Web Excursions 2022-01-15
要做一个好弹弓,还挺费事。
首先你得有个架子,也就是「Y」型的一根树杈。
这东西就像鹅卵石,虽然常见,但是一个方方正正的「Y」型还是很少见的,寻它就像寻宝。
除了形状要符合条件,材料也有讲究,不能用那种太脆的树,例如苦楝书、龙眼树之流,最好是那种长得慢,长得扎实的树,
野生番石榴树就是典型代表――光溜溜的,摸着很扎实。但它疙瘩多、开叉还多,极难找到合适的。
其次,你得攒钱买「鸡肠」,也就是带弹性的橡胶管子。
这种橡胶管子的需求长期都存在,所以各个小卖铺都会进货,不过货的质量大不相同。
有些看着很耐用,实则拉扯几下就开裂断掉了,比如我印象很深刻的一种是又红又粗,卖相颇好,但是没等我套好就断开了,从此拉黑这种「徒有虚表」的「鸡肠」。
为了让我们的零花钱物有所值,我们各位「弹弓手」之间时常互通消息――哪家的好,哪家的垃圾,
最后总结出好的「鸡肠」的特性就是中等偏小宽度,色泽黄中透着红,拉扯时有着明显的韧性。
最后,你所缺的就是一块包裹石子的皮革了。
这个皮革的材料也有讲究,必须得耐用且柔软,因为它除了要忍受石子的摩擦,还得忍受「鸡肠」的拉扯。
当时常用的材料是篮球的皮,
因此,每当谁的篮球坏了,大家就会言不由衷地感叹,然后手舞足蹈。
有时候一个篮球满足不了所有人,还得排着队分割
另外有个说法,真皮才是最理想的材料。有真皮就有假皮,当时流传的一个鉴别方法是用防风火机烧,烧不烂的就是真皮。
这个鉴别方法至今不知真假,因为我没见过烧不烂的,当然我也知道那个时候的真皮皮鞋也没几双是真的。
最后的结果显而易见,不少人老爸的皮鞋遭了大殃,当然,他们的屁股最后也好不到哪里去。
很快,一个新的东西,让打鸟变得极为简单,从此弹弓大部分时间就被冷藏在了抽屉里,这个东西就是――鸟网。
我和邻家孩子「合资」购买了一张大网,打算铺在我家果园的一侧,给它们来个一网打尽。
走近一看,我才发现这不是小麻雀,也不是垃圾袋,而是一只鹰,猫头鹰。
当我将它扶正时,它原本静静的身躯开始爆发出巨大的力量,两只利爪极力张开上下挥舞,被网死死缠住的翅膀奋力挣扎,整张网瞬间向它的位置塌陷。我吓得后退了一步,静静地看着它。
它越挣扎,被缠得就越紧。也许是半分钟后,也许是几分钟后,它停止了动作,此时我才敢上前去好好观察它。凌乱的羽毛,被紧勒的翅膀,眼神犀利毫不畏惧,相互对视时我甚至有点心虚。
那一刻我很后悔,像做错的孩子。
可能是《聊斋》看多了,我还期望着它能知恩图报,给我点反馈,哪怕叫两声,回头看一眼也好啊。
但它并没有,甚至头也不回地消失在黑暗中
[Even after a successful adoption of the GTD methodology,] I still felt overwhelmed by all the things I wanted to do.
That’s when I stumbled across what would become my favorite book of 2021, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennet.
One hundred and ten years ago, The New York Times Book Review claimed “Every one who wants to talk smartly about the books of the hour must read Arnold Bennet.”
During that time, it was popular to write articles about how to live on a certain income per day.
Bennet wonders, why aren’t there more articles on how to live on a certain allotment of hours per day?
we must begin by thinking of the day, not as nine to five, but as a full twenty-four hours separated into three chunks.
It’s those remaining eight hours [besides the eight hours for work and another eight for sleep] that Bennet focuses on.
How can you use them to their full potential?
Those eight hours, for those who don’t love and live for work, are all we have to carve out a meaningful life.
As he evaluates his Londoner’s life, he notices the train commute in the morning where they read a newspaper. He asks for that time to be set aside for use later.
He asks that his Londoner set aside just ninety minutes every other day, three days each week.
He suggests that we use the evenings for learning.
About what? It doesn’t matter, really.
But you should spend your time learning about something.
Ideally, something you care about. If you have a hobby or interest, learn about that.
The point is that you spend your time learning about something you’re interested in so that you experience it more deeply.
Here, he suggests learning about science, history, or philosophy.
Spending a few hours each night reading Epictetus, Epicurus,
and others can help you develop a framework for thinking about life in a deeper and more meaningful way.
And that’s exactly the point of the morning time he asks us to set aside. To think about life and reflect.
Now, this isn’t meant to be idle thinking.
Instead, it should be dedicated and focused reflection.
It will require focus, which may be tough at first (it’s still tough for me).
When you put the two together, you have a regimen of learning and reflection designed to deepen the experiences you care about.
Words of caution
start small. With a small amount of time and small expectations.
don’t become too strict about our regimen. The idea is for the learning and reflection to serve our life, not for our life to serve the regimen.
avoid becoming a snob about it. There may be reasons that it doesn’t work for everyone, or why they can’t implement it. I
be cautious of failure at the beginning.
In the summer of 1827, a merchant named Fedor Shergin, whom the tsar had dispatched to Yakutia as a representative of the Russian-American Company, tried to dig a well. Shergin’s team of laborers spent the next decade chiselling a shaft, reaching three hundred feet down, only to find yet more frozen earth. Finally, in 1844, Alexander von Middendorff, a prominent scientist and explorer, made his way from St. Petersburg to Yakutsk and estimated, correctly, that the soil under the shaft was frozen to a depth of at least six hundred feet.
Soviet ideology contained a strong Promethean impulse,encapsulated by Maxim Gorky’s axiom, paraphrasing Marx, that “in transforming nature, man transforms himself.” The construction of the Trans-Polar Railroad was one of many infrastructure projects under Stalin that had to contend with the particularities of land that might sink by several inches in the summer or heave upward in the winter. As one scientist declared in the thirties, “It is necessary to defeat the enemy—vechnaya merzlota—and not surrender.”
The area on the Lena’s right bank, a valley of some twenty thousand square miles, is known for its large deposits of yedoma, a type of permafrost that is especially rich in ice.
As yedoma thaws, it can create depressions in the land that fill with water, a process known as thermokarst.
When it thaws, it can release ten times more greenhouse gases than other, sandier types of permafrost.
An equally pressing problem is snow cover. “Snow is like a warm blanket—it doesn’t allow the wintertime cold to penetrate all the way into soil,” Zimov said. One of the effects of climate change is more precipitation in the Arctic ecosystem around Chersky. Yearly snowfall has increased by as much as twenty centimetres since the early eighties, adding two more degrees of warming effect. As a result, Zimov explained, permafrost that used to be minus seven degrees Celsius is now on the verge of thawing, if it hasn’t already.
In 2015, scientists from a Russian biology institute in Pushchino, a Soviet-era research cluster outside Moscow, extracted a sample of yedoma from a borehole in Yakutia. Back at their lab, they placed the piece of frozen sediment in a sterilized culture box. A month later, a microscopic, wormlike invertebrate known as a bdelloid rotifer was crawling around inside.Radiocarbon dating revealed the rotifer to be twenty-four thousand years old.
This creature has intestines, a brain, nervous cells, reproductive organs. We’re clearly dealing with a higher order.
By analyzing ancient environmental DNA, they determined that rapidly warming temperatures melted the glaciers and inundated the tundra, wiping out the mammoth’s food supply. “Our results suggest that their extinction came when the last pockets of the steppe-tundra vegetation finally disappeared,” the authors wrote.
Mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study.
Murton told me that the first thing that struck him during his time at the crater was the sound. “It’s like an orchestral piece,” he said. “In the summer, when the head wall is thawing quickly, you hear the constant trickle of water, like first violins. And then you have these massive chunks of permafrost, up to half a ton, that fall to the bottom with a big thud. That’s the percussion.”
These days, fire is the biggest threat to the landscape. Last summer was Yakutia’s worst fire season in history, with eight million hectares ablaze—an area about the size of Maine—releasing the equivalent of more than five hundred megatons of carbon dioxide.
Thirty years ago, during an average summer, the permafrost thawed to a depth of less than a metre. Now, at the bulldozed site, Zimov had to fasten two probes together, finally hitting solid ice at a depth of three and a half metres.
The [restoration] theory rests on the warming effect of snow. As Zimov explained, there isn’t much hope of quickly cooling air temperatures. But lessening the snow cover during the winter would allow more cold air to reach the permafrost. “You could do this mechanically, by sending three hundred million workers with shovels across Siberia,” he said. “Or you can do the same, for free, with horses, musk ox, bison, sheep, reindeer.” Those animals would break down shrubs and churn the soil, allowing grasslands to reappear. In summer, owing to the albedo effect—light surfaces reflect heat, dark ones absorb it—the pale grass would stay cooler than the brown shrubs that currently blanket the tundra.
Two years ago, Zimov and Nikita completed a study with a team of researchers from the University of Hamburg, which showed that the animals reduced average snow density by half, and lowered the average temperature of the permafrost by nearly two degrees Celsius. The researchers theorized that thirty-seven per cent of Arctic permafrost could be saved from thawing by the wide-scale introduction of large herbivores
Like the mammoth, the Arctic camel disappeared during the late Pleistocene era, along with giant beavers and sloths, horses and cave lions—a Noah’s ark of lost Arctic species.
“People didn’t start acting as gods fifty or a hundred years ago, or even one thousand, but ten thousand years ago,” Nikita said. “The point isn’t whether it’s O.K. to act like a god but whether you’re acting like a benevolent or wise one.”