voltagegate

User Image

Posts by this author

May 7, 2007
Oprah makes me sick. She recently had another uber-hypocritical show about environmental issues and I thought it would be appropriate to repost my reaction to her first show about "going green", which was aired last June. Hey, at least her blouse is green, right? Has anyone noticed how Oprah…
May 4, 2007
It's beginning to look a lot like spring in Maryland, which means that the suburbanites will be out in their yards clearing dead brush and leaves, sculpting unkempt hedges and painstakingly homogenizing their lawns. I wrote this post last May, asking why lawns are treated like an extension of the…
May 4, 2007
David at the World's Fair has been unceremoniously sucked into Facebook. After wrestling with Its vast networking powers (as well as Its opioid addictive properties), he has brought the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique to Facebook. If you're on Facebook,…
May 4, 2007
The Ecological Society of America published a special open access issue of Frontiers in Ecology on Wednesday, focusing on sustainability in light of unprecedented human mobility, aka globalization. All of the articles agree on one thing: Ecology itself needs to be more effectively globalized,…
May 3, 2007
E. Jean Carroll, the infamous advice columnist for ELLE magazine, picked 40 sex columnists from student newspapers across the country, and our own Amanda Baldwin was one of them. Carroll set all 40 columnists up on her website, giving them space to post their columns for the nation to read. To see…
May 3, 2007
Sorry for the lack of substantial updates this week. I'm graduating in about three weeks and looking down the barrel of tests/papers-before-finals-week as well as finals. In addition to that, I've been gathering data (and posts) from the Blogger Bioblitz. I'm hoping we can have everything tabulated…
May 2, 2007
Julie MacDonald, the Bush appointee accused of suppressing the Endangered Species Act last year has resigned after proof of her corruption was brought to light: Julie MacDonald left her position as the Department of Interior's deputy assistant secretary of fish, wildlife and parks, from which she…
May 1, 2007
"All we have yet discovered is but a trifle in comparison with what lies hid in the great treasury of nature." -Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
May 1, 2007
I caught an episode of National Geographic's Wild Chronicles discussing the Wollemi pine, a rare, ancient contemporary of the dinosaurs that was discovered alive in Australia in the '90's. The stand is the only one known in the entire world, and conservationists are trying to find ways to preserve…
May 1, 2007
For the kids, of course. I got this comment on my basics post about tropical dry forests last night around midnight: Hey, I just wanted to say Thanks for being a GREAT resource for my school project on the Tropical Dry Forest Biome. This has helped greatly and I hope in the near future I do some…
April 30, 2007
Well, the blog anyway.
April 30, 2007
Carnival of the Godless #65 is up at Light Remembered.
April 30, 2007
From Ontario to Greece to Panama, what are participating bloggers finding out in the field? This thread will be constantly updated throughout the week, blog carnival style, compiling all of the bioblitzes that are being conducted. Please contact me if you have something up; I'll make sure I add it…
April 29, 2007
After the past month of planning, promoting and actually surveying, today is the last day of the Blogger Bioblitz (B3). But that doesn't mean we're quite done. Sara, Jenn and I will be tabulating data over the next week or so, getting a final count of species and shipping the data off to Madhu and…
April 28, 2007
Zuska blasted some moron at SciAm for referring to our own Shelley Batts as "attractive" during his summary of Shelley's recent run in with the lawyers at Wiley over the reproduction of a research figure: Excuse me? "Seems to be attractive"? WTF??? I mean, what the f*ck does that have to do with…
April 27, 2007
I love to read old science books, especially those that discuss biology before the discovery of DNA (aka the "mechanism of heredity"). I found this particular book in a small antique store in Pennsylvania and was struck by a small passage affirming the viability of evolution. From The Outline of…
April 26, 2007
"Humanity did not descend as angelic beings into this world. Nor are we aliens who colonized Earth. We evolved here, one among many species, across millions of years, and exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness…
April 25, 2007
Tangled Bank #78 at About: Archeology Carnival of the Green #74 at Evangelical Ecologist I'll be hosting the next edition of Oekologie on May 15th. See the tab above for more info.
April 25, 2007
Man, this game sucks. They show you what amounts to be an extra depressing trailer of An Inconvenient Truth and then unleashes you on the world - to stop emitting so much CO2. Usually when a game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, you at least get a gun or a blade (or a gunblade) and have to…
April 25, 2007
"There should be more attention paid to scientific research in the ecology area, and I think that such attention to proper environmental concerns would make the public feel much better about it." -Thomas R. Cech
April 24, 2007
We have submission guidelines and a full game plan for the next couple of weeks. As of today, there are 50 participants (including the birth of a new blog). Please send me an e-mail and register at the Google group if you are interested in joining us, and the Flickr group if you plan on…
April 24, 2007
"Shortsighted men... in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things." -Theodore Roosevelt
April 24, 2007
Kevin Dayhoff has posted Carnival of Maryland #5.
April 22, 2007
Well, Heather and I stumbled out of bed this morning around 5:30 (after two alarms, my clock and my cat), sipped some coffee and watched the sun rise. It could have been a typical school day, actually, but this morning we were heading out for our first bioblitz of the week. We decided to leisurely…
April 22, 2007
This clip is from State of the Planet, another BBC gem yet to be released in the US. This is perhaps the best presentation of the story of Easter Island there is, and intimately relevant to this day, Earth Day.
April 21, 2007
Jenn over at Invasive Species Weblog wrote a brilliant post about corporations that are distributing seeds as a supposedly "green" gesture of peace and love straight out of 1969. Betcha they don't have answers to her questions: ...someone needs to tell Starbucks that "wildflower" is not the…
April 21, 2007
"To promote conservation, fishers and officials need to view fish as a part of a larger ecological system, rather than simply as a commodity to extract." -Ann Platt McGinn
April 21, 2007
Over 40 bloggers will be stepping outside for National Wildlife Week, April 21 - 29, field guides, binoculars and seines in hand and pack to catalogue all the species they can find in a local area of their choosing. Early tomorrow morning, I'll be heading out to our campus' arboretum, a small,…
April 20, 2007
From Planet Earth, the great struggle on the Tibetan Plateau, Tibetan fox vs. pika:
April 20, 2007
Not a breath of air stirred over the free and open prairie; the clouds were like light piles of cotton; and where the blue sky was visible, it wore a hazy and languid aspect. -Francis Parkman (Photo: Mongolian grassland) Perhaps no where else on the planet can you find a better example of the rise…