Natural history

I enjoy museums because they always help me gain a fresh (or forgotten) perspective. Below are highlights from my trip to the American Museum of Natural History.

- The brown bear is probably the largest carnivorous mammal alive. A grown bear can get up to 1,600 pounds. I thought this was impressive, until I came across the walrus. 140 pounds at birth, adult males can go to 2,600 pounds. Ridiculous!

- Less than 5 percent of the ocean has been explored. Who knows what we don't know.

- I wonder how long it will take for the African mammals exhibit to look like the North American one. While the African exhibits showed dioramas from all across the continent, the North American exhibits were concentrated in Alaska and parts of Canada. Even the African exhibits that compared present prevalence to past terrains, showed the spread of animals shrinking. Many countries are protecting natural habitats, but how do you protect against climate change?

Potato, it's enough

From Chris Blattman's blog (dedicated to VK)

From 1000 to 1900 the world's population grew from 300 million to 1.6 billion. Urbanization more than quadrupled.

The culprit? According to a new paper by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian: the potato.

...Old World regions that were suitable for potato cultivation experienced disproportionately faster population and urbanization growth after the introduction of potatoes.

...our baseline estimates suggest that the potato accounts for 12% of the increase in population, 22% of the increase in population growth, 47% of the increase in urbanization, and 50% of the increase in urbanization growth.

The more traditional view credits modern medicine and public sanitation in the late 19th century for the population boom. Nunn and Qian argue the population boom came much earlier. As the potato spread from the NewWorld to the Old World, it carried a huge increase in calories and nutrients.

Something I didn't know:

Humans can subsist healthily on a diet of potatoes, supplemented with only milk or butter, which contain the two vitamins not provided for by potatoes, vitamins A and D. ...This, in fact, was the typical Irish diet, which although monotonous, was able to provide sufficient amounts of all vitamins and nutrients.

Seems my grandmother had it right all along...

Poverty, hunger, and numbers

Three pieces that are worth reading -

How many Indians are Poor?

Drawing a Line Under Poverty in India

How to tackle India's hunger

Its clear that we have a long way to go. The question is whether we are heading in the right direction.

Bing

I'm a fan of anything Google - gmail, G1, google reader, blogger. So when I read this NYT column on Bing, Microsoft's latest challenge to Google, I was skeptical. Still, some features seemed useful. On Bing, you can point to a search result and see a pop-up balloon that shows the first few paragraphs on text on the page. Saves you the trouble of clicking back and forth.

As the author notes -

People won’t start dumping Google en masse; Google is a habit. Everyone already knows how to work it, and it may be built right into your Web browser. But if you value your time, you should give Bing a fling.

Have you used Bing?