Anthropology is close enough to cultural geography to count, for me. I like this song enough that I played it in the background while I did other things a few times today.
'Greyhound' - Joanna Pocock
4 hours ago
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Saturday, November 21, 2009
What if Earth had rings like Saturn?
I don't want to interrupt the loveliness of this idea, but there are bits from the video and the comments that I want to note:
Someone commented that this might make places under the rings where it was permanently dark. But because the earth is tilted on its axis and the sun appears to move north and south through the sky seasonally, so would the shadow move. But it's likely some places (the equator, generally everywhere between the tropics) would get some level of shade from the rings. The layer is very thin; aside from under the rings at equinox, there would be plenty of bright sun. Would there be enough insolation change to affect climate? Probably. But given the scenario, I expect the earth would have evolved this way, it's not like it would be a change from how things are now.
The person who made the animation seems to have designed it for equinox. Seasonal variations aren't addressed at all.
The theoreticals (e.g. one commenter's note that this would affect satellites) are irrelevant to me: It's beautiful.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Accra - A C C R A
I don't know the capital of every country in the world, nor do I think I *should* - but this is still fun:
When I was little, and couldn't sleep, Mom suggested I list every single state in the US, alphabetically. If I ever realized I'd missed one, I had to go back and start from the beginning. I don't think I made it to Wyoming.
I found myself, as I passed San Bruno Mountain today, where the endangered Mission Blue butterfly lives, "There are Mission Blues on San Bruno Mountain, but the California dogface butterfly is our state butterfly. Why do I know that? I don't know. I just do."
It's the sort of useless thing that helps me paint a picture of the world when people talk about it. It's a piece of the whole puzzle.
When I was little, and couldn't sleep, Mom suggested I list every single state in the US, alphabetically. If I ever realized I'd missed one, I had to go back and start from the beginning. I don't think I made it to Wyoming.
I found myself, as I passed San Bruno Mountain today, where the endangered Mission Blue butterfly lives, "There are Mission Blues on San Bruno Mountain, but the California dogface butterfly is our state butterfly. Why do I know that? I don't know. I just do."
It's the sort of useless thing that helps me paint a picture of the world when people talk about it. It's a piece of the whole puzzle.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Africa from Europe on Google Streetview
How cool is that? That is very cool.
We're fostering a tiny puppy, switching the garden over into fall mode, trying to get our house in order, and I'm finishing a semester at school. This is Geography Awareness Week, and I think there will be a post about that before the week is up.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
sense of place - Oakland Hills Fire
For some reason, as I go through my old photos, the fire photos are really affecting me. Even before I noticed them in my stack of "photos to scan," I was noticing again how the hills have grown up thicker with eucalyptus than before, and the plan to places houses farther apart and make roads wider is barely there. And I might be wrong, but I think that Oakland never did get around to making its fire hydrants compatible with the hoses of surrounding towns' fire departments.
But anyway: I'm thinking of it, eighteen years later.
But anyway: I'm thinking of it, eighteen years later.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
sense of place - Loma Prieta quake, twenty years ago
Visual memory? How about visceral memory!?! This gave me a chill.
I was standing exactly where the guy with the shorts is standing at 5:04 pm on October 17, 1989.
I was standing exactly where the guy with the shorts is standing at 5:04 pm on October 17, 1989.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane!
It's the moon! It's meteors!
Pretty much everyone knows that I have a broad definition of "geography," right? Usually, if I can see it from earth, or if what happens there is directly relevant to earth, I'll often decide it counts. For awhile, I pondered having a day a week set aside for related sciences, but I've mostly given that up. If I post them here, I'll find a way to make them geography-relevant.
But this trailer is about an event that involves people on the ground looking at things relatively close to us, including within our atmosphere, so I think it's all about geography. Check it out. It's a lot of fun.
Pretty much everyone knows that I have a broad definition of "geography," right? Usually, if I can see it from earth, or if what happens there is directly relevant to earth, I'll often decide it counts. For awhile, I pondered having a day a week set aside for related sciences, but I've mostly given that up. If I post them here, I'll find a way to make them geography-relevant.
But this trailer is about an event that involves people on the ground looking at things relatively close to us, including within our atmosphere, so I think it's all about geography. Check it out. It's a lot of fun.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
"oh AWESOME"
I've never been tidepooling at night. This makes me think I should definitely try it.
I love hearing grownups, especially teachers, say "OH AWESOME."
I love hearing grownups, especially teachers, say "OH AWESOME."
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Why did Georgia flood so badly this year?
This guy talks about a couple of reasons quite clearly, if a little over-excitedly. He makes good points. There are probably hmore reasons, but these are the jist.
(About his first argument: Fall flooding like this was pretty much predicted by models.)
(About his first argument: Fall flooding like this was pretty much predicted by models.)
Monday, October 12, 2009
Feed the child
I grew up in a 1950s housing development, thick with oaks and chaparral, on the edge of fields and oak woodlands, near the banks of Churn Creek. Mom let us dig in the yard – I loved my real metal Tonka trucks and old silverware digging tools – and we camped in rural Shasta County several times a year. In the hottest months, when the house was too hot to sleep in at night, we slept on the back lawn, and watched meteors fly overhead, while Mom taught us the names of constellations.
I learned to swim in creeks and lakes. I peeled endless acorns in my attempts to make acorn mush under trees while friends had tea parties in their bedrooms. I used my magnifying glass to set small piles of oak leaves on fire in my driveway, knowing better than to try that out in the woods.
When I was little, we were allowed to run around the woods (some of it has become a giant church complex, some is now protected as park) and nearby fields. I think I was 7 or 8, just old enough for my mother to append “bring your sister” to my requests to go play “in the fields,” as we called them. My sister wasn’t yet in kindergarten, and hauling her along was like dragging an anvil behind me as I ran off to the trails and creekside on the road to adventure.
Mom taught us how to avoid rattlesnakes and poison oak (we didn’t assume there were mountain lions around, but there had to be, we were right on the edge of town), and told us to be home before dusk, then sent us out to play. There was really nothing we were forbidden except to go into the rain culvert where Churn Creek went under Highway 44, in case of flash flood – so we did, of course, and would stand under the stormwater grates and listen to the roar of cars and trucks overhead, reveling in the danger. I didn’t climb trees, but the live oaks and black oaks often had multiple lanes of commuting black ants, and the gray pines were sticky with sap, and weren’t good climbing trees.
Instead, we collected sticks and branches and crunchy, prickly fallen leaves and wove forts not much bigger than our bodies. After intense summer thunderstorms, we’d go out to where the boys on their bikes had worn ruts over the dead grass and hard dirt near the creek, and slide down the mud-slick ramps on our bottoms. We had church clothing, school clothing, play clothing, and “mud clothing,” the bottom of the barrel, as Shasta County’s iron-rich soils leave permanent red tint on any clothing that touches it when it’s wet.
We picked wildflowers in the spring, and on the first of May, we made paper baskets, then filled them with brodaeia and shooting stars and lupine and wilting poppies and hung them on neighbors’ doorknobs, ringing the bell, then running away. We knew the names of most of the flowers – Mom called everything by name -- but she called all the brodaeia species “blue dick,” and called all the hummingbirds “ruby-throated” because in our basic birding guide, that was the only hummingbird with a red throat. (Anna’s weren’t in the book, and weren’t part of Mom’s Modoc County childhood, as they’ve only gradually moved north with human population.) Turkey vultures were “buzzards.” Everything had a name, though they weren’t always accurate names. We called gray pines “digger pines,” as that was their name then. We knew they were named after the foothill native people who were called “Digger Indians,” but even though my grandmother was an advocate for and sympathetic friend of the Pit River and Maidu people, it never occurred to any of us that “digger” was a racist euphemism.
One of my iconic memories that defines what gave root to my adult curiosity came on a late spring day, on one of the several trips to Burney Falls and Mount Lassen that we took every year. Redding was much smaller, then, and roads in the surrounding hills were often quiet. We were somewhere up near Kings Creek or Hat Creek, and there were turkey vultures rising on the morning thermals. They seemed to be doing their morning cruise more than looking for food, so Mom pulled over. “Get out of the car,” she told one of my older sisters. “Lie down in the middle of the road.”
Terry’s mouth fell open, and she shrieked, “WHAT?”
“Just lie down.”
“I’ll get run over!”
“I’m watching, I’ll tell you whether a car is coming.”
These days, ornithologists know that turkey vultures hunt by smell, not sight, but in the sixties, most people hadn’t learned that. My sister lay in the middle of the road for awhile – a minute, or five minutes, I was young – then leaped up to brush her clothes off and yell at Mom for risking her vulnerable child’s life.
The vulture hadn’t landed, no traffic had come by.
Had a vulture landed, would Mom have allowed it to pick out Terry’s eyes? Would she have scared it off? I might never know. Mom was that kind of woman.
This is the story that I most vividly remember, about Mom’s fascination with nature, and how she fed it to her children, but it’s one of many. Her willingness to live in nature, not as a spectator, but as an active participant, flowed onto and into me along with her milk and her singing when she was happy, and later her taste for ginger and marzipan.
I learned to swim in creeks and lakes. I peeled endless acorns in my attempts to make acorn mush under trees while friends had tea parties in their bedrooms. I used my magnifying glass to set small piles of oak leaves on fire in my driveway, knowing better than to try that out in the woods.
When I was little, we were allowed to run around the woods (some of it has become a giant church complex, some is now protected as park) and nearby fields. I think I was 7 or 8, just old enough for my mother to append “bring your sister” to my requests to go play “in the fields,” as we called them. My sister wasn’t yet in kindergarten, and hauling her along was like dragging an anvil behind me as I ran off to the trails and creekside on the road to adventure.
Mom taught us how to avoid rattlesnakes and poison oak (we didn’t assume there were mountain lions around, but there had to be, we were right on the edge of town), and told us to be home before dusk, then sent us out to play. There was really nothing we were forbidden except to go into the rain culvert where Churn Creek went under Highway 44, in case of flash flood – so we did, of course, and would stand under the stormwater grates and listen to the roar of cars and trucks overhead, reveling in the danger. I didn’t climb trees, but the live oaks and black oaks often had multiple lanes of commuting black ants, and the gray pines were sticky with sap, and weren’t good climbing trees.
Instead, we collected sticks and branches and crunchy, prickly fallen leaves and wove forts not much bigger than our bodies. After intense summer thunderstorms, we’d go out to where the boys on their bikes had worn ruts over the dead grass and hard dirt near the creek, and slide down the mud-slick ramps on our bottoms. We had church clothing, school clothing, play clothing, and “mud clothing,” the bottom of the barrel, as Shasta County’s iron-rich soils leave permanent red tint on any clothing that touches it when it’s wet.
We picked wildflowers in the spring, and on the first of May, we made paper baskets, then filled them with brodaeia and shooting stars and lupine and wilting poppies and hung them on neighbors’ doorknobs, ringing the bell, then running away. We knew the names of most of the flowers – Mom called everything by name -- but she called all the brodaeia species “blue dick,” and called all the hummingbirds “ruby-throated” because in our basic birding guide, that was the only hummingbird with a red throat. (Anna’s weren’t in the book, and weren’t part of Mom’s Modoc County childhood, as they’ve only gradually moved north with human population.) Turkey vultures were “buzzards.” Everything had a name, though they weren’t always accurate names. We called gray pines “digger pines,” as that was their name then. We knew they were named after the foothill native people who were called “Digger Indians,” but even though my grandmother was an advocate for and sympathetic friend of the Pit River and Maidu people, it never occurred to any of us that “digger” was a racist euphemism.
One of my iconic memories that defines what gave root to my adult curiosity came on a late spring day, on one of the several trips to Burney Falls and Mount Lassen that we took every year. Redding was much smaller, then, and roads in the surrounding hills were often quiet. We were somewhere up near Kings Creek or Hat Creek, and there were turkey vultures rising on the morning thermals. They seemed to be doing their morning cruise more than looking for food, so Mom pulled over. “Get out of the car,” she told one of my older sisters. “Lie down in the middle of the road.”
Terry’s mouth fell open, and she shrieked, “WHAT?”
“Just lie down.”
“I’ll get run over!”
“I’m watching, I’ll tell you whether a car is coming.”
These days, ornithologists know that turkey vultures hunt by smell, not sight, but in the sixties, most people hadn’t learned that. My sister lay in the middle of the road for awhile – a minute, or five minutes, I was young – then leaped up to brush her clothes off and yell at Mom for risking her vulnerable child’s life.
The vulture hadn’t landed, no traffic had come by.
Had a vulture landed, would Mom have allowed it to pick out Terry’s eyes? Would she have scared it off? I might never know. Mom was that kind of woman.
This is the story that I most vividly remember, about Mom’s fascination with nature, and how she fed it to her children, but it’s one of many. Her willingness to live in nature, not as a spectator, but as an active participant, flowed onto and into me along with her milk and her singing when she was happy, and later her taste for ginger and marzipan.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
In Science We Trust?
Put on the headphones if you're at work. It's worksafe, but there's music. The first few seconds of the video explain the point of it all:
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
They really don't make flags like they used to
Wikipedia says: "The Benin Empire or Edo Empire (1440-1897) was a pre-colonial African state of modern Nigeria. It is not to be confused with the modern-day country called Benin." In Nigeria, Benin City still sits to mark the region, a central part of the slave-trading region of the 17th century.
I want to learn more of the kinds of world history I missed in middle and high school, either because it just wasn't taught (where do kids learn about the Benin Empire in high school history?) or because in all my moving around (five high schools, really and truly) in my youth, I missed out on some curriculum.
This is the sort of thing I've missed.
(Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer
I want to learn more of the kinds of world history I missed in middle and high school, either because it just wasn't taught (where do kids learn about the Benin Empire in high school history?) or because in all my moving around (five high schools, really and truly) in my youth, I missed out on some curriculum.
This is the sort of thing I've missed.
(Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Nothing's where you think it is
"What do maps have to do with social equality, you ask?"
The good doctor (don't let me say "phlox" here) has a point. Size on a map matters, kids grow up seeing disproportionate sizes, and perhaps, attributing disproportionate values, even unconsciously. I think that as they learn mapping, learning about different projections, and the reasons for them, will continue to be important.
When I lived in Australia, I had a "corrective map of the world."
How much do these things matter? Why?
And I did crack up at the video clip. A lot.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
The Spirit Bears
I'd never even heard of the Sloth Bears of Sri Lanka. Wow.
The subsequent parts of this documentary are at http://www.youtube.com/user/neofelisman
There's more to this than Sloth Bears, of course. There are vultures, leopards, deer, buffalo, the aboriginal Vedda people, hornbills,
The subsequent parts of this documentary are at http://www.youtube.com/user/neofelisman
There's more to this than Sloth Bears, of course. There are vultures, leopards, deer, buffalo, the aboriginal Vedda people, hornbills,
Monday, September 28, 2009
Scientific literacy for girls - it's like seeding the future
Maybe I just cry easily, but this video from the National Science Foundation pushed me over into tears:
I'm saddened when I listen to teenagers, or even adults, or read what they've written online, and it smacks of scientific illiteracy, or even scientific ambivalence.
A couple of years ago, I took a college-level class in which we studied, among other things, the effect of the full moon on behavior. Study after study we examined showed that even when, for example, emergency room staff or police officers say people behave more wildly during a full moon, statistics -- based on arrests, ER visits, psych ward incidents, and other apparent behavior measures -- show that there really is no causal relationship between behavior and the phase of the moon. (In the few small studies that show some minor correlation, it can be explained elsehow, e.g. the full moon only increased wild behavior when the weather was also warm and folks were hanging out on the street more.) But after this investigation, students still insisted that no matter what science suggested, they knew that the full moon affects behavior because their nieces and nephews threw more tantrums, or they saw more chaos on the job, or whatever. Science was irrelevant. They didn't seem to get how it worked.
The kids in this program are excited about science. The topic at hand is astronomy, but they're not all interested in that, specifically. Some want to be doctors, one says she wants to be a marine biologist. Some might even end up being teachers, or stay-at-home parents, or captain ferries that cross the bay. But they're learning, they're excited about learning, and they're excited about science. This is priceless. These are the kids we need growing up into our future, and making it go.
I'm not sure why I cried when I read this. Maybe it's because these are kids mostly from Oakland, and mostly African-American, and the high school dropout rate in Oakland's phenomenal, especially within the African-American community. Maybe it's because a female, African-American astronomer is part of their worldview now. Maybe it's because these are girls, and the adults working with them seem so much to care that they grow up with positive, science-related educational experiences. Maybe it's because these are kids and need a positive science background, and many public schools can be a hard place to get that these days, and the Girl Scouts and Chabot Space and Science Center and the other people and organizations behind this program are offering it to them.
These are kids who will grow up as better critical thinkers, with experience reading about science and learning how it applies in "real life." Their own experiences and perceptions won't, as much, form the bases for their realities. Their understanding of what is possible out there, both in science in general, in the universe, and in their own lives, are forever expanded.
I'm saddened when I listen to teenagers, or even adults, or read what they've written online, and it smacks of scientific illiteracy, or even scientific ambivalence.
A couple of years ago, I took a college-level class in which we studied, among other things, the effect of the full moon on behavior. Study after study we examined showed that even when, for example, emergency room staff or police officers say people behave more wildly during a full moon, statistics -- based on arrests, ER visits, psych ward incidents, and other apparent behavior measures -- show that there really is no causal relationship between behavior and the phase of the moon. (In the few small studies that show some minor correlation, it can be explained elsehow, e.g. the full moon only increased wild behavior when the weather was also warm and folks were hanging out on the street more.) But after this investigation, students still insisted that no matter what science suggested, they knew that the full moon affects behavior because their nieces and nephews threw more tantrums, or they saw more chaos on the job, or whatever. Science was irrelevant. They didn't seem to get how it worked.
The kids in this program are excited about science. The topic at hand is astronomy, but they're not all interested in that, specifically. Some want to be doctors, one says she wants to be a marine biologist. Some might even end up being teachers, or stay-at-home parents, or captain ferries that cross the bay. But they're learning, they're excited about learning, and they're excited about science. This is priceless. These are the kids we need growing up into our future, and making it go.
I'm not sure why I cried when I read this. Maybe it's because these are kids mostly from Oakland, and mostly African-American, and the high school dropout rate in Oakland's phenomenal, especially within the African-American community. Maybe it's because a female, African-American astronomer is part of their worldview now. Maybe it's because these are girls, and the adults working with them seem so much to care that they grow up with positive, science-related educational experiences. Maybe it's because these are kids and need a positive science background, and many public schools can be a hard place to get that these days, and the Girl Scouts and Chabot Space and Science Center and the other people and organizations behind this program are offering it to them.
These are kids who will grow up as better critical thinkers, with experience reading about science and learning how it applies in "real life." Their own experiences and perceptions won't, as much, form the bases for their realities. Their understanding of what is possible out there, both in science in general, in the universe, and in their own lives, are forever expanded.
Now it's your turn to ride across North America
Nathan Winters just finished a ride from Maine to Washington to raise awareness and money for The Nature Conservancy. His photos document the miles. He reached a small portion of his very ambitious goal. You can help fill it out at http://www.firstgiving.com/follownathan
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
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