Meanderings, 2 October 2021

Good morning!

Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash

You gotta love this squirrel’s sense of being prepared for anything:

Squirrels are much like humans in that they are capable of forward planning to manage their food stores over a long period of time. However, the cute little mammals aren't capable of real agriculture, nor building silos to store their harvest. Instead, one enterprising little rodent decided to stash its nuts for the winter in the engine bay of a truck, reports the Grand Forks Herald.

North Dakota man Bill Fischer found his Chevrolet Avalanche overflowing with black walnuts after leaving it parked for just four days, according to the Herald. In photos posted to Facebook, Fischer shows off 5-gallon buckets filled to the brim with nuts. Apparently the work of a single industrious red squirrel, every nook and cranny of the engine bay and fenders had been stuffed full. Fischer ended up removing the entire front clip of the vehicle in order to clear everything out.

"I had to pull the fenders off and clean out all the walnuts out," Fischer told the Herald, noting that his efforts were not 100% successful. "I have some rolling around the frame, rails wells as well, that I can't get at," Fischer added.

 One photo posted by Fischer shows he was able to fill a total of seven buckets with the nuts pulled out of the truck. With each bucket apparently averaging 26 lbs, that one enterprising squirrel apparently managed to harvest well over 150lbs of walnuts for the winter. It certainly would have made for good eating. Fischer later stated he had 42 gallons of nuts available, "Naturally grown" and "all hand (paw) picked by a squirrel." The Drive reached out to Fischer who confirmed that he was able to get the job finished and the Chevy back on the road. 

I like this spot outside Corinth:

The Corinth Canal, one of the most important infrastructure works of the modern Greek State, was inaugurated on July 25, 1893. Many believe that the canal changed maritime activity forever.

Also known as the Isthmus of Corinth, the canal connects the Ionian and the Aegean making the passage of cargo and passenger ships between the two seas much quicker.

Construction works started in 1882 and the canal was inaugurated by then Prime Minister Sotirios Sotiropoulos, but it was envisioned and completed by his predecessor Harilaos Trikoupis whose term had ended only two months before that date.

Before the canal was built, ships from the Ionian Sea with destination Athens or the Aegean islands had to go around the Peloponnese peninsula and vice versa.

After 1893, cargo and passenger ships would only have to cross the Corinth Canal and reach their destination much quicker.

Wow:

In 2019, 19 of Facebook’s top 20 pages for American Christians were run by Eastern European troll farms overseas, internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal. The data shows the vast spread of Facebook misinformation is largely powered by coordinated efforts among foreign professionals working together to spread provocative content in the U.S.

These groups, based largely in Kosovo and Macedonia, have been particularly successful when it comes to targeting American Christians. Though they split their efforts among multiple pages, they were mostly operated by the same groups. Collectively, their Christian Facebook pages reach about 75 million users a month — an audience 20 times the size of the next largest Christian Facebook page.

For the most part, the people who saw and engaged with these posts didn’t actually “like” the pages they’re coming from. Facebook’s engagement-hungry algorithm simply shipped them what it “thought” they want to see. Internal studies revealed that divisive posts are more likely to reach a big audience, and troll farms use that to their advantage, spreading provocative misinformation that generates a bigger response to spread their online reach.

The Facebook study was conducted in the lead up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and found that these troll farms were targeting the same audience that Russia attempted to manipulate in 2016 with their own Facebook misinformation campaign. Though Facebook was aware of the troll farms and their manipulation of Americans in 2016, they did little to address the issue.

“Our platform has given the largest voice in the Christian American community to a handful of bad actors, who, based on their media production practices, have never been to church,” wrote the report’s author, Jeff Allen, who used to be a senior-level data scientist at Facebook.

The buzz:

All summer long, swaths of wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) quake in the presence of thousands of native bumble bee wings beating away. These pollination dynamos use a technique called buzz pollination, vibrating their bodies to trigger nearby flowers to release pollen. At the Lake County Forest Preserves in northern Illinois, a similar buzz of excitement arrived in summer 2020 when staff spotted the federally endangered rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) at Greenbelt in North Chicago.

Fast forward to summer 2021. The hum continues to reverberate after multiple sightings of this keystone species were documented across the county from Flint Creek to Wadsworth Savanna in Wadsworth. While summer’s the height of hive activity, the shoulder seasons—usually defined as May, June, September and October—might be key to the success of the rusty patched bumble bee. This is partly due to the timing, or phenology, of the species’ lifecycle. It’s one of the first bees to emerge in spring and the last to enter hibernation in fall.

The birds:

If you’re like me, you’re probably easily fed up with the weather forecast. It’s often wrong or shows me what I don’t want to see.

I’m here to tell you that there’s a better forecast out there — a forecast for birds.

Called BirdCast, the forecast provides a three-day outlook of how many birds will be flying overhead across the country — and where. After sunset on Tuesday, for example, BirdCast estimates that 74,000 of them will journey through the skies of New York City. The tool, which was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a handful of other universities, also shows where large numbers of birds are cruising through the sky in close to real time. In other words: It’s radar, but for birds.

This kind of predictive technology is especially useful as fall migration nears its peak in North America. Each autumn, billions of migratory birds travel south in search of food and warmer weather, some flying several thousand miles. The famous Arctic tern makes an epic journey of more than 12,000 miles from the Arctic to Antarctica — a distance that surpasses the world’s longest nonstop commercial flight.

Why don’t gun control measures pass? Gun owners, not the NRA (so much):

Even so, Democratic leaders can’t seem to pass the gun policies they want.

And it isn’t because of the filibuster, either. The Democrats can’t get bare majorities to support their top gun priorities. They haven’t passed an assault-weapons ban since retaking the House in 2018. They’re unlikely to pass one or even bring it up for a vote before the 2022 midterms. And even if it passed the House, it wouldn’t pass the Senate.

The deadlock isn’t the result of the NRA paying off politicians to vote against the wishes of their constituents. It’s much simpler than that: Many people in this country own guns, and millions of them are dedicated voters. And they are what now stand in the way of new gun laws.