What I’ve noticed

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Nectar isn’t just insect food, it’s a drug – the plants produce narcotics and alcohol.

How on earth can people believe that torture keeps us safe?

(en)Gender points to the most awesome thing I’ve read all week – a statement released by the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe.

It really irks me that the most basic fact-checking is thrown out the window when religion is mentioned.  Thank goodness for PZ Myers.

In my dreams.

Great post on rice field pictures:

A better analogy for the situation in Gaza.

A little hope from Sugarbutch.

Who cares if some scraggly weed goes extinct?

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I mentioned in the first Extinction Thursday why you should care about the extinction of seemingly insignificant plants.  Jared Diamond puts it much better in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:

But biodiversity losses of small inedible species often provoke the response, “Who cares? Do you really care less for humans than for some lousy useless little fish or weed…?”  This response misses the point that the entire natural world is made up of wild species providing us for free with services that can be very expensive, and in many cases impossible, for us to supply ourselves.  Elimination of lots of lousy little species regularly causes big harmful consequences for humans, just as does randomly knocking out many of the lousy little rivets holding together an airplane.

What We Killed Thursday

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Continuing with the extinction series, next is Byttneria ivorensis, a tree from from the Ivory Coast.

Byttneria ivorensis

Byttneria ivorensis

It probably went extinct in the 1900s due to deforestation.  Other members of this genus are hosts of several butterfly caterpillars and it’s likely that B. ivorensis was, too.  Some caterpillars feed exclusively on specific species of Byttneria.  We’ll probably never know whether B. ivorensis served as the sole host for a beautiful butterful since it would have disappeared with the tree.

Earthjustice is an organization that uses the court system to enforce environmental laws.  Check out some of their recent campaigns.

Fur: an imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus

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I borrowed Fur: an imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus from a friend months and months ago and finally got around to watching it last weekend.  I had never heard of Diane Arbus, but it turns out I’d seen one of her more famous photos, “Child with Toy Hand Grenade,” on the cover of an SNFU album.  Her photographs are often funny-sad and a little scary sometimes, like “Masked Woman in a Wheelchair:”

Fur got some pretty bad reviews, but I really liked it.  The movie makes clear, even in the title, that this is a highly fictionalized account of Arbus’s life and a lot of what bugs the reviewers is that she and her life are portrayed so differently from what we know of her.  Perhaps if I’d known more about her before I saw the movie, I would have enjoyed it less, but I don’t think so.  I like when artists take a small piece of something and create an almost totally new thing.

Working from home

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I love that I can do so much of my job from home.  It’s nice to be able to prop my feet up and wear fuzzy pajamas and drink hot cocoa and get paid.  I’m also still in shock that I get paid to read about the coolest things ever (ecology and plants, duh).

working at home

While my fleece slippers aren’t nearly as gorgeous as Dr. Isis’s Naughty Monkeys, I love them as much as my very favorite pair of heels.  There’s something to be said for snuggly warm slippers.

Migraine Log – Week 5

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I’ve been keeping track of how many migraines I get each week since I’ve started taking Petadolex.  You’re in for a treat this week – I’ve made a snazzy graph.

The y axis, Headaches:Bad Weather, is the ratio of headaches I get to how much bad weather there was in a given week.  So if the bar goes up to 1, it means every time there was bad weather I got a migraine.  If the bar is above 1, I got migraines even when there wasn’t bad weather, and if the bar is below 1, I didn’t always have a migraine when the weather was bad.

It’s too soon to draw any real conclusions, but at least it doesn’t look like they’re getting worse!

Winter shoes: unfortunate necessity

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Snow is pretty and sledding is fun, but I hate when it sticks around forever.  Having to tromp through several feet of snow to get anywhere is exhausting.  Repeatedly slipping on the 3 inches of ice coating my landing has caused my rear end to turn several shades of purple.  Worst of all, I am confined to these boots for weeks on end.

I hate hot weather and do like the long, cool spring and fall here and the rarely-above-85 summers, but I might be convinced to move someplace with a real summer for a few more weeks of weather I could wear these shoes in.

They’re so sweet and pretty and impossible to even get out my front door with 4 months of the year.