Project Noah

Check out Project Noah: According to Jill Priluck's article in Slate, it is "a database of spottings, a field guide, and a repository for ecology surveys." You could spend all day viewing the massive collections.

Project NOAH has found the sweet spot between professional scientists and casual naturalists. It began as an app for people to share their nature sightings but has evolved into a scientific and culturally relevant tool for both the masses and the experts. Project NOAH functions as a kind of Foursquare for flora and fauna, a way for amateur nature spotters to record the bugs, leaves, and birds they've found. Those data, in turn, have become a valuable tool for professional researchers.
The good news? "The platform is about to go global with a cross-media blitz, in hopes of turning wildlife spotting into a cultural sport."

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We’re all gonna die

Here's an exquisitely compelling photo project that is also cleverly thought-provoking. It's a project created by Simon Hogsberg and it is called "We're all Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence." Hogsberg took the photos making up this long collage on a Berlin bridge over a 20-day period in 2007. I found myself moving the cursor slightly off-center so that I could sit back and slowly pan from left to right, a bittersweet journey of several minutes.

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What it means to be human

What is a human animal? If you were a Martian anthropologist, you would probably want to supplement your field studies (at grocery stores, sports events and tupperware parties) with a visit to this website of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. It is not highly technical, so those of you with children might want to share this site with them. What it lacks in technical information, it makes up for with a rich collection of videos, images and illustrations of artifacts, behavior and environments. Lots to click on here!

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Is the Supreme Court biased towards corporations?

I wrote last week about the plutocracy or corporatocracy which has emerged as the dominant force in American politics. Today, Bloomberg News has a teaser article up featuring an interview with Justice Stephen Breyer, who was appointed to the court by Bill Clinton in 1994. Before I get into the substance of the post, permit me to point out that Bloomberg News is a subsidiary of Bloomberg L.P., a company with revenues in the billions of dollars, and owned by Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City and America's 10th richest person. See how money, the media and politics all work together? And I'm sure this was entirely coincidental, but Bloomberg TV was severely reprimanded a few years ago in the United Kingdom for breaching British rules on broadcasts before elections. It seems that Bloomberg covered the Labour Party's "Business Manifesto", but failed to provide equal coverage to the Conservative or Liberal Democratic parties.

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