Here’s one of the articles I have in my backlog of items to share; it is from a while back.

Back in December, a respectably large cache of garden gnomes was discovered in a Mount Vernon, Washington resident’s back yard when high winds knocked down her fence. The fence was concealing around sixty yard gnomes — at least some apparently stolen from other yards — along with other yard ornaments. See the link for more details.

Seattle P-I: Gnome-napping: Thefts may have created backyard statue stash.

The Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California was shutdown on Tuesday by bottles of honey. They did not know they were dealing with honey at the time. From “Bottled Honey Shuts Down California Airport” in VOANews:

Two Transportation Security Administration officers were also treated and released from the hospital after being exposed to what were described as “fumes” from the bottles.

My path to the VOA article: Boing Boing >> Backwards Beekepers >> VOANews.

I just pulled this one out of my email drafts folder.

“Dream of solar sailing in space lives on in new project” discusses an announcement by The Planetary Society to build, launch, and test LightSail-1 — a small craft that will be propelled by solar sail. As explained in the article, previous attempts to launch solar sail craft failed.

I have always been intrigued by the solar sail concept (I am intrigued by a lot of things, though) and will try to keep an eye on this.

I learned about this story in an email from a mail list.

“I Lost 331 Pounds” is a short slide show story about a man who topped out at over 500 pounds, but ultimately reached a healthy weight after taking up cycling.

I have for a long time been fascinated by the symbiotic relationship between some species of acacias and ants. Honestly, I have also for a long time been fascinated by ants alone. Now some researchers have observed interesting behavior by a species of jumping spider, Bagheera kiplingi, that lives on the same acacia plants.

In many of these ant-plant relationships, the ants are provided food — called Beltian bodies — by the acacia plant. The researchers observed the spider B. kiplingi “hunting” and eating the Beltian bodies as its primary source of food, making this spider the first known to have a primarily vegetarian diet.

Read a summary of the research here. The research manuscript is at doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.08.049, but you will need an individual or institutional subscription to get the full text.

Manufacturing methamphetamine used to take a whole home chemistry lab, but now it only requires a two-liter soda bottle, some cold pills, and household chemicals.

The downside of making your own meth (other than addiction and various ill effects)? The process is dangerous and leads to an explosion if oxygen is allowed to participate in the reaction.

The American Heart Association has reminded us again that Americans consume a lot of added sugar each day. Between 2001 and 2004, Americans consumed, on average, twenty-two teaspoons of added sugar daily. The recommended limits? For men: nine teaspoons, and women: six teaspoons.

This article claims that teenagers eat thirty-four teaspoons of added sugar daily, on average. It also has some other interesting information, such as the amount of sugar that “fruit-flavored” yogurt contains: six teaspoons.

And to put this into a unit that actually helps you: one teaspoon of sugar is about 4.2 grams.

In the August 2009 edition of the Communications of the ACM, venture capitalist Tim Draper argues that now is the time to innovate and try to make something happen. Unfortunately, for you civilians out there, viewing the article’s content requires ACM credentials.

Update: I have discovered that this article is available as a preview of the digital edition of Communications of the ACM. How lucky; everyone can view it without credentials here.

In terms of American healthcare, Jonathan Alter sarcastically asks What’s Not to Like? The piece is directed against the belief that nothing is wrong with American healthcare, but avoids commentary on the big challenge: how best to address the problem.

Now for something that I care a lot about.

Fourteen days ago, Sound Transit opened Link Light Rail, a light rail line between Tukwila (about 1.5 miles from the airport) and Downtown Seattle. In December, track covering the final 1.5 miles to the airport will open providing a direct train link from downtown to the airport. Trains run every 7.5 minutes at peak and every ten or fifteen minutes during off-peak hours, depending just how off-peak it is. Until the track to the airport is opened, shuttles will run frequently from the Tukwila station to the airport terminal.

Despite my tardiness in writing about it, I have been excited about this project since I first heard about it, which was months before I moved here. Since I do not drive to the airport, this is a big step up personally in convenience in getting there.

The next step, after completion of the line to the airport terminal, appears to be tunneling 3.15 miles to the University of Washington, creating the University Link, which also includes the construction of stations at the University and on Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, this project will not be completed until 2016.

In the 2008 General Election, voter approval was given to expand the light rail service north to Northgate, east across the I-90 bridge to Redmond’s Overlake Transit Center, and south to the Redondo/Star Lake area of Federal Way. I have yet to see completion date estimates on these projects. The same expansion proposal also adds other forms of transit in other areas, such as more buses across the 520 bridge.