I thought for sure this was going to be whistle designed to scare off pigeons or something. Turns out they attach whistles to pigeons so they make sounds when they fly! Very interesting.
This is why the whole discussion around reintroducing them into the North Cascades in Washington has fascinated me (I take no sides, though as a backpacker in that area, I'd kinda prefer not to have to deal with them - black bears trend afraid of us, I've never minded spotting them!). British Columbia has them, and the border doesn't prevent them from making their way down here. I've yet to understand why that is the case - what keeps them from actually coming into the Washington Cascades and making themselves at home?
Layman’s understanding, but the only real prevention is time and if there’s an existing grizzly pop down there. Reason grizzs are expanding is the males have very large roaming territory, and each new adolescent male needs to find its own or face conflict. If you’re backpacking in an area with a pop, good odds there’s 1x grizz per 6 square miles.
Hunting and environmental damage could play a role, but I don’t think modern hunting/F&G policies could do much. They are very adaptable creatures and eat a variety of stuff, so I speculate you’d have to have real ecosystem collapse to cause them to bow out of an area.
End of the day for me - grizzlies ranged the entire country in 1776 times, and then by the 1970’s got boxed into Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming basically. If that bear disappeared/disappears, it’d be a tragedy. Meet a bear or see one skinned and they’re pretty darn close to human-looking. The Montana pop in glacier is about to join with the Wyoming pop in Yellowstone, they’re now in the bighorns in WY, and get spotted in eastern plains Montana now.
If you’re not hunting and dressing game, as most hikers are not, the main danger comes from surprising them, so just keep head on a swivel and carry bear spray. Carry a 10mm or .44 and up for if you get stalked by one. NOLS Lander has a good YouTube video on grizzly safety. After long enough accounting for this, I realized I wasn’t really “hiking” in non-bear areas much as marching around woods acting like I was, and I haven’t looked at the non-bear areas the same.
If you told me that I would ask for some clarification.
The UT system has a very large endowment, (which appears to be a little smaller than Harvard's), but UT Austin is much smaller (but still very large for a public university.)
I'd also ask why you included the University of Florida in that list, since it appears their endowment is pretty small (at least compared to the other schools in that list.)
I'm guessing they relied on an LLM response. That was my thought, and having tried it they indeed generate lots of garbage for this topic. I got a ChatGPT A/B test for this and both options were incorrect (one obviously and the other subtly, due to misinterpreting a bond rating page's discussion of the PUF and just blindly regurgitating the number from there).
I kind of want a tattoo because I'd like to know what it feels like to get one. I don't think I'll ever get one though. I have a hard enough time deciding what kind of art to hang on my walls.
You can get one that's only visible under UV light, but given the topic here it might be relevant to know that these are much harder to remove and also if they age they may become visible under normal light and/or stop fluoresced under UV light.
Maybe this wasn't all over the US, but in the 90s I helped serve and clean up our elementary school lunches. There was a rotation through all of the older classrooms.
On the internet it’s easy to forget that the US education system is extremely heterogeneous. There isn’t one set of practices or laws that are shared across the country. It’s very local.
For me, I can barely remember school provided lunches existing as something that a small handful of students got. The majority of students brought a lunchbox from home that our parents prepared.
Yup, we had "hot lunch" available or you could bring your own. Some kids had meal cards that got them free lunch (or maybe just reduced lunch? I was like 8 years old so I don't remember.)
I also did this to get lunch for free in high school from 2008-2010. I don’t remember how many hours a week it was (it was definitely less than 10). The shifts were prep work in the morning, serving lunch, or doing dishes. Each shift was at most an hour. It was pretty fun since it was with my friends at school.
I can remember similar from public elementary school in the early 80s in the suburban SF Bay Area.
In kindergarten, we had a rotating chore to take the collective milk money for the class, exchange it for a crate of milk at the cafeteria, and return it to the kindergarten room. I can imagine social norms have changed since then about this de facto mandatory financial exercise.
In later grades, we had some rotating lunch duties including, at least, rinsing the lunch trays and loading the big dishwasher. I can't remember if we ever helped serve food, but I do remember being told to be careful with the very hot water spray nozzle in the washing basin. I can imagine this having changed due to shifting safety and liability norms.
I went to a boarding high school in Kenya (most high schools are boarding there) and we were responsible for cleaning the hostels and the bathrooms, which we had to do every morning before class. The flowerbeds outside our hostels were also our responsibility.
> These moments used to be given over to silent reflection or conversation with whoever is around. Now, for most of us, nearly all of them are grabbed by our phones.
Maybe this is true for the author, but before smartphones I wasn't just chatting up strangers while I waited for the elevator or reflecting on my life. I was staring at the elevator light getting angry that it was taking too long.
I spent a lot of time being bored and being angry that I was bored. Now I can consume information and learn new things ALL THE TIME. It's amazing!
The lower ranking is total mileage tons while the highest ranking is percentage of freight moved by train.
The US ranks decently high in passenger miles as well, but that's just because we're a huge country, not because trains are regularly used by people in the US.
I guess I should have used a different word but I meant huge to imply a large population as well as area. The US is the 3rd most populous country in the world after all.
