Posts

January 02, 2013

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5:25 AM | Revitalizing Watershed Moments: New Year = New Chapter

In my last post I talked about the rambling nature of my blog. According to Brainpickings, being interested in a range of topics is a hallmark of creativity. “Every really [...]

December 31, 2012

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10:00 PM | Solid as a Rock

Is reality an ethereal, mathematical poem... or is it made up of solid, physical stuff? In this short, we kick rocks, slap tables, and argue about the nature of the universe with Jim Holt.

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4:34 PM | A dot for every person

Brandon Martin-Anderson of the MIT Media Lab mapped every person in the U.S. 308,450,225 of us. From a wide angle, it doesn’t look very different from other density maps. But zoom in and you’ll see a different story. (Since it’s based on the Census, each dot isn’t an actual address or location. Rather, since Census data [...]∞

December 27, 2012

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12:02 PM | Don’t Believe Everything You See on YouTube: Parícutin Edition

I’d like to conduct an experiment someday. I’d like to gather together a group of experts in a particular field and show them a few popular science video clips relevant to their areas of expertise. Would they groan, howl and laugh as much as I did during these three short clips? The sad fact is, [...]

December 21, 2012

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7:01 PM | Google Maps of the Year

Picking 100 mashups is a challenge in and of itself, and picking the 100 “best” even more so. Kudos to Keir Clarke for sifting through them. With such a big number, there are bound to be some so-so ones, but don’t let that distract you from the gems. Weather conditions along a route, crowdsourced neighborhood boundaries, [...]∞

December 20, 2012

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7:15 PM | Battle over the front yard

Steven Kurtz, reporting for the New York Times: Gardeners aren’t generally known for their civil disobedience, yet in the last couple of years several have run afoul of local officials for tending vegetables in their front yards. In Ferguson, Mo., a stay-at-home father was ordered to dig up his 55 varieties of edible plants. In [...]∞

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5:45 PM | Orangutan culture

Rachel Widiss, reporting for ScienceNow: Even when they are very young, orangutans may start to form ideas about their world — specifically, how and when to use certain tools. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which indicates that ape cultural traditions may not be that different from our own. ∞∞

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11:01 AM | What’s So Unusual About Tolbachik’s Eruption? Um… Actually…

Please sit down. I have some news to break. It may be very difficult to hear, and it may shake your innocence and trust. But I need you to know the truth. Are you ready? Have you braced yourself? Okay, let’s have it: sometimes, the media is really terrible at science reporting. I’m so sorry. [...]

December 19, 2012

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7:53 PM | Nested sets

David George Haskell: This was a stroke of avian genius. No chipmunk or squirrel would be stupid enough to try to raid this nest. ∞∞

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6:14 PM | Where there’s money, there’s corruption

John Nicol and Dave Seglins, reporting for CBC News: CBC News received several tips after a recent story about a company shipping the same load of biodiesel back and forth by CN Rail at a cost of $2.6 million in the summer of 2010. It turns out the shipments were part of a deal by [...]∞

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5:06 PM | Another reminder of New York’s historical coastline

Geoff Manaugh: Some of my favorite architectural images of all time come from a series of photos taken by Fred R. Conrad for the New York Times, showing the remains of an 18th-century ship that was uncovered in the muddy depths of the World Trade Center site, a kind of wooden fossil, splayed out and [...]∞

December 18, 2012

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7:50 PM | California as an island

Stanford recently acquired a collection of maps depicting California as an island—illustrated representations of what many in the U.S. assume is figuratively true, that the state is a world unto itself. But back when the original maps were drawn, people really did think California was an island. My grad advisor had an example in her [...]∞

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4:54 PM | You Are the Real Winner Of the Mobile Maps Wars

Rachel Metz, writing for Technology Review: The fact that Google now has some major competition in an area that it pretty much owned previously is likely to make the company innovate more quickly and invest more seriously in making its own product better. In the end, neither Apple nor Google will win these “map wars”-consumers [...]∞

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1:00 AM | Bliss

Moments of total, world-shaking bliss are not easy to come by. Maybe that's what makes them feel so life-altering when they strike. And so worth chasing. This hour: stories of striving, grasping, tripping, and falling for happiness, perfection, and ideals.

December 17, 2012

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8:48 PM | Before GIS

Eric Fischer found this relief map depicting the predicted traffic volumes of the “National System of Interregional Highways”, later known as the Interstate system. Another way of looking at this might have been, where should we build new train lines in addition to the Interstates? Sadly, that wasn’t the case. ∞∞

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5:45 PM | Why Earth and atmospheric scientists are swearing up a storm and getting arrested

Jonathan Mingle, writing for Slate: Many of us have wondered at some point in almost precisely these terms: “Is Earth F**ked?” But it’s not the sort of frank query you expect an expert in geomorphology to pose to his colleagues as the title of a formal presentation at one of the world’s largest scientific gatherings. [...]∞

December 14, 2012

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8:45 PM | Wild Horses Are Running Out of Room

Dan Frosch, reporting for the New York Times: Despite deep differences on how the animals should be managed, both sides agree on one thing: The situation has reached a tipping point. These days, the temporary holding facilities and long-term pastures where many wild horses end up are nearing capacity or full. And the cost of [...]∞

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5:22 PM | Even American Drivers Like Mass Transit More Than They Think

Eric Jaffe, writing for the Atlantic Cities: In an upcoming issue of the journal Transport Policy, a research duo reports that nearly 30 percent of regular car commuters in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, gave up their full-time parking permits immediately after a brief free-transit trial, with most downgrading to an occasional permit and a few [...]∞

December 13, 2012

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8:50 PM | Can technology save the environment?

A healthy debate on an important topic. ∞∞

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7:32 PM | Google releases Maps for iOS

It’s an impressive app, but most reviews fail to ask, why didn’t Google do this in the past? Why didn’t they provide this level of data detail for the old maps app? Because they didn’t have to. Google essentially had a monopoly on mobile mapping, and they thought Apple had no choice but to use [...]∞

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5:47 PM | City birds use cigarette butts to smoke out parasites

Matt Kaplan, reporting for Nature: “It really makes me wonder: might these birds show a preference for cigarette brands high in nicotine? If they did, that might suggest this behaviour has truly evolved as an adaptive response to challenges from parasites,” says Timothy Mousseau, an ecologist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. ∞∞

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10:51 AM | The Cataclysm: “That Whole Mountain Range Had Just Exploded”

A few seconds after the beginning of the directed blast, life within roughly ten kilometers (6.2 miles) of Mount St. Helens within the blast zone was about to be extinguished. “Directed blasts,” Rick Hoblitt, Dan Miller, and James Vallance wrote in their 1981 paper on the blast deposits, “typically devastate large areas… and kill essentially [...]

December 12, 2012

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3:55 PM | ■ How TED and The City 2.0 took the internet for a ride

Last year, TED made a lot of noise when it announced that it was awarding its TED Prize to something called “The City 2.0”. In case you don’t know what “The City 2.0” is, it’s an idea. At least that’s what TED was telling us. They were awarding the prize to an “idea” instead of [...]

December 11, 2012

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7:14 PM | Sandy, before and after

Exactly what it sounds like. Some of the changes are striking. ∞∞

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5:09 PM | About those 100-year flood zones

Michael Howard Saul, writing for the Wall Street Journal: Two-thirds of all New York City homes damaged by superstorm Sandy were outside of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s existing 100-year flood zone, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Thursday, calling for an immediate redrawing of the maps to reflect current conditions. New York City isn’t the only [...]∞

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9:33 AM | Tuesday Tune: “Pompeii”

One of my regulars over at ETEV pointed me toward this gorgeous E.S. Posthumus song, “Pompeii.” In light of a recent Rosetta Stones post, it made sense to listen to it. I’m in love. This is the kind of thing that makes my heart go pitter-pat: grand, sweeping, forboding music combined with rather chilling visuals [...]

December 10, 2012

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6:54 PM | You’re subsidizing your cable company

Elisabeth Rosenthal: Facing the prospect of regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency, cable TV operators and appliance manufacturers have announced a voluntary program to improve the energy efficiency of the set-top boxes that bring programming into your home. Some environmental advocates say the changes don’t go nearly far enough. I’m skeptical, too, because the market [...]∞

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6:20 PM | Wrestling with privet on Bluebell Island

David George Haskell: Sharp blades and muscles: These are the lab tools used lately by my class. We’ve been mapping and eradicating privet from Bluebell Island, a local hotspot for wildflowers. Privet is a non-native invader and it overshadows and kills native plants. More proof that we’re responsible for the balance of life in the [...]∞

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5:36 PM | Depressing

Jim Robbins, writing for the New York Times: The death rate of many of the biggest and oldest trees around the world is increasing rapidly, scientists report in a new study in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. They warned that research to understand and stem the loss of the trees is urgently needed. ∞∞

December 07, 2012

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6:01 PM | An inverted city

Matt Novak: Jellicoe was talking to the Associated Press in 1960 about his vision for a radically new kind of British town—a town where the bubble-top cars of tomorrow moved freely on elevated streets, and the pedestrian zipped around safely on moving sidewalks. For a town whose main selling point was the freedom to not [...]∞