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The event, staged as part of an agricultural exhibition on Moscow’s outskirts, is set up like soccer, with two teams of five piglets. Instead of goals, the teams try to move the ball into painted, half-circles located at the pen’s corners. To move things along, the ball is slathered in mashed carrots.

Cheered on by dozens spectators, the winning piglets got a trophy for their efforts — and a trough of mashed carrots.

My only question is: how was the audience of the world’s first game of pig-ball so small? Dozens?

(BoGlo/AP: ” ‘Pig-ball’ soccer match staged in Russia.” [June 5, 2005])

Google unveils Google Earth, previously known as Keyhole, for free. Of course you can upgrade to get additional features, etc. etc., but the free product itself is fairly impressive. Essentially, Google Earth is a program that combines the standard Google Map functions with satellite view and a couple other goodies (like 3-D rendering of buildings and terrain, view perspective, distance measuring, and more).

Or, if the earth isn’t enough for you, explore space in 3-D with NASA’s Planet Quest. View the solar system and beyond, with all sorts of nifty tricks at your fingertips.

The United States has just had its first official case of home-grown mad cow disease. “Just had” in this case corresponding to seven months ago but, well, you know.

While it took seven months from the first suspicion of this lone mad cow to positively identify its condition, at least it wasn’t entered into the nation’s food supply.

US Ag. Secretary Mike Johanns sez:

“The fact that this animal was blocked from entering the food supply tells us that our safeguards are working exactly as they should.”

In reality, we know it proves virtually nothing. By analogy, a security system that prevents one robber from looting a museum is working to perfection. Which would be the case if only one attempt was made to rob the museum, but not if multiple attempts were made by multiple robbers. Could it be working to perfection? Sure. Could it be working to abomination? Sure.

The fact of Johanns making claim of the US Mad Cow net’s working to perfection does nothing but make me suspicious, not of ill-will so much as of incompetence.

Stay tuned.

(AP: “Feds: Safeguards Working Amid Mad Cow Case,” by Libby Quaid [June 25, 2005])

Using a formula that relies mostly on the floor count of a cities skyscrapers, skycrapers.com (AKA Emporis) ranks the cities of the world by the impressiveness of their skylines. Fun, utterly useless and irrelevant (and also debatable) trivia.

(Pittsburgh weighs in at #60, Philly at #35, and Boston at #43 [nestled in between Montréal and Calgary].)

…is a new, open-access journal available online. Only online, in fact.

In its own words,

Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy is a new peer-reviewed, open access journal that provides a platform for the dissemination of new practices and for dialogue emerging out of the field of sustainability.

I hope to see some interesting—and, ideally, useful—things come out of this venture.

(via Waterboro Library Blog)

This is not new news, nor is it relevant in the sense of being anything anyone needs to worry about, but it certainly is curious:

Seattle police launched an investigation on Friday to determine how a patient undergoing emergency heart surgery caught on fire at a local hospital in 2003.

The male patient, who was not identified, went up in flames after alcohol poured on his skin was ignited by a surgical instrument.

(Reuters: “Man Catches Fire During Surgery.” [April 18, 2005]; the original Reuters link is no longer available, though you can find postings of the article by searching for it.)

Local Harvest lets you find organic food grown close to where you live. Browse/search for farmers’ markets, restaurants, farms, co-ops, and the like.

• Maggots. They may not ever be the life of the party, but now they are qualified by the FDA for use in medical treatments. (via BoingBoing)
• Time travel. …is now okay. Which is to say that researchers have finally gotten around to speculating that, in the event of time travel at any point in the (ahem) future becoming possible, you won’t be able to alter the past. The ‘new’ ideas apparently conform to actual laws of quantum mechanics; more importantly, however, they simply make good sense. (BBC News)
• How to be smart. New Scientist has a few suggestions. (Eleven of them, in fact.) My favorite would either have to be sleep or casual walking, which both do their bit towards tweaking your smarts.

Check the facts on power generation with EPA’s eGRID database. Get info on regions, states, individual power plants, etc. Find out the mix of power generation (i.e., wind power [ha!] vs. nuclear vs. coal, etc.). Find out how dirty the plants are. And all sorts of other useful info.

(via Gristmill)

The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler is as proficient a thinker as he is a writer, so it comes as a surprise that his newest book doesn’t quite work. The topic—society’s reliance on oil, and the problem of what happens when it runs out—is certainly an important one. Part of the problem undoubtedly stems from the fact that the book covers massive grounds; from time to time, Kunstler steps out of his field of hsi realm of knowledge, sapping credibility from the entire book. Generally speaking, he does well when the issues are more down-to-earth and less speculative. Speculation needs to be done, but Kunstler somehow doesn’t manage to pull it off. Still, this is an important book, with important ideas worth discussing.

Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is excellent, as always. Dance Dance Dance is possibly a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, and one of the most entertaining aspects of it (though there are many) is how the main character offhandedly refers to all that happend in the previous book. There are about five or six consecutive paragraphs in the novel that disappoint, so on the whole you will not be disappointed. Murakami manages, yet again, to remain both morbid and optimistic. How, I don’t know.

The idea is that additional stops—for, say, coffee—tacked onto already painful commutes translate into even more gridlocked traffic and a powerfully negative ecological impact. The idea’s originator is one travel behavioral analyst by the name of Nancy McGuckin, who based her ideas on a survey of 70,000 households. It might not actually make that much of a difference—there’s possibly some debate—but, you know, it could.

(WaPo: “Pursuit of a Grande Latte May Be Stirring Up Gridlock,” by Katherine Shaver [April 18, 2005]; via PLANETizen)

Execution by lethal injection may not be the painless procedure most Americans assume, say researchers from Florida and Virginia.

They examined post-mortem blood levels of anaesthetic and believe that prisoners may have been capable of feeling pain in almost 90% of cases and may have actually been conscious when they were put to death in over 40% of cases.

My question is, do most Americans assume being put to death is a painless procedure? I honestly have no idea, and in a cursory search I was not able to find anything relating specifically to the pain aspect of the death penalty; it seems, however, that pain is probably not first and foremost on people’s minds. It’s probably something they simply do not think about. Is my guess. The death penalty involves killing, and in anything involving killing, we try not to think too hard (e.g., factory farming, wars abroad, genocide, etc.).

Will it make any difference if we have concrete knowledge of the pain caused by lethal injection?

(New Scientist: “Execution by injection far from painless,” by Alison Motluk [April 14, 2005])

PostSecret collects people’s secrets. People with secrets, who seem to be curiously artistic. Have secrets? Mail in yours today!

It should come as no surprise that bats tend to be poor runners. What should come as a surprise, however, is how well vampire bats can run.

Riskin started out studying how bats of various species move across a surface, which they generally do badly. The least effective of them “just smack their wings against the ground and freak out,” never successfully taking a step, he says.

Other species can shuffle. “The typical bat can get from A to B, but it looks really clumsy while it does it,” Riskin says.

In contrast, he ranks the ground-traversing skills of vampire bats as “off-the-scale good.” The 8-centimeter-long animals move nimbly in any direction, easily making the transition from ground to air movement. They can jump into flight from a standing start in some 30 milliseconds.

(via BoingBoing; Science News: “Vampires Run: Bats on treadmills show high-speed gait,” by Susan Milius [March 19, 2005])

Via the Waterboro Public Library, I stumbled across a blog called, appropriately enough, So what can I do? The site explores ways to enact social change. A lot of them, in fact. A lot of the tips seem to be the ‘easy’ sorts of things of which I’m endlessly suspicious—I tend to be skeptical of the social-change-can-be-achieved-through-easy-feel-good-activities school of thought—but it might be the type of thing you’re looking for, in which case, enjoy.