Ponderings of a Scientist

I hate blogging at work even if it only takes a few minutes.  Shouldn’t I be working on something job related?  I’m just going to suck it up and deal with this early morning guilt, because I heard something on NPR I can’t let pass.  So today the State of Mass. and many other’s are taking the EPA to court over carbon dioxide.  The EPA, that is the Environmental Protection Agency, is tasked with protecting us Americans against all chemicals that have a reasonable chance of being pollutants and causing harm to us, our land, water, weather, or climate.  However, the EPA does not regulate CO2 emmisions, why you might ask?  The short answer is because a former oil lobbyist heads the EPA (and every other seat in the administration); the slightly longer answer is such:  The EPA and G.W. do not find CO2 to be a pollutant, and even if it was there is not enough scientific evidence on how to solve the problem (which remember isn’t a problem) to write any EPA regulations.  How do they get away with this crap!

Back to Work!!!

I haven’t posted any intriguing animal tale in a while, so here you go!  Fetal non-human mammals:

 

Dog                    Elephant

Check out the neat video footage! 

So we hosted the big celebration at our house. Things went well and everyone seemed to leave full and happy. Apparently, being pregnant really does lower the energy scale a bit, while I felt fine on Turkey Day, I had no energy yesterday. Oh well, spending the day reading every once in a while is actually pretty nice. Today Zip and I started the annoying task of Christmas shopping. In case you didn’t know I’m slightly agoraphobic (look it up stupid) so anytime spent in a store after Thanksgiving gives me the creeps. For this reason I plan well, make gifts, buy as much as possible online and purchase everything else in one or two stores max. So, thanks to my planning and a relatively short list of giftees we’re almost done!

This is totally against proper etiquette, however, I’ll just put it out there. In case you wanted to buy the One on the Way anything for the Holidays, the kid has his/her own registries at Amazon and Babies R Us. We also encourage conservation so used books and clothes are much appreciated. My family informed me that we WILL be having a shower sometime in early March - FYI.

Just about the only thing we can’t blame the U.S. for.  Check this out BLAME CANADA!!!

Check out this movie!  Its a bit depressing for a Friday, but very poignant and well done.  If there were only 100 people on Earth, but all proportions were keep intact there would be…..

So what do you think about Second Life?

I just read an interesting artice in Wired about this virtual world, which I previous only had a novice understanding of.  I’m honestly torn as to whether it is a neat advance in our media driven, cyberinfrastructured culture (perhaps to be used for education among other things) or whether it is just a video game taking over people lives and allowing them to be more irresponsible with their money.  Thoughts?  Check out this blog for more info…

To paraphase Georgie, ” The reason we lost in Vietnam is that we quit; the lesson to take from Vietnam is that we will succeed in Iraq as long as we don’t quit.”

Could he be any more wrong.  Most of us that weren’t even born during the Vietnam War, have known from the start of Iraq that it was “another Vietnam”  and we wouldn’t succeed, not because of quitting, but because we were yet again trying to take over a country and convert the value structure and government to model our own.  Nevermind the fact, that yet again, the government went into a war without truly understanding the culture of the country!  Stupid, stupid.

On a happier note, I look forward to Charles Rangel leading the House Ways and Means committee.  This guy is going to seriously straighten out our tax laws, and he’s kicking V.P Cheney out of the office that Cheney took from the former Republican Ways and Means Chair to boot!

If the following sounds interesting to you, you should check out at least the executive summary of the below quoted paper titled “Confronting the Challenges
of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”

“According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly onethird of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created)….

A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace. “

This year’s Northern shrimp (i.e. those little pink shrimp from the Gulf of Maine) commercial fishing season will be over 100 days long.  It starts December 1st and runs through April.  So it your a fan of shrimp, buy them this winter, they will be cheap, local, and nature (not grown in an Asian shrimp farm).  This industry has been through a lot of late, including seasons as short as 25 days in the early 2000s, so the on-land infrastructure is lacking, thus making it difficult for fishermen to sell the shrimp and/or get a fair price.  So do your part to buy local and eat well.

I should also mention, this industry uses neat trawls that use grates and other seperation gear to minimize bycatch of groundfish, sea turtles, and other non-target species.

How much do you know?   

I think I’ve blog on this before, but its an important topic.  Too many American’s know too little about the rest of the World, myself included.  I blame this on a complete and utter lack of geography and world history teachings at the elementary and middle school levels, and therefore my complete disinterest in these topics at later grade levels.  So how much do you know?  Take the test, its for kids, but I bet you learn something!