Not only did Morenci’s boys defeat Whitmore Lake on Tuesday night, the girls won, too. Dagnabbit, I was addressing papers and missed it.

Girls: Morenci 57, Whitmore Lake 44
Boys: Morenci 60, Whitmore Lake 54

That’s a lot of points for the girls. Fantastic night.

Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education writes about problems faced by many science teachers:

Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class.

Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up.

“Mrs. Brown! My dad says global warming is a hoax!”

Or you come to school one morning and the principal wants to see you because a parent of one of your students has accused you of political bias because you taught what scientists agree about: that the Earth is getting warmer, and human actions have had an important role in this warming.

Or you pick up the newspaper and see that your state legislature is considering a bill that declares that accepted sciences like global warming (and evolution, of course) are “controversial issues” that require “alternatives” to be taught.

Incidents like these have happened in one or more states, and they are likely to continue to happen. Teachers are encountering pushback from many directions as they try to teach global warming and other climate science topics.

Take this link for a very impressive list of occupations from former days. Check out these samples from the criminal division:

boothaler – marauder, plunderer
diver – fig. a pickpocket
fence – one who trades in stolen goods
footpad – one who robs pedestrians
silk-snatcher – one who steals bonnets
stewsman – probably a brothel keeper – “since the words stew and stewholder both mean a bawd, I’m guessing that a stewsman would be a brothel-keeper as well. Whether bawdry counts as a criminal activity varies at different times and places.”
thimblerigger – a professional sharper who runs a thimblerig (a game in which a pea is ostensibly hidden under a thimble and players guess which thimble it is under)

Wacky, inconsistent and extreme. That’s the current winter around the world. Justin Gillis has some details on the Green Blog:

People in Europe are freezing to death in one of the coldest winters on record. It snowed on Monday in Libya. Libya! That is a country better known, weather-wise, for suffering the highest temperature recorded on earth in modern times (136 degrees Fahrenheit, in 1922).

Meanwhile, the United States is enjoying a bizarrely mild winter, in stark contrast to last year’s. At Tuesday’s parade for the New York Giants, some people walked around Manhattan in short sleeves. I was in Oklahoma last week, and daytime temperatures were topping out in the 60’s.

But don’t count on any kind of consistency in this country or anywhere else. People in Colorado were enjoying a balmy winter, too, until last weekend. Now they are digging out of several feet of snow.

I never saw the original video, but this fast version is interesting. Very fast:

Video: Koyaanisqatsi (1982) at 1552% speed. (The year 1552 marks the publication of “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” an account of the mistreatment of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas)

So you’ve never heard of the radio show “On the Media?” I seldom miss it and this week you might not want to miss it because it’s all about Facebook. Do you know about the country Facebookistan? Do you know what it can mean to corporations when you like their products? Hear the story about a woman who received a friend quest from someone who raped her a decade earlier (it helped her). What will be the legacy of Facebook? How long will it be around?

It’s an interesting collection of segments. Listen to it here.

Google Earth now has some great seafloor mapping which led some people to believe that the Lost City of Atlantis was located. P-shaw:

Some have speculated that these are the plow marks of seafloor farming by aliens. If there really are little green men hiding somewhere, the ocean’s not a bad place to do it. Mars, Venus, the moon, and even some asteroids are mapped at far higher resolution than our own oceans (the global map of Mars is about 250 times as accurate as the global map of our own ocean).

One theory that’s gained more traction is that these marks might be the ruins of the lost city of Atlantis. If that were the case, some of the city blocks would have to be over eight miles long – that’s about fifty times the size of a city block in New York City (if you zoom in and use the measurement tool in Google Earth, you can do this comparison yourself).

More here from the Google’s Blog.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has released new high-detail images of the planet we love to call home:

“This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012,” said the space center in a released statement.

Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board and is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS which took the photos above.

Bad Lip Reading strikes again.

Go here for additional photos:

In all, more than one hundred towering tipuana trees line the road like a living colonnade, forming what some have called a ‘green tunnel’ over three city blocks. The quiet, shady street has long been a favorite among locals, but recently it garnered some broader acclaim.