In this edition of Maya’s Musings, a plethora of links to things I stumbled across in the first weeks of the month. As always, I welcome any comments, questions, recommendations, or feedback!

Five articles I'm glad I read

I enjoyed the experience of actually reading these five, so I’ll leave my commentary to a minimum in the hopes that you may, too!

• What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names? Sleek data visualizations, clever analyses, and some fascinating conclusions on how Chinese names reflect historical and cultural context.
• In Defense of Thinking (and why now, more than ever, we need to do more of it.)
• Our Quest for Circularity: On Patagonia's mission to be a cradle-to-cradle company, designing for more than just profit, and , most importantly... "Do we need a Better Sweater® 1/4-Zip in 18 colors?"
• Gaia, the Scientist: Hope Jahren, one of my favorites, contemplates women, science, and the way we define ourselves.
• Against “Feel Free To Take Some Time If You Need It": As always, Anne Helen Petersen’s description of the conflation between productivity and morality give just a little more clarity to the painful persistence of workism, both within and around me.

Four images that caught my eye

• Artist Naoki Onogawa makes tiny paper cranes, none more than a centimeter in diameter, and displays them on bonsai-esque tree forms. As a fellow crane-folder, I was intrigued by Onogawa's reflection on seeing a display of 1000 paper cranes at a school destroyed by the 2011 tsunami: “It was like witnessing the result of a desolate ritual where people channeled their unsettled feelings into these cranes. And here they exist, spirited with prayers that they would go back and forward to and from a world beyond here. I struggle to find the words to describe it, but I think that maybe the cranes that I fold now come from that place of solemn prayer.” (via Colossal)

• Another Japanese artist, Motoi Yamamoto, crafts stunningly intricate patterns like this one out of... salt. Why salt? "I like about the process is that I only use this natural medium for a fleeting moment in my work before returning it to its place in nature. this project enables me to experience how my life in this world is a mere moment in the long, long passage of time." It's like dominos, but so much... more (via designboom)

• The global deforestation footprint of the US from 2000-2015, courtesy of a study out in Nature Ecology & Evolution that quantifies and maps worldwide forest loss attributed to individual countries, linking deforestation patterns to international trade and global supply chains. Check out the supplementary materials for maps of other countries.

• This page from William Saville-Kent‘a 1893 publication The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities, the first popular science book on the underwater world. I love the artistic style of scientific illustrations from this era, and can’t help but wonder if we’d all appreciate the world around us a little more if we took the time to study it as closely as one must to create a piece like this. (via Brain Pickings)

Three cool ideas to try

• Use the peel and core of your next pineapple to make tepache, a fermented probiotic drink originating from Pre-Columbian Mexico
• Get the same effect as blue light glasses for about 0.00001% the time and money by... holding your device one inch further away from your face
• Use this Color Problems generator to create a color analysis of your favorite photo, in the style of the artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (and send me what you come up with!)

Two facts that made me pause

• According to a 2019 analysis of climate-change mitigation strategies, getting households to reduce food waste and adopt a plant-based diet would save twice as many carbon emissions as getting them to recycle, switch to LED lighting and hybrid vehicles, and add rooftop solar systems combined (via The Atlantic)
• Some strains of bacteria could help California crops survive frosts. We’ve apparently known for decades that frost-sensitive plants harbor microbes that can cause ice to form at above-normal temperatures (these strains are sometimes even added to snow machines at ski resorts!). Now, researchers are trying harness other naturally-occurring strains to displace the ice-inducing ones, which can prevent frosts and the resulting damage (via Inside Climate News)

One poem for the road

"Why" — Wendell Berry

Why all the embarrassment about being happy? Sometimes I'm as happy as a sleeping dog, and for the same reasons, and for others.