Gleanings of the Week Ending July 25, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

It's official: Workplace rudeness is contagious and Kids expecting aggression from others become aggressive themselves - For some reason the results of these two studies seemed similar to me. They both found that our environment - and expectation of our environment - have impacts on our own behavior.

This New Map Shows Your Risk of Catching Lyme Disease - Maryland it in the dark blue - not a surprise. I hear often enough about people in our area discovering they have Lyme Disease. Wearing long pants tucked into socks is difficult when it is a hot day.

Iron: A biological element? - Much of the iron of our planet was deposited by bacteria living two and a half billion years ago. At that time in Earth’s development there was little oxygen in the atmosphere and many organisms metabolized iron instead of oxygen.

Intensive End-Of-Life Care on the Rise for Cancer Patients - As the population in the US ages, end-of-life discussion are important to more and more people - not just cancer patients.

What Happens to Your Blog when You Die? Why You Need to Appoint a Social Media Executor NOW - Another ‘end-of-life’ consideration…then one developing because of modern technology.

Let This Video Show You How Air Bubbles Form, Rise, and Erupt in Sand - For anyone that has ever wondered about craters or sand…..high speed video captures more than the eye can detect.

Organization of North America's bird species: List updated - The update includes some reorganization…but also some species new to North America!

E-waste: What we throw away doesn't go away - A problem for just about everywhere in the world…and it is about more than old phones and computers.

5 Simple Tips to Turn Your Yard into Pollinator - Some good basic tips.

The Women Who Rule Pluto - Good to hear that there are technical women behind parts of the Pluto stories in the news recently.

A Grand Finale

I recently used up the 150 or so credits I had on paperbackswap. They has accumulated at a time when I was clearing out a lot of accumulated books. Over a year ago I decided I had more credits than I would every use so I started donating books to a local library and slowly started using credits. I got books that supported courses I was taking on Coursera or books for family/friends. But so much of my reading has moved to digital platforms that I was using the credits very slowly.

When paperbackswap decided to charge a small fee for swaps, I decided to use the bulk of my credits before the charge went into effect. About 50 credits were used for books for family. The other 100 were primarily in x categories:

• Nature related reference books (identification primarily)
• Audubon series on Wildlife Refuges (for vacation planning)
• Big Island of Hawaii books (to support a vacation we are planning)
• Coffee table books (lots of pictures)

What a treat to get all those packages in the mail within such a short period of time! Our mailbox frequently could not hold all that arrived on the peak days. Unwrapping the padded envelopes and boxes was like a recurring Christmas morning.

Now I am working my way through the giant pile. It is wonderful to have such beautiful books in the ‘to read’ pile. Some of the books I’ll keep for reference after I read them but more than half are going elsewhere. About 15 of them have already been passed along to other people.

This grand finale is pleasurable on a number of levels…good reads (choosing them, having then in a pile to choose from, reading them), giving then to others, and building up my reference library for Master Naturalist work.