It's amazing how quickly a forest can grow back on clear-cut ground. I've written here before about a National Seashore in Wisconsin that looks like forest primeval today, but was, less than a century ago, a treeless expanse of small-scale timber, fishing, and stonecutting industry. The same sort of thing happens in New England, where colonial and 19th-century farms, roads, and fences have been allowed to disappear beneath a forested landscape — and to disappear well enough that people often forget they existed, at all. Now, digital archaeology is helping to uncover these sites once again.
Finding old development under modern forest
A chemist invented a fake Frenchman to justify capital L for liters
The International System of Units capitalizes a unit's symbol only when the unit is named for a person, which leaves the liter with a lowercase l that is easy to… READ THE REST
Britain's £36 million peanut farm harvested less than it planted
In 1946, with Britain still on wartime rationing and short of cooking fat, Clement Attlee's government approved a plan to plant peanuts across 3 million acres of Tanganyika, a stretch… READ THE REST
What if the whole planet ran on a single clock?
Sometimes someone proposes removing all time zones and using one clock for the whole planet. Then the time is the same everywhere at the same moment. When the clock shows 08:00 in London, it also shows 08:00 in New York and Beijing. But in New York the sky is dark, as it usually is at 03:00. In China it is late in the afternoon. This idea sounds strange, but many groups already use one clock. Airlines, militaries, the International Space Station, and agencies such as NOAA all use one global clock, UTC. They do this because an error in the calculation between two time zones is dangerous in aviation or on a spacewalk. Arthur C. Clarke suggested the one-clock idea in 1976. An economist and an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University made it part of a proposal to change the calendar. But this system does not remove the problem. Each region still opens its shops, starts its schools, and eats lunch at the UTC hour that matches its daylight. So the "business hours" are 13:00 to 21:00 in one place and 22:00 to 06:00 in another place. This system replaces time-zone offsets with local customs, and those customs do the same work. Also, the date changes in the middle of the afternoon in parts of the Americas and the Pacific. Previously:• Scientists explain our dislike of Daylight Savings Time READ THE REST
Make an old PC feel new again with this $10 Windows 11 Pro deal
Disclosure: Boing Boing earns a commission on purchases made through links in this post. TL;DR: Give your PC a major productivity boost with this Microsoft Windows 11 Pro license, now just… READ THE REST
This refurbished HP ProBook with a 12th Gen Core i5 is down to $439.99
Disclosure: Boing Boing earns a commission on purchases made through links in this post. TL;DR: Save $760 on a Grade A refurbished 2022 HP ProBook 640 G9 with a 12th Gen Intel… READ THE REST
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