Home Sweet Earth
chaoticutopia | October 18, 2007
How do we study our environment? Is it too complex a thing to quantitatively describe, and thus too complex to exhibit predictable behavior? I’ve been performing a thought experiment over the past few days, tossing around such questions. I’m not sure I can really adequately describe these thoughts with words or images. Still, I’m going to try.
Individual scientific experiments tend to be specific. We look at a certain property and try to explain it with a hypothesis, then test that hypothesis repeatedly under various conditions to show if it is valid or not. If it isn’t, we head back to…
chaoticutopia | September 11, 2007A few posts back, I indicated that I was finished with travelling, and ready to settle into my classes at CU Boulder. Naturally, chaos has a way of affecting plans made with certainty. Sure enough, as soon as I returned from New York, I found myself packing my suitcase once again, this time to head to Wyoming and South Dakota for my grandpa’s funeral. The timing wasn’t wonderful; I had to miss a day of class, and ended up spending part of my "vacation time" studying. That’s where the chaotic parts played in.
Of course, the subjects that I’m studying are intrinsically relevant to me,…
chaoticutopia | June 5, 2007
Better Homes and Gardens recently listed 10 Easy Ways to Go Green in a slideshow on their website. While the ideas are accompanied by classy pictures, none of them are especially novel or revolutionary. However, they are excellent ideas, and most of them can save money around the house. (BHG details just how much with each slide.) Here are their suggestions, written by Kelly Tagore, along with my comments:
10 Easy Ways to Go Green
Change a Light Bulb
BHG recommends changing your light bulbs to compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). We changed all of our light bulbs well over a year ago, and…
chaoticutopia | May 18, 2007I think I'm going to take this Nova Julia set home, color it with fBm noise, and call it "Find Nemo":
Didn't find him? Try here:
A Percula Clownfish (Amphiprion percula) swimming around in an aquarium
Ok, so, this one is for the kids. (And the grownups, who, like me, couldn't resist watching Finding Nemo once or twice... or a dozen times.) As any child who has seen the movie knows, clown fish live with poisonous sea anemones, which protect them from predators. In the movie, Nemo's father says he "gets stung all the time" and so he's "used to it". However, real clownfish (often known as…
chaoticutopia | April 25, 2007
The rain finally stopped this afternoon, so I decided to head over to Site A for a 15 minute bioblitz. The lake seemed deserted when I arrived. No other people were interested in climbing around in the mud, and all of the fauna was hiding. Far away, I heard a meadowlark and what sounded like a frog, but otherwise, all was quiet. I walked around a little, and decided I had better mark off a square, and start counting the many clumps of prairie grass along the trail. Unfortunately, in early spring, when it is just sprouting from the ground, prairie grass is notoriously difficult to identify. I…
chaoticutopia | April 24, 2007
In theory, conducting a bioblitz was going to be a simple enterprise. I would go to one of my chosen spots, count the organisms as I went along, noting them in my book and, if possible take a photograph. I figured the two places I'd chosen would be relatively barren. In the tall grass prairie (especially one that has been mowed) you expect lots of grass, the occasional shrub or succulent, and the standard plains fauna, mostly passing birds and a profusion of prairie dog mounds. Site A is one of my regular haunts, and I knew I'd spot, at best, some waterfowl or wildflowers there.
I chose…
chaoticutopia | April 22, 2007
Today is Earth Day, the perfect holiday to kick off a little Blogger Bioblitzing for National Wildlife Week. All around our bumpy sphere, people are going out and getting intimate with nature. Like many other bloggers, I've been scouting out the perfect places to bioblitz.
In Colorado (as everywhere else) ecology depends on the water... and there just isn't much to go around. The earliest humans who lived along the Front Range kept constantly moving, letting the limited natural resources replenish as they went along. Later, fur trappers and miners settled in the region, and eventually…
chaoticutopia | April 5, 2007A while back, I asked for your input for a paper I was writing, concerning practical solutions for adapting to climate change. The paper was for a contest, which, unfortunately, I did not win. I'm sure others were more prepared to offer innovative solutions. I felt my paper made a good point, however, so I'm taking the opportunity to publish it here.
America, Adapt!
Leading our Country towards Sustainable Solutions
By Karmen Lee Franklin
Climate change is inevitable; this is obvious to anyone taking the time to examine the
multitude of evidence at hand. These changes, regardless of the…
chaoticutopia | March 23, 2007Are you curious about the future of energy use? Will you also be in Colorado this weekend? If so, this is one meeting you won't want to miss:
The Colorado New Energy Summit of 2007 is being held this weekend at the Wells Fargo Theatre in the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver.
Join business, scientific and government leaders and members of Colorado's energy community for an update on developments in renewable energy, emerging technologies, state and national energy policies and opportunities for tax incentives and financing options for residences and businesses.
The Colorado New…
chaoticutopia | March 6, 2007Since we're on the subject of weirdness this week, I thought I'd share this somewhat surreal photograph:
In Colorado, March (like most months) means temperature fluctuations. Snow, melt, warm, repeat. Lately, in between the snowstorms, it has been warming up enough for algae to grow in sunny shallows. However, the snow still hasn't fully melted in the shady spots. This is actually a drainage gutter running along the greenbelt near my home. The gutter is blooming... not the grove of trees. (It has a month or so to go.) This becomes a little more clear when the picture is turned right side up…
chaoticutopia | January 23, 2007...let's come up with some advice for the next president.
It seems like everyone is passing the buck on climate change, these days. In his speech, President Bush spoke of future technologies, and called climate change a "serious problem". He isn't going to be in office too much longer, of course, and the next president will be faced with decisions concerning that serious problem. As the Presidential Climate Action Project put it:
Leading scientists estimate that the international community has approximately 10 years to make serious changes in its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions if we wish to…
chaoticutopia | June 21, 2006Behold! The Earth, as viewed from the sun. You can also view the Earth from the moon, a satellite, or above any point by entering coordinates for latitude and longitude. You can even look at the moon from the sun. (By John Walker of Fourmilab Switzerland.)
Enjoy!
chaoticutopia | June 13, 2006In the Fishlake Mountains of Utah, several fires are steadily burning. As the American West enters yet another dry season, there will almost certainly be more. Folks around these parts have been whispering about the increasing fire danger, dreading another year like 2002. We reffered to that period of time as "the summer of fire", when the Hayman fire, started by a disgruntled forest service worker, burned over 7 million acres of land and destroyed over 100 homes. This year is shaping up to be disturbingly worse. Why? The Bush administration thinks that the bulk of our firefighting helicopter…
chaoticutopia | June 9, 2006Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to adapt. I made this "adapt fish", which you can see sitting beneath my blogroll. However, aside from the obvious-finding a way to live that isn't so dependant on fossil fuels-I'm not exactly sure what it means. This has dragged out a whole hoard of philosophical questions hidden within the big one: Do we know when we are adapting? Why do we react so badly to change, if change can bring improvement? It seems clear that it isn't a black and white issue... there's a swath of grayness, where our dependence on technology clashes with our…