Tag: georgia

Biodiversity
April 14, 2013 0

Biodiversity

By News Desk

This week’s Science Friday had a segment with Lincoln Brower , an entymologist who studies the monarch butterfly.  The monarch population is collapsing faster than the Arctic ice cap, with the area of their wintering grounds in Mexico going from 52 acres to less than 3 in twenty years.  In Brower’s words “In previous years we had seventeen sites with colonies, this year eight of those sites had zero butterflies, and the rest of them had very few butterflies.   Only one of the colonies had significant numbers.  My worry is that they are winking out one by one and they may not be able to recover” There are several reasons for this, among them that the Oyamel forest is being thinned which exposes the area under the canopy and makes it harder for the butterflies to shelter from winter frost in the high forest.  Monarchs have an absolutely crazy life cycle .  Simplified, overwintering butterflies in Mexico (there are also populations in California) leave Mexico in late March and head for Texas, where they feed on milkweed and create a new generation.  The new generation is short lived, and starts the migration north to the Great Lakes region and the east coast.  They, in turn, lead to two other short lived generation, with the fourth and final one being the one that migrates back to Oyamel and overwinters.  You can follow this on Journey North , a science activity for young and old. Monarch larvae are fussy eaters, depending on milkweed the way that pandas depend on bamboo.  It is the only thing that they feed on in all stages of their lives.  This has made them indirectly vulnerable to GMCs.  The introduction of Roundup Ready crops has lead to broadcast spreading of Roundup, which kills everything EXCEPT the Roundup Ready crops, including the milkweed (and also nectar yielding plants which does nasty things for pollinators).  This breaks the Monarch’s lifecycle

Good Business
April 13, 2013 0

Good Business

By News Desk

Exxon must hate your children because their business model depends on drilling for more and more of the fuels that cause climate disruption, even though fossil fuel companies have already discovered significantly more oil, gas and coal than scientists say we can safely burn . They are creating climate chaos every day — and they’re getting rich doing it..

A temporary end to bliss
April 11, 2013 0

A temporary end to bliss

By News Desk

With a rare exception or two, I’ve been blissfully ignoring Roger Pielke Jr’s recent stuff for the last year or so as he slid into irrelevance. As long as I didn’t read his stuff, I could keep open the possibility that he was doing something useful.

Meta-analysis in the middle
April 9, 2013 0

Meta-analysis in the middle

By News Desk

Tweet My general view both in general and as a policymaker in my small local-office pond is that a widely held (few expert dissenters) and strongly held (high confidence) consensus position might as well be a fact as far as the policymaking is concerned . A contradictory study is just that, a study. If it turns out to be accurate, then the consensus will eventually fracture soon enough and create problems for policymakers, but there’s no need or even a rational way for policymaking to jump the gun

Bridge Building
March 30, 2013 0

Bridge Building

By News Desk

Bridge Building Eli grew up in Brooklyn and one of the things he particularly was fond of, other than Flatbush carrots , was biking down to and across the Brooklyn Bridge.  The story of the Roeblings and especially Emily Warren Roebling at Scandalous Women is worth reading I’ve always found the story of Emily Warren Roebling inspiring, because it’s a story of how a woman came into her own and learned what she was capable of through adversity.  It’s also a deeply moving love story. When Washington Roebling was unable to continue hands-on work as chief engineer, his wife Emily worked tirelessly to relay his wishes to the workers, and to keep the vision that father and son had worked long and hard to achieve.   This was during the late 19th century, when the idea of a woman being able to understand complex mathematics or science, was unheard of.  Many men(and women) believed that women’s brains weren’t developed enough or that they were too weak

Should Eli Believe His Lying Eyes or Makarieva
March 27, 2013 0

Should Eli Believe His Lying Eyes or Makarieva

By News Desk

Should Eli Believe His Lying Eyes or Makarieva James reminds Eli of  Makarieva et al in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics as well as featuring on several blogs.  One can summarize the entire thing by noting that Makarieva claims that winds are formed when water vapor condenses decreasing the gaseous volume.  Were this the major process, air would move inwards towards the area where the condensation occurred.  Most others point out that the release of energy from the heat of condensation will blow the air outwards.  That’s the summary There was an almost infinite amount of mathturbation about this including the original paper, and Dr. Makarieva was very, well, insistent. Eli OTOH is a member of the reality based community.  The Rabett likes to look at what is going on and figure out what it means before turning the math crank.  Recently Ms Rabett dragged Eli off into the mountains where he could actually watch the clouds form.  He could tell you what happened, but in this world we have the video.

My "prediction": Tolkien was a wrestler
March 24, 2013 0

My "prediction": Tolkien was a wrestler

By News Desk

My "prediction": Tolkien was a wrestler Off topic, but still a prediction in that I don’t know the answer:  I think Tolkien wrestled in his youth. When you read his description of armed combat, it’s pretty simple and somewhat vague, but when it becomes unarmed combat, suddenly every single motion gets described and punching takes a distant second place to grappling. Maybe it’s out there somewhere, but I’ve looked around and not read much about Tolkien’s athleticism – some brief mention of tennis and rugby at Oxford, but that’s about it.