Gleanings of the Week Ending December 14, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Hummingbird Metabolism Unique in Burning Glucose, Fructose Equally - It takes a lot of energy for these small birds to live as they do!

The Use of Social Media in School - Infographic. Learn some ways Facebook, Pinterest, Blogger, and Twitter are being used in the classroom.

Estrogen: Not Just Produced by Ovaries - The brain can produce and release estrogen! So what does this mean for the hormone over the course of a lifetime?

Elephant Foster Mom: A Conversation with Daphne Sheldrick - It takes a tremendous amount of effort to raise orphaned elephant babies.

Man Walks All Day to Create Massive Snow Patterns - Art for the season!

Useful Infographic on Picking Seasonal Fruits and Vegetables - Sometimes we are so used to finding things in the grocery store all year round that we forget about the season. Cherries and pomegranates are the ones I notice that are only available during their season but almost everything has a season.

World Builder - This video was referenced in a Coursera course on Digital Culture. It is somewhat futuristic but not too far into the future….and thought provoking about technology, relationships, and cognition.

Supervolcanoes Discovered in Utah: Evidence of Some of the Largest Eruptions in Earth's History - Active 30 million years ago in southern Utah. The remains of supervolcanoes are not high cones; at their hear is a large collapse. The ‘Utah’ in this headline was what first caught my attention; I’m still gleaning items that are near our October vacation!

Incredibly Elaborate Illustrations by Victo Ngai - These illustrations are worth at least 1000 words!

Birth date popularity - An interactive data visualization of US births between 1973 and 1999. Move the cursor over the wheel to find how your birthday ranks. September 16 is ranked 1 (9 months from the end-of-year holiday season).

3 Free eBooks - June 2013

It’s time again for the monthly post of eBooks that are freely available on the Internet. The three below are my favorites for June 2013.

Chadwick, Luie. Fashion drawing and design: a practical manual for art students and others. London: Batsford. 1926. Available from the Internet Archive here. Scan through the illustrations for historical perspective of fashion illustration or fashion itself. I particularly liked the silhouettes below.

2013 06 trillim and tiger lily.jpg

Gordon, Elizabeth. Flower Children. Chicago: P.F. Volland and Company. 1910. Available from the Internet Archive here. The drawings capture both children and flowers. The tiger lily and trillium are shown at the right. What fun it would be to have customs along these lines for ‘dress up’ play!

2013 06 high chair.jpg

Quennell, Marjorie Courtney andQuennell, Charles Henry Bourne. A History of Everyday Things in England. London: Batsford. 1918-1934. Three volumes available on the Internet Archive: volume 2, volume 3, and volume 4. This is quite a series - covering from the 16th Century to the early 1930s. The illustrations depict changes in that time period for simple things like staircases to work such as farming and the advent of the industrial age. The high chair from about 1860 (left) looks like a low table with a chair attached to the top!