“‘Tis the season for some to take offense when a store clerk says ‘happy holidays’ instead of ‘merry Christmas.’ It is easy to imagine saying ‘merry Christmas’ as another cudgel in the culture wars between Christians and the irreligious. The actual story, however, is much more nuanced.”
Source: fivethirtyeight.com
70-degree weather will span from Florida into southern New England
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Circles show locations where the record temperatures for this time of year are being forecast to be broken (or within a degree of the record).
Tags: physical, weather and climate.
“In my post last week I cited a few ways in which English is unsuitable as a global language, and mentioned that its being one anyway is attributable at least in part to undeserved luck. Of course, it wasn’t all luck.”
Tags: language, colonialism, diffusion, culture, English.
Source: chronicle.com
Additionally, here is an article explaining why Mandarin won’t become a lingua franca in the near future.
“A postal worker created a guide for black travelers that was published almost every year from 1936 to 1966.”
Source: hereandnow.wbur.org
The effects of globalization and technologies are uneven; this is a very clear example of how mobility and access to other places can be limited based on various segments of the population. It is repugnant to think that such a book was ever necessary in this country, but it is heartening to see the evidence of an organized network that worked to lessen the pain of those oppressed by it (podcast on the Green Book and an additional article).
Geographer Derek Alderman complied these resources for teachers wanting to use the example of the Green Book in their classrooms.
Tags: mobility, transportation, race, class, culture, historical, USA, ethnicity.
Regions of America have their own grammar, just like they have their own vocabulary.
Source: www.atlasobscura.com
Here’s you a post on regionalized grammatical differences. And if you want a link of Southern vocabulary terms, (personal favorite: I’m fixin’ to…) click on this.
See staff at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo try traditional Norwegian Christmas dishes. Se ansatte på den amerikanske ambassaden i Oslo smake på norsk julemat.
Tags: Norway, food, culture, seasonal, perspective.
Source: www.youtube.com
“The word lavaka means ‘hole’ or ‘gully’ in Malagasy, and it has become the accepted international term for the spectacular erosional features that characterize the highlands of Madagscar. Lavakas are gullies formed by groundwater flow, with steep or vertical sides and flat floors.”
Source: madmonster.williams.edu
Lavakas are often seen as an ecological catastrophe since rapid deforestion leads to young, active lavakas that can silt up rice fields. While obviously not desirable, these scars on a deforested landscape do offer a glimmer of hope as well. Some National Geographic explorers are finding that older, stabilized lavakas can become great agricultural pockets for rebuilding in these denuded communities.
Tags: Madagascar, erosion, environment adapt, environment, ecology, political ecology, Africa, National Geographic.
New research shows that more than four billion years ago the surface of Earth was heavily reprocessed – or melted, mixed, and buried – as a result of giant asteroid impacts. A new terrestrial bombardment model, calibrated using existing lunar and terrestrial data, sheds light on the role asteroid collisions played in the evolution of the uppermost layers of the early Earth
Tag: geology.
Source: sservi.nasa.gov
This map by Jakub Marian shows you how to say Merry Christmas in European languages.
Source: fairlanguages.com
To those that celebrate Christmas I was going to wish them a Merry Christmas in English, but this gives us so many other options…Feliz Navidad! For any interested in exploring the setting of the Christmas story from a geographic perspective, read on.
Tags: religion, Europe, culture, historical, language, seasonal.
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 