In the mornings, I tend to read CNN's Five Things. I think it is generally well-written. Good writing to me these days includes good headlines. I think it is surprising how much the headline influences the reading. Maybe it shouldn't but, with me, it does. A headline can be semi-accurate or better and still raise alarm or lower alarm.
Most mornings, I also read the Writer's Almanac, both for the poem of the day and for the interesting, informative and well-written biographical bits about people, usually people born on that day of the year. I almost always read Numlock News by Walt Hickey. The items feature some number or numerical measure. I am confident that numbers often bewitch and mislead, but the items in Numlock News manage to bring attention to surprising aspects of our world. For instance, two items today continued interests and experience we have had.
The first is about "corridors", passageways over or under a busy highway that deer, bears and other large animals, small ones, too, can use to cross a road without getting hit. We first found the subject when our bus through Canada drove under passages explicitly built for wildlife.
Corridors
Large animals cause 20 crashes a day on California's state highways, amounting to about 7,000 collisions per year. Animals just want to cross the road, but lack an opportunity to do so safely; deliberately building bridges and underpasses for animals to traverse freeways reduces the number of collisions. Utah saw a 98.5 percent decrease in deer mortalities after two new underpasses were installed along migratory routes, and Colorado saw vehicle collisions drop 89 percent after two bridges for mule deer and elk went up across a highway. California seeks to follow that model, funding its very first animal overpass for $7 million in Liberty Canyon, plus $2 million for a tunnel under Highway 17 and another $52.5 million for other crossings.
Marissa Garcia, High Country News
Lynn was the librarian in the local Plover-Whiting Elementary School. She would be annoyed during hot weather that she needed to wear a sweater to be at all comfortable. Other parts of the building were kept at okay temperatures but her central library room, in the center of the building, was too cold. Earlier, she was an assistant in the local university library and her place there was even colder. So this Numlock News item got my attention. There seem to be many people who find the workplace too hot or too cold.
Office
A new survey of Americans gauging preferences in returning to the office found that while 48 percent of employed respondents can currently work in-person, 12 percent of them said they never want to return to in-person work. That latter data point has an interesting crosstab: while 7 percent of men who responded said they never wanted to return to the office, fully 19 percent of women indicated they had no desire to ever return to an office to work in-person. Huh, yeah, guess you kind of reap what you sow when it comes to the thermostat and also pretty much all the other stuff that comes bundled up in office politics, eh?
