Every time I deal with MOE’s I can’t help but thinking of the taco place when I should be thinking about margins of error!

Who is the author? You can’t really read it.

☕️ unscientific poll: does tea usually make you feel better?

On the one hand, humans have been drinking tea for thousands of years, so surely we have cultivated the varieties that have the best effects.

On the other hand, this is clearly just the placebo effect, right? 

Disclaimers • This is NOT an endorsement. • I bought this book with my own money or I checked it out from the library. • No one asked me to read this book. • I do not know the author, and I got exactly $0 for reading it. • Even if I liked the book, that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with everything the author says. • A few sentences in a post is not going to do justice to a book several hundred pages long. This is just a few things I found interesting. I suggest reading the whole book yourself. • Sorry, I can't review your book too. I have a job. I just love expanding my horizons and learning something new!

9/ And my usual caveats.

8/ The only thing I didn’t like was that the author went a little overboard on describing roadkill.

Obviously, I understand that’s a big part of road ecology but you may not want to read this book while trying to eat lunch.

In the past I'd had good luck hitchhiking around parks, but either society had grown less trusting or Ta potten creepier, and the minutes became an hour. At last a trucker took iconic byways: the Denali Park Road. pity, pulled over, and delivered me to the turnoff for one of America's most vice's heart. Its curvaceous ninety-two-mile course is smudged with Ste The Denali Park Road epitomizes the tension that tugs at the Park Ser-phen Mather's fingerprints: in 1924, soon after construction began, Mather's lieutenants urged builders to "avoid long straight lines" and showcase "the best possible views and vistas of the country." From the start the road was a boondocole The Alaskan weather and "bottomless" mud frustrated road crews, who earned poverty wages and lived in tent villages. Even so, luxury auto-tourists, inspired by the Vagabonds' escapades, showed up in droves. Caravans of Studebakers ferried sightseers, clad in suits and pearls. thireen miles down the road to Savage Camp, where they slept in wood-framed tents and waltzed on a polished floor, "You sit down at a table that is covered with snowy linen and napkins-articles scarcely looked for in the wilderness," marveled one reporter. The Park Service continued to genuflect to cars in the years that fol-lowed. In the 1950s the agency launched Mission 66, a massive construction program, cosponsored by the American Automobile Association, that, among many other projects, would have paved and widened the mosily dirt Denali road. The scheme outraged Adolph and Olaus Murie, biologist brothers who feared that a bigger, faster road would ruin the "purity of [the park's] wilderness atmosphere." Denali was a place for deep thought, not cursory sightseeing. "The national park will not serve its purpose if we encourage the visitor to hurry as fast as possible for a mere glimpse of scenery from a car," Olaus admonished. Even as the Lower 48's car culture approached its apogee, the Muries insisted that Denali remain a templ…

7/ Roads are perilous even when animals DON’T cross them. They will stay behind an interstate and starve, even though they would usually migrate to better pastures with changing weather.

The neat thing about Denali is that they limit buses so sheep can have 10 minutes to cross the road every hour.

Emilie Snell-Rood, the ecologist who oversaw Team Ditch's labors. Yet the road's novel ecosystem was as dramatic as a forest or wetland. Snell-Rood stooped to inspect a thistle, atop which a crab spider slurped a bumblebee's innards. "There are bees whose entire home range might be a single roadside," she said. "or all its unlikely benefts, though, the road is still the road: noisy. chemical loced, perilous, an environment that both nourishes insects and reduces them to goo. As Team Ditch thrashed the flowers, a monarch butterfly sailed into view. She (for she was a she, identifiable by the thick black veins in her orange wings) flew in languid zigzags, seeking a place to lay an egg. There was something of the flaneuse about her, the window-shopper drifting between storefronts. We bit our lips as she sailed into traffic. She tumbled like a cork bobber in a rapid, buffeted by turbulence. At last she alit on a milkweed, touched her thorax to its surface, and freckled it with a white speck. We cheered. Egg deposited, the butterfly took off again, bound for a stand of milkweed across the road. "She just bounced over three cars-kind of impres-sive," Snell-Rood said. "I'm so worried for her." "At least she's already replaced herself," Mitchell said. "Except larval mortality by predation is at least 95 percent," Snell-Rood replied. In other words, for every twenty eggs she laid, nineteen of her caterpillars would be devoured by wasps, spiders, and other foes. Mitchell shrugged. "Maybe she's already laid a hundred." We watched the monarch wobble. Every moment I expected to see her hit a windshield. But buoyed by her wings or slipstreams or good fortune, she wafted over traffic and gained the shoulder. There, in the quiet eddy of the ditch, she settled onto a milkweed and laid another egg. Who are roads for? Well, us, of course. We're accustomed to regarding roads as human spaces, environments inimical to other forms of life. But roads create habitat as well as destroy it.

6/ In the Midwest, 99% of natural grassland habitat has been eliminated. So the Monarch butterfly’s massive migration depends on milkweed along the sides of interstates where, obviously, it’s pretty dangerous for them.

If you can, plant some milkweed this year!

Most lavpeople treat the words sound and noise as synonvmous. To an acous-tician, though, they're antonyms. Sound is fundamentally natural, and tickles the ears in even the quietest places: the susurrus of wind, the drone of a bee, the starched snap of a jay's wings. Noise, by contrast, is a human-produced pollutant, and, like its etymological root, nausea, it's unpleasant. In the serenest landscapes even an airplane can seem a violation, as sinister as "Flight of the Valkyries" blasting from the helicopters in Apocalypse Now. And noise is still harder on other species. Wild animals inhabit an aural milieu that is sensitive beyond our imagining. Human conversation occurs at around sixty decibels, and sounds that barely register to us-gentle breathing, the rustle of leaves— produce around ten decibels. The most acute predators, meanwhile, can detect negative-twenty decibels. Bats seize upon the crunch of insect feet; foxes triangulate snow-buried voles. Prey is equally perceptive. Scrubwren nestlings freeze at the footsteps of enemy birds. Tungara frogs duck at the flap of bats. Vision is a luxury, hearing a necessity: most animals sleep with their eyes closed, but nearly all awaken at the snap of a twig. This acoustic arms race evolved in a quiet world, one that roads have vandalized. Although organisms have always contended with loud envi-ronments, like blustery ridgelines and crashing waterfalls, cars have made cacophony more rule than exception. For animals that survive by the grace of their hearing, traffic's "masking effect" can be fatal. Ambient road noise drowns out songbirds' alarm calls and prevents owls from detecting rodents. A mere three-decibel increase in background noise halves the "listening area," the space in which an animal can pick up a signal. By disturbing animals, noise also disrupts the ecological processes they cat-alyze, among them seed dispersal, pollination, and pest control;

5/ Even the sound of roads can make it difficult for animals to hear each other or their prey!

So the true barrier is actually much further from the edge of the road than you would think.

252 CROSSINGS Among the places the infrastructure tsunami will crash hardest is Brazil, a country that exemplifies the clash between highways and nature. Brazi's biodiversity and its roads both invite superlatives: it hosts the world's most amphibians, the most freshwater fish, the second-most mammals, the third-most reptiles, and the fourth-longest road network. (It trails only the United States, China, and India.) One Brazilian biologist has estimated that cars strike more than four hundred million animals there each year and that future development stands to "cause the [additional] loss of half a billion vertebrates annually" The country is at once an established powerhouse and an emerging nation, with a shoddily built road system that's forecast to grow by 20 percent in coming years. "The expansion of roads in Brazil is important for the quality of life of the people," one ecologist told me. "The thing is, how will they do it? Is there enough legislation to protect wildlife? I'm not sure." Brazil's expansionism, fortunately, is matched by a concomitant growth in road ecology. No tropical country is home to as many road ecologists, and projects spring up constantly: underpasses for pumas and tapirs, a new bridge for a resplendently furred monkey called the golden lion tamarin. And Brazil's road-ecology movement hasn't merely replicated the Northern Hemisphere's successes: it's built on them, embedding the discipline into the country's legal fabric. Brazilian law requires highway operators to gather data about the roadkill that occurs within their jurisdiction, transport injured animals to veterinary clinics, and reimburse drivers for damages incurred in collisions. (Imagine if you could sue your state transportation department every time you whacked a deer.) To my American eyes Brazil seemed to sit at road ecology's forefront—a country squarely in the infrastructure tsunami's path, but one where ecologists were frantically throwing up wave breaks.

4/ This blew my mind, and I wish the author would have talked more about this: in Brazil the state reimburses drivers for damages caused by wildlife collisions!

It does make sense though: these are foreseeable accidents, which have a lot to do with how we design roads.

54 CROSSINGS In Wyoming, biologists discovered that the combination of roadside fences and underpasses allowed mule deer to cross I-8o safely. Gregory Nickerson they acclimated to the culverts and incorporated them into their routes ungulate culture and human technology together forging a new pathway. Within three years nearly fifty thousand muleys had trekked under Highway 30. Mule deer didn't need lettuce trimmings to enter an underpass. They were simply claustrophobes. The Nugget Canyon underpasses were also backed by compelling fiscal math. Historically, wildlife crossings had drawn from the same limited pots of funding as basic maintenance, like lane repaving and bridge repairs. Pitted against crumbling infrastructure, animals almost always lost. In 2009, however, a group of eminent road ecologists, led by Marcel Huijser, tallied up the many costs of wildlife crashes: the hospital bills, the car repairs, the loss to hunters, and so on. The average DVC, they calculated, set society back $6,600. Bigger animals inflicted worse damage: elk collisions cost $17,500, while moose came in at a whopping $31,000.' All told, ani- * Adjusting Huijser's figures for inflation in 2021, researchers at the Center for Large Landscape Conservation calculated that the average collision now costs around $9,100 for deer, $24,000 for elk, and $42,200 for moose.

3/ Americans have been slow to adopt wildlife crossings even though they dramatically reduce accidents. Animal crashes cost the US $8 billion per year!

103 A box turtle makes the long and perilous trek across a Georgia road. David Steen tailspin. In one Canadian marsh a population of snapping turtles that numbered nearly a thousand fell to 177 in less than two decades, pulverized by traffic. Highway 27, Aresco calculated, was crushing enough turtles to "potentially cause irreversible declines." Biological annihilation was happening in real time. Aresco knew that he couldn't move turtles by hand forever. Fortunately, a corrugated metal culvert ran beneath the highway and connected the two lakes: a ready-made wildlife passage, just waiting for some fencing to guide turtles through. Aresco begged Florida's transportation department to intervene. The response was tepid. One day a maintenance guy pulled

2/ This book documents the stunning decline of biodiversity in our world: since 1970 animal populations have shrunk by an average of 60%.

And even among those who do survive, their range and diversity is extremely limited by our endless desire to pave the world.

Book cover of Crossings: how road ecology is shaping the future of our planet by Ben Goldfarb

1/ When you were young, you often scraped bugs off your windshield. Now you rarely use those gas station squeegee sticks.

I didn’t even think about this gradual change until reading Crossings.

This is a fascinating book on the intersection of infrastructure & ecology.

@bengoldfarb.bsky.social

Arenge welcomes students to the presentation portion of the 2026 Hackathon: our state in Data. Students took six hours to look at 20 years of PA traffic accident data

Scenes from a beautiful spring day in University City

Deer are crepuscular. Exhibit A: most car vs dread crashes happen at dawn and dusk

How one team separated crashes into categories: 1) under influence, 2) distractions, 3) aggressiveness, 4) Environment

So much fun to guest judge this @upenn.edu data contest led by @mrarenge.bsky.social.

Fascinating: there are more accidents on @philadelphiaeagles.bsky.social game days compared to similar days without.

But actually fewer drunk driving crashes! (Probably because more people are out & about)

@ryanlittle.bsky.social should do Baltimore!

I feel like I see this in folks who constantly challenge themselves with reading or crosswords or whatever

The little writer who lives in your head wrote this so that's a start. Maybe they just took a break instead of leaving entirely.

That was perfection

Ope I didn’t know this was an option, but sign me up

Doesn’t this cost the actual human who owns the bot a lot of money? Why would he let it keep creating stuff that he doesn’t even read?

a man applauds with the words way to go super proud of you behind him ALT: a man applauds with the words way to go super proud of you behind him

5/5 Obviously, not every complaint is resolved. Many are referred out to lawyers, etc.

But this is one of the most important public services of journalism that is often overlooked! Congrats to everyone on the consumer team for hitting this milestone.

Hyundai and Kia to offer free repairs, reimburse owners under anti-theft technology settlement Automakers Hyundai and Kia will offer restitution and free repairs to vehicle owners under a settlement announced on Monday.

4/5 But also incredibly useful. For example a string of complaints helped NBC break the Kia thefts story: www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/h...

3/5 The consumer complaints database is fascinating.

It ranges from the very silly (callers complaining about a meteorologist's attire) to the very serious (there are a lot of missing person complaints and there's really not a lot we can do about that.)

2/5They do this in English and Spanish. Producers actually have a list of interchangeable local terms because they have to deal with so many different forms of Spanish!

For example, in Puerto Rican Spanish, a bus is called a
guagua (pronounced wah-wah), not autobús.

$100M recovered for viewers by NBC Responds & Telemundo Responde A major milestone has been reached. Since 2014, NBC and Telemundo Responds teams have recovered more than $100 million for viewers and consumers across the country.

1/5 Behind the story: @nbcnews.com-owned stations have a team of 28 producers who only answer calls/emails from viewers.

Many of these stories end up NOT being stories at all- often NBC will call about a consumer complaint and suddenly it gets resolved!

www.nbcsandiego.com/video/videos...

ugh I was beaten to it!

Oh wow I feel this!

Particularly as someone with a name that can have multiple pronunciations:
🇮🇹Lucia (loo-chee-ahh) [me]
🇪🇸Lucia (loo-see-ahh)
🇫🇷Lucia (loo-shah)
🇬🇧Lucy (loo-see)

Plus St. Lucia- 🇱🇨- an Italian saint but they speak French!

How AI Can Help Journalism AI can never replace accuracy and humanity, but it can help journalism by improving workflows and spurring innovation.

It is a bit confusing! Some local stations license NBC content but they are owned by separate companies.

NBC Universal’s
Policy: nbcuacademy.com/ai-help-jour...

NBC has as well! Please add @nbcnews.com @nbcbayarea.com @nbcwashington.com @nbcboston.com @nbcphiladelphia.com etc

Aw congrats

Thank you