an eco-tourism tour. We read a book in book club by Rachel Joyce
called Miss Benson’s Beetle with just
this plot. Miss Benson travels to Borneo
hoping to do something special, discover a new beetle. But she had to live for YEARS in Borneo
before her discovery. It was a quirky
book about women's empowerment.
#246 March 27: Scientists have
found that they can use weather satellites to detect methane gas releases. For instance, they detected a release equal to
the annual emission of 17,000 cars by a farmer who ruptured a pipeline with an
excavator. This technique is helping
identify fossil fuel operators unable or unwilling to halt major methane
releases. Big Brother really is
watching, and there are consequences!
#247 March 28: Tennessee just
passed the ELVIS Act. It prohibits AI
from using a person’s voice without their (or their heirs) permission. It opens the AI generator to civil
lawsuits. The ELVIS Act stands for Ensuring
Likeness Voice and Image Security.
#248 March 30: Covid did have a
few positive outcomes. When fishing
tourism dried up during COVID-19 in Namibia, fishermen spent time rescuing seals
from marine plastics. They recorded
their efforts on Instagram and became instant hits. They have formed a non-profit, Ocean Conservation Namibia, and have rescued around
3000 seals since 2020. A group in
California has only been able to rescue 100.
#249 March 31: I won’t live to see it, but the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change predicts that by the turn of the next century (2100) an increase in sea level could be between 1.4 ft. to 6 feet. Here is a map of what the coast would look like with 6 new feet of sea level. I remember as a kid in elementary school studying the sandhill region of North and South Carolina and learning that it used to be the oceanfront. I guess what “goes around comes around" and the Sand Hills will once again greet the ocean. Note on the map that Los Angeles is under water as is Seattle, Boston, New York, and Washington, DC.
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