The Danish Poet (Short) - Torill Kove - 2006

Winner of the 2007 Oscar® for Best Short Animation Can we trace the chain of events that leads to our own birth? Is our existence just coincidence? Do little things matter? The narrator (Liv Ullmann) of The Danish Poet considers these questions as we follow Kasper, a poet whose creative well has run dry, on a holiday to Norway to meet the famous writer, Sigrid Undset. As Kasper's quest for inspiration unfolds, it appears that a spell of bad weather, an angry dog, slippery barn planks, a careless postman, hungry goats and other seemingly unrelated factors might play important roles in the big scheme of things after all. Directed by Torill Kove - 2006

Don’t Show Crying Kids During March Madness Show crying band members instead.

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How South Africa’s Wine Industry Plans to Survive the Water Crisis - Brendan Lowe

From the article:

South Africa’s Cape Winelands are limping through the third year of a drought whose severity is estimated to occur only once in 311 years. Experts expect vineyard yields in parts of the region to be reduced by as much as 50 percent. But at Paul Cluver Wines, a 2,000-hectare estate in the Elgin Valley, about 75 kilometers southeast of Cape Town, where about half as much rain fell between 2015 and 2017 as between 2012 and 2014, the yield is increasing.

Cluver Wines is also one of 292 grape-growing farms that monitor their irrigation by means of FruitLook, a satellite-based tracking service provided to area farmers for free by the Western Cape Provincial Department of Agriculture. Each week, farmers can log on to a website and see the amount of evapotranspiration, biomass growth, and seven other data points for each pixel of their land, which represents 20 by 20 meters.

“The main angle of [the service] is to increase what we refer to as water-use efficiency,” said André Roux, a drought and water specialist in the Western Cape Government’s Department of the Premier. “The general feeling is that [we’ve seen] 10 to 20 percent water savings. Some farmers indicate [that they’ve had] up to 30 percent water savings.”

As a result of its multifaceted approach, Cluver is not suffering as much as many other wineries.

“It’s like building a bridge—you have to build it for the 100-year flood,” says Cluver. “If you build it for the 10-year flood, it’s going to wash away. If your water use doesn’t take into account the 100-year drought, then you’re going to have a problem.”

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One Town, Four Elements - Tom Scott

There’s a small town in Sweden that has not one, not two, not three, but four elements named after it. Those elements–yttrium(Y), terbium (Tb), erbium (Er), and ytterbium (Yb)–were discovered by part-time chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius in the gadolinite, a black stone that’s also referred to as ytterbite, in Ytterby Mine on the Stockholm archipelago. From wikipedia:

In addition, three other lanthanides, holmium (Ho, named after Stockholm), thulium (Tm, named after Thule, a mythic analog of Scandinavia), and gadolinium (Gd, after the chemist Johan Gadolin) can trace their discovery to the same quarry making it the location with most elements named after it.

In this video, Tom Scott tells the story behind this historical landmark.

My Mom's Favorite Geologic Feature - Transgressive Regressive Cycles

My mom was also a geologist - I have a lot of memories as a kid of her pointing out different features in the land around us, though I didn't appreciate it very much when we would stop somewhere on vacation to pick up rocks.  How times have changed!

What are Transgressive Regressive Cycles?

When a river delivers its load of sediment to the shoreline, wave energy acting on the shoreline winnows out the fine grained mud, leaving the larger grains of sand on and near the beach. Offshore in deeper water, beyond the reach of waves, mud settles on the sea-floor. A lateral change occurs in sediment type and environment, from shoreline sand to offshore mud. Such lateral change in sediment and environment is also observed as vertical changes in ancient strata. The vertical alternation of sandstone and mudstone results from transgression and regression of a shoreline. During shoreline transgression (Figure 1, Time 1 to 4), the shoreline moves towards the land and the sedimentary environments “follow” the shoreline. As transgression continues, perhaps over a distance of tens of kilometers, offshore mud is deposited on top of sandy shoreline sediments. If a sediment core was collected from the deposited sediment, there would be a vertical change from sand at the bottom of the core into mud at the top of the core. Transgression of the shoreline occurs during sea-level rise.

Figure 1. Illustration showing how transgression and regression of the shoreline deposits a transgressive-regressive sedimentary cycle. Such cycles may extend horizontally for several tens of kilometers, and range from a few meters to a few hundred meters in thickness. 

During shoreline regression (Figure 1, Time 5 to 8), the shoreline moves towards the ocean and the sedimentary environments “follow” the shoreline in a seaward direction. Shoreline sand is deposited on top of offshore mud. If a sediment core was collected of these sediments, there would be a vertical change from mud at the bottom of the core into sand at the top of the core. Regression of the shoreline usually occurs during sea-level fall. However, if there is a very high rate of sediment supply to the shoreline, such as occurs at a delta, regression may also occur during sea-level rise.
The sediment deposited during a complete transgression and regression is referred to as a transgressive-regressive cycle. Each transgressive-regressive cycle at Point Upright commences with a thin sandy interval overlain by dark grey mudstone. This is the transgressive “fining-upward” part of the cycle. The mudstone in the middle of the cycle then grades upward into sandstone and this is the regressive “coarsening-upward” part of the cycle.

Shoreline transgression and regression occurs in response to rising and falling sea level, respectively. An important mechanism of sea level change is the alternate melting and freezing of polar continental ice. Water added to the ocean derived from melting ice causes sea-level rise and shoreline transgression. On the other hand, when water is removed from the ocean as polar ice-caps grow, sea-level falls and shoreline regression occurs. The alternate melting and freezing of continental ice is caused by climate variation. The second main mechanism of sea-level change is uplift and subsidence of the sedimentary basin floor arising from plate tectonic movements. Uplift of the basin floor results in shoreline regression, while subsidence results in transgression.

Transgressive-regressive cycles can play an important role in the concentration of Earth resources such as oil, gas, and groundwater. These resources are found in the pore spaces between grains of permeable sandstone. The impermeable mudstone units that surround such sandstones act to trap these resources. Thus oil and gas traps are made up permeable sandstone (termed reservoir rock) and impermeable mudstone (seal rock). In the case of groundwater, the water-bearing sandstone is referred to as an aquifer while the surrounding impermeable mudstones are called aquicludes. In recent years, porous sandstones sealed by mudstone have been investigated as places where human-produced carbon dioxide can be injected and stored.

  

  

How the student activists of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High demonstrate the power of a comprehensive education - Dahlia Lithwick

As someone who received an above average education, I know that everyone deserves the same opportunity.

From the article:

Part of the reason the Stoneman Douglas students have become stars in recent weeks is in no small part due to the fact that they are in a school system that boasts, for example, of a “system-wide debate program that teaches extemporaneous speaking from an early age.” Every middle and high school in the district has a forensics and public-speaking program. Coincidentally, some of the students at Stoneman Douglas had been preparing for debates on the issue of gun control this year, which explains in part why they could speak to the issues from day one.

...

To be sure, the story of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students is a story about the benefits of being a relatively wealthy school district at a moment in which public education is being vivisected without remorse or mercy. But unless you’re drinking the strongest form of Kool-Aid, there is simply no way to construct a conspiracy theory around the fact that students who were being painstakingly taught about drama, media, free speech, political activism, and forensics became the epicenter of the school-violence crisis and handled it creditably. The more likely explanation is that extracurricular education—one that focuses on skills beyond standardized testing and rankings—creates passionate citizens who are spring-loaded for citizenship.

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Color Our Collections (2018) - Biodiversity Heritage Library

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RrNoSFKsPS6D0u47dZ3JtGWOxGujf3W4/view