After 500 years, chemistry comes for Christmas

The Toxic Truth About Your Christmas Tree

Today, that ancient tradition is a booming business that employs nearly 100,000 people, garners close to $2 billion in revenue, and harvests 25 million to 30 million natural Christmas trees annually.

It's about the pesticides, fungicides, and whatevercides used to grow them. Maybe dangerous in your living room — maybe — and maybe a little less maybe in the fields where they grow.

"A review of the Christmas-tree-related complaints made to the Oregon Department of Agriculture over the most recent five-year period reveals considerable anger and frustration," Wired says. (About 30 percent of Christmas trees grown in the U.S. are grown in the Pacific Northwest.)

"There are greener choices available," the magazine says.

Greener than a Christmas tree?

What? Moi?

Are you a morning person? You may be a Neanderthal descendant.

Yes. I am a morning person. Also magnificent noses are common in my family (almost said "run" there, but thought better of it) and I wear clothes. All of which (and more) are Neanderthal traits according to this WaPo story. (The scientific paper is here.)

Somehow I'm suddenly dreaming of eating a big, juicy steak. I wonder if that…

Mouse escapes (sort of)

Mickey Mouse will soon belong to you and me — with some caveats

The copyright on Mickey Mouse — the original "mischievous, rat-like, non-speaking boat captain" version of the famous rodent, at least – will expire on the last day of this year and the critter will enter the public domain. It's been 95 years since Mickey's first appearance in the short film, "Steamboat Willie."

More modern versions of the character will remain under Disney's control.

Other well-known works due to enter the U.S. public domain in 2024 are a Virginia Woolf novel named "Orlando," a film featuring Charlie Chaplin called "Circus," and "The Threepenny Opera," a musical play by Bertolt Brecht.

In our modern world…

…this is news.

Delegates at UN climate talks in Dubai agree to ‘transition away’ from planet-warming fossil fuels

"Delegates stood and hugged each other," reports AP.

United Nations Climate Secretary Simon Stiell told delegates:

"Whilst we didn’t turn the page on the fossil fuel era in Dubai, this outcome is the beginning of the end.”

 Let's remember this is the twenty-eighth such annual UN climate talk.

My math is a little rusty, but if it took 28 years to get to a beginning…

But no mention of wind, it seems

A little-noticed (by me at least) highlight of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) now winding up in (yes) Dubai* was a panel discussion entitled "Responsible Yachting. Today & Tomorrow." 

“Yachting benefits from the beauty of the oceans. And I’m excited and fascinated to be working with Sunreef Yachts because they are trailblazing sustainable luxury yachting," said one Nico Rosberg, clean-yachting enthusiast and partner in a yacht-building company, as reported by MSN.

Battery-powered yachts with sustainable interior finishing are high on the list of yachting improvements we can look forward to.

*Maybe COP29, if there is one, should be held in Afghanistan or Bangladesh. Just a thought.

All this time and I didn't know, really…

 …what foolscap is. Until I just happened across it looking something else up.

It's a piece of paper of a certain delightfully vague size — "usually 8 x 13 inches" in the U.S., says Merriam-Webster, implying that it's otherwise elsewhere.

Also — and this is the really cool* thing about looking something up — I ran across a quote referring to "thwarted megamergers and private-equity acquisitions."

Last week I sat in on a computer class in which a woman asked what "megabyte" means. The answer to that one is also delightfully vague. A megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, or 1,048,576 bytes, or, as it is commonly used in non-geeky geek talk, a million bytes. (A megameter would be exactly a million meters but that's a whole nother thing. Don't ask.)

A megamerger is not a million mergers: It's a single merger, but it's really, really big.

*And don't even think about looking that one up unless you've got some time on your hands.

[The else I was looking up was "based."]