American wars are organized by how we remember them over at The Edge of the American West. When that makes you feel terrible, go calm down by looking at Emily’s fantastic fern pictures. They almost make me want to brave the poison ivy to find my own.
Blood-Lakes
-As for me: laugh at me. I agree with you. It is a fool-
ish business to see the future and screech at it.
One should watch and not speak. And patriotism has run
the world through so many many blood-lakes: and we
always fall in.
From “So Many Blood-Lakes” by Robinson Jeffers
For Una
I built her a tower when I was young-
Sometime she will die –
I built it with my hands, I hung
Stones in the sky
Old but still strong I climb the stone –
Sometime she will die –
Climb the steep rough steps alone,
And weep in the sky.
From “For Una” by Robinson Jeffers
Digression Hats
This week I’m taking a course in population biology from Dr. Robin Snyder. She’s a pretty fantastic teacher. I only looked at the clock 4 times in 6 hours today. You should notice she’s wearing two hats in this picture. The first hat goes on when she starts a digression. The second hat is for digressions from digressions.
UPDATE*****
So usually digressions are not a good thing and some of you have brought it to my attention that I’ve complained about teachers that go on a million different tangents. First of all, Dr. Snyder did not go on a million tangents. Secondly, her digressions are very useful. They’re like “let’s make sure we all remember how to do this math” or “what does this result actually mean” rather than “this one time I went fishing and that’s how I understand integrals” or “my not especially important research is kind of sort of related to this topic.”
Flying
Flying is awful. It wouldn’t be that bad if I could ever afford a direct flight. But the cheap tickets are always the worst. It took me over 12 hours to get from Phoenix to Kalamazoo. I wasn’t in the air that long. I spent most of my time in the LA and Detroit airports wishing the chairs were comfortable enough to sleep in.
But now I’m at the Kellogg Biological Station. The weather is cool and humid, I have a nice apartment, and I’m taking fantastic math/ecology classes. What more could I ask for?
What I’ve noticed
Monitor Mix is complaining about the same music being redone. Have you ever heard of Cilla Black or Sandy Shaw?
Doing science in a nutshell at Seeds Aside:
If you don’t make mistakes, you’re doing it wrong. If you don’t correct those mistakes you’re doing it really wrong. If you can’t accept that you’re mistaken, you’re not doing it at all.
Pandagon discovers that voter ID laws have prevented a woman who has voted in the last 19 presidential elections from registering to vote in Arizona. And I believe it. I had to try 4 times before I’d given them all the paperwork and information they wanted.
The Edge of the American West presents “Things that it has been empirically demonstrated academics do not know,” including
Asking a question is not the same thing as giving a speech.
This is painfully evident at departmental seminars.
A video of McCarthy you should have seen over at The Edge of the American West.
Some plants can recognize genetic relatives and modify their behavior based on that information. Full length explanation at A Neotropical Savanna.
Hottonia inflata is now on the list of plants I have to see in person.
Art Walk
Unlike the last art walk, I actually took a picture of some of the art last night. People make strange things and mean even stranger things by them. I really did like some of the paintings by Chrissy Holland, but I can’t find any of the paintings I liked to post here.
