Greenhouses of Aremia

This is one of the more extraordinary photos that I've seen in awhile (click on the photo for a full-screen version):

Here is a satellite image of the area: "An estimated 20,000 hecatres of extra-early market produce is grown in greenhouses in the Campo de Dalías, and it accounts for over $1.5 billion in economic activity."

P.S. "I just found my cane"

This is great:

Later on this mystification and ceremoniousness became so much part of him [Proust] that his letters sometimes constitute whole systems of parentheses, and not just in the grammatical sense—letters which despite their infinitely ingenious, flexible composition occasionally call to mind the specimen of a letter writer's handbook: "My dear Madam, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane." Proust was most resourceful in creating complications.

That's from Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Image of Proust."

Bullfighting

This bullfighting video starts out violently with a bull goring a matador (so be warned), but the whole thing is interesting. The matadors move as gracefully as ballerinas, and their uniforms might be the best in all of sports:

Homemade sauerkraut

Sauerkraut is easy to make and only requires vegetables--cabbage and carrots in this case--water, salt, a jar, and some patience. Here's what it looked like after a couple days on my kitchen counter:

Tweeting from orbit

I've been enjoying Astro_Mike's Twitter feed. Mike Massimino was one of the astronauts on the just-concluded shuttle mission.

A couple days ago he wrote:

"From orbit: Flying over the Pacific Ocean at night there were some thunder storms, it is so cool to see lightning go off below the clouds"

Hard not to be a little envious of an experience like that.

Here's a photo set of the mission from the always excellent Big Picture.

Carless in America?

The New York Times is hosting a discussion among a variety of city experts about the possibility of creating more "car-free" communities in the U.S. Witold Rybczynski argues that passing a critical density threshold is key to achieving some measure of carless-ness. It's not enough to create neighborhoods that are sort of densely populated. They need to be substantially more dense than their conventional suburban counterparts:

There are only six American downtown districts that are dense enough to support mass transit, which you need if you’re going to be carless: New York City (Midtown and Downtown), Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco. That’s it. The breaking-point for density and mass transit feasibility seems to be about 50 persons per acre, which means families living in flats and apartments, rather than single-family houses, even row houses. Not necessarily high-rise apartments, but at least walk-ups.

Other contributors to the discussion include: D.J. Waldie, author of “Holy Land;” Dolores Hayden, professor of architecture; Christopher B. Leinberger, real estate developer and author; Alex Marshall, transportation columnist, Governing magazine; J.H. Crawford, author of “Carfree Cities;" Marc Schlossberg, professor of public policy

India's cities

This Wall Street Journal article about megacities in India is filled with interesting facts:

• [The city of] Lucknow has more than 780 slums, overflowing sewage pipes and streets choked by gridlock. Its population of 2.7 million, nearly triple the number in the 1980s, is adding as many as 150,000 new residents a year.
  
• [Lucknow] hasn't completed any major new sewage infrastructure since before the country won independence in 1947. As much as 70% of residents don't have sewage service
  
•  Mayor Dinesh Sharma, a university professor, says his annual budget is $139 million. Some similar-size cities in the U.S. have budgets in the billions. 
  
• India has at least 41 cities with more than one million people, up from 23 two decades ago. A half dozen others will soon join the megacity list.
  
• 70% of the population still lives in the countryside.
  
• India is expected to add 10 million people a year between 2000 and 2030 to its 5,161 cities, according to the United Nations.
  
• The country already has 25 of the world's 100-fastest growing urban areas...That compares with eight in China. 

Read the whole thing!

Briefly, books and baseball

• The Literary Saloon reports that Kazuo Ishiguro has a new book out, "Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall." It's available in Britain now, though it appears that the American edition is not scheduled for publication until September. It's a collection of short stories about music and musicianship. I liked his first three books, but haven't read his most recent four. The Times of London recently profiled Ishiguro in anticipation of the book's release. Last year the Paris Review interviewed Ishiguro.
• Here's Joe Posnanski with some "fun facts" on Royals pitcher Zach Greinke, who is off to a very good start this season.
  

Mental distress in the U.S.

That is a map of mental distress in the U.S. (darker shading indicates more distress), posted at Gene Expression by Razib. Kentucky is the most mentally distressed state, and Hawai'i the least. I wonder what explains the high levels of distress in southwest Wyoming and northwest New Mexico. 

There appears to be a lot going on here, but I'd guess that mental distress correlates strongly with poverty. Here's a map of poverty in the U.S.:

Are pastured eggs more nutritious?

Yes they are, according to Stephen at the excellent Whole Health Source blog: "The reason pastured eggs are so nutritious is that the chickens get to supplement their diets with abundant fresh plants and insects." 

Chickens are not vegetarians; in addition to insects, they will eat almost anything that they can catch, including mice. So even though the "vegetarian feed" that some companies advertise really means "fed no chicken parts," they are unintentionally saying to shoppers, "our chickens are fed an unnatural sub-optimal diet."  

Revisiting the Irish Miracle

A short while ago, I emailed Tyler Cowen and asked him to revisit the "Irish Miracle," and today he posted his response. He mentions "overconfidence" in two of his four points. Read the whole thing. 

Someone actually bought my old digicam

Five years ago I bought a 4 megapixel Canon S410 for a few hundred dollars (I don't remember the exact amount--but it was at least $350). At the time, it was one of the best point-and-shoot cameras on the market and I was satisfied with the quality of the photos it captured. Over the years, however, newer cameras have emerged with image stabilization, more megapixels, greater zoom capacity, and all for much less money. By comparison, the images from my S410 look terrible.

So I decided to buy another point-and-shoot and will probably purchase something like the Canon A1000 for under $200. In the meantime, I also decided to see if my old Canon could fetch anything in the online used camera market, and remarkably someone bought it for about $80. In absolute terms, the depreciation is fairly severe, but in relative consumer tech terms, it's a great price... for the seller. I cannot comprehend why someone would buy that camera (even if it was in great condition) for that price. Art project? Style preference? Scam? Collector's item? Who knows? 

I mean it's true that I did throw in 64 MB and 256 MB cards, but that alone can't explain the buyer's behavior.