Category: just because

Hey, I’ve kept this up for a few weeks in a row!

Here are the now-regular (hopefully to stay that way… we’ll see how it goes) half-dozen Coleopteran mandible dainties.

You’re checking your smartphone too much!

The take-home, Ballard says, is that being connected isn’t always entirely a bad thing. “The benefits are only sustainable, however, when these tools are used in ways that are a good fit for each individual’s needs, skills and preferences.

Although your iPhone might be just fine

One option would be that rather than keeping the virtual and the natural worlds separate — turning off our machines, taking e-sabbaticals, or undergoing digital detoxes, in order to connect with nature — we think about them all as integrated elements of a single life in a single world. There is already a growing sense in the wired community that connections with the natural world are vital to digital well-being, both now and in the future. This same community needs to pay attention to biophilia and to its implementation in biophilic design. With the help of biophilic insights, we can connect the planet beneath our feet with the planet inside our machines.

Then again…

In school, and in other settings where adults are in charge, they make decisions for children and solve children’s problems. In play, children make their own decisions and solve their own problems. In adult-directed settings, children are weak and vulnerable. In play, they are strong and powerful. The play world is the child’s practice world for being an adult. We think of play as childish, but to the child, play is the experience of being like an adult: being self-controlled and responsible. To the degree that we take away play, we deprive children of the ability to practise adulthood, and we create people who will go through life with a sense of dependence and victimisation, a sense that there is some authority out there who is supposed to tell them what to do and solve their problems. That is not a healthy way to live.

One very sad place with no internet and minimal time for play

Before I talk about what I learned, I’d like to quickly say hi to whomever from the North Korean government is reading this. Only the highest-level officials have access to the internet in North Korea, and I learned that the job of one of them is to scour the internet for anything written about North Korea and keep tabs on what the foreign press is saying. So hi, and haha you can’t get me cause I’m back home now and I can say all the things I wasn’t allowed to say when I was in your country.

Now that I’ve jinxed myself to certain assassination, let’s get started—

Conservation and the fact that everyone is a taxonomist

Without even realizing it, we have traded a view of ourselves as living beings in a living world for a view of ourselves as consumers in a landscape of merchandise. We have unwittingly traded a facility with living things for a savant-like brand expertise that exchanges the language of the living world—the names of real plants and real animals—for a vocabulary of Tony the Tigers and Geico geckos. The world we live in, our simple reality, is the world of purchasable items. We have, without even trying, absolutely gotten what we’ve paid for. You might need a naturalist interpreter to help you make sense of things as you walk through the local forest, but you would never need such assistance when wandering through the mall.

Not surprisingly, we are also simultaneously trading the actual world of living things for a world filled instead with human-made products, with factories to build them, with stores to sell them, with homes to fill them with. While we’ve been busy shopping and the world’s diversity of human-made things has been increasing, the world’s wealth of living things has been dwindling.

Technology and nature swim with the sharks

Explore dozens of satellite tracks by selecting a species and individual shark…

These shark satellite tracks are part of an ongoing research project by RJD scientists to better understand the migratory routes and residency patterns of Tiger, Hammerhead, and Bull sharks in the subtropical Atlantic.

Bonus byte: Tubas

It’s been a great week of (mainly sunny and crisp) autumn fieldwork for me, so I haven’t worked up another blog post. I’ll try to get to that soon as well. But for now here are a few links that I found to be interesting/amusing/useful on the web this week.

Some thoughts to consider on GMOs

On 8 August 2013, vandals destroyed a Philippine “Golden Rice” field trial. Officials and staff of the Philippine Department of Agriculture that conduct rice tests for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) had gathered for a peaceful dialogue. They were taken by surprise when protesters invaded the compound, overwhelmed police and village security, and trampled the rice. Billed as an uprising of farmers, the destruction was actually carried out by protesters trucked in overnight in a dozen jeepneys.

I’m a big fan of the Felidae

On cold winter days, comfort-loving house cats of Nippon, Japan gather around charcoal braziers, snuggle under figure-silk quilts wrapped around their mistresses’ knees, or step into styling made-to-order garments. Once upon a time the Japanese ship’s cat was commonly classed as a member of the crew and might earn a rank higher than the cook.

My love of cats is tempered with deep respect

A young deer is the unfortunate star of a new viral video, as it was caught on film being killed by a cougar near Powell River, B.C.

…

Try to get this out of your head the next time you go for a relaxing nature hike.

My regular “not encouraging” link

The South African government said that 688 rhinos have been poached so far in 2013. There are still three months left in the year, but the number has already surpassed last year’s total of 668 slain rhinos.

Are you actually reading these links?

When we read on screen, the translucent surface holds the text at a remove from our fingers, displaying it under glass like an archaic specimen. This distance blunts our immersion in the words, causing us to regard them with irony even when we are enthusiastic about what they say. By making all events equally available (and equally distant), the screen engenders a simultaneity that nullifies the words’ ability to forge an alternative chronology or a summation of what the world is like. The screen’s imposition of historical simultaneity, in which events that occurred centuries apart appear side by side in undifferentiated sameness, is accentuated by the more agitated simultaneity of the multi-window experience. Whatever I may be looking at, I feel hectored by other screens that want my attention: email, Twitter, Facebook, newspapers, work-related sites.

The extensive impact of neonicotinoid pesticides

Widespread preemptive application of neonicotinoids (or any pesticide) represents a fundamental shift away from Integrated Pest Management, since chemicals are frequently applied before pest damage has occurred, and often in the absence of any current pest abundance data.

Just a few links to kick off your weekend.

Amazing bristlecone pines

I am not a fan of the desert. It seems unnecessarily brutal. Being a person is a huge disadvantage in the desert, where there is nothing interesting to do besides getting lost and dying.

Peer review: The more things change…

With an appropriate celebrity endorsement tweet too.

I fully endorse this. MT @peeragescience “Tweeting like Wallace” http://t.co/Rtc7jsGm9Q

— A.R. Wallace (@WallaceFRS) September 19, 2013

Speaking of tweeting your science:

Projects will be focused on specific species found in our region, from trees to beetles, to mushrooms and mammals. Each week, students will be tweeting facts, anecdotes, and observations about their study species (and some of these tweets should come directly from the field).

Don’t you wish that you had this job?

Last May, Google sent 13 camera-equipped researchers to capture the beauty of the Galapagos Islands, both on land and in the surrounding sea. Now, Google has unveiled the results: the newest addition to Street View is a tour of the islands Darwin made famous after he first visited them, 178 years ago this week.

Not encouraging:

Arkansas government figures showed, for example, that licensed collectors had removed more than half a million wild turtles from the state between 2004 and 2006; data from the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, airport showed that “more than 256,638 wild-caught adult turtles” were exported to Asia between 2002 and 2005. Overall, the experts estimated, the total trade in U.S. turtles likely added up to “thousands of tons per year.” After mystifying trips halfway around the world, most of the animals probably ended up in the stomachs of Chinese diners.

Neologisms and ephemerality (or lack thereof?)

apols, A/W (“autumn/winter”), babymoon, balayage (“a technique for highlighting hair”), bitcoin, blondie (small cake), buzzworthy, BYOD (“bring your own device”), cake pop, chandelier earring, child’s pose (yoga), click and collect, dad dancing, dappy, derp, digital detox, double denim, emoji, fauxhawk, FIL (“father-in-law”), flatform (shoe), FOMO (“Fear Of Missing Out”), food baby (“a protruding stomach caused by eating a large quantity of food”), geek chic, girl crush, grats, guac, hackerspace, Internet of things, jorts, LDR, me time, michelada (“drink made with beer, lime juice…”), MOOC, Nordic noir, omnishambles, pear cider[see comment below], phablet, pixie cut, prep (v. “prepare”), selfie, space tourism, squee, srsly, street food, TL;DR, trolly dash (UK supermarket promotion), twerk, unlike (v.), vom (“vomit”)