voltagegate | April 14, 2008NWF is once again urging people to explore their natural areas with Wildlife Watch, to be held during National Wildlife Week, April 19 - 27. So if you're rusty on Blitzin' from last year, check out their website, take some photos and get some practice in for the Blogger Bioblitz in June.
voltagegate | April 14, 2008It's coming tomorrow at the Evangelical Ecologist. Use the BC form or just send them by email.
We are looking for Oekologie hosts for August 15th on, so if you feel like putting together a carnival (and drawing some traffic to your blog), just shoot me an email and I'll sign you up.
voltagegate | April 9, 2008Tara has a great post up about infectious diseases and landscape ecology, and being able to reconcile, if you will, very big picture (landscape ecology) with the very small (microbiology).
voltagegate | April 8, 2008It has been claimed in the past that birdfeeders were bad for the environment, and now a couple of researchers are looking into published literature on whether or not birdfeeders significantly disrupt the ecology and future evolution of birds.
The PR from SD is basically highlights of the researchers' survey, including indications that birds may get "trapped" in inhospitable areas by the surplus of food or that birdfeeders can disrupt a bird's natural breeding/feeding cycle throughout the year.
This review seems to be a jumping off point for more research:
"Changing the natural dynamics of…
voltagegate | April 8, 2008
This is a beautiful snapshot of Providence Canyon, right here in Georgia, believe it or not. The state parks down here seem to be a bit different from the fare up north. Can't wait to poke around a bit.
Here's another interesting park I found, Panola Mountain, which contains a 100-acre granite monadnock.
Photo by airnos.
voltagegate | April 7, 2008When I was traveling around the country for media conferences in college, the very first thing I did upon arrival was find the aquarium, the zoo and the natural history museum, find how to get there via public transportation and go. I've been living in Atlanta for about a month now, and I haven't done any of the above.
Why? I blame money, mostly. The Georgia Aquarium, which is supposedly beautiful and engaging, is also exquisitely expensive. So is the zoo. And the art and natural history museums. We were casually planning on taking a trip to the aquarium yesterday, but including parking fees…
voltagegate | March 31, 2008So Saturday was Earth Hour, and as if anyone reading this blog didn't know, lights were supposed to be cut off from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. to send a message to mysterious world power that the world was ready to cut down on energy use. Sort of.
I didn't honor the Earth Hour. We rarely have more than one light on in our home at a time on a daily basis because it's wasteful and increasingly expensive. I don't have a million electronic devices running 24/7, we walk to the store when we can (Heather can walk to work) and luckily, my commute is only about 15 minutes a day. In every daily activity, even…
voltagegate | March 28, 2008"The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth ... the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need -- if only we had the eyes to see."
-Edward Abbey
voltagegate | March 28, 2008Okay, not really.
But Jen did just get back from a hiking trip in Utah and has some fantastic photos, including examples of rock art, which she promises to write about in the near future.
I'm holding you to that Jen.
voltagegate | March 27, 2008
The black caiman is just one of the endangered species that inhabits the Guiana Shield.
Back in November, the president of Guyana, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, offered the entirety of his country's rainforest to a British-led international body in return for help with development. Jagdeo was searching for alternatives to an obvious, but morally objectionable solution.
"Maybe we should just cut down the trees. Then someone would recognize the problem," said Mr Jagdeo. "But I want to think we can fulfill our people's aspirations without cutting down the trees."
British…
voltagegate | March 26, 2008Anyhoo...
The week before we left for Atlanta, Heather and I stayed with my parents, who drove back up to PA to help us load our moving truck. The day before we got there, it snowed about a foot, making it impossible to even get the Subarus up there, much less the truck. We had to hire someone to come out, clear the driveway and then tow the moving truck up to the house, which took all day. Packing took all night. The following morning, on four hours of sleep, we left for Atlanta.
The icing on the cake, the very rock bottom, was the fiasco involving our remote choice of residence. We signed a…
voltagegate | March 24, 2008 As you may have already guessed, things are beginning to normalize. We just finished moving in the rest of the furniture to our new place this past weekend, a cute little house in Midtown Atlanta. From our street you can see downtown, which is beautiful at night.
Apparently, the previous owner's name was Hattie, who was a prominent member of one of the local Baptist churches (in the basement, our landlord found a plaque of some kind given to Hattie in honor of her service to the church). Hattie's old deep freeze, dryer and Frigidaire stove still work perfectly (and go perfectly with our…
voltagegate | March 21, 2008There's a neat study being published today in Science discussing the reproductive potential of ecological systems 570 mya. The findings are based on the new discovery of a "tube-like" organism (so say the PRs) called Funisia dorothea, which apparently was able to reproduce sexually and lived in a complex ecosystem despite the apparent absence of predation. The researchers have taken this to be an example of a much more complex world during the Neoproterozoic and periods before. From the PR:
...in describing the ecology and reproductive strategies of Funisia dorothea, a tubular organism…
voltagegate | March 19, 2008
I heard this morning on the news that Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed. NPR did a nice piece on him, if a bit focused on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke was a big influence on me and my interest in science and science fiction, and I thought it would be nice to have a permanent memorial of sorts, celebrating some of his own words.
Here's to the long, influential life of a great author and scientist.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of…
voltagegate | February 26, 2008Before I get started, I want to assure those 10 people that still check TVG for updates that this is still a blog, and I do intend to pick up where I left off months ago.
I got a phone call about four weeks ago from a family friend offering me a position as a tech writer in Atlanta. I interviewed and accepted the offer, and I'm moving - again - in the next week.
I apologize for the lack of material. It's been a tough few months for me. My friends at Seed have been very patient with me fortunately, and I hope to get this blog up and running again before long. There's much to talk about.
For…
voltagegate | January 29, 2008Brian's got a great post about Sarah Boxer's editorial in the NY Review of Books the other day, using this quote as a jump off point:
Bloggers are golden when they're at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn't the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And…
voltagegate | January 28, 2008Man am I not on top of things. EDGE released its list of evolutionarily distinct and Globally Endangered amphibians last week, and I just read the press release with the top 10 (actually nine, but it says 10) on the list. If you want a brief explanation about how EDGE prioritizes conservation, I blogged the PLoS paper released by EDGE scientists last year.
Without further ado, the list:
Chinese giant salamander (salamander that can grow up to 1.8m in length and evolved independently from all other amphibians over one hundred million years before Tyrannosaurus rex)
Sagalla caecilian (limbless…
voltagegate | January 23, 2008I just read a great editorial from E-Commerce Times discussing the grossly inflated advertising claims from businesses scrambling to embrace, at the very least, the imagery associated with the recent push in the environmental movement.
...this of course calls to mind the super-green-men of the new branding circus. As the green signal zips across the globe, the army of re-packaging experts awaits in their shiny green suits, carrying green flags while humming the song of the unicorn.
Branding. I remember hearing this term spewed by every advertising/PR major bustling in and out of the newspaper…
voltagegate | January 21, 2008
On my way from an interview the other day, on my way home, I was winding up a mountain in a little town called Windber when the tree line broke to my right, revealing a panoramic, and quite startling sight. Spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table, so to speak, was a huge expanse of what was once the beginnings of Windber, and many little towns before and after, the remnants of a giant coal mine. Naturally, I took some time to take a closer look and a few photos.
The mine itself was called Mine 40, while the town that cropped up around it, created and managed by the…
voltagegate | January 15, 2008This is the kind of crap I get in my email:
I blog about ecology therefore I'm one of the morons that watches this sensationalized garbage and considers it a "teaching tool".