ECOhoma!: science

Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

9/19/2012

Revisiting Aldo: Audio Time Machine a la Wired

You may remember my post on Aldo Leopold last November (my singular EcoIcon post to date). The run down is:
     1. Aldo is one of my eco-idols, science heroes, and officially on my "good ole boys" list, to use the Okie phrasing. ("Home boy" to use my 90s high school slang, heh)
     2. A land manager, forester, and professor, he was the founder of the land ethic.
     3. He had a weekend escape - a little farm.
   4. He wrote a beautiful zen-like book about observances from the farm called a Sand County Almanac.

Further recall the post on my favorite news sites, and you will know both why and how a certain news article pricked my ears. It not only pricked them... in fact, you might say, it tickled, educated, and delighted them all at once.

Wired Science recently ran an article describing how Aldo Leopold would record the bird songs from his little farm. (Double delight, there's a photo of the building) He described them in such detail that they were able to re-create what he heard, using the marvelous wonders of modern technology. Small wonder that bird populations and behavior changes over time - the article touches on the whys and the how these changes are reflected in the song patterns - so you can use the audio to hear the bird community at Mr. Leopold's farm as it was in 1940. A fantastic audio time machine.

The article on Wired has the audio file on the left, annotated with the species of birds on the seconds reading so you can learn to pick them out with your ears. So cool.

7/03/2012

Science and Patriotism

My attitudes towards patriotism has changed a lot over the years. I'm a bit more ambiguous now than I used to be... which is strange, all things considered. On the 4th of July, I most like to remember my earliest thoughts and emotions on patriotism, and try to feel the way I felt before I started pondering cynical adult things.

This year the 4th of July brings it with an exciting announcement about the Higgs-Boson, and the entire world is a flutter. And I have to admit that I had been hoping the announcement, if and when it came, would come from Fermilab. You know - routing for the home team and all. Go USA! This is my current form of patriotism.

So I have been sitting here of course, thinking about the Higgs-B and the 4th of July, and it strikes me that patriotism and science are quite the pair.

Firstly, you have how patriotism contributes to science and how science contributes to patriotism. Some of our greatest advances have come from military technology, and we all know how federal spending supports science exploration. Federal dollars play such a large part in the science field that any cuts cause worry and commotion, and that the surest way to create research for a particular subject is to create a pot of federal dollars for it. I hope government and science have a prenup, because they may as well be married. The most obvious examples are military and space exploration... let us not forget (The Alamo?) Los Alamos! The Space Race, yet another glaring example.

Secondly, you have how the pursuit of science demonstrates some of our "American values". Persistence, hard work, inquisition, and independent thought. Is this why many of the world's greatest science discoveries and inventions happened on our homesoil? One of my favorite examples here are Thomas Edison's demonstration of hard work and persistence when he tried to create the light bulb thousands of times before succeeding. Albert Einstein was said to have praised America's merit-based system of rewards and our freedom of speech for fostering creativity and freedom in intellectual pursuits.

This last statement strikes me as almost out of place during a time when science and politics are clashing in this bizarre imagined battle, but it's true. Science and patriotism - and certainly science and government - are joined at the hip, in a manner of speaking. They are like peas and carrots, peanutbutter and jelly, electrons and protons.

So, this 4th... Remember Los Alamos! (hehe)

9/02/2011

All My Sciences

I have always loved the sciences; I think that most – if not all – of the fields are fascinating in their individual ways. But there are always those fields that seem (to me) to have more momentum than others. The research and progress will speed up and slow down for various reasons, and I’ve certainly experienced this in my own science realm. My Dad likes to follow the news about sports – he will at least skim through almost anything sports-related and focus on his favorite sports and teams. I follow science news in much the same way, and with much of the same excitement. And lucky for me, my “team” is in the news a lot nowadays.

Environmental science is very exciting and dynamic right now. There is so much movement, in so many different directions, with potential thought-provoking socio-political effects. It’s getting a lot of attention, both good and bad, from different interest groups, politicians, and even the layperson.

I’m not quite sure if I agree with the old advertising saying, “Any publicity is good publicity,” because quite frankly the amount of misinformation regarding popular science topics is sometimes maddening to me. When it comes to science, it seems that much of the public are either too lazy to research on their own or does not have enough basic knowledge to differentiate fact from fiction from exaggerated fact, so they will believe anything. Which would not be such a big deal if not for the fact that the uninformed/misinformed masses can sometimes pose major roadblocks to progress. What I do believe is that publicity leads at least to awareness, which leads to conversation, which is good.

All this musing aside, reading science news these days is just outright fun. It’s exciting. Sometimes it contains incredible things from science fiction, or suspense and intrigue to match mystery novels. The sciences that keep catching my attention in the news these days are environmental science and astronomy (astronomers seem to be on a heck of a streak these last couple years at the very least; and check THIS out; a supernova is viewable in the Big Dipper this week http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/how-to-spot-a-supernova/ ). Once in a while there are also particularly fascinating pieces on biology and sociology, or health… and of course there’s the continuing drama of the Higgs-Boson in physics.

I thought I would take a moment and share with you the links from my favorite science news sites. So, in no particular order, the sites I love to keep up with and the frequency with which I check them:

Daily

Wired Science News

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/

NPR Science News

http://www.npr.org/sections/science/

BBC Science News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment/

Weekly or monthly

New Scientist Environmental News

http://www.newscientist.com/section/environment

Science Daily

http://www.sciencedaily.com/