Today I learned about mautâm, a cyclic ecological phenomenon occuring every ~50 years, when vast bamboo forests in northeastern India flower simultaneously, resulting in abundant seed, a boom in the rat population, then a famine when the rats run out of seeds and turn to crops.

While an honest assessment of the past might make us realize “the low likelihood of the present and the future turning out any differently…we still must care for one another as the tragedy unfolds.”

Enjoyed this review of The Counterforce, a book that seems right up my alley in proposing that “Pynchon can help us diagnose much of what’s wrong with our culture in general, and literary culture in particular” and suggesting the cultivation of “eccentricity as an antidote to a world gone mad.”

Cathexis (n) - investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea.

Today I learned that turkey vultures’ sense of smell has been used to locate leaks in an oil pipeline: ethyl mercaptan, a chemical redolent of rotting meat, was pumped through a 42-mile pipeline, and the maintenance crew just looked for the vultures to find the leaks.

On this day in 1958, Ben Carlin became the first (and only) person to circumnavigate the Earth by amphibious vehicle, traveling 17,000 km by sea and 62,000 km by land. It took him ten years and seems to have been quite the odyssey, as could be expected.

Today I learned that euhemerism is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages.

Today I learned that in the second century BCE, Eratosthenes developed an algorithm used to this day to find primes, drew perhaps the first ‘scientific’ map, and calculated the circumference of the Earth to within about 2%. His work was lost with the Great Library of Alexandria.

Sesquipedalian (adj) - Long and ponderous; polysyllabic. From the Latin sēsquipedālis, of a foot and a half in length.

Today’s amazing word is “gallimaufry” (n) - A jumble or hodgepodge.

A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.

• Lester Bangs, Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, 1975

Inquiline (n) - An animal that characteristically lives commensally in the nest, burrow, or dwelling place of an animal of another species.

Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it.

Werner Herzog

On this day in 1940, Polish underground resistance soldier Witold Pilecki was voluntarily captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz to gather and smuggle out information on the camp. He escaped 30 months later, and was executed by the Soviet-backed Polish government in 1948.

Pleonasm (n): The use of more words than are required to express an idea; redundancy. As in the man he said.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Today I learned about Müllerian mimicry, “in which species with strong defences evolve to resemble one another. By mimicking similarly coloured species, the warning signal to predators is shared, causing them to learn more quickly at less of a cost to each of the species.”

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Fernando Pessoa

Today I learned about Henry Wickham, an “explorer” and braggart who, in 1876, smuggled rubber seeds out of Brazil to Kew Gardens in England, who in turn used them to grow rubber in Asia, collapsing the Brazilian economy: “The greatest act of biopiracy…maybe in history.”

Pierre’s insanity consisted in the fact that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.

-Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Part Four, Chapter XIX (I bet that reads badass in the Russian)

Prolepsis (n) - The representing of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so. As in he was a dead man before he entered.

It is decidedly difficult to tell a lie when you don’t know the truth.

Péter Esterházy, from this article full of his amazing sentences

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

Bertrand Russel, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930, as mentioned in this Aeon article.

On this day in 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, clearing the way for the incarceration of 112,000 Japanese Americans in prison camps.

Check out this fantastic word: autochthonous au·toch·tho·nous (ô-tŏk′thə-nəs) adjective: 1. Originating or formed in the place where found; indigenous: autochthonous rocks; an autochthonous people; autochthonous folk tales. (American Heritage Dictionary App)

Today I learned that oropolitics is the use and abuse of mountaineering for political purposes. The most notable example of which culminated in the Siachen conflict.