This map, from data provided by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, shows where wildfires are burning, uncharacteristically early, in Canada.  Many of these fires are contributing to poor air quality in Canada and the U.S.  (Map appeared in www.wsj.com/articles/air-quality-levels-drop-in-u-s-as-smoke-billows-from-canadian-wildfires-c87c53db.)

A New York Times investigation finds a fleet of rogue oil tankers are using fake transponder signals to move sanctioned Russian oil, primarily to ports in China. The elaborate ruse seems to be undertaken primarily to maintain the tankers' insurance coverage. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/30/world/asia/russia-oil-ships-sanctions.html

This article from Fortune introduces readers to Gatun Lake, a body of water you may have never heard of or thought about that is poised to play a huge role in global trade, supply chain management, and inflation because of a severe, ongoing drought in Panama:

"Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell keeps careful track of employment levels, wages, consumer prices and numerous other metrics to see where the US inflation rate may be headed in the next year. He might also want to keep an eye on water levels at Gatun Lake. That’s the lake that feeds the locks in the Panama Canal with the fresh water needed to raise vessels as they pass from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. But a severe drought has caused water levels in the lake to drop far below normal, resulting in weight limits and rising surcharges for vessels traversing the canal. It’s also unnerving economists and supply-chain experts. Just as the world’s delivery bottlenecks are easing, Panama’s drought and worrisome weather patterns elsewhere threaten to revive some of the chaos of 2021, when a surge in shipping costs and consumer demand resulted in shortages of goods, helping to drive US inflation to a four-decade high. If Gatun Lake levels keep falling as forecast, the market reaction will be higher shipping rates and a scramble to find alternative routes from Asia to the US, logistics experts said. ... Making matters worse, an El Niño system is building in the western Pacific Ocean and is expected to upset normal weather patterns by the end of this year. While this can cause heavy rainfall in some regions, in Panama it typically means severe drought and higher than normal temperatures."
fortune.com/2023/06/02/panama-canal-water-levels-drought-inflation/

The headlines associated with the first geo-graphic in this article tend to focus on hot job creation rates in politically "red" vs. "blue" states. This analysis, though, goes deeper into the hiring numbers to discuss connections with job churn, wages, education, and housing: www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/26/hiring-red-blue-states/

Until the 1840s, vegetarians were referred to as "Pythagoreans" because, in addition to thinking about right angles, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Pythagoras was associated with a school of Greek philosophers that shunned meat eating, in part because Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of the soul, including the migration of the soul between people and animals. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/202305/how-vegetarianism-was-born-out-of-philosophy-and-mysticism

Two express trains collided in India's Odisha state yesterday, resulting in more than 200 deaths as of this writing. Odisha borders the Bay of Bengal, southwest of Kolkata.  The trains were on the main rail line connecting the megacities of Kolkata and Chennai. The pin on this map marks the approximate location of the crash.

I will be out exploring the next couple of weeks and will not be posting to my blog or Facebook page until June.  If you find you miss me, tell a friend about my classes or blog posts :-).

To paraphrase Jurassic Park's Dr. Ian Malcolm, life finds a way.  This article looks at the creatures living in the North Pacific Gyre's "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." www.wsj.com/articles/pacific-ocean-garbage-patch-is-bursting-with-life-e57b04f3

Farmers in my native upper Midwest should have their fields mostly planted by now. This map shows the percentage of each state's land area taken up by corn fields (nearly all of which is field corn, or cattle or cow corn, not sweet corn): cerealsecrets.com/corn-fields-usa/

As more aspects of our lives -- and in this case our books -- are digitized and made available electronically, it is useful to remember that, legally at least, we do not own that digitized content.  We are merely licensing it, which allows the service that provides it to change it at will.  Just as no one will ask you to approve changes to your email interface, you have no say if your digital "friend" is altered or the words in your ebooks.  www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/arts/dahl-christie-stine-kindle-edited.html

This map looks at the 2nd largest nationality living in each European country. Deciphering it may be an opportunity for some flag research, though :-). brilliantmaps.com/2nd-largest-nationality/

Planning a road trip or local getaway? This article highlights what editors consider to be the best state parks in the U.S. (The eagle-eyed among you might recognize a few of the photos on my website were taken at some of the state parks profiled.) www.outsideonline.com/adventure-travel/national-parks/best-state-parks-in-us

On Sunday, Türkiye (Turkey) will be holding its presidential election, and the Kurdish vote is likely to play a significant role. This map, which redraws current borders in the Middle East based primarily on dominant nationality, hints at the geographic extent of the Kurdish population in Türkiye and in neighboring countries. brilliantmaps.com/new-middle-east/

Lake Kivu, sitting between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is one of East Africa's rift lakes. It is also sitting amidst the zone of devastation caused by flooding and landslides that killed more than 550 people, mostly in the eastern DRC, over the last week. www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-65521521

Reporters Without Borders released its 2023 World Press Freedom Index earlier this week: "180 countries and territories were analyzed based on five indicators covering political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context and safety." This map shows the results: www.statista.com/chart/13640/press-freedom-index/  Worst countries for press freedom: North Korea, China, and Vietnam. Best countries for press freedom: Norway, Ireland, and Denmark.

Looking for a new verbal game? Merriam-Webster offers a variety of free vocabulary-based games, from a four-at-a-time wordle puzzle to farm idioms and famous last lines of literature: www.merriam-webster.com/games

Images of the earth at night can reveal a great deal about population, economics, land use, and the availability of electricity. In this article, The New York Times has assembled a series of satellite images to illustrate how all of these factors have changed on the ground in Ukraine since Nov. 2021. www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/world/europe/ukraine-satellite-darkness.html

Although biogeography is considered a subset of physical geography, it has clear overlap with human geography as well, as this article about extinct foods shows. Some of the foods profiled humans ate into extinction; others just died out, as commercial preferences changed cultivation practices. www.mentalfloss.com/article/654207/extinct-foods-from-history

For a better appreciation of U.S. topography (and the challenges of westward expansion), check out this computer-generated map of the contiguous U.S.: www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/jslbn9/us_elevation_tiles_oc/

Previously, discussion of machine intelligence/consciousness has come at the issue from the perspective of an artificial being becoming intelligent/conscious. This piece by two professors at Peking University in Philosophy Now (UK) invokes the famous Ship of Theseus paradox (and the sorites paradox) to come at the issue from the other way: an intelligent being becoming a machine. As humans adopt more technological enhancements to their biology -- including neural enhancements, integrations, and even replacements -- at some point a human may become if not a machine at least more artificial than natural, which presumably would yield a conscious, intelligent artificial being. philosophynow.org/issues/155/Can_Machines_Be_Conscious

Teens interested in learning more about stock investing might want to check out the Top Trader Competition being offered by the University of Texas at Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management this summer. Rising 9th-12th graders compete to maximize returns on $1M in virtual cash. The registration deadline is May 26; there's an early-bird discount until April 28. jindal.utdallas.edu/events/top-trader/

Although it's been widely reported that India will overtake China as the world's most populous country at some point this year, what has received less attention are the divergent trends in fertility rates within India: the birth rate in northern India is nearly twice that of southern India. In southern India, the total fertility rate is 1.8 children per woman, on a par with the U.S. and most of Europe. In northern India, the total fertility rate is about 3 children per woman, on a par with Namibia and Libya, among other countries. "Not only are southern [Indian] states providing women better access to contraceptives and family planning services, experts say, but they’re also affording women better educations, more jobs and higher relative social status — crucial, intangible factors that have led to smaller family sizes and greater prosperity. 'Demographically, we have two Indias,' said Arvind Subramanian, the Indian government’s chief economic adviser between 2014 and 2018. 'The India of the south already resembles East Asia. It’s actually in the early stages of aging. But the Hindi heartland is still very much booming.' ... The north-south gap in birthrates and overall development is stirring frequent debates about how to apportion federal spending and how to allocate seats in Parliament. It’s also sparked efforts by government leaders and development experts to provide enough jobs to the poor, northern states — and lift up women like Malika [a woman profiled in the story from the northern state of Bihar], who are left behind even as India’s surging economy looks destined to overtake Germany’s later this decade. ... According to the 2021 national family survey, 84 percent of Tamil Nadu women are now literate, compared with 55 percent in Bihar, the lowest in India. Forty-six percent of married women in Tamil Nadu were employed in the last 12 months, versus 19.2 percent of married Bihari women. ... Increasingly, India’s failure to close its north-south demographic and economic divide is leading to political consequences. In Bihar, the pressure on public-sector employment is so great that cuts to government job openings or in military recruitment often spark riots. Meanwhile, southern states such as Tamil Nadu, which is expecting to see its population decline sometime in the next decade, has seen an influx of northern migrant laborers, occasionally leading to friction."
www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/14/india-china-population-most-populous/

This article from Politico analyzes the geography of gun-related deaths in the context of U.S. cultural geography. "The geography of gun violence — and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into the problem are revealed. ... The reason the U.S. has strong regional differences is because our swath of the North American continent was settled by rival colonial projects that had very little in common, often despised one another and spread without regard for today’s state boundaries. ... As expected, the disparities between the regions are stark, but even I was shocked at just how wide the differences were and also by some unexpected revelations." www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising-geography-of-gun-violence-00092413