The Mount Pisgah Arboretum in Lane County, Oregon, USA, recently completed a lichen survey.
“The Mount Pisgah Lichen Inventory Project contributed significant data, offering one of the most thorough biogeographical accounts of lichen species at a single site in the Willamette Valley.”
Read the full report here: bit.ly/3HbPlOd (PDF)
How To Talk About Anti-Asian Racism With Kids And Family – Code Switch : NPR
The Free Software Foundation: it’s time for a new beginning – Dries Buytaert
The Near-Magical Mystery of Quasiparticles – Quanta magazine
The American Obsession with Lawns – Krystal D’Costa This post originally appeared on Scientific American and was published May 3, 2017. This article is republished on Pocket with permission.
Mississippi River Rescue Plan Called Too Big to Fail – Daniel Cusick: Scientific American
NFTs are a dangerous trap Seth Godin
Offshore Core – James Hankins: Law & Liberty Includes some discussion of the Columbia Core Curriculum
The Little Saildrone Survives and A Weak Tornado Hits Our Coast – Cliff Maas
Willful Blindness, Societal Rift & Death of the Dollar – Michael Leibowitz: RIA
Super Hostile Takeovers – Robin Hansen: Overcoming Bias
In the gut microbiome, at least, it’s nurture, not nature
This is a test.
This is a test. Please ignore.
Please ignore. this is a test & there may be a few more. I want to see what this automatic post to tweet thing does
Check out this new live cam showing Bristol Bay, Alaska walruses!
According to Explore.org:
Each year, while female walruses and their young pups follow the receding ice north, the males “haul-out” to laze around the warmer beaches of Alaska’s Bristol Bay. It’s basically a pinniped bachelor pad of belching and fighting. These guys might not be pretty, but you won’t look away: Round Island is so remote and difficult to access that our live cams offer otherwise unseen warts-and-all walrus action.
More details and some geography at Quartz!
Giving a talk? Or some other form of public speaking?
Jeremy Fox’s post at Dynamic Ecology provides some excellent advice that should not be limited to ecologists! These are useful lessons for all public speakers. I particularly like this idea:
“That’s also why I start my synchrony talk by talking about Huygens’ clocks and synchronized swimming: it’s a way of conveying essential information while holding the audience’s attention with something unexpected.”
For some more guidance on various types of public speaking consider these tips.
Also, all you folks out there who speak in public should spend a year or two with one or more of your local Toastmasters clubs.
Let me be blunt!
I have not made the progress I thought I might, not even close and will not document much that has already past.
The goals are still mine but my path has diverged rather dramatically over the past 3.5 years and I do not have a lot to show for developing expertise in any of the areas mentioned in my initial post. My divergence, to the extant I document it, will be reviewed in my private journal.
No other excuses. Just recognition that I did not go where I had intended at that time.
And, yes, I am still of a mind to pursue these and other goals. However, I know that I have a multitude of learning and action goals and that I struggle with having the laser focus needed to really master any one discipline. I’ll have a lot of fun but that so-called expertise will be elusive.
I will continue to keep this as my personal learning space and keep my political action oriented stuff on other sites. No, I do not plan to link to those at this time.
There are a couple areas of progress.
I started studying Spanish again (last time was in the 9th grade) earlier this year and have been keeping at it much more steadily than any of my other educational projects. I look forward to reading, understanding and comprehending, inter alios, Borges and Marquez in Spanish.
Soon I will put up a Spanish page and perhaps start documenting the work I am doing and the resources that I am using.
I have taken a couple online courses dealing with the basics of Complexity from the Santa Fe Institute. Good stuff and an area that we all need to understand!
One area I might incorporate into this site is stuff related to urban development. This can bleed over into politics and philosophy but there is much that ties to complexity as well as the way we live in this world. This will be the hook and will likely lead to some more politically oriented stuff finding its way onto this site.
‘Nuff said for now.