Month: July 2015

Ranches the size of small nations

“FOR SALE: Largest ranch in the US within a single fence. Texas fixer-upper with more than 1000 oil wells; 6800 head of cattle; 500 quarter horses; 120 km2 of cropland; tombstones for legendary cowboys, long-dead dogs, and a horse buried standing up. Favorite of Will Rogers and Teddy Roosevelt. Colorful history of drinking and divorce. 15-minute drive to rib-eyes at the Rusty Spur in Vernon. Ideal for Saudi oil sheiks, billionaire hedge funders, and dot-commers who can tell a cow from a steer. Profitable. 0 debt. Property taxes only $800K a year. Price: $725M. Everything you can see, as far as the eye can see, is the ranch”. He points straight ahead, then behind him, then left. “Each horizon is this ranch.”

also, the world’s largest working cattle ranch is on the market. Australia’s remote Anna Creek Station clocks in at 24k km2—more than 12x the size of Waggoner –and its sale package will include 160k head of cattle.

Perpetual passenger

about a guy who has literally lived in the first class cabin for the last year.

His trip reports betray a theme, in photo after photo entirely devoid of human companionship, empty lounges, first-class menus, embroidered satin pillows — inanimate totems of a 5-star existence. On our next flight, a 7-hour run from Jakarta International to Tokyo, Schlappig tries to get himself motivated about the champagne selection, holding forth on the best meal pairings with a $200 bottle of Krug.

First Peoples

The earliest skeletons, especially in Brazil, look like Australo-Melanesians. Long skulls. If population Y were almost entirely standard Amerindian, with only a smidgen of Australo-Melanesian ancestry, they would have looked like Amerindians. On the other hand, if the original settlers of the Americas were mostly or entirely Australo-Melanesian (or more exactly something vaguely related to those existing populations) they would have those long, narrow skulls. This is the Paleoamerican model – and if true, it means that an Onge-like population arrived first, and that the incoming Amerinds almost completely wiped out them out later, with here and there a bit of admixture.

50x SETI

Breakthrough Listen will employ the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank and the 64-meter Parkes Telescope over a period of 10 years. The search will be 50x more sensitive than any SETI program before it, cover 10x the sky of previous programs, involve the 1M stars closest to Earth, and scan 5x as much radio spectrum 100x faster than before. It will also search for laser transmissions.