Nov11

The Session #93: Mendenhall

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The Session #93: Mendenhall

Literature and Libation

(This month’s session comes to us from Brian, Maria, and their RV, Stanley, over at The Roaming Pint. The topic asks us to walk a slightly different path than normal and not talk about “what” beery places we’ve visited, but “why” visiting them is important.)

Enough salmon crowd themselves into the creek that you think you might be able to walk across their silvery backs to the other side. The sockeye slide and bump in an teeming mass of scales, wriggling onward in nonstop reproductive pilgrimage even when the water doesn’t look wide enough for ten of them, never mind a hundred. Tenacious to a fault, those fish.

A short bus ride and a brief hike past black bear warnings deposits you in front of an alien wall of ice; eerie blue glow and otherworldly jagged geometry like features from a Lovecraft fiction. A glacier cuts slow through nature like a cold, sharp blade…

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Nov9

Fake news sites spread ebola hysteria: is there a way to stop them?

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Fake news sites spread ebola hysteria: is there a way to stop them?

Gigaom

Ebola is a scary disease, but not as scary as the stupidity and public panic it can create. That’s why “news” sites like National Report, which reaches millions of people through Facebook, are so infuriating: they make money by fanning hysteria at the time of a crisis.

Here’s a screenshot, for instance, of National Report’s homepage on Monday, four days after a New York doctor was quarantined:

National Report

The story is nonsense, of course, but the website is hoping that it will go viral through [company]Facebook[/company] channels, which will in turn let the owners of National Report make money selling ads.

Unfortunately, the tactic is working. As the Verge reported, millions of people saw or shared earlier versions of the National Report’s ebola “reporting,” including a story about a whole town under quarantine in Texas. That piece of “news” was just as false as the New York story above, but it still…

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Nov9

Hopeful

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Tootlepedal's Blog

Today’s guest picture comes from Gavin, one of my neighbours, who wonders whether having the builders in can have caused this overnight outbreak of toadstools on his lawn.  I would be more worried about what has been taking the great bites out of them.

toadstoolsDropscone came round with some scones in hand to have a cup of coffee this morning but we hadn’t bothered with cycling first as the forty mile an hour gusts and the driving rain had made cycling an unattractive proposition.  In fact it made more or less everything rather gloomy and we are badly in need of a burst of sunshine to cheer us up as we are in a run of very grey days at present.

The wind and rain made bird pictures difficult to come by and I had settled for a chaffinch perching, or rather hanging on for grim death in the plum…

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