Seek The Substantial

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1. Ever heard of Salzkammergut? Me neither. It’s a region of mountain and lakes near Salzburg, Austria. And Austria is really a funny country, it stretches from Switzerland to Hungary and it borders those two countries along with Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia (home of Luka).

Photo by Dimitry Anikin on Unsplash

2. This is pretty fantastic, via Maptia, a pictorial of a journey through the Sahara, and really this is train hopping through the Sahara to the ocean.

3. My dream vacation, walking among the red woods in California, via OM.

4. Via NPR, the discovery of Harriet Tubman’s childhood home in Maryland. Tubman’s father was Ben Ross and owned the home.

According to Rutherford, historians believe Ross harvested and sold timber along the property to free Black mariners, who built ships in Baltimore. As Tubman grew up working alongside her father, she learned the roadways and waterways, which later helped her lead dozens of enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad — including some of her own family.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service initiated the search in 2020, when it acquired 2,600 acres of land near Blackwater to preserve the habitat, according to Marcia Pradines, a refuge manager with service. But before stepping onto the property, Pradines said she knew that Ben’s Ten could be located within the 2,600 acres, and initiated plans to search the parcel.

The most inspiring thing to me is that history is all around us and still being discovered. I post things nearly weekly where archeologists are discovering things from hundreds or thousands of years ago and it’s inspiring to know that we’re still earning, that what we know can change and that history is currently being written.

5. Another Beau Miles production, Miles walks around his paddock with his daughter fixing things, picking up trash, eating fruit, and doing nothing.

Photo by Bob Raymakers on Unsplash

1. Ever heard of Sligachan? Me neither. Sligachan is a small settlement on Skye, Scotland, and this is the Sligachan Old Bridge and dates to 1810. Sligachan is also the location of a famous battle, where the Lord of the Isles attacked Skye in 1395, but “William MaLeod met the MacDonalds at Sligachan and drove them back to Loch Eynort.” If you go there there, it’s close to the Bblack Cuillin mountains and there’s a hotel and a microbrewery. That sounds pretty awesome.

Photo by Agnieszka Mordaunt on Unsplash

2. Via Outside Online’s Paul Kvinta, the story of a type of falcon that appeared to be incredibly intelligent and picked on the crew of Charles Darwin while visiting the Falkland Islands.

The book is most compelling with Meiburg on the ground in these difficult places, discovering consistently fascinating caracara behavior. Deep in the rainforest of Guyana, he finds red-throated caracaras who survive primarily by eating wasp larva. The birds have deduced that if they dive-bomb wasp nests as aggressively as possible, the shocked residents will choose flight over fight. In the Chilean altiplano above 12,000 feet, Meiburg spends one of the coldest nights of his life in a sleeping bag on the edge of a salt lagoon, staking out mountain caracaras known for working in groups to flip over heavy flat stones in search of edible creatures.

3. The story of a couple who found a baby on a subway and ended up adopting that baby. The interesting thing about all of this is that the couple is two men, Danny and Pete, Danny found the baby wrapped in a sweatshirt with the umbilical cord still intact. It is amazing how life happens in front of us and how things happen to us.

“I had not had thoughts of adopting,” says Danny, “but at the same time, I could not stop thinking that… I did feel connected, I felt like this was not even an opportunity, it was a gift, and how can you say no to this gift.”

That baby is named Kevin and Kevin is in college studying computer science and mathematics.

4. Via the Associated Press, a handful of coins in Rhode Island led the the story of the very first worldwide manhunt, Captain Henry Every.

A handful of coins unearthed from a pick-your-own-fruit orchard in rural Rhode Island and other random corners of New England may help solve one of the planet’s oldest cold cases.

The villain in this tale: a murderous English pirate who became the world’s most-wanted criminal after plundering a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims home to India from Mecca, then eluded capture by posing as a slave trader.

“It’s a new history of a nearly perfect crime,” said Jim Bailey, an amateur historian and metal detectorist who found the first intact 17th-century Arabian coin in a meadow in Middletown.

That ancient pocket change — among the oldest ever found in North America — could explain how pirate Capt. Henry Every vanished into the wind.

On Sept. 7, 1695, the pirate ship Fancy, commanded by Every, ambushed and captured the Ganj-i-Sawai, a royal vessel owned by Indian emperor Aurangzeb, then one of the world’s most powerful men. Aboard were not only the worshipers returning from their pilgrimage, but tens of millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver.

What followed was one of the most lucrative and heinous robberies of all time.

5. This New York Times article about these tiny subatomic particles that are disobeying the laws of physics is getting a ton of play this week because they’ve just discovered it. I’m reading this while finishing up the 5th book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Mostly Harmless, and the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash.

The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash (WSOGMM) is the sum total of all the different ways that exists of looking at things, or more specifically, all the different probabilities that exist through which you could look at things.

The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash is a metaphor created to help people better understand a part of the complex concepts presented by the complicated web of probabilities and possibilities (parallel universes, one could say) presented by creation.

The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash, one could say, should be viewed as a plate of pie, or as a large tank of water. You could slice it and divide it up any way you’d like, and you’ll almost always find a way of looking at things somewhere in probability (a parallel universe) that somebody will find familiar.

It should be noted that the idea of the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash supersedes the very idea of parallel universes, and that the term is used in the above article only because it provides a comfortable thing with which one can equate, and better understand, the WSOGMM.

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1. Ever heard of Picos de Europa? Me neither. Affectionately known as the Peaks of Europe, this is a mountain range in the Cantabrian Mountains in northern Spain. In fact, it is the northern most part of Spain, basically the ocean on the other side.

Photo by Antonio Rull on Unsplash

2. Hakai Magazine on the Indegenous women of the Pacific Northwest who had a pack of small white cogs that they would use the fur basically as a wool. Not once in my life would I have ever thought about using dog’s fur as a wool. As an aside, the dogs were basically large Pomeranians

3. Via The Radavist, a father and his daughter take a trip bikepacking the Monumental Loop in New Mexico, the daughter old enough to about to begin graduate school. This link is for my brother who is a new father and will hopefully look forward to a similar trip with his daughter 20 some odd years from now.

4. One of my favorite YouTubers, Beau Miles, walked 90 kilometers to work to give a speech. Just the clothes on his back and a pair of shoes. I run on the highway sometimes and am always amazed by what I see. A few weeks ago, I saw a pair of sunglasses, money, lots of trash, and a dead goat in an old feedbag that someone didn’t want to take the time to bury.

5. Well, I’ve signed up for another ultramarathon, set to be raced on April 17h. I don’t know if I’m ready for it, but I signed up nonetheless. I figure I only have so many of these left in me. In the spirit of that, via SB Nation the story of the original marathoner Pheidippides.

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1. Ever heard of Morskie Oko? Me neither. It’s a lake in Poland and it means “Eye of the Sea” and it is the largest and 4th deepest lake in the Tatra Mountain range (we’re saving the Tatra Mountains for another day). Morskie Oko is nearly at the most southern end of Poland, almost right on the Slovakia border. It has honestly been a while since I’ve looked at a map of Eastern Europe and it’s good to look at how Czechia, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Poland are all settled.

Photo by Greg Trowman on Unsplash

2. Via the Guardian, Douglas Adams’ note to himself about writing and this hits close to home because I’m about 100 pages from finishing all 5 of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I know how people can sometimes feel about sci-fy, but I wouldn’t classify these books as that, but they are, and they are absolutely foreshadowing of the world that we live in today and will likely be in 100 years. The imagination involved with writing these books are just on another level.

Forget about the worry, just press on. Don’t be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don’t grain at them. Give yourself time you can come back and do it again in the light.

3. This is my annual reminder to give your old running shoes, or really just any shoes, to Soles 4 Souls. You can print off a UPS packing slip and ship them for free. These shoes are given to impoverished people who then sell them and make a living. I’ve bookmarked Soles 4 Souls and send off shoes regularly because I’ve got kids and I tend to go through running shoes. It’s such an easy way to make someone’s life better.

4. The New Yorker on a small bookstore’s fight against the price of books and why buying books locally helps a community so much (the jobs, the business, and everything else).

5. Via Outside Online, when Covid hit, the Galapagos Island’s shifted to bartering when the tourism dollars dried up.

During the strict 11-week lockdown that began in March, the majority of the 30,000 residents entered into a barter system. Fruit was traded for meat; milk for English lessons. Clothes were handed down, not just within families but through the community. At one point, Solís swapped 50 oranges for some dental work. Elsewhere, Brett and Maria Peters, the affable owners of Galápagos Deli in Puerto Ayora, traded produce they couldn’t use in their restaurant for houseplants to decorate their new home. Nature guide Lola Villacreses, realizing she wasn’t going to be aboard any cruise ships for the foreseeable future, did a crash course online and began growing fruits and vegetables on her smallholding in the fertile Santa Cruz Highlands. During my two-month stay, whenever I bumped into her around Puerto Ayora, she gave me a bucket of tomatoes. 

“Things have been changing very fast. All the money used to be in the town,” said Matias Espinosa, a dive master and naturalist on Santa Cruz whose businesses had been crippled by the pandemic. “Covid froze all our enterprise. Instead, we have this trading now, so these farmers are the kings of the island.”

1. I’m pretty sure that I’ve featured Snowdonia before, but this was a fun video, a son who said that he wanted to run his very own ultra marathon in a way with his father, invented an ultra by running up and down 12 Hewitts, which are essentially mountains in England, Wales, and Ireland.

Photo by Josh Kirk on Unsplash

2. Things I’ve never heard of –> the Spiro Mounds of Oklahoma. The Spir Mounds of Oklahoma and Arkansas were part of a city from 800 A.D. to 1450 A.D with a population of 10,000 of the Spiro people and was “the single most powerful group ever to exist” in the U.S.

“What truly makes Spiro so unique is that not only is it the most object-laden mound ever discovered in North America, but it also included objects from around the known world [in North America],” says Eric Singleton, a National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum curator who spearheaded the new exhibit.

“There is copper from Lake Superior, engraved shell cups from the Florida Keys, beads from the Sea of Cortez, items from the Valley of Mexico, and those are just a few of the items,” continues Singleton. “They invited people from around the known world to bring their holy objects to Spiro to be ritualistically acted upon.”

3. Runner’s World’s Keith Eckert as told to Andrew Dawson on Eckert attempting to run the Iditarod Trail, running 350 or 1,000 miles in zero degree temperature.

4. One of the things I read weekly is something called Farnum Street and Shane Parrish wrote about the 5 ways we make bad decisions, and this has really stuck with me.

1. We’re unintentionally stupid.
2. We solve the wrong problem.
3. We use incorrect or insufficient information.
4. We fail to learn.
5. We focus on optics over outcomes.

I have kind of take these with me because I’m wrong often and I think about what category I’ve fallen into, if one at all.

5. I can’t remember where I saw this term, but it was something that I had not considered, “witness trees”. Trees that are in famous places that witness history and their importance. The Smithsonian has 5 witness trees. I’d also add that I’ve got five oak trees on my lot that are no less than 100 years old. They are massive and they won’t be here some day, but I cannot fathom the history that they’ve seen, even if that history is not necessarily significant.

Bonus: I ran across this phrase from a Good Beer Hunting article, but the phrasing of it is fantastic. This is from the Simpsons, Marge is telling Homer something about getting drunk and says, “drunk as a poet on payday”. I’d tell you that the phrasing of that is beautiful to me and I don’t even know why. Feel free to use that as needed.

1. Ever heard of Triglav National Park? Me neither. It’s a park in the Land of Luka, Slovenia, and for me there are so many countries in that former Eastern European Block that are probably absolutely amazing. Part of this park is the Juliana Trail, which is 167 miles and circles the national park.

Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash

As the article notes, there’s no need to bring a tent because each stage ends in a village or town where you can sleep.

For history buffs, there are seven major castles and fortresses along the Juliana, with several others close by. Among the most notable are the 1,000-year-old Grad Kamen castle, north of Begunje village in stage three, and Kluze Fort, which defended against Napoleon’s army in the 18th century, en route to Log pod Mangartom on stage 14. On stage eight, at Vrh Bace, a mountain pass north of Podbrdo, the Juliana crosses the Vallo Alpino, where defensive bunkers were built along Italy’s northern border before World War II. Here hikers can explore a labyrinth of abandoned passageways and tunnels honeycombing the mountain ramparts (no fees here—just scramble off the path a bit to find the entrances). The trail also travels a large portion of the Isonzo (Soca) Front in the west, which saw a dozen bloody battles between Austro-Hungarian and Italian forces in the First World War (much of Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms is set along the Soca). As a result, a host of impressive museums dot villages and towns along the trail. Of note is the award-winning history museum in Kobarid, the stopping point after stage 12.

Photo by Ignat Arapov on Unsplash

2. This is really cool. From Good Beer Hunting, the Carillon Brewing Company in Ohio is not just your normal brewery, but basically this is a period brewery, showing how beer was made in 1850 using, “an entirely gravity-fed, wood-fired, oak-fermented brewing system, Spears and Lauro are breathing life into methods of producing beer that fell out of use a century and a half ago. And perhaps more importantly, they’re making good beer in the process.” No stainless steel. Imagine a brewery without stainless steel.

3. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to change people’s minds, or at the very least have a productive conversation. From the Harvard Business Journal’s Adam Grant and this is pretty terrific. Regardless of where you land on whatever side, we could all take a step back and probably not be so confident in our opinions because we probably don’t really know how the sausage gets made.

4. Via EW, Anthony Bourdain’s posthumous guidebook World Travel as written by Christopher Bourdain.

5. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening here, but this is Chad Johnson (Ocho Cinco) and some other former NFL players. Johnson is telling this guy that he’s eating way too much healthy food, that when you eat bad food, your body rejects it. I don’t know if it’s me, or me getting older, but absolutely yes this happens to me. If I go out and eat friend food I simply don’t feel well the next day. I think I’ve heard where Johnson eats Big Macs like they are going out of style, but I’m guessing that his body and my body processing that food would have quite different results. Regardless, this doesn’t make him wrong, it makes him right on a lot of levels. My body does reject this stuff.

“listen to me I’d never steer you wrong” pic.twitter.com/CSqvilyflu

— Chad Johnson (@ochocinco) March 4, 2021

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

1. Ever heard of the Ordesa Valley in Spain? me neither. It’s absolutely amazing, a huge valley that’s part of the Pyrenees. This is a statement from Wikipedia: “It was first discovered in 1820, but not mapped in detail until approximately the 1920s.” I don’t see how this is even possible, to not be discovered until 1820 and not mapped until 1920?

Photo by Marco Montero Pisani on Unsplash

Photo by Marco Montero Pisani on Unsplash

2. This is one of those things where you didn’t know that it existed, but it does. There’s this whole brewery district in Seattle called Ballard Brewery District, via Good Beer Hunting, that looks absolutely amazing. So many breweries per square foot, you could spend an afternoon there and barely be able to walk straight out of there.

3. Sometimes we (Americans) don’t get how popular soccer actually is and this article from The Guardian is really terrific how Pele became a myth, which is part of a Netflix documentary, where the last quote from the trailer:

I think the greatest gift you receive in victory isn’t the trophy. It is the relief.

Imagine the pressure to win or succeed being that overwhelming.

4. From Aeon’s Sam Dresser on the ethical life, what does choosing the right thing to do actually mean and how do you make that choice?

In contrast, a good deal of moral theory prioritises one of these practical perspectives and downplays the moral relevance of the others by ruling them out as providing genuine access to moral reasons. This has the effect of allowing any responsiveness to other classes of normative claims to be categorised as irrational or evil. For example, classical utilitarianism enjoins us to think of everyone – ourselves included – as an equal unit in the moral calculus that aims to maximise the satisfaction of legitimate desires and preferences. This is a third-person way of approaching the question of what it’s best to do, since each of us is to be treated as an equal moral unit, subjected to the same categories and assessments as any other. Similarly, Kantian deontology prioritises the third-person universality of a reason understood to be identically present in all agents. In each case, the good life is defined in terms of your ability to submit yourself to universally shared moral categories – to think of yourself in third-person moral terms.

There is something right about this approach. It has the compelling result of putting pressure on us to do more for strangers in distress than we tend to do because we’re so often caught up in our own troubles, or those of loved ones. But it also gives rise to objections that ultimately derive from a recognition of the equal value and importance of the first- and second-person perspectives in our moral lives. For example, critics of Kantian deontology point out that respect for a universal reason that manifests in every other human is hardly the same thing as loving concern for this particular person. Critics of utilitarianism, meanwhile, have pointed out that maximising ‘total expected utility’ – ie, getting as large a ‘quantity’ of good results as possible – might require us to, say, harvest someone’s organs when she arrives for a routine check-up at the doctor’s office, since five of her healthy organs could save the lives of five critically ill people. Allowing her to keep her organs will save only a measly one. Though utilitarians and deontologists have come up with many ingenious responses to such objections, these worries follow naturally from a third-person practical perspective, in which each person is viewed as an interchangeable and largely anonymous unit of general rationality or calculable outcomes for the world at large.

5. From Eater, the history of African American brewers and the idea African American culture not embracing craft beer despite having a long history of brewing beer.

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1. Ever heard of Mount Tamalpais? Me neither. It’s in Marin County, California, and contained in the Mount Tamalpais State Park, Muir Woods National Monument, and is right next to the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. I was a bit fascinated by the name, Tamalpais, which means “west hill” from the Coast Miwok language.

Photo by Levi Bare on Unsplash

2. This is great! Via Outside Online, the National Park Service has released apps for all 423 national parks, Android and Apple, which include maps (can download for offline use), lodging, restaurant hours within the park, and audio tours.

3. This is so neat, via University of Alaska Fairbanks, blue glass beads that were made in Venice were found in Alaska, and they also pre-date Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the America’s.

How did the beads — found in no other archaeological site west of the Rockies — make their way from the canals of Venice to a plateau in the Brooks Range?

In the 1400s, craftsmen in the city-state of Venice traded with people throughout Asia. The beads might have traveled in a horse-drawn cart along the Silk Road eastward toward China. From there, “these early Venetian beads found their way into the aboriginal hinterlands, with some moving to the Russian Far East,” the authors wrote in their recent paper.

After that great journey, a trader may have tucked the beads into his kayak on the western shore of the Bering Sea. He then dipped his paddle and made passage to the New World, today’s Alaska. The crossing of Bering Strait at its narrowest is about 52 miles of open ocean.

Kunz and Mills think the beads found at Punyik Point and two other sites probably arrived at an ancient trading center called Shashalik, north of today’s Kotzebue and just west of Noatak. From there, people on foot, maybe traveling with a few dogs, carried them deep into the Brooks Range.

Someone at Punyik Point might have strung the exotic blue beads in a necklace, which they lost or left behind as they walked away. The tiny blue spheres rested for centuries at the entrance to an underground house north of the Arctic Circle, waiting to be found.

4. Via Smithsonian Magazine, archaeologists from Egypt found a 5,000 year old large-scale brewery.

The brewery probably dates to the time of King Narmer, who ruled ancient Egypt around 3150 B.C., reports Agence France-Presse. It houses eight large areas for beer production, each containing about 40 earthenware pots arranged in rows. Workers would have heated grains and water in the vats, which were held in place by clay levers.

Evidence found at the archaeological site—located in the southern Egyptian city of Sohag—suggests that the beer was used in sacrificial rites. The brewery “may have been built specifically to supply the royal rituals that were taking place inside the funeral facilities of the kings of Egypt,” says joint expedition leader Matthew Adams, an archaeologist at New York University, in a statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

5. More history stuff. Via National Geographic, Stonehenge may not have been an original site, but rather part of an older site in Wales:

Now, a new study published in the journal Antiquity offers another plot twist in the saga of Stonehenge: The World Heritage site may not be an original creation. A team of researchers has found a possible precursor to Stonehenge in the remains of an even older monument in Wales.

The megalithic circle at the Welsh site of Waun Mawn has comparable dimensions to Stonehenge, is similarly aligned with the sun, and appears to feature some of the same building materials. But unlike Stonehenge it has few surviving stones. The research team speculates that the builders of Waun Mawn dismantled it five millennia ago and hauled some of its three-ton bluestones 175 miles east to the Salisbury Plain—an extremely arduous (and, on a practical level, unnecessary) endeavor. So why do it?

The end of 2020 ended up being a situation where I was not able to focus on any goals for 2021. I gave it zero thought and I typically always have some goals, especially recently, for the new year. So, rather than rush some goals that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do, I gave it some thought, and now, in the middle of February during a blizzard for the ages in what I hope is the ass-end of a pandemic, I’ve got some goals for the year.

Read of a book of poetry.

It’s been since college that I’ve read a book of poetry. In fact, I tend to stay away from poetry entirely because it’s something that really requires me to think about things that require more brain power than I have available. I’ve chosen a book of poems from my favorite author, Jim Harrison. Harrison wrote three of my favorite books, Dalva, True North, and Returning to Earth. Harrison also wrote a short story called, Legends of the Fall. I’ve chosen Jim Harrison, The Essential Poems edited by Joseph Bednarik. Will let you know how this goes, but it is something that I have to sit with for a while and staring at he words and I think that’s a good thing.

Two minutes of planks every day.

This is ridiculously easy for me because I just do this right after I do push-ups. I simply finish my push-ups and then do some planks and it’s gotten much easier since I first started at the beginning of the year. Doing these after running 15 miles or so? Not really fun.

Take another online class.

One of those things that I’m not sure if this is truly beneficial, but I enjoyed the class that I took last year, the class on Happiness at Yale. This year I’m taking a class at Penn called “Resilience Skills in a Time of Uncertainty“. I try to work on this on Sunday mornings when I have some quiet time. I do think that I want to do a bit more and if you need a place where you can find free online courses, then look no further than Open Culture. A ton of these are on iTunes for those of you who are normally stuck in the car for good stretches and maybe you’re a bit over-podcasted.

Run ultramarathon #2.

This has been the most difficult thing for me to do, but it should be the easiest thing for me to do because I’ve been training for this for 2 years since my last ultramarathon. I promised myself that I would not run another ultramarathon until I went for a yearly physical and got more life insurance. I’m in the process of getting more life insurance and I don’t want to get a physical until I get the insurance done.

I want to run the the 50k at the Coyote Trail Run where I’d take 4 laps around the Cleburne State Park. This is relatively close to my house (like a couple of hours) and would require just one night away, the night before the race and then I could just go home after the race.

But back to the two prerequisites, I like to get the yearly physical done each year, but last year I didn’t get it done because of Covid-19, I didn’t want to go to the doctor unless it was necessary. The life insurance is something that I wanted to do for a while because my life has changed when I got my first term policy. By holding the race as the carrot, I accomplish two things that need to get done. So, I’m waiting to sign up, but I think I should go ahead and sign up so I can get this off of my list of things to do.

I always reserve the idea that goal-setting isn’t something that you should do halfway through the year, but instead should do it during the course of the year. There’s always time to get better, even if it is incrementally.

Photo by Arthur Hickinbotham on Unsplash

1. Ever heard of The Drakensberg? Me neither. The Drakensberg is part of the Great Escarpment, which is in South Africa and essentially runs parallel to the coach, but inland. Basically, there’s this huge drop-off, a few thousand meters (or elevation gain, depending on your point of view) and then there’s a plateau. There’s also these cave paintings called the San rock art that are attributed to the San people who are part of one of the first nations of Southern Africa and date and apparently their Y-chromosome carries some of the oldest Y-chromosomes among people walking the Earth.

Photo by Elin Jonsson on Unsplash

2. Fascinating article from the BBC about the eighth continent of the world, Zealandia (sounds totally made up), that originally included 1.89 million square miles. There’s a ton to unpack here, but the thought is that Zealandia was once above the ocean and an actual eighth continent, part of the evidence (we really don’t know, but it’s fun!) is that the kiwi, which has whiskers and feathers like hair — did you even know that? — has a close relative, the elephant bird and is found in the forests of Madagascar. That’s not exactly close to each other.

The plot thickens with one of New Zealand’s weirdest and most beloved inhabitants, the kiwi – a dumpy, flightless bird with whiskers and hair-like feathers. Oddly, its closest relative is not thought to be the Moa, which is part of the same group – the ratites – and lived on the same island until its extinction 500 years ago, but the even-more giant elephant bird, which stalked the forests of Madagascar until as recently as 800 years ago.

The finding has led scientists to believe that both birds evolved from a common ancestor that lived on Gondwana. It took 130 million years to fully break up, but when it did, it left behind fragments which have since been scattered all across the globe, forming South America, Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, Australia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Subcontinent, and Zealandia.

This, in turn, suggests that at least part of now-submerged Zealandia has remained above sea level the whole time. Except around 25 million years ago the entire continent – even possibly the entirety of New Zealand – is thought to have been plunged underwater. “It was thought that all the plants and animals must have colonised afterwards,” says Sutherland. So what happened?

3. I don’t think that I ever considered this, the idea of a sea floor being a memorial, via Duke.edu. I don’t think that I ever considered a map like this and I don’t think that I ever considered the lives lost that was part of the slave trade from Africa to North and South America. Over 5.5 million from west central Africa is a number that seems astounding and that’s the number that left, but not the number that arrived.

According to the group’s research, more than 12.5 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic on an estimated 40,000 slave-trading voyages between 1519 and 1865. At least 1.8 million perished under horrendous conditions on the two-month voyage and were thrown overboard.

That’s a lot of dead bodies and that’s “at least” meaning that there was probably more.

4. Via NPR, an attorney purchased a building and found a sealed attic with a ton of antique portraits. A real life version of National Treasure.

5. It is nearly Valentine’s Day, so let’s end on that idea, from The Conversation, the six different types of love from ancient Greece: eros, storge, ludus, pragma, mania, and agape. The word “love” is always one of those words that probably doesn’t properly describe the emotion. I’ve always been fascinated with those words that have multiple meanings in another language and for the record, I think I’m all storge, “Storgic types tend to be stable and committed in their relationships. They value companionship, psychological closeness and trust.”