Posts

May 30, 2012

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I'm moving on to Wordpress, folks, so please update your bookmarks / RSS readers / email subscriptions (yes, I'm talking to all 3 of you who follow this blog regularly!) to point to: Reconciliation Ecology: a leaf warbler's gleanings I've been here for the past two and a half years, during which my blogging expanded and became more personal and eclectic. The ease with which I could post and then share my posts via Posterous' wonderful autoposting features made this my primary blogging […]

May 26, 2012

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4:58 PM | Deforestation of an urban ecosystem DRAFT RESPONSE (from President Welty)

I woke up this morning to find the following DRAFT response in my campus email inbox, and thought it worth sharing given the interest my original letter has generated. Do share your thoughts on this while I mull it over and respond.Begin forwarded message:From: John Welty <johnw@csufresno.edu>Subject: Deforestation of an urban ecosystem DRAFT RESPONSEDate: May 26, 2012 8:20:56 AM PDTTo: Madhusudan Katti <mkatti@csufresno.edu>Cc: John Welty <johnw@csufresno.edu>Sent from my […]

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10:05 AM | How do we unbrand our university? A call for creative submissions

Last month our university - California State University - decided to stop calling itself a university, and transform itself into the brand Fresno State instead. This makeover came with a new sports-team inspired logo consisting of the words "Fresno State" (minus the word "university") emblazoned with a paw print supposedly from our mascot the Bulldog (but with retracted claws, suggesting a cat more than a dog!). Underneath are the three D-words that are supposedly […]

May 25, 2012

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4:47 PM | Message from President Welty regarding parking lot project

This morning, we got the following email distributed on the campus Bulletinboard system, in response to faculty concerns about the removal of trees for parking lot expansion, which included my letter to President Welty yesterday:From: Cindy Matson <alangrid@CSUFRESNO.EDU>Subject: [BULLETINBOARD] Message from President Welty regarding parking lot projectDate: May 25, 2012 9:00:11 AM PDTTo: BULLETINBOARD@LISTSERV.CSUFRESNO.EDUReply-To: Cindy Matson <cmatson@csufresno.edu>I have […]

May 24, 2012

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7:39 PM | Deforestation of an urban ecosystem and failure of campus governance: an open letter to President Welty

Yesterday morning I drove into to campus to my customary parking spot under the dense canopy of trees that have shaded our parking lots for years - only to find a scene of carnage: the entire urban forest on those parking lots - some 100 or so trees - were being chopped down to make way for a larger parking lot! Mature, healthy trees, supporting many other species, being cut down to make way for a few more cars!! Craig Bernthal has written about this and posted a bunch […]

April 25, 2012

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3:52 PM | Effects of urban noise on the songs of wintering white-crowned sparrows

This is another day for me to be proud: my graduate student Jenny Phillips will present her thesis exit seminar at noon today! If you are reading this before noon, and are on campus today with some time on your hands, do consider joining us for what should be a very interesting seminar. She will present her work on "The effects of urban noise on song structure in a long distance migrant, Gambel’s white-crowned sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii)". You can read [...]

April 23, 2012

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1:58 AM | Science Comedian Brian Malow is coming to Fresno! May 7 2012

Mark your calendars and prepare to join us for a fun evening! ScienceComedian-BrianMalow.pdf Download this file Permalink | Leave a comment »

April 21, 2012

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6:19 AM | Chimpanzee: a nature film where story matters. For our cousins. For ourselves.

It is something else to look into the eyes of a Chimpanzee staring out of a giant movie screen, the rainforest canopy reflected in those intent pellucid mirrors so like our own. I don't know if I will ever get the chance to really look into the eyes of our closest cousins, the Chimpanzees and Bonobos, in their natural habitat in the wild. I have seen them in captivity, and lingered around their captive groups, which appear not entirely unhappy in modern zoo habitats enriched to sustain their [...]

April 20, 2012

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7:42 PM | Dang... I better update my lab website...

via phdcomics.com ... but I have this meeting to prepare for first... Permalink | Leave a comment »

April 14, 2012

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10:37 AM | How the athletic tail wags the academic dog at the new "Fresno State"

As of yesterday, I no longer work for California State University, Fresno. I got my tenure at that institution almost two years ago and have been an Associate Professor in the Biology Department since then. I still have my lab and office in the same Biology building, and I still have that view from my window of the Sierras, currently hiding under ominous dark clouds as the state reels under today's rainstorm. But our campus too is under some dark clouds these days. So I'm still [...]

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2:08 AM | How the athletic tail wags the academic dog at the new "Fresno State"

As of yesterday, I no longer work for California State University, Fresno. I got my tenure at that institution almost two years ago and have been an Associate Professor in the Biology Department ever since. I still have my lab and office in the same Biology building, and I still have that view from my window of the Sierras, currently hiding under ominous dark clouds as the state reels under today's rainstorm. But our campus too is under some dark clouds these days. So I'm still here. But I'm [...]

April 03, 2012

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6:46 AM | Jennifer Lawrence should've hung on to Ree's ragged wardrobe for Katniss of Panem

via youtube.com Just re-watched the haunting 2010 film "Winter's Bone" with K, who could barely watch the shocking climax. It occurred to me again that the 17-yr-old "Ree" seems almost like Jennifer Lawrence's audition for the role of "Katniss" in the now mega-hit "Hunger Games". Bone is grittier, more realistic, and therefore more shocking in some ways, although I also liked the Games very much for the punch it packs. Especially for S, who falls in the demographic for which that [...]

March 30, 2012

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11:24 PM | ScienceOnline2012 in Review

via vimeo.com Nice short video overview of the ScienceOnline2012 unconference I attended last january, just days before my life went into a turbulent period from which I am still recovering. I had several blog posts in mind to record my own experience at the meeting, and summarize the discussion in the un-session I was able to lead there. It is nice to see this video which reminds me of the warmth of that unconference, and jogs memories that should help me write those blog posts... [...]

March 29, 2012

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7:45 PM | "What Kind of Times Are These" by Adrienne Rich

via youtube.com Sad times indeed, now that Adrienne Rich too has disappeared. At least we still have her powerful voice with us... if only we choose to listen. Permalink | Leave a comment »

March 28, 2012

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12:07 AM | Hoodies and the beasts within our multicolored skins

In his very second outing, the newest Doctor Who (a white guy… ever wonder why the last remaining Time Lord in the universe keeps choosing to be reincarnated as a parade of white guys?) and his newest (and whitest; again, where's the kick-ass black beauty Martha Jones who accompanied him for a season?) companion land on a strange sort of ship which is really home to all of Britain transported into outer space somehow. But something is awry (of course), as the Doctor soon [...]

March 26, 2012

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7:07 PM | Yosemite: a mind-blowing high-definition visual journey through an incredible place

A spectacular view of the freshly rain-and-snow-washed Sierra Nevada range had me in its thrall during my morning commute this morning! Just the kind of view that all-too-rarely these days reminds one of the value of living in Fresno, so near to these fantastic mountains. Yet also so far sometimes as we get too caught up in the daily mundane. A view like that, and a video like this one, remind me again that I don't go up in these mountains as often as I would like to... as I really [...]

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6:13 AM | Welcome to the Anthropocene (a video)

via vimeo.com A 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes. The film was commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure conference, London 26-29 March, a major international conference focusing on solutions. planetunderpressure2012.net The film is part of the world's first educational [...]

March 25, 2012

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8:31 PM | PIRATES!! Yes!!! (But hush... don't mention scientists or Charles Darwin - we're Americans!)

via youtube.com Now that sure looks like a fun movie, doesn't it? Pirates! Aardman's brilliant digital claymation wackiness! and Pirates! What's not to like? Well, a rather big chunk of the premise of the story, apparently - if you're American. For the film is based on a novel titled "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists". Not just any old scientists either - but the story actually revolves around Charles Darwin, whose Beagle is sunk by the titular pirates who then actually team up [...]

March 20, 2012

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9:29 PM | Jet-lagged on the ish watch

My favorite, most poetic definition of jet lag, that modern malady of the flying-across-time-zones age, comes from an observation attributed to an Indian (of the American kind) saying which goes something like this: "if you travel too fast, your soul can't keep up". Not that I believe in souls, but long international flights of the sort I just undertook several days ago do leave me feeling as if some essential part of me hasn't quite caught up! And so I have to wait for my "soul" to [...]

March 19, 2012

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5:55 PM | Muhammad Yunus on how economists went wrong and misinterpreted human beings

via guardian.co.uk I particularly like what he says at the end about the problem of unemployment, and the sheer waste of human potential when we allow people to be unemployed. Permalink | Leave a comment »

March 10, 2012

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9:28 AM | "... the tea would glitter like a garnet waterfall."

That wonderfully evocative description, in a paragraph about of a cup of chai being made, can be used to describe this entire piece of memoir written by my friend Samina Najmi. It is a beautiful, moving piece about place, displacement, and family, about how families are torn apart, scattered, and brought together in strange, heartbreaking, beautiful ways. And if you let Samina's words catch the light as you read, they too glitter like a garnet waterfall. Here's a taste - but go read [...]

March 08, 2012

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4:32 PM | "Rights, not privileges, its that easy!" Happy International Women's Day

I just finished watching, once again, "Made in Dagenham" the powerful movie (one of my favorites in recent years) about the fight for equal pay for women in the UK which started in the summer of 1968 with 187 women sewing machinists going on strike in the Ford factory in Dagenham, and ended with the landmark Equal Pay Act of 1970. Stirring stuff for International Women's Day, which, after all, started as International Working Women's Day in the first place. It is [...]

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8:01 AM | Womb Envy (a poem for International Women's Day)

Since I've been digging up some of my old creative (or not, you might say) writing lately, and inflicting it upon readers here, here's something for International Women's Day - an image and a poem I wrote some years ago: Womb Envy(Old Freud got it upside down)Freud got it wrong when he said, the problem with women was: penis envy. I think the truth reallyis upside down, nearly,the problem with Men is:not enough womb envy.Of course, being born male.I have enjoyed the [...]

March 05, 2012

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7:05 PM | Archaeologist Brian Fagan to visit Fresno State this week (and a repost)

I just learnt that archaeologist and writer Brian Fagan is visiting my campus this week - tomorrow (Mar 6) in fact - but I will miss his visit! I've been wanting to bring him to Fresno for some time now - and here I am stuck in Mumbai when he does actually arrive on campus! If you are on Fresno and reading this, please do go to his talk on the Fresno State campus tomorrow. Here's more info on the event, which is open to the public: Meanwhile, since I won't be able to participate in the [...]

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4:22 PM | "Forest Fires" - in which Sarah Kay cuts deep

Another astonishing poem, spoken word, from the young-but-seemingly-wise-beyond-her-years Sarah Kay. This one cuts deeper into me, given my own recent brush with fire... and hospital beds too, amid the cacophony of beeps. I don't have her father's (or my own father's) slicer-dicer to help me deal with grief. So words from her and others - and the few I have been able to write myself - are what I fall back upon... via youtube.com Permalink | Leave a [...]

March 04, 2012

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7:14 AM | Because I have daughters too ...

... and I want them growing up knowing that there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away. via ted.com Permalink | Leave a comment »

March 02, 2012

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10:01 AM | Why, oh why, does it rain so much in a rainforest?

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February 25, 2012

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1:43 PM | Ficus, Focus, Poet, Cop.

"What are you photographing here?", the policeman asked somewhat sternly, as he approached me. The young policewoman, eyebrows deeply furrowed, hovered behind her superior. She had been eyeing me with increasing concern as I had loitered near one of the entrances of the Brihanmumbai Mahanagar Palika (or Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) building for almost half an hour. Peering into the darkness of the grand old doorway she guarded, and at another entrance in an adjacent building, [...]

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10:35 AM | I'll be back home... oh... in a week-ish?

... -ish! That is how my yesterday went. Waiting, mostly, for some very important ink from the hand of a high-ranking officer to be signed onto an important certificate verifying my very existence (at least in the eyes of the Indian government) which is crucial for my obtaining a fresh passport, and in turn, a fresh visa so I can return home. Even the word tatkal (meaning "instant" in Sanskrit) has come to mean 1-7(ish) days, officially, when it comes to issuing passports, urgently, in [...]

February 21, 2012

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8:45 PM | Tripping on a pocket of air, hitting some more turbulence...

Air. Just a little bit. Trapped underneath a thin film of plastic. That's what tripped me up today as I was looking forward to getting my visa to return home. The once delayed consular interview went well, considering I'd rushed over at dawn to make it in time through Mumbai traffic, after two hours of sleep, stood in another line for an hour before bring scanned and frisked through security to yet another waiting area, clutching my passport, waiting for my number to be called.. Anxiety, [...]