If The Trees Die We Die Too, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most important facts from the past few days. This week: Trees keep us alive, clogs keep us comfy and the weekend keeps us trapped.
No Really, We Need Trees To Live
Trees. They're important. They inhale the (bad) carbon dioxide we exhale, and exhale the (good) oxygen we crave.
You know this. But what you might not be aware is that some of the secondary benefits from trees — shade, something peaceful to behold — might be more important than you think.
WIRED's Adam Rogers dives into the latest tree science and finds that there's a link between the number of nearby trees and public health. In other words, the less trees there are in a given area, the more people will die. Researchers have yet to pinpoint exactly why, but it would seem logical that more trees means less pollutants in the air, and more peaceful walks through nature — arguably two large boons to one's health.
Cool, right? Rogers points out one more thing: 26.8 million trees are going to die in Southern California over the next few years, because of a fungus from beetles.
[WIRED]
Baking Things At 350 Degrees Is No Accident
In life, we seem surrounded by arbitrary constants. A beer is 12 fluid ounces. Pop-Tarts come packaged in pairs. A headphones cable is just long enough to get snagged on stuff.
Adrienne LaFrance's look into why we bake almost everything at 350 degrees for The Atlantic will convince you that everything happens for a reason. Almost nothing falls to chance. LaFrance finds that we lean on 350 so much because this is where decades of human experimentation and intuition, scientific research and product design has led us. There wasn't a single person who deemed that 350 is the Good Temperature, but rather this is what housewives found was the ideal temperature where things browned but didn't burn, science examined their claims and quantified it and the appliance manufacturers internalized it in how their ovens functioned.
Realizing this, you could look at anything — say the flexibility of the walls of an aluminum can — and find that many people for quite some time have thought about it, and determined that this is the way it should be. Humanity is in the details, I suppose.
Yep, Clogs Are Comfy As Heck
Have you ever noticed the shoes of nurses or wait staff? For some inexplicable reason, they're almost always wearing clogs. Is this just an occupational thing? Like librarians who wear thick cardigans or bankers who wear wingtips? Is everyone in the service and medical industries in the pocket of Big Clog?
Racked's Tiffany Yannetta (hardcore fans might recognize her from our recent guide on how to buy work clothes) spoke with people who are on their feet all day and found that clogs, well, they're just really comfortable? They swear by 'em. Other runners-up were running shoes and Blundstone boots.
I'm not sure about you folks, but I think this is the Year of the Clog.
[Racked]
We're All Working For The Weekend
If you take one thing away from Katrina Onstad's history of the weekend for Quartz, it's that there wasn't always a weekend. We joke now about how robots are going to take our jobs, but back then people were at the mercy of the machine — tasked to keep them running at all hours, and if they couldn't, someone else would.
Clearly, the workers fought back and won themselves two days of rest. And now we enjoy it as a sort of inherent thing about life — just as much as we sleep at night or enjoy premium cable on Sunday nights.
But Onstad points out this socialist policy doesn't quite mesh with capitalism, creating an environment where people feel like they need to work in order to "earn" time off. We, as a society, seem to have come to agreement that working all the time is bad. We haven't, yet, tackled the issue of if we should be working at all. But we'll get there, one day at a time.
[Quartz]
Previously on What We Learned This Week
An Indestructible Bunker Sleeps In Colorado
There Are Cocktails That Can Kill
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