my desk is a mess...

Here's a bunch of things I didn't know from Alan Weisman's The World Without Us: 

• Have you seen this cool, underground city? Derinkuyu! 
• Big animals that used to inhabit North America? Giant armadillos, Glyptodonts ("resembling armo-plated Volkswagens with tails that ended in spiked maces"), giant short faced bears (grizzly x2), giant beavers (as big as black bears), giant peccaries, the American Lion (faster and bigger than the ones we know today), the dire wolf (big fangs), mammoth (10 kinds, small and large, furry and hairless), mastadons, horses (3 kinds), camels (lots of kinds), tapirs, a ton of antlered animals (moose, pronghorns, and others), saber-toothed tiger, and the American chetah.  
• "A flower, like a human, is two-thirds water. The amount of water a typical floral exporter therefore ships to Europe each year equals the annual needs of a town of 20,000 people. (Talking about exporting flowers from Africa.) 
• There's a concentration of "petroleum refineries, petrochemical companies and storage structures" that begins on the east side of Houston and runs "uninterrupted" 50 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. 50 miles? Really?
• Did you know that there's a place where annual soil samples have been taken since the 19c? Check this out: Rothamsted Research
• In rural Wisconsin alone, cats (farm, pet and feral) kill "at minimum 7.8 million, but probably upwards of 219 million, birds per year." (I had heard this one before and thought I'd exaggerated it -- ah, guess not.) Other bird facts? Annually, 100 million die in collisions with window, and 120 million die thru hunting. That's the stuff he's got numbers on. Cellphone towers, lights on towers, charged power lines also kill birds. (Read the section: "Wings Without Us" for more information.)
• In mountain top coal removal the trees aren't usually logged. (Coal is mined "100 tons extracted every two seconds." So those trees "bulldozed into the hollows." 
• What really can't "live without us?" Head and body lice. 
• People used to use whisky and arsenic to embalm a body.  
• There's a group of people who "hope to colonize virtual space by developing software to upload their minds into circuitry..." See Transhumanists.
• What will last a long time? Copper pennies (pre-1982)
• Healthy coral reefs are surrounded by big predators like shark, snappers, eels, barracudas. Kingman reef is a contemporary example. 
• My favorite quote is from the above section about the coral reefs. Coral reefs are so filled with life that the sea life shares the crawl spaces in the coral. Describing the way fish live there, Alan Friedlander of Hawaii's Oceanic Institute says, "It's kind of like hot-bunking in submarines. Guys take four to six hour shifts, switching bunks. The bunk never stays cold for long."