It's stormy and blustery where I am. How is it where you are? Still, despite all that, a good day.
First:
"As trees grow, they absorb details about their surroundings into their wood, creating snapshots of the environment through time," says first author Victor Caetano-Andrade, a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. "By combining techniques such as dendrochronology (the study of tree rings), carbon and oxygen isotope analysis, and genetics, we can obtain information about climate and the past human-mediated events in the rainforest."
As trees are some of the most long-lived organisms on the planet -- some tropical species live for up to 600 years -- many of those standing in the rainforest today bore witness to significant changes in human history. When the biological information gathered from living trees is combined with archaeological and historical records of native rainforest societies, we can evaluate, for example, how indigenous communities or foreign invaders managed their local environment or how their actions influenced the recruitment and growth patterns of trees."
A cool piece about using trees as kind of historical archives.
A nice piece about living inside Beethoven's String Quartets, straight through, for a few days. This is interesting: "I recommend completism. It’s a fine antidote to the fragmentation bomb of culture we live in and a chance to encompass an artist in totality." He goes on to say Beethoven is the best for this, but having done something similar once--listening to all of Bach's Cantatas over something like a week--I would invite you to try it with any number of composers' works.
I read Cal Newport's blog because he seems from time to time to suggest interesting questions and concerns about our attachment to technology. Here he explains how he understands his critiques, which he doesn't think of as Luddite but as cautions. I think he's right, both about his own kind of critiques, and also about the legitimacy of those kinds of critiques.
“63 Up,” the ninth installment of Michael Apted’s monumental series tracking the lives of 14 everyday Britons at seven-year intervals, joins its prequels in not even capturing an Oscar nomination. Perhaps that’s because no one quite knows how to categorize it. It’s impossible to imagine anyone replicating its accidental audacity, which every few years requires the same bunch of otherwise unconnected individuals to renew their commitment to do this thing one more time. For more than 50 years.
In light of the Coronoavirus, this seems to me interesting about the complications regarding the Chinese populations' attitudes toward their rulers.
Fresh evidence for what should be our ongoing concern about the middle class:
“Income growth for the middle class is still falling behind both the rich and the poor. To be sure, the bottom quintile started from a much lower base in 1979. We are not suggesting that those at the bottom are doing just fine. However, we are arguing that the middle class has not seen strong income growth relative to other groups.”
Be well, stay dry, and, if you go out in a fierce wind, don't get hit by falling limbs from trees.