Archive for 2011
Escaping poverty
I drove through an Indian Reserve on a class trip this weekend. Homes were rundown and ramshackle, with junk piled helter-skelter. I was deeply uncomfortable without knowing exactly why. Then one of my classmates ‘explained’ that the houses looked so bad because the First Nations people of the area owned the houses communally, with no […]
ESA Interviews: Jeremy Fox
I interviewed awesome ecologists at the 2011 Ecological Society of America meeting in exchange for reader donations, which paid for my conference attendance. This is one in a series of posts about those interviews. After a lazy Sunday morning spent reading Middle World over buckwheat pancakes and strawberries, I poured myself another cup of coffee, […]
Pretty Things
What’s a neuroscientist doing at ESA?
Every year at ESA, I meet awesome new people. This year, one of the very most awesome was Zen Faulkes of NeuroDojo. He’s a neuroscientist studying crayfish nervous systems – not exactly who you’d expect at an ecology meeting! But it turns out that the crayfish he’s studying is a new invasive species with some […]
Why our political discussions don’t go anywhere
I normally delete comments that merely sling insults and don’t contain any substantive contribution/critique. But I had to leave this comment by Dave Koch from Prescott up on my post poking fun at the poor writing skills of of AZ Representative Paul Gosar (or his staff). I left the comment up partly because it (amusingly) […]
ESA Interviews: Jean Burns
I interviewed awesome ecologists at the 2011 Ecological Society of America meeting in exchange for reader donations, which paid for my conference attendance. This is one in a series of posts about those interviews. Jean Burns is an ecologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. She’s interested in community assembly and using invasive species to […]