How to photograph a redwood tree
How do you photograph an entire redwood tree? It's not easy, but the result can be spectacular, especially when it's done by National Geographic's pros.
Fundamental error: talking evolution instead of speciation
Scientist/writer David Horton describes it as a mistake that we have talked about "species evolving" when discuss evolution. He considers this "an easy mistake to make, and you can see why we made it, but it has proved fatal." He argues that biologists have unwittingly confused the creationists with talk of species evolving.
So if I was writing biology text books for use in Texas or Kentucky or Missouri schools I think I would join their education authorities in demanding that the word evolution not be mentioned. Instead I would put all of my effort into explaining speciation. Show how that original bacterium could become 2, 4, 8, 20, 30, 60 ... species. Could become, even after losing tens of thousands of species along the way, the tens of thousands of species, including humans, chimps, and bacteria, we see today.
Instead of focusing on natural selection, which Horton considers "too obvious," he would stress the importance of allopatric speciation:Allopatric speciation is simply this - if one part of a species becomes separated by a geographic barrier (a mountain range forms, sea level rises, a desert comes into being, a river changes course, a landslide falls, a continent moves, a glacier extends), and stays separate long enough, then its members will no longer be able to breed with the other part of the population and it will therefore have become a different species. Doesn't matter why it becomes different - just an accumulation of mutations might do the trick . . .
Garrison Keillor describes his stroke
What's it like to have a stroke, then get really lucky? Garrison Keillor tells it like only Garrison Keillor can tell it:
[A] neurologist shook my hand and said: "I hope you know how lucky you are." That was pretty clear as I walked down the hall, towing my IV tower, and saw the casualties of serious strokes. Here I was sashaying along, like a survivor of Pickett's Last Charge who had suffered a sprained wrist.
What's it like to get world class treatment for your stroke when you have a strong sense of social justice?Rich or poor, young or old, we all face the injustice of life -- it ends too soon, and statistical probability is no comfort. We are all in the same boat, you and me and ex-Gov. Palin and Rep. Joe Wilson, and wealth and social status do not prevail against disease and injury. And now we must reform our health insurance system so that it reflects our common humanity. It is not decent that people avoid seeking help for want of insurance. It is not decent that people go broke trying to get well. You know it and I know it. Time to fix it.
How peak oil affects food and everything else
Media Education Foundation has released a new documentary called "Blind Spot" which
explores the inextricable link between the energy we use, the way we run our economy, and the multiplying threats that now confront the environmental health and stability of our planet. Taking as its starting point the inevitable energy depletion scenario known as "Peak Oil," the film surveys a fascinating range of the latest intellectual, political, and scientific thought to make the case that by whatever measure of greed, wishful thinking, neglect, or ignorance, we now find ourselves at a disturbing crossroads: we can continue to burn fossil fuels and witness the collapse of our ecology, or we can choose not to and witness the collapse of our economy. Refusing to whitewash this reality, Blind Spot issues a call to action, urging us to face up to the perilous situation we now find ourselves in so that we might begin to envision a realistic, if inconvenient, way out.
You can watch a ten-minute excerpt here. By watching it, I learned that:- The U.S. now has more prisoners than farmers.
- Corn ethanol is energy negative (making it uses more energy than burning it).
- It takes 30 calories of energy to bring one calorie of lettuce from California to the average plate.
- The average item of food travels 1,500 hundred miles to your plate.
- The concept of peak oil (essentially, that we are running out of cheap oil), is still ignored or rejected by most businesses, governments and individuals.
Financial crisis: NOT fixed
Have we "fixed" the problem that lead to the financial collapse of the U.S.? Not at all, according this article in Bloomberg.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. “In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”