If you want something done right, do it yourself. Or, if you're tired of waiting for someone else to do it, give it the ol' college try yourself. So saith two local governments, anyway.

Two unrelated stories caught my eye, and I thought them interesting enough to share. I'm willing to bet you have examples of such local action in your region. The first deals with my hometown (and current place of residence), the charming Hennepin County in Minnesota. The second comes from that bastion of fun and civilization among Iowa's corn- and soybean fields, Iowa City (where I lived for a lovely summer while on a biochemistry fellowship).

Imagine no teen pregnancy, I wonder if you can...¹

Science comedian Brian Malow ties much of science to growing up in a happily dysfunctional family. He asks:

What if the driving force behind the evolutionary patterns of homo erectus was moms telling their kids to “Stand Up Straight?”

Once when I was 10, he tells us, I asked my dad why the sky was blue. He said go ask your mom. She said, “Because I said so.” I never asked her a science question again. 

Since China becomes ever more important also for academia and science, here insights into difficulties that are not widely mentioned. I started with the language barrier, and there were points that need to be explained further.

My first point was that if you usually speak German or some such language, learning Spanish is just one more language while Mandarin equals learning three new languages: Written characters, spoken Mandarin, and Pinyin Romanization.