I heard a great story on public radio this morning. It was about a "researcher" who is studying how windows effect birds. He says that it is an unknown fact that a billion birds are killed every year flying into windows. He found this out by taking some window panes out into the forest and seeing if any birds hit them. Lo and behold they did. Next he went and found the average number of birds that hit a particular building, multiplied by the number of days in a year, then multiplied by the estimated number of buildings in America. Hence, one billion. He says that every new building should have "bird-friendly" glass.
Let's dissect this for a second. First, if he cared so much about birds, why did he murder them by placing window panes in a previously window-less environment? Of course the birds hit them. If I was walking through a forest that I had frequented for years and all of a sudden there's a window pane hanging there I would hit it too. Next, did he take into consideration that there are many areas of the country where birds don't normally hit windows? I don't remember birds ever hitting any of our windows where I grew up in Eastern Washington. I have a freind here in Salem who commented that there had been two birds to hit the window of thier home in five years!
Next in the story they found a university somewhere on the east coast that installed so-called "bird friendly" windows in a new building. They installed two "thump" detectors to see how many birds hit those two buildings in a year. They found that five hit the windows. So say there are 50 windows. That means these "bird-freindly" windows KILLED 125 birds! And it is a major science building, and they said it was mostly glass. So I'm guessing the total number of windows is more like 500. I don't even want to contemplate the carnage 500 windows would visit upon those poor, defenseless birds.

Oh yeah, Greek is hard too.

That's it for today.