terra preta, smart birds, big nerds, deadly chicks, and a book

Today I learned that if you heat up plant material in an anaerobic environment, you can stir the result into lousy soil and your crops do as well or better than if you just added nitrogen, and you don't have to do it every year. It also sequesters carbon. The article I read about it only said that the company helping with the trials hasn't been able to make very much yet, but it didn't ask if any of this sounded familiar. Apparently between the time I was in school learning about the mystery of terra preta and now, scientists figured it out, and people used to do it in the fields, and I bet they didn't call their smoldering mounds of dead plant parts 'pyrolysis plants.'

In other news:

• Birds have discovered that cigarette smoke acts as a pesticide.
• A Slingbox is a device that lets you watch stuff you recorded from tv at home over the internet from someplace else, but you have to buy their proprietary software for your computer and a Slingbox. I think this would be more interesting to me, personally, if I hadn't already been doing that for a couple of years. (Obviously my Unix skills aren't up to that yet; I'm a nerd, but I married a bigger one.)
• Petting zoos'll kill you.

It also appears that Fahrenheit 451 doesn't mean what we think it means, but it's going to be hard for some of us to find out for sure because my local library doesn't have it. Ok, so there are about fifteen local libraries here in town, and several of them have multiple copies, but still.