Lots of 2’s in our date today. Found this picture of an owl. Can you ID it?
Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash
Deep in the South Pacific, scientists have explored a rare stretch of pristine corals shaped like roses off the coast of Tahiti. The reef is thought to be one of the largest found at such depths and seems untouched by climate change or human activities.
Laetitia Hédouin said she first saw the corals during a recreational dive with a local diving club months earlier.
“When I went there for the first time, I thought, ‘Wow — we need to study that reef. There’s something special about that reef,” said Hédouin, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Moorea, French Polynesia.
What struck Hédouin was that the corals looked healthy and weren’t affected by a bleaching event in 2019. Corals are tiny animals that grow and form reefs in oceans around the world.
Globally, coral reefs have been depleted from overfishing and pollution. Climate change is also harming delicate corals — including those in areas neighboring the newly discovered reef — with severe bleaching caused by warmer waters. Between 2009 and 2018, 14% of the world’s corals were killed, according to a 2020 report by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Project.
The newfound reef, stretching 2 miles (3 kilometers), was studied late last year during a dive expedition supported by UNESCO. Unlike most of the world’s mapped corals, which are found in relatively shallow waters, this one was deeper — between 115 feet (35 meters) to 230 feet (70 meters).
SMcK: Would you dive to see this?
A wonderful read by Beth Allison Barr:
It was early Spring 2021. I picked up an advance reader copy (ARC) of The Making of Biblical Womanhood and walked down the hall.
“Dean Lyon,” I said, knocking on the open door. “I don’t know what is going to happen, but I think you should know what I have written.” Professor of Sociology, Dean of the Graduate School, and Vice Provost at Baylor University, Larry Lyon has been my direct boss since 2018. He took the book from me and read it. Then he preordered copies for everyone in the Graduate School. Then he sent me a youtube link.
“Beth, you’ve got to watch this Designing Women episode,” he said.
I laughed. I was so relieved by his response. Of course I would watch it! I remembered Designing Women from my teenage years. Set in Atlanta in the late 1980s, the storyline revolves around 4 white women and 1 black man who run an interior design business. I’d watched it a few times; I’d even learned the plot of several episodes—thanks to one of my high school friends who never missed it. But I didn’t recognize this particular show. So I looked it up (season 2, episode 20—”How Great Thou Art”), read the description, and hit play on the link.
At first, being reachable all the time felt good. To professionals who started using BlackBerries 20 years ago to conduct business on the go, it registered as a superpower. “They felt like masters of the universe,” Melissa Mazmanian, an informatics professor at UC Irvine who studied the devices’ uptake in the early 2000s, told me. But as more people got mobile devices, responding to messages anytime became the norm among co-workers as well as friends and loved ones. The superpower morphed into an obligation.
This is an evolution that Mazmanian refers to as the “spiral of expectations.” When communication technology makes a new thing (like responding on the go) possible, doing that thing can be a way for people to signal how dedicated they are as workers or family members—and, crucially, not doing that thing can suggest that they aren’t dedicated enough. Now when people feel they haven’t responded sufficiently quickly, they think they owe their correspondent an apology.
This dynamic is not unique to the internet and instant communication. Nineteenth-century letter-writers were constantly apologizing for and explaining their delays when they felt that a socially unacceptable amount of time had passed, according to Jason Farman, a media scholar at the University of Maryland. As an example, he pointed me to a line in an 1863 letter from an Illinois man to his cousin: “I feel it my duty to write to you and I also feel that it is a duty which I have neglected quite long enough, yet I hope I will be forgiven when I explain the matter to you.”
But what’s changed in the past 10 to 20 years, with the mass adoption of email and smartphones, is that the “acceptable” window of response time has gotten much smaller. Someone could conceivably apologize for their delay when responding in the afternoon to an email sent that morning.
Every time you turn on your TV or open a website, you’re bombarded by ads for things that purport to improve your memory. It turns out that one of the best ways to pull that off might be to sleep on it.
Northwestern University professor Ken Paller joined “Morning in America” to talk about how to get good sleep and what it can do for you.
The most elemental part of good sleep is to set up a routine. Go to sleep and get up at roughly the same time every day. Also, watch out for caffeine within a few hours of bedtime, and don’t eat a heavy meal right before sleeping. Make sure your sleeping room is dark and cool, and avoid doing things like leaving the TV on while you sleep.
What it boils down to is valuing your sleep. You value yourself, and sleep is a critical part of keeping yourself healthy, so spend some time and money making sure you have a good sleep environment. (Note: This might involve tossing that 10-year-old pillow and getting something that actually supports your head.)
He’s a coach who is a fan of his shoes, too:
CHICAGO (WLS) -- When 29-year-old Drew Valentine was tapped as Loyola's next head basketball coach, it opened a lot of eyes. He had big shoes to fill, and he's already done so in more ways than one.
Coach Drew's Shoes is a Twitter parody account documenting all things Loyola basketball. But he showed off his actual shoe collection: over 100 pairs of Nikes and Air Jordans that mean something to him.
"These are my favorite shoe of all time," he said, giving ABC7's Dionne Miller a tour of his collection. "These just got re-released, I haven't worn them yet."
Valentine, now 30, is the youngest head coach leading the youngest staff in Division I basketball. Looking that way is part of the job.
"That's what we gotta be," Valentine explained. "We have to present ourselves in a way that shows who we are, and shows our youth, our energy. But we're young, we're fit, we can still get out there on the court so why not dress the part?"
And the Ramblers are winning, with 10 straight victories. They're 6-0 in the valley and back in the top 25 for the first time in two years, maintaining a culture they've all bought into.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — Images circulating on social media purport to show an IRS guideline asking taxpayers to report the value of any property they have stolen each year as income.
The guideline is real.
The Internal Revenue Service’s Publication 17, available on the agency’s website, contains a section on stolen property that may leave readers scratching their heads.
“If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year,” the guideline states.
I watched that episode of Designing Women this week after seeing Dr. Barr tweet about it. The true-to-life dialogue and emotional weight of the show blew me away.
Burrowing owl? We have them at our small county airport here (elevation is 1000 ft).