Tropophilia

June already? Welcome to summer. A few of these links are old because I’ve been out enjoying the weather…and the North Carolina Wine Festival.

• I’ve been digging the heck out of PolicyMap lately. It’s basically a GIS application for those of us who don’t know how to use real GIS. Which is to say, it’s lots of data over-layed with maps. Demographics, socio-economic data, education levels, Super Fund sites, etc. Fun to play with, and maybe even useful (depending on your line of work).

• The NY Times reports on high schools that are trying to prevent their students from over-scheduling:

[N]early half the students at Briarcliff High School have packed their schedules so full that they do not stop for lunch, prompting administrators to rearrange the schedule next fall to require everyone to take a 20-minute midday break

• After this weekend, Mental Floss provides the answer to a question nagging at many of us: “Why does Puerto Rico get a primary?“

• The Check Out Blog (yes, the Wal-Mart blog) talks laundry detergent:

Wal-Mart’s goal to work with laundry detergent suppliers to shrink the packaging of every liquid laundry detergent product on the shelf is completed. Water has been pulled out of the bottles, and now all of the laundry detergents are compacted by a factor of 2 or 3.

I love this kind of small change with a big impact for two reasons. First, this change is so practical. Though it has been literally years in the making, it is just at first blush a little occurrence until you think about the effort and the impact of a change to all of the detergent bottles that are sold at Wal-Mart shelves across the country. [...]

Second, these changes are great b/c they end up being about more than just Wal-Mart. Because this was done in partnership with the suppliers of detergent focused on efficiency across the entire supply chain, the impact will be seen at the rest of the retail over time too. Soon, every bottle of laundry detergent will be compacted in every store.

• Wired’s Gadget Lab provides a bit of follow-up on the e-book debate that’s familiar on this blog. They point out a fatal flaw in Kindle and other e-readers: the screen, like any cell phone at some point in its life, will probably break:

Books, while more bulky in, well, bulk, are substantially more durable. And being analog, when they break, they’re still readable. Try using your Kindle after you drop it in the bath. With a book, you have a slightly swollen wad of paper, but it’s still serviceable. And if you leave a book on the subway, you have only lost one $10 title, not a $400 gadget.

• Jarred’s Satellite Challenges just got more interesting, because a new plug-in allows Google Earth to be used through a browser (instead of as a separate application).

• Finally, if you’re looking for a good summer dessert: Katherine and I made this Strawberry Tart for a few friends last week and it. was. awesome. Easy to make, too (though lots of whisking).