Broad Cast 15 January 2009

BROAD CAST 15 JANUARY 2009

Ken Jennings, superstar from Jeopardy (though not our biggest star here at this blog, of course), has his own blog and published the map above, which was created in 1999, probably appearing in Newsweek, and "purports to show Jeopardy! popularity regionally in the U.S".

Daily Routines: How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. Fascinating details about how Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, Fred Rogers, James Thurber, and Joseph Campbell, among others, brought order to their hours.
(Screen capture from 1969-70 television show "My World and Welcome To It", based on life and work of James Thurber.)


For "news junkies and media mavens", Media Bloodhound has created a 2008 Fact or Fiction Challenge, a compilation of quotes and headlines culled from this past year at their blog. The trick is to tell which ones are real and which are satire.


An article by Fred Pearce in Conservation Magazine points out that bananas are "sterile, sexless mutants" which " has been at an evolutionary standstill ever since humans first propagated it in the jungles of Southeast Asia at the end of the last ice age". This means that almost all of us eat only one, massively sprayed variety, the Cavendish. And, as the article points out, it brings to bananas the same mono-crop risk that hit potatoes in Ireland in the 1840s. This plant may be on the verge of extinction. Read more at The Sterile Banana. Also at this site, an article on how the total number of natural disasters has quadrupled in the past two decades at Environmental Refugee Crisis.
(Banana flower before fruit; photo from Beechwell House Garden.)


A study conducted by Freedom to Marry "unequivocally shows" that "voting to support the freedom to marry and opposing anti-marriage measures helps rather than hurts politicians". A review of 1100 legislators' votes from 2005 to the present on laws concerning same-sex marriage and family protection demonstrated they are consistently re-elected. "In fact, these legislators are re-elected no matter what party they represent or if they changed their vote from opposing to supporting marriage equality. Even better, legislators who run for higher office win after voting in favor of marriage for same-sex couples." The study can be downloaded (as a PDF file) here or read online here.
(Card from Stella Marrs.)









The traveling contemporary art exhibition called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet is a groundbreaking collaboration between museums, artists, and conservationists to bring attention and protection to eight World Heritage sites: Komodo National Park, Indonesia; El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, Mexico; Southeast Atlantic Forest Reserves, Brazil; Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas, China; the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador; iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa; Mount Kenya National Park, Kenya; and Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, which straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. The five-year collaboration is between the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, and the environmental organization Rare. Read about what the artists did at these sites at Human/Nature in Orion Magazine online.
(HDR photo of Devils Peak from WebEcoist.)