James' World 2

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The Tumblr sounds a bit like a college course: People of Color in European Art History.

And its goal is pretty ambitious. The blog’s author, Malisha Dewalt, says that her goal is to challenge the common perception that pre-Enlightenment Europe was all white, which she argues is a much more recent and deliberate invention.

“All too often, these works go unseen in museums, Art History classes, online galleries, and other venues because of retroactive whitewashing of Medieval Europe, Scandinavia, and Asia,” she writes. “[T]his blog is here to emphasize the modern racism that retroactively erases gigantic swaths of truth and beauty.”

And she means erased literally: While it was once the convention to depict one of the Magi — the fabled “three wise men” of the Christian folklore — as a dark-skinned black man, many dark-skinned people who appear in portraits of European royals were later painted white or simply cropped out when they were reproduced in textbooks.

Pamela Patton, a professor of art history who focuses on Iberia, says that artists from the Middle Ages “seem clearly interested in representing a diversity of ethnic variations, including different skin colors, hair textures, and facial features.”

She goes on. “It’s tempting to ask whether they were primed for this by the actual ethnic diversity of the medieval Iberian world, where there were Africans, Arabs, Jews, and other non-European groups in some numbers,” she says. tangie

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We all know the numbers by now. Industrial meat production is the single biggest cause of global deforestation.

It creates an estimated 14.5 percent of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions — more than the combined emissions from all forms of transport. In the face of these alarming numbers, there has been a groundswell of people attempting to eat zero, or less, meat.

But what about the little carnivores that share our homes, our beloved pets?

In the US alone, at least 70 percent of households own pets, according to the 2020-2021 APPA National Pet Owners Survey, and many of them are dogs. There are an estimated 77 million individual dogs in America — the highest number since the American Veterinary Medical Association began counting in 1982. Worldwide, more than 470 million dogs live with human families. 

But as the food packaging and poop baggies pile up, some owners have begun to wonder about the impact their furry friend is having on the planet. What do we know about dogs’ environmental paw print, and are there things we can do to mitigate it?

Far and away the biggest environmental impact our canine companions exert is through their diet. The global pet food market was worth almost $97 billion in 2020. More than one-third of that food was purchased in the US, with other large markets in the UK, France, Brazil, Russia, Germany, and Japan.

US dogs and cats snarf down more than 200 petajoules (a unit that measures the energy content of food) worth of food per year — roughly the same as the human population of France, according to Gregory Okin, a researcher at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “We’re talking about animals whose consumption is on the order of nations,” he says.

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Alamy

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Ever since the Rubik’s Cube was released, it’s taunted almost a half billion tinkerers who think they can crack its confounding mysteries, only to be stymied by its maddening secrets. Now, it’s time to unpack the puzzle once and for all—using some deep math. The cube’s literal insides are made of plastic, but its real guts are nothing but numbers. Let’s dive in

Breaking Apart the Blocks

Starting with some basics, a 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube has six faces, each a different color. The center of each face is attached to the core scaffold that holds the cube together, so they don’t move other than rotating in place. As a result, the same colors always end up opposite from each other; on a standard cube, white is opposite yellow, red opposite orange, and blue opposite green.

Bust open a Rubik’s Cube, and you’ll see it’s made of three types of building blocks. First, there’s that central scaffold, connecting the center of each face. Then there are the cubies—the nickname for the little 1x1x1 blocks. The corner cubies have three colored sides, and the edge cubies have two. A Rubik’s Cube has one core, eight corner cubies, and 12 edge cubies.

The immediate math to be done with those numbers is the total number of ways you can scramble a Rubik’s cube: 43,252,003,274,489,856,000. Written in a more mathematical way, that number is (3⁸8!)(2¹²12!)/12. Here’s how that comes together.

The first term, 3⁸, counts every way the eight-corner cubies can be rotated. A corner cubie can fit into its slot, rotated three different ways. That’s a factor of 3 for each of the eight corner cubies, so they multiply to 3⁸.

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Photo by  Andrew Spencer/Getty Images

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Lawns are a sign of prestige. Once a sign of upper-middle-class British wealth, over the past century, the traditional yard transformed into an element of the “American Dream”—owning a house of surrounded by a mini field of greenery.  It takes a significant amount of water, fertilizer, and labor to maintain a simple grass lawn—and even more resources for keeping sporting arenas, golf courses, and gigantic McMansions in top shape. 

Still, some eco-conscious people and landowners are swapping pristine green grass for a sustainable lawn. Plants still cover the ground and provide beautiful greenery, but take up less water to maintain. Some are even great for local pollinators and utilize different plants and grasses that are often native to an area instead—creating beautiful, unique landscapes that support local wildlife. And in a changing climate, there’s plenty of reasons to ditch the monotonous green grass lawn for something more resilent and resource-savvy. 

Native Grasses and Plants Use Way Less Water Than a Typical Lawn

According to the Natural Resource Defense Council, grass lawns consume nearly 3 trillion gallons of water a year, 200 million gallons of gas (for all that mowing), and 70 million pounds of pesticides. A challenge to maintain in some areas, considering that some rivers out west are facing historically low levels—it means water shortages for residents out in Western states. The U.S. has experienced a “megadrought” this year, and hot dry conditions are also worsening the incidence of forest fires in various states across the West Coast. 

Creeping herbs like thyme and oregano, ornamental grass, evergreen moss or even covering an area with rocks and then surrounding it with perennial native plants require less water and physical maintenance than regular grassy lawns but still make for a beautiful, colorful lawn.  

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Clover is a great plant to start with for making your lawn more environmentally-friendly. Couleur from Pixabay 

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