voltagegate
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December 3, 2007
Well, two weeks of hell has receded for me. This past Friday we finished moving all of our stuff out of Frostburg, waving a not-so-tearful goodbye to the old apartment and its coal furnace (not just for heat either; our water was warmed by the furnace as well, which I didn't know until this past…
November 14, 2007
Get your submissions in now if you haven't already. Can't wait to see what Mike will have for us.
November 9, 2007
I had to do it. With the red panda (Ailurus fulgens) at the top of my favorite animals list, I had to know exactly how many folks share enough interest in the firefox to name their toon after its genus name.
So how many Ailuruses are there out there? Seven on the North American servers and three…
November 9, 2007
It's been a bad week for me, and I don't think things will be slowing down for a couple more.
Heather is graduating this semester, and as we planned, it's time to move on. I'm moving into a new job and she'll be searching for one (after a much needed break), but since Frostburg is devoid of…
November 7, 2007
Heather finally printed the follow up to her cellular self portrait (links to the first print), this time using plant cells. I particularly like the difference in movement between the prints.
A week from this Friday she's having her senior art show, which we are both looking forward to. She put up…
November 2, 2007
In Part I we looked at the eastern hemlock's northwestern progression after the last ice age,
and the frequency of the hemlock along a slope-oriented moisture gradient:
The distribution pictured above is almost exactly the case in the Laurel Hill old growth stand. The hemlocks are dense at the…
November 1, 2007
Today we'll start this little experiment with one of the toons that gave me the idea (the other is a secret as of yet!), Empidonax from Ravencrest. Emp is spec'd holy with almost two dozen points discipline as well, presumably for mana sustainability in raids like Karazhan.
There are only two…
October 31, 2007
Catch up on all of your fall foliage science with Carl at The Loom. He has all the links you need, even one to his interview on ABC News.
October 31, 2007
In March of this year, to the amusement of my friends, my brother convinced me to start playing World of Warcraft (WoW) with him. Since I left the Baltimore/Washington DC area four years ago, I've only had a few chances to see him per year, mostly on holidays or on vacation, and he pitched it to me…
October 29, 2007
About 16,000 years ago, glaciation from the last ice age finally began to retreat after millennia of occupation. As the glaciers melted and filled scrapes in the landscape with fresh water, the animals and plants followed, once only able to live in the temperate climes of southern North America.…
October 29, 2007
This seems to be a more sensible theory regarding leaf color change in autumn:
By taking careful stock and laboratory analyses of the autumn foliage of sweetgum and red maple trees along transects from floodplains to ridge-tops in a nature preserve in Charlotte, N.C., former University of North…
October 24, 2007
Here we go again, folks:
Evolution is flawed because it can't tell us where life came from. The cell is too complex to have evolved by itself. Secularists are persecuting scientists who believe in God.
Spin. Spin. Spin. Vacuous, vicious propaganda. Again.
Let's not forget that Intelligent Design…
October 24, 2007
Island ecology may have been popularized by tropical climes, but it certainly isn't limited to them. Michigan's Isle Royale National Park, a chilly 50 mile by 8 mile island in the corner of Lake Superior an important benchmark in the island's important research history is being celebrated.
For…
October 22, 2007
The coal industry has always been a big provider in Western Maryland. Right across the street from my apartment complex is a winding road up the mountain to several active blast sites. There are still old mine tunnels under the campus.
Acid mine drainage is a huge problem up here. Many of the…
October 20, 2007
Clutch,
Fall of Troy
and Coheed and Cambria
touring together? Can't wait. I haven't seen Clutch in eight years or more.
October 20, 2007
I picked up a couple of shifts catering homecoming this weekend, which is why things have been dead the past couple of days. I did, however, finish a couple of Jack Vance books which I want to discuss next week, specifically the social/lingual aspects of them. I also found a great paper about…
October 16, 2007
Just read an article about the apparently widespread use of tropical hardwoods in New York City. The numbers are impressive:
...the market for Ipé wood drives much of the industrial logging of the entire Amazon, and has increased dramatically in the past 20 years. An emergent flowering tree, which…
October 16, 2007
Oekologie #10 is up at Laelaps. We're looking for hosts beyond February of '08, so if you're interested, let me know by e-mail: thevoltagegate [at] gmail.com.
October 12, 2007
Over the past few billion years, life has persisted through countless geologic, atmospheric and extraterrestrial disturbances through its ability to change with the environment. Ecosystems exist in their present state because they have evolved to be as such. It took trillions of events - biotic and…
October 10, 2007
Ecology is a study of interactions or relationships between organisms and the environment; the connectedness between living systems and non-living systems on the Earth. Ecology is, in a sense, a historical field, founded upon the Earth's far reaching and ever evolving natural history.
The term…
October 9, 2007
Things will be a bit slow on TVG this week. My mother was pulling weeds a bit too hard, fell back and snapped both her radius and ulna in half. The doctors had to bolt and plate the bones, and needless to say, she's out of commission for the next couple of months.
But, mom being mom, she was not…
October 6, 2007
I've been on a serious pigment kick lately (reinforced by my little art excursion last night and my review of all of the fall leaf literature), and rhodopsin came to mind, a light absorbing pigment found in animal eyes, archaea and bacteria (often referred to as bacteriorhodopsin in the case of the…
October 4, 2007
Heather just finished her self portrait assignment in printmaking, and while others studied pictures of their faces from all angles, she picked up a cell bio text and studied other aspects of self. Her rationale and a few of my thoughts about science and art are below the fold.
I thought her…
October 3, 2007
I've been reading up on this critter for the past few days, ever since I pulled out some old mammal texts I had sitting on the shelf. I got sucked in and thought I would share a bit of what I've read.
The volcano rabbit, Romerolagus diazi, is found on the slopes of only four volcanoes in Mexico,…
September 28, 2007
I've been tagged!
It's cool, it's about animals and I've only got an hour to blog this morning before work, so let's do it.
An interesting animal I had
All of the animals I've made friends with over the years have been a bit weird in their own way, I suppose. When you get the chance to get to know…
September 27, 2007
Martin has Tangled Bank #89 up at Aardvarchaeology. Bring a packet of something light; a vinaigrette perhaps, but never something as uncouth as ranch or blue cheese. The shoots are tender, after all.
September 26, 2007
Bora has linked the final scientific paper by Steve Irwin on crocodilians (what else?) over on his blog, and I just finished giving it a good read over coffee. A brief review below the fold.
The experiment was thrillingly simple. Three estuarine giants of the species C. porosus were captured at…
September 26, 2007
WWF is running their latest holiday animal adoption campaign, and have some interesting critters up for adoption just in time for Halloween, including the hellbender, octopus and of course, the vampire bat. Cute idea, and I love the teasers, but... THERE'S NO CANDY IN THE BAG???
Guess I'll have to…
September 24, 2007
Here's a clip from Wild America illustrating the incredible agility of the lynx and the snowshoe, predator and prey. The full documentary about the Canada lynx is below the fold. It's not the greatest quality, but the footage does the animals justice.
September 24, 2007
A stand of Dahurian Larch beginning to change color in Northeast Siberia.
Between 50 and 65 degrees N latitude lies a globe encircling band of forest dominated by conifers and chilly winds called the boreal forest (boreal is from the Greek word for north) or the taiga (Russian for "marshy pine…