voltagegate | December 3, 2007Well, two weeks of hell has receded for me. This past Friday we finished moving all of our stuff out of Frostburg, waving a not-so-tearful goodbye to the old apartment and its coal furnace (not just for heat either; our water was warmed by the furnace as well, which I didn't know until this past year... they used to use gas).
To be frank, Friday was one of the worst days of my life. We still had the essentials in the apartment - food, a few dishes, coffee, computers, mattress, etc. - so they needed to be packed in both cars to haul up to our new place. But before we could load her car, it…
voltagegate | November 14, 2007Get your submissions in now if you haven't already. Can't wait to see what Mike will have for us.
voltagegate | November 9, 2007I had to do it. With the red panda (Ailurus fulgens) at the top of my favorite animals list, I had to know exactly how many folks share enough interest in the firefox to name their toon after its genus name.
So how many Ailuruses are there out there? Seven on the North American servers and three on the European; appropriately, six of them are druids (cat/bear forms). The highest level (and she's leveled in the past few days, so is active) is a 68 feral druid who must have just recently snagged her Staff of Beasts from the Ring of Blood quest series in Nagrand.
If you've kept up with TVG,…
voltagegate | November 9, 2007It's been a bad week for me, and I don't think things will be slowing down for a couple more.
Heather is graduating this semester, and as we planned, it's time to move on. I'm moving into a new job and she'll be searching for one (after a much needed break), but since Frostburg is devoid of opportunity, we had to find a new place. We did, and we're in the process of packing up and giving/throwing away (with emphasis on the latter - I hate clutter).
So I ask forgiveness if things get dusty here for chunks of time. I'm sure I'll find the time to get some quick posts up here and there, but until…
voltagegate | November 7, 2007Heather finally printed the follow up to her cellular self portrait (links to the first print), this time using plant cells. I particularly like the difference in movement between the prints.
A week from this Friday she's having her senior art show, which we are both looking forward to. She put up her banner yesterday and postcards are being distributed:
If you're in the area, feel free to stop by next week, check out some unique, science inspired art, have a cupcake and a cream puff (homemade of course), drink some yummy coffee and BS with me and Heather about art and science. Should be a…
voltagegate | November 2, 2007In Part I we looked at the eastern hemlock's northwestern progression after the last ice age,
and the frequency of the hemlock along a slope-oriented moisture gradient:
The distribution pictured above is almost exactly the case in the Laurel Hill old growth stand. The hemlocks are dense at the moist valley bottom, surrounding and shading Laurel Hill Creek and At the different levels of the gradient, not only does the abundance of trees differ, but the composition of the ecosystem. There is a "no-man's land" of sorts between each level that ecologists called ecotones.
Ecotones are imaginary…
voltagegate | November 1, 2007Today we'll start this little experiment with one of the toons that gave me the idea (the other is a secret as of yet!), Empidonax from Ravencrest. Emp is spec'd holy with almost two dozen points discipline as well, presumably for mana sustainability in raids like Karazhan.
There are only two Empidonax's on all 200 of WoW's North American servers, none on the European servers. The other Empidonax is a level 10 Druid on Arathor.
IRL (in real life) the genus Empidonax, meaning "mosquito king" in Latin, collects a group of "tyrant flycatchers" from the family Tyrannidae. Our representative of…
voltagegate | October 31, 2007Catch up on all of your fall foliage science with Carl at The Loom. He has all the links you need, even one to his interview on ABC News.
voltagegate | October 31, 2007In March of this year, to the amusement of my friends, my brother convinced me to start playing World of Warcraft (WoW) with him. Since I left the Baltimore/Washington DC area four years ago, I've only had a few chances to see him per year, mostly on holidays or on vacation, and he pitched it to me as a way for us to interact weekly without having to travel. The two of us grew up casually playing video games together, starting with Combat on the Atari 2600, so naturally the idea was immediately appealing. I bought the software, registered and hopped on his server. We've been playing ever…
voltagegate | October 29, 2007About 16,000 years ago, glaciation from the last ice age finally began to retreat after millennia of occupation. As the glaciers melted and filled scrapes in the landscape with fresh water, the animals and plants followed, once only able to live in the temperate climes of southern North America.
The eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadenis) was one of these pioneers, albeit a slow, steady one. Spreading north at about 100 - 400 meters per year (incidentally about the same rate of large ungulates like elk), the hemlocks wouldn't reach the extent of their expansion, around the glacier-crafted Great…
voltagegate | October 29, 2007This seems to be a more sensible theory regarding leaf color change in autumn:
By taking careful stock and laboratory analyses of the autumn foliage of sweetgum and red maple trees along transects from floodplains to ridge-tops in a nature preserve in Charlotte, N.C., former University of North Carolina at Charlotte graduate student Emily M. Habinck found that in places where the soil was relatively low in nitrogen and other essential elements, trees produced more red pigments known as anthocyanins.
Habinck's discovery supports a 2003 hypothesis put forward to explain why trees bother to make…
voltagegate | October 24, 2007Here we go again, folks:
Evolution is flawed because it can't tell us where life came from. The cell is too complex to have evolved by itself. Secularists are persecuting scientists who believe in God.
Spin. Spin. Spin. Vacuous, vicious propaganda. Again.
Let's not forget that Intelligent Design is not merely the belief that God created the universe, it is an attempt to displace science by allowing a hazy philosophical freedom of inquiry sans the scientific method. This is not about God or religion or freedom of speech, it's all about power plays and politics.
My dislike of Stein has been…
voltagegate | October 24, 2007Island ecology may have been popularized by tropical climes, but it certainly isn't limited to them. Michigan's Isle Royale National Park, a chilly 50 mile by 8 mile island in the corner of Lake Superior an important benchmark in the island's important research history is being celebrated.
For nearly 50 years scientists have been studying the interaction of wolves and moose on the island and their effects on the forest, the longest running predator-prey study in the world. Naturally, such a long term study has naturally opened up other, broader areas of research on the island.
The wolves and…
voltagegate | October 22, 2007The coal industry has always been a big provider in Western Maryland. Right across the street from my apartment complex is a winding road up the mountain to several active blast sites. There are still old mine tunnels under the campus.
Acid mine drainage is a huge problem up here. Many of the streams are nearly decimated, so clogged with iron and sulfur that only the most hardy of algae can survive.
Last year, my ecology class surveyed about eight miles of George's Creek, from the Hoffman drainage tunnel (also called a blow, where water flows through excavated mine areas due to changes in…
voltagegate | October 20, 2007Clutch,
Fall of Troy
and Coheed and Cambria
touring together? Can't wait. I haven't seen Clutch in eight years or more.
voltagegate | October 20, 2007I picked up a couple of shifts catering homecoming this weekend, which is why things have been dead the past couple of days. I did, however, finish a couple of Jack Vance books which I want to discuss next week, specifically the social/lingual aspects of them. I also found a great paper about habitat fragmentation which opens the door for me to go into edge effects (the resulting edge of clearing a natural habitat and imposing another - ex: forest/farm land) and a new theory regarding its variability.
The next couple of months should be very interesting. We're moving at the end of November,…
voltagegate | October 16, 2007Just read an article about the apparently widespread use of tropical hardwoods in New York City. The numbers are impressive:
...the market for Ipé wood drives much of the industrial logging of the entire Amazon, and has increased dramatically in the past 20 years. An emergent flowering tree, which peppers the canopy of the Amazonian rainforest in hues of pink, magenta, yellow and white, Ipe grows in the rainforests at densities of only one or two trees an acre. This means that vast areas of the forests are razed to the ground to feed the market for a single tree. It is estimated that, for…
voltagegate | October 16, 2007Oekologie #10 is up at Laelaps. We're looking for hosts beyond February of '08, so if you're interested, let me know by e-mail: thevoltagegate [at] gmail.com.
voltagegate | October 12, 2007Over the past few billion years, life has persisted through countless geologic, atmospheric and extraterrestrial disturbances through its ability to change with the environment. Ecosystems exist in their present state because they have evolved to be as such. It took trillions of events - biotic and abiotic - for these complex systems to weave their thick web of dependence.
One way for ecologists to define and correlate these varied environments is by categorizing these areas by the types of plants that inhabit them. These categories are called biomes. Categorizing each biome by plant life is…
voltagegate | October 10, 2007Ecology is a study of interactions or relationships between organisms and the environment; the connectedness between living systems and non-living systems on the Earth. Ecology is, in a sense, a historical field, founded upon the Earth's far reaching and ever evolving natural history.
The term ecology comes from the Greek root words oikos logos, literally "the study of household," first combined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Haeckel was referring to the interactions within the house of nature, and we have used the word ecology (translated from the German Oekologie or Ãkologie) to describe complex…