As the U.S. is scaling back both its support for UNESCO and its domestic protection for unique wilderness and cultural sites, China is devoting resources to pass Italy in 2018 as the country with the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites. For China, this is a matter of tourist dollars and national pride, but the road has not been without potholes, as this article from The Economist (UK) points out. (I believe the article's accompanying photo is from the South China Karst UNESCO World Heritage Site.) www.theworldin.com/article/14432/edition2018now-cultural-supremacy

Bitcoin has been in the news a lot lately because of its rapid increase in valuation. This map considers what goes into creating bitcoin: the computers "mining" bitcoin collectively consume more electricity than the countries shown in orange on this map. In fact, if bitcoin mining were a country, it would be 61st in the world in electricity consumption. bigthink.com/strange-maps/bitcoin-consumes-more-energy-than-159-individual-countries

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of Hannah Arendt. Arendt is considered one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century. She may be most famous for her work on totalitarianism, but she also wrote about something nearer to all of our lives: the difference between labor, work, and action. In The Human Condition, Arendt argues that "labor" is necessary for the maintenance of life but creates nothing of permanence. Because labor is required by necessity, labor is contrary to freedom.  "Work," on the other hand, is characterized by the creation of things (and knowledge and institutions) that are not required to live and have a degree of permanence. Work is still partially subject to necessity, but engaging in work allows us to experience some freedom. As Steven Maloney writes in the article linked to below, the distinction between labor and work is the difference between plowing a field and doing archaeology. "Both might be slow, labor intensive tasks performed while one wilts in the hot sun but one task sustains our bodies while the other one refines our imagination of the past."  "Action," according to Arendt, involves taking initiative and doing something new in the public sphere. It is by our actions that we are most free, and our actions reveal us to be who we are as individuals. For a short look at this part of Arendt's philosophy, see, for example, blog.oup.com/2017/10/hannah-arendt-philosophy

The U.S. has now been militarily engaged in Afghanistan for more than 16 years, but most Americans don't know a whole lot about the people of Afghanistan. This map, created by the U.S. Army in September 2001, shows Afghanistan's assumed ethnic geography at the beginning of the war. (Over the last 16 years, though, Afghanistan has created more refugees than any country except Syria, which has undoubtedly changed the substance of this map. Afghanistan's 2013 census pointedly did not ask questions about language or ethnicity.)
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/US_Army_ethnolinguistic_map_of_Afghanistan_--_circa_2001-09.jpg

Explorer Classroom is devoting the next two weeks to big cats. Beginning Monday and continuing through Dec. 14, you can join a variety of National Geographic photographers, conservation biologists, and community activists by webinar to learn about work being done to understand and safeguard the planet's big cats. The program kicks off with South African cheetah biologist Vincent Van der Merwe at 9:00 (ET) Monday morning. For the complete schedule or to register for a webinar, see www.nationalgeographic.org/education/programs/explorer-classroom/