Exciting things are afoot. Dan is dead, slain by painting, and scheduled to return to life sometime soon. I have just committed to hurling my bloated, pasty body into freezing cold water for charity, because I am foolish and compassionate. And I’ll be hanging around Tri-Con KW today like a bad smell, watching tables and shooting videos. On Monday, I record a secret surprise thing. Pretty excited. Anyway, lots of neat things today, some new, some old, all cool.
Spain runs mostly on hot air
Wind power accounts for around 20% of Spain’s energy production now, which is more than any other country in the world. “…enough to power about 15.5 million households, with nuclear coming in a very close second at 20.8 percent. Wind energy usage was up over 13 percent from the year before, according to the report.” This is a country that’s doing energy right. Read the full article on Al Jazeera America for more details.
Scary insect mind control
Researchers at the University of Lueven have discovered that insects that have a queen, like ants, bees, and wasps, are subject to a special pheromone that the queen emits that keeps them from mating. The chemical in question literally renders workers infertile, to the point where worker ants and bees fail to even develop ovaries. Just one more reason to be weirded out about bugs, I supposed.You can find the full story on the New Scientist.
Credit: Matthew Inman
Making things
Making things is awesome. We don’t do it full time, but sometimes we’d like to. It’s not just online content but art, video, dance, whatever it is that really gets you going. Matthew Inman made a comic about it. It’s pretty cool. Read the whole thing at the Oatmeal.
Read more books
If, like me, you spend a lot of time wishing you were reading more books, or find yourself in a position where you do a lot of research, this kind of advice can be invaluable. How to read a book in two hours or less. Warning: does not work with novels. Still, I did a fair amount of this in university, and it’s a technique for extracting important information from a research text without having to read it cover to cover.
Reworking Tolkien (and any other story)
Michelle Nijhuis’s daughter thinks that Bilbo Baggins is a girl. And why not? Bilbo, she points out, makes a great heroine, and changing Bilbo’s gender affects the story in exactly zero ways. In fact, it tends to make it better because the story doesn’t go out of its way to try and overemphasize his heroism as though he were overcoming some handicap of womanhood in order to do great deeds. Subversion is a wonderful thing.
Weird science
The crew at Periodic Videos poured mercury into liquid nitrogen. That is all.
That’s all for this week! Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Wednesday. As always, if you see something super interesting, tweet it to us at #cchexup!
