Manhattan is sitting on a treasure trove of minerals and these NY Time writers went in search of them. First stop is Central Park where the mica schist that gives New York’s buildings a strong foundation is visible. Then it’s off to the shores where the material excavated from the construction of subways and skyscraper was piled along the edge of the island. There they find numerous garnets, not excellent quality, but sparkly red just the same, and a bit of black tourmaline. Last stop is the American Museum of Natural History where the New York Mineralogical Club’s impressive collection is housed.

Take a peek at fashion magazines from the 1940s and 50s. Most of them have scans from a few inside pages as well (click on the covers). (via DesignWritings)

Here’s an update on nushu, the special script that was used by women from Jiangyong County, in China’s Hunan Province. Efforts are being made to preserve knowledge about the language. Only a few women remain who can write and read the script. A museum is being built to collect and house the language’s artifacts. A publishing house is compiling a nushu dictionary. Researchers continue to look for the origins of the characters, which have been compared to inscriptions that are 3,000 years old. (via provenance: unknown)

Ever wonder how far your mouse or trackball travels as you point and click through your daily grind and surf? The Modometer (for Windows users) will track your cursor movements, button clicks and keystrokes. You may be surprised by the results. Things can really add up! I haven’t tried it myself, but I am certainly curious. (mentioned in a Scientific American article about voice recognition software)

This NY Times article discusses an interesting approach in anthropology, determining when humans started to cook their food and correlating expected body changes and social behaviors. Anthropologist Dr. Richard W. Wrangham postulates that the advent of cooking was 2 million years ago, 1.5 million years earlier than the standard belief. There’s no evidence for skeletal changes at the time where most believe humans started cooking their food, but Homo Erectus had the smaller teeth, gut, rib cage, and larger females that could point to a shift to a cooking lifestyle. Wrangham prefers the cooking theory as cause for the evolution to Homo Erectus rather than the common view that the changes resulted from the hunting of big game. Why smaller teeth if they were eating more raw meat? Why did the Homo Erectus female evolve to be substantially larger but not the male? Did cooking help create monogamy and the family unit? The arguments, listed in detail in the article, are fascinating to think through, but don’t have strong supporting evidence. Better tests are being developed to determine how long ago men made their own fires. Regardless of whether Wrangham is correct that cooking started with early Homo Erectus, the approach is fresh and provides new theories for anthropologists to sink their little teeth into.

Looks like Discover Card is continuing along in the designer card trend. My husband got the kidney-shaped 2GO card I mentioned last month and he even used it at a point-of-sale terminal this weekend. Today I got a pop-up ad for what appears to be a see-through Discover Platinum card. I can’t find it from their main site (only the Platinum and U.S. theme cards are available there), but here’s the secure link that the ad led to. It’s difficult to see how the card is transparent, but the ad reads: “Unique Clear Design”. I’ve seen a couple people showing off their clear American Express Blue cards. Interesting that this one’s blue too.

I fell down the stairs so many times as a small child that my mother almost got used to the sound of my body bouncing its way down the stairs and the crying that followed. In her touching, personal memory of the late Stephen Jay Gould, photographer Jill Krementz recalls the time she was on the phone with Gould when she heard her baby daughter fall down the stairs. He waited patiently for her to return to the phone and comforted her with the information from the chapter in his book “Ever Since Darwin” that was about this very subject:

“If a child half your height falls down, its head will hit with not half but 1/32 the energy of yours in a similar fall. A child is protected more by its size than by a ‘soft’ head. In return, we are protected from the physical force of its tantrums, for the child can strike with, not half, but only 1/32 of the energy we can muster.”

This is likely something my mother realized as I picked myself up, time and time again, unhurt, save for the residual damage of tears drying my face, which she fixed with Pond’s Dry Skin Cream, and a lifelong fear of down escalators, which I haven’t yet found a fix for.

David Bowie is releasing a new album, titled Heathen, on June 11. The first single, Slow Burn, with Pete Townshend on guitar, is available for listening in Real Audio format. Bowie is headlining Moby’s Area2 Festival this summer along with a happy surprise: Blue Man Group.

The Natural Point trackIR follows a silver dot on your forehead so you can control your mouse cursor with your head. There’s a special version for gaming and software packages to provide assistive technology for people who can’t use a mouse or would like an ergonomic alternative.

Production of this year’s state quarters is down from previous years. 648 million Tennessee quarters were minted; compare that to others on the mintage chart. The 2002-P Ohio quarter has the lowest mintage for one mint, 217.2 million. There has not been as much demand for coinage with the economy downturn. Also, the Pennsylvania mint was closed for six weeks, while they should have been producing Ohio quarters, to fix some OSHA concerns. Louisiana is out, so I’m losing ground fast in my hunt.