You’ll notice that this week there are 3 excerpts from Kid Koala’s Your Mom’s Favorite DJ
As always, if you’re reading this in a feed reader, you probably need to actually visit this post to play the songs.
What I’ve Noticed
What gender expectations do to people.
Settlers of Catan really is the perfect board game. I should buy my own soon.
China refuses to participate in an important awareness raising climate change action in order to celebrate “Serf Liberation Day” – when the Dalai Lama was kicked out of Tibet. Oh propaganda.
If the Obama Administration does go ahead and officially identify climate change as a threat to public health, the US will have to take more action on the issue. Unfortunately, we’ve got a lot of idiots in office who may make significant changes very very difficult.
There are so many awesome education tools and resources on the internet. Youtube EDU is my new favorite resource. (Did you just call me a nerd for watching lectures on youtube? Because I think this is way nerdier.) Also, I think writing/editing/correcting wikipedia entries for classes is something that should be done more often – especially in grad classes.
One & two freaking awesome data visualizations from Flowing Data.
Just two recent examples of sexism in lower and higher education.
Many people think we should deport all of our illegal immigrants and support immigration raids (which target legal immigrants, too). But they don’t understand what those immigration raids do. They make a joke of our legal system, are unnecessarily cruel, and hurt EVERYONE in the community.
PZ has an awesome post up about the chronic underfunding of our nation’s universities and an important admonition for voters:
Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via “academic freedom” bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It’s been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.
I think I’m in love
Tout Disparaître
Welcome to another edition of What We Killed This Thursday.
Dracaena umbraculifera inflorescence
Dracaena umbraculifera
Dracaena umbraculifera, Umbrella dracaena, was found on Mauritius in 1797. It was propagated and grown by plant collectors and is found in several botanic gardens, but has not been seen in the wild since the original description.
Mauritius is a fairly remote island with relatively few species. However, over half of the 670 species of flowering plants on the island are found nowhere else in the world. This island is famous for its extinctions – it was the home of the dodo. Development and tourism along with invasive species threaten the very interesting and very rare plants and animals on Mauritius. Luckily, at least two wonderful conservation organizations are hard at work on the island – the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.
But threats like invasive species, development, and tourism pale in comparison to the threats posed by climate change. While we are on track to exceed the worst case scenarios presented in the IPCC reports, major political figures are still denying that global warming is real and the majority of the public not only doesn’t care, a large percentage think that climate change news is exaggerated. So this week I’m not going to ask you to write a letter to a politician. Instead, I encourage you to talk to your friends, your mom, your neighbor, a stranger on the bus about the hard realities of climate change. If you don’t feel like you have enough information, take a look at these sites from the E.P.A., National Geographic, and the Pew Center. I’ve mentioned it a few times, too.
Pi(e) Day!
March 14th was Pi Day and the first day of spring break. Of course, I had a party – only round food allowed! I had lots and lots of leftover pumpkin in the freezer, so I decided to make some pumpkin pies. I hadn’t made a pumpkin pie since I realized that dairy and eggs were why I felt so sick so often, but the vegan recipe I used turned out well and was very simple.
Pumpkin pie batter with molasses smiley face
In addition to the pumpkin pie, I also made shepherd’s pie and cornbread muffins with my new favorite recipe (with sweet corn added). I was so excited that so many of my friends also brought pies. One of my friends who’d never made a pie before brought an amazing lemon blueberry pie. We ate way too much and then played clue, which is one of my very favorite games. At some point in the evening, my roommate brought out her fingerpuppets, and I was apparently possessed:
Actually, I'm not crazy
The semester’s halfway over, but the amount of work left to do is kind of terrifying. I’m already missing spring break…
Migraine Log – Week 17
I’ve been keeping track of my migraines for several months now to see if Petadolex would help my migraines. What I’d hoped to see with Petadolex was fewer migraines relative to bad weather days (my main migraine trigger). On the graph, that would mean more points below the line than on or above it. It didn’t seem to have any effect and I stopped taking it last week. To be sure, I’m going to continue to record my migraines for another month or so. If they get worse, then Petadolex really was having an effect.
Life vs. living
From Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:
I happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and I have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. As a person who finds himself in such a position, I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing that those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment – perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one’s life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.