Exploring Southern California's inland habitats

Small palm grove
Originally uploaded by °Florian.

Florian Boyd has beautiful photos from his hikes around Southern California's inland deserts and mountains.

He's got a picture of native fan palms here, which are vital to many bird and mammal species. For instance, the Hooded Oriole, which nests in its fronds, takes shelter there for the insulation; the air within the dead fronds that hang down can be ten to fifteen degrees Fahrenheit lower than surrounding air. In deserts that have several 100+ days every year, that's a big help. Though their traditional range is the desert of far southern California (and thus, so is the range of that oriole), they've been planted extensively as landscaping trees. When I lived in Fremont, in the San Francisco Bay Area, our neighbors had a fan palm too tall to trim dead fronds from, and Hooded Orioles, far to the north of their historic habitat, set up a nest, and frequently raided our hummingbird feeders.

If you've got fan palms and have the option to let the dead fronds stay, please do -- Habitat's a precious thing.

(Don't miss the rosy boa.)

That's great, it starts with an earthquake? again?

The BBC reports in one of today's headlines that there's a "Tiny chance of planet collision," and in its first paragraph, reports that this won't happen for at least a billion years.

New Scientist, on the other hand, which can be a bit overdramatic in its headlines, says "Solar system's planets could spin out of control" and in its first paragraph, qualifies that with "one day."

The graphics are fabulous, in either case. I get the sense that the smash simulations at the end of the video are more about "hey, check this out, BAM!" than they are about "here is a scientific illustration that will make everything more clear."

sometimes I miss the good old days

Lady Mary moored in Cape May (2004)
Originally uploaded by uscgd5publicaffairs.

I was looking about a bit at background for a piece I intend to write about sustainable seafood, and ran across this article with something else entirely to please me:

From Loving Fish, This Time With the Fish in Mind

I learned about buying sea creatures in the late ’70s at the sides of two old-time New Haven fishmongers who ran competing markets with differing styles. One brought in every fish he could find, mostly by going (or sending his help) to the Fulton Fish Market, Boston and Point Judith, R.I.

The other relied more on the trucks that worked the East Coast, going from fleet to fleet and market to market: A driver would start in Portland, Me., for example, with lobsters and scallops, and drive to Boston, where he might drop off lobsters and pick up cod and quahogs, then move on to Providence or Point Judith, where he would drop off whatever was in demand and load squid and swordfish. In New Haven he might find flounder. From there, he would hit New York, Cape May, Maryland, right down to Virginia or even Georgia or Florida. Then, his northern load diminished, his southern load — pompano, porgies, spots, snapper — in full supply, he would reverse the trip.

This makes me nostalgic. I may have missed out on the nickel-a-flounder days in New Haven, but I got to shop, learn about and cook fish at a time when my selections were varied and mostly local.

I find myself wanting to go along for the ride, to watch the season change with latitude, and watch the plants change, and the birds, and fish, and the accents of the working people on the east coast of the United States. (I live in California and grew up on the west coast. Accents?)

I know the "good old days" weren't always good at all -- DDT and women who felt trapped at home and kids with special needs who were marginalized and hawks shot for fun in New Jersey. And I love the internet, and air travel, and learning about and loving the whole world. But maybe we don't spend enough time moving slowly on the ground, and getting to know a small area well, and eating the food, and listening to people talk who work there, and live there, and feel the joy and the pain of the land and sea right through their shoes.

(I read the caption that accompanies this photo after I chose the photo for this post. Oh. See, these things also should be remembered.)

Did I ever tell you I'm afraid of heights?

shapes of the world

World Box
Originally uploaded by oschene.

The Guardian offers five different projections, with their whys and wherefores, for modern maps.

And now I want to learn to fold this paper one.

beer geography quiz

Beer Bottle Cap Assortment
Originally uploaded by lopolis.

Beer geography?

(Aside from the odd foray into Belgian beers, which are their own special wonder, I almost always come back to Californian microbrews.)

Fee-free days coming up in the national parks

Yosemite Valley
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

Many of the US National Parks charge some sort of fee to get in, either a nominal day-use fee, or in the case of big, popular, and over-used parks like Yosemite, a hefty $20 per car entry fee.

Just as California's state parks are on the verge of closing (and our governor is talking about "selling state property" including San Quentin, which makes me wonder a bit about other state land), the National Park Service is instituting a series of fee-free days in our national parks.

Now's the time to get out and visit.

When I was young, I thought Yosemite was overrated, by the way. Then I saw it, and can't imagine not having it.

For a listing of upcoming fee-free days, please check the NPS page about it.

(Pictures below are of Lassen and Yosemite, two of my favorite parks.)

where?

where?
Originally uploaded by iammikeb.

SilverFox at where in the west leads me to ponder doing a regular a "where in the world?" or "where in California?" (or something else geographic, maybe not photolocation-based) but I'm not quite sure whether I have enough readers, or whether it would be at all fun. I shall continue pondering.

Sequoia Sempervirens in Humboldt Redwoods State Park

Poison oak up a redwood trunk
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

I hadn't heard this one, but it makes sense:

FACT: For every dollar that funds the parks, $2.35 is returned to the state’s General Fund through economic activities in the communities surrounding the parks.

That means eliminating all funding for state parks could actually result in the state losing over $350 million dollars in revenue

I picked it up on Help4Wildlife, but that links back to (and credits) the California State Park Foundation for the information.

I, for one, welcome our robotic rescuers

Japan's nifty rescue robot might be able to crawl around in buildings looking for folks who are trapped:

The Walking Engine of Glittering Metal

At the Ethical Paleontologist, you can see where Martians landed

California state parks system just got its throat cut

also:
Schwarzenegger proposes cuts to schools, in-home health care, and state employee salaries, more
Desert (and other) state parks to close, more




On the other hand: California is also cutting home health care, school funding, funded mandates that allow animal shelters to keep animals alive for five days before killing them ... California is broke. Our treasury system is broken, we can't save money here. Bad times mean hard cuts, because we seem unable to prepare for them.

I love this state, and I wouldn't want the responsibility for running it -- but *argh* sometimes I want to pull my hair out at the decisions the voters and the legislators have made over the years that have gotten us where we are now.

Honestly, I don't know what to say. I don't want state park funding cut, or education cut. I don't know where we're spending money that we (in my rarely humble opinion) shouldn't be. I know California has been historically bad at saving money, both by habit and by constitutional restrictions. (And I know for sure our constitution and its processes are badly broken.)

We can't spend money we don't have, and regardless of why we don't have money now, we just don't have it.

What do we do?

Girl Scouts are geographiles

2009-05-18 Rachel showing USGS stuff to Girl Scouts (6)
Originally uploaded by juverna.

Here's why Girl Scouts rock, among other reasons.

Rachel (in 4th grade) was among the friends I went to the USGS open house with. She collected a bunch of material -- geologic maps, mineral posters, bookmarks, stamps, anything sciencey and interesting -- at the open house, and showed it to her Girl Scout friends, and they were fascinated.

Rachel is a science geek, and an interesting kid. Her Girl Scout friends rock.

There are a lot of good reasons for girls to participate in Scouting, if they can find a good troop:

• Girl Scouts don't require religious attachment or belief.


• Girl Scouts encourage girls to be bold and adventurous, to be smart, and independent.


• Girl Scouts have fun.


• Girl Scouts don't discriminate on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.


• Girl Scouts work on environmental awareness.


• Girl Scouts learn science.

What else rocks about Girl Scouting?

Thematic Maps

Water USe in the US PNG
Originally uploaded by mmmaps.

Amanda Briney at about.com explains thematic maps, what they're for, and how to read them:

http://geography.about.com/od/understandmaps/a/thematicmaps.htm

nifty 3D city modelling

freedom map of the US?

future gay marriage map
Originally uploaded by coltmaverick.

The picture-maker says (edited a bit, as indicated):

The United States seems inexorably headed towards marriage rights for [same-sex] -- but how long will it take to get there across the board? Nate Silver has an answer. Based entirely on his hard work at fivethirtyeight.com, here is the future of [same-sex] marriage in the US:

The years indicated are those by which a [same-sex] marriage ban would be defeated by voters in a given state, according to a regression model designed by Silver....

How did Silver come up with these results? Here's the explanation:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive.

It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:

1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.

Click through for more details.

Needless to say, I'd like to see this map go black as fast as it can go. I think any consenting adult should be able to marry any other consenting adult.

Redwood Canyon, East Bay Regional Parks

redwood canyon_1
Originally uploaded by EBRPD Public Affairs.

The East Bay Regional Parks historical photos pool might just be my new favorite flickr pool. I'm going to be poking around in it and sharing some of these photos here and there, because the EBRPD is one of my favorite things about living in this part of California. Just a mile from my house between San Jose and Oakland, I can take my dogs running off-leash over hillsides and on wooded trails for miles, canoe, and swim, and a bit farther away, I can tour historic mines, ride an antique carousel, talk to goats, and learn about the special vegetation of serpentine grasslands.

40%

"A group of high profile New Zealanders talk about climate change and why they Signed On at http://www.signon.org.nz to ask NZ Prime Minister John Key to go to Copenhagen to Sign NZ On to 40 per cent emissions reduction by 2020."

FORTY PERCENT

It's so necessary.

Population control has to be part of it.

Clean energy has to be part of it.

Personal sacrifice must be part of it.

But 40% still seems like so very much.



How can we do it, really?

"Sign on" -- Okay. Now what?

lightning hits the Space Needle

lightning
Originally uploaded by spookythecat.

Geology.com, one of my favorite sites for geographilic information, has a fabulous video from May 23, 2009, of lightning hitting Seattle's Space Needle.

Here's the video:
http://geology.com/news/2009/lightning-hits-space-needle.shtml

And poke around geology.com for more nifty stuff.

A Green Journey for Conservation: Nathan Winters of follownathan.org

Great Reward After a Huge Climb
Originally uploaded by nathan andrew winters.

Nathan Winters has said goodbye (for now) to his beloved dog and set off across North America on a bicycle, raising environmental awareness (and blisters, and muscles) and tree-planting money for the Nature Conservancy.

Nathan started in Maine and is now in his home state of Vermont. He's chugging along visiting farmer's markets and organic farms, talking to real people doing real work about sustainability and conservation.


(Nathan talks to Larry Bisbee about recycling.)

This is an expensive trip. He's saving travel expenses where he can, but this is a fundraiser -- your donations to the Nature Conservancy (one of my all-time favorite environmental organizations) are fuelling his spirit.

To learn more about Nathan's travels:


Also:
Nathan's flickr stream, awesome cafepress shop (I love that bike), youtube channel, facebook page, and twitter stream. (Nathan posts updates about his location to Twitter, including when he's looking for a cozy place to bed down for the night, so you can help by following his travels there, and letting friends know when he's approaching and could use their hospitality.)

Please visit http://follownathan.org/ to find out how to donate to the Nature Conservancy and support Nathan on his journey.