botany, shoes, books, and justice
By being so unbelievably and unnecessarily cruel, Isreal has finally lost the moral high ground in the eyes of the world.
(en)Gender has a great post up on Brazil and the current state of our country.
The next part of “An Evil God,” my current favorite blog series, is up at Unreasonable Faith.
From Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:
Today the world no longer faces just the circumscribed risk of an Easter Island society or Maya homeland collapsing in isolation, without affecting the rest of the world. Instead, societies today are so interconnected that the risk we face is of a worldwide decline. That conclusion is familiar to any investor in stock markets: instability of the U.S. stock market … affects overseas stock markets and economies as well, and vice versa. We in the U.S. (or else just affluent people in the U.S.) can no longer get away with advancing our own self-interests, at the expense of the interests of others.
Clermontia peleana
It’s time for your extinct plant of the week! This week is a little less depressing than the last few. Clermontia peleana are flowering trees in the bellflower family. Many Clermontias have beautiful, showy flowers frequented by birds.
Clermontia peleana isn’t actually completely extinct, though it is in pretty serious trouble. While one of the subspecies has already gone extinct, the one remaining plant of another was successfully propagated and a reintroduction program is underway.
The major threats to this species all come from us: habitat degradation and animals and plants we introduced to the islands.
While this plant is in Hawaii, I’m going to ask you to take action to protect a habitat close to my heart (also where one of my research sites is located) – the Kaibab National Forest.
the Kaibab National Forest is nothing short of spectacular and deserves the highest level of protection. It’s an incredibly rich and diverse forest that serves as a refuge for imperiled and biologically important species. Many of Grand Canyon’s wide-ranging wildlife, particularly mule deer, mountain lion, and black bear, are dependent on adequate Forest Service as well as park habitats. Sensitive species, including the northern goshawk and Abert’s squirrels, nest and forage within the ponderosa forests of both areas.
Off-roading is an incredibly destructive activity and has already significantly damaged this forest. Write the Forest Service and urge them to put stricter rules in place.
My mentor, cutting down a dead tree for me
I want to know how different soil types affect pinyon pine growth during drought and if there’s a difference in growth between trees that die in the drought and those that have survived so far. So I needed some cookies.
tree cookies
We had no idea that there would be two feet of snow on the ground at the site, which made working much much harder. As much as I usually hate fieldwork, you would think that I would have had a terrible time. Actually, I had a great time. Of course, that might have had a little to do with the drugs I had to take to deal with the change in elevation.
I’ve now been taking Petadolex for 5 weeks. I’ve been keeping track of my migraines and my main trigger (bad weather). Last week I graphed the migraine data collected so far and received a few ideas for a better graph in the comments. Here’s the updated data presented a bit differently than last week’s:
In this graph, weeks on the line were weeks that I had a migraine every time there was bad weather, weeks above the line are weeks that I had migraines even when there wasn’t bad weather, and weeks below the line were weeks when I didn’t have a migraine every time the weather was bad. If the medicine works, I would expect later weeks to usually fall below the line.
So far, it doesn’t look like Petadolex is having an effect on my migraines, but it’s really too early to tell. Most migraine meds take 2 or 3 months to really have an effect and I’m determined to give this drug a chance. So expect at least 7 more weeks of these graphs…
From Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:
…the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degredation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability.
Last week there was no Weekly Top 5 and there won’t be this week, either, though I did manage to recover almost half of my music. Instead, here’s one of my favorite songs.