Berry Go Round!

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The latest edition of Berry Go Round is up at The Phytophactor.  I’m more than a little late with this announcement, but I promise it’s not because I’m bitter about missing the deadline with my Archeopteris post.  That would just be petty and, despite what my sister may tell you, I really don’t hold a grudge like that.

There are a great many very cool posts (and blogs) featured in the carnival.  I was especially pleased to find the blog of ArtPlantae Today.

Botanical illustration is quite difficult. My drawings of mosses in my plant morphology course just weren’t this good.  In fact, I can barely recognize what I was trying to draw when I page back through my old notebooks.

I am refining my skills a bit this semester in my plant taxonomy course. I still find it easier to copy a line drawing than to draw from live plant material, so I spent most of last weekend looking up drawings of grasses and painstakingly reproducing them.  Drawing plants in such detail forces me to really think about the different structures and to appreciate their complexity.

I find that I really enjoy the process.  It is very different from the kinds of work I normally do.  Most of the time it’s both entertaining and soothing, whereas the work I normally do usually puts me somewhere close to elation or pulling my hair out without much inbetween.

Snow leopard kittens & our burgeoning population

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I came across this adorable overload of a snow leopard at the Akron zoo frolicking in the snow.  I’m not going to tell you how many times I watched the video because then I’d have to come to terms with all of the homework I should have gotten done instead.  The zoo snow leopard is squeal-inducing-cute, unlike the visibly dangerous snow leopards on Planet Earth:

Snow leopards, like most (all?) large cats, are endangered and between population pressure, poaching, and climate change, their prospects aren’t looking good.  Maybe we should take the advice of the author of Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families (and a bunch of other people) and consider not having kids or adopting if you want a large family.  If you live in the US, not having kids is the absolute best thing you can do for the environment:

[It] would save 9,441 tonnes of CO2 – almost six times, on average, the amount of CO2 they would emit in their own lifetime, or the equivalent of making around 2,550 return aero plane trips between London and New York. If the same American drove a more fuel-efficient car, drastically reduced his or her driving, installed energy-efficient windows, used energy-efficient lightbulbs, replaced a household refrigerator, and recycled all household paper, glass and metal, he or she would save fewer than 500 tonnes. [emphasis mine]

The enormous environmental impact is just one of the reasons I’m not planning on having children. I don’t think people shouldn’t have children, of course, but I think having children shouldn’t be expected.  I think many more people would be childless and happy if there wasn’t a constant message from society (and our mothers…) that we should settle down & have kids.

Hold on to your socks

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This article in New Scientist blew my mind.  Basically, physicists were trying to find gravitational waves, but kept getting all this noise in their data.  And by “noise” they might actually mean they’ve figured out that we’re “living a giant cosmic hologram.”

I took a philosophy class about identity and perception once that made me reconsider my ideas about reality.  I wonder what all those philosophers we read would have to say about this?

Happy Blog Anniversary!

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I started blogging 6 years ago today.  I’ve blogged for a lot of different reasons, but the desire to share and connect with other people, to be part of a larger conversation, has always been a part of it (though sometimes I’ve really identified with Jamie here and felt like quitting).  I count many of the people I’ve met through blogging as dear friends.

During many of the years that I’ve blogged, I haven’t consistently kept a real journal, but some rather large changes have happened in my life. I’m grateful to have at least some sort of record of my thoughts.  Six years ago, I was partway through my first (somewhat miserable) year of college and my livejournal is full of cringe-inducing and confusing posts that reflect the havoc migraines and medications were wreaking in my life.  My second blog documents the painful end of my time at UNC, my poorly thought out stint as a nanny, the odd & sometimes lonely experience of teaching English in China, and my first very happy year living in the southwest.

I’ve been writing here since 2007 and I don’t think I’ll be moving again anytime soon.  In general, I think my blogging has become less personal now than it used to be, but I still write about plants, politics, shoes, books, and living with migraines.  You all don’t comment very often, but I’d love to know why you read my blog and what kinds of posts you particularly look for.

Just one reason we shouldn’t be nation-building

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From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

Politics is not extrinsic to a Muslim’s personal religious life, as in Christianity, which mistrusts mundane success.  Muslims regard themselves as committed to implemented a just society in accord with God’s will.  The ummah has sacramental importance, as a “sign” that God has blessed this endeavor to redeem humanity from oppression and injustice; its political health holds much the same place in a Muslim’s spirituality as a particular theological option (Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Baptist) in the life of a Christian.  If Christians find the Muslims’ regard for politics strange, they should reflect that their passion for abstruse theological debate seems equally bizarre to Jews and Muslims.

January Migraine Data

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Several weeks ago I posted barometric pressure trends from December along with whether or not I was sick that day.  Unfortunately, I didn’t do a good job recording barometric pressure on days that I wasn’t sick.  I did a better job in January.

If you’re new to this blog, I have frequent migraines that I believe are influenced by barometric pressure.  I think that large and/or fast changes in barometric pressure are likely the cause of most of my migraines.

Below, I present barometric pressure trends on days that I didn’t have a migraine, days that I did have a migraine, and days where I captured a switch (migraine to no migraine or no migraine to migraine).  In these graphs, barometric pressure is on the vertical axis in millibars and the time is on the horizontal axis.  The last time on the horizontal axis is the time that I captured the graph from WolframAlpha and recorded my condition.  So, for example, on January 2nd at ~10pm I didn’t have a migraine, but on January 4 at ~8am I did have a migraine.

Continue reading January Migraine Data

Religious tolerance under Arab imperialism

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From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

Nobody in the new empire was forced to accept the Islamic faith; indeed, for a century after Muhammad’s death, conversion was not encouraged and, in about 700, was actually forbidden by law: Muslims believed that Islam was for the Arabs as Judaism was for the sons of Jacob.  As the “people of the book,” … Jews and Christians were granted religious liberty as … protected minority groups.  When the Abbasid caliphs began to encourage conversion, many of the Semitic and Aryan peoples in their empire were eager to accept the new religion.