interweaving ideas
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20th Anniversary of Tank Man
Twenty years ago, a crowd gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of pro-market, pro-democracy and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang. Students had been gathering in the square off and on since April 14th. Soon one million people had gathered, but without a common cause, rather they were an emergent phenomenon. Some were free-market reformers,…
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Putting Away Magical Thinking
The movement of troops through the islands of the South Pacific in World War II had a profound, unintended consequence for the native cultures living in them. These isolated aboriginal peoples were suddenly exposed to soldiers in the Japanese and Allied Forces, who brought incredible amounts of manufactured clothing, medicine, canned foods, tents, weapons, and…
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Smithsonian National Zoological: Bird House
When Vicky was searching through children’s variations on the Google logo for her Google Doodle Trees post, one logo caught my eye. It was a wish to “Bring back the dinosaurs.” I know the kid was talking about bringing back the dinosaurs in the sense of Jurassic Park, but I doubt the child realized that…
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Active Reading with the Amazon Kindle
Emily Dickinson Kindle Screensaver Credit: Cheneworth Gap I have hundreds of megabytes worth of free books that I’ve downloaded from Project Gutenberg and various other sources online, which presents me with the dilemma of finding a way to read all of them. Reading them at my desktop is uncomfortable, although I have done this, sitting…
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Don’t Tax Plastic Bags, Tax the Hell Out of Them
Credit: Green England On June 1, 2008, China joined countries like Bangladesh, Ireland, and Rwanda, and the city of San Francisco in instituting a ban on plastic bags. As a result, China saved 1.6 million tons of oil in the year following the ban, the amount of oil it would have taken to manufacture 40…
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Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam: Desert Plants
“Sunshine all the time makes a desert.” – Arab Proverb Cacti Deserts are the metaphor of choice to describe anything bleak, barren, and devoid of life. The word is synonymous with wasteland. It’s a place where prophets go to spend 40 days and nights in fasting and isolation. Life might be sparser in the desert,…
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The Human Flaw That Science Heals
“For now we see through a glass, darkly…” – 1 Corinthians 13:12 There is a common theme among religions of the world: humans are flawed. We are subject to a cycle of suffering, guilty of original sin, or afflicted with a modern malaise of dissatisfaction, which may only be cured through adherence to Buddhism, accepting…
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Green Jobs Hurt the Economy
“When a government builds a road, it subsidizes the car industry.” – Comment seen on a Blog Wind turbines at night Credit: lukewestall A peer, who is also a Rush Limbaugh listener, was explaining to me the folly of things Obama said in his ASU Commencement Speech, where the President emphasized charitable volunteer work, shrugging…
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CIS517 IT Project Management: The Project Management Experience
A PDF of this Paper is available here. On the one hand, it is difficult to think of this as the half-way point in the Blue Group’s project; however, what I may perceive as a slow start to project is, in fact, just what is expected in what was mostly a formational period. Although the…
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Port Discover Science Center Needs Your Enthusiasm
Nobody flunks a science museum. – Frank Oppenheimer, founder of Exploratorium Center Director Jenny Eaton at the Port Discover Booth for Knobbs Creek Recreation Center’s Safety Day There’s a feeling I get when I find a picture of a living species on Earth that looks as though it belongs in a science fiction film, come…
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Response to the OSTP Request for Comment on Scientific Integrity
On March 9, 2009, the White House issued a Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, directing the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to develop recommendations for improving scientific integrity based on six core principles. The OSTP opened a solicitation for public comment on their blog for ideas on how best to implement and enforce these…
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Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam: Tropicals and Subtropicals
Greta oto aka. Glasswing Butterfly As climate change raises the average temperature of the Earth, the subtropical environments will become tropical, as plant hardiness zones move toward the poles. Tropical zones, like the Amazon Rainforest, unfortunately, have nowhere to go. Check out the complete flickr set here.
