Many of the newer electronic watches today have a built-in pedometer.  The Apple SE second generation includes this device, and is  on sale at Amazon.com for $169 .  The Ultra 2 costs $599.  Two years ago I bought a  pedometer from Amazon for $16 .  Use it regularly and haven't changed the battery yet.  I don't really need an Apple watch, for I have several cheap ones I've owned for decades, plus an Apple 16 Pro, which, of course, provides the time. Among the applications of my pedometer. Golf. The average golfer playing 18 holes walks a little over  six miles .  I was able to do this before the pandemic. Surprisingly enough, carrying your golf bag does not take a lot more energy than pushing/pulling a golf cart .  Much better to push than pull. Eighteen holes of golf on a riding cart still involve 3-4 miles of walking.  Now that I'm 84, I ride, but still regularly count from 6000 to 7000 steps/round, which convert to  3 to 3.5...

The first law of ecology is that title above, at least as written in Barry Commoner's 1971  The Closing Circle:  Nature, Man and Technology .   A  further searc h indicated that the adage is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, who died in 1519.  But there is very little to support this contention. From German  philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1769: In nature everything is connected, everything is interwoven, everything changes with everything, everything merges from one into another . Close, but what about U.S. jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote: If the world is a subject for rational thought it is all of one piece; the same laws are found everywhere, and   everything is connected with everything else;   and if this is so, there is nothing mean, and nothing in which may not be seen the universal law. And there is an environmental inspiration from U.S. naturalist John Muir in 1869: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we fi...

Deloitte published their assessment of Rome's 2000 year-old Colosseum, which could well cost from $250 million to $1 billion to build today.  You can  read the details here , but, ta-da, it is worth $79 billion.  It would rank   #14 in the current list of world billionaires . There are moments and experiences, says Mastercard, that are priceless, but many famous historical artifacts are also in that category, especially those of Leonardo da Vinci. Some of his works do have known values.  A prominent one, and most expensive art piece ever sold, is  Salvator Mundi,  which was bought by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed Bin Salman in 2017 for $450 million, some say as a gift to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and today has a value closer to $500 million, or half a billion dollars. To the right is how the Leonardo pictured Jesus Christ, but it is still not clear if he finished it in the 1490s while working in Milan on  The Last Supper , or in Florence a...