Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

Our friend Bookworm has great photos from her trip to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan.

Speaking of photographs,  Nikon’s Small World has an extensive collection of images captured by the light microscope.

A mosaic depicting the Trojan War has been found in Syria.

The most precious resource is agency.  Excerpt:

Seizing opportunity requires opportunity to exist at all. And I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people. Ushering everyone into an endless default script is disastrous when underlying conditions or assumptions change. Even when they don’t, some people exit academia almost terrified to leave (to interact with the “real world”), a kind of Stockholm syndrome. How could we celebrate a higher learning that creates something so pathetic, the opposite of a readiness for life?

What is going on in the world’s art museums?

Organizational cultures and product failures. (at Twitter)

A very interesting analysis of the embedded energy associated with various products.

This natural resources investment firm suggests that the reductions in the cost of wind and solar technologies has been driven not primarily by a Moore’s-law-like learning curve, but rather by reductions in energy and capital costs.

The energy transition of the last 700 years: trends in the share of economies consumed by acquiring food and fuel.