Entry tags:
Science Tuesday - Green Weddings, Artificial Reefs, "Flaming," modeling, climate change, and a tent
It's a good one today, pardon the number of articles...
How Green Was My Wedding
By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times, February 11, 2007
Kate Harrison’s idea of a fairy tale wedding goes something like this:
Gather more than 150 friends and relatives at an organic farm for a prewedding day of hikes and environmental tours.
Calculate the mileage guests will travel and offset their carbon dioxide emissions by donating to programs that plant trees or preserve rain forests.
Use hydrangeas, berries and other local and seasonal flowers for her bouquet and the decorations, instead of burning up fuel transporting flowers from faraway farms. Design an organic autumnal menu (same reason). Find a vintage dress to avoid the waste of a wedding gown that will never be worn again.
“It’s well worth it to start your life together in a way that’s in line with your values and beliefs,” said Ms. Harrison, 28, a graduate student at Yale, who is to marry in October. “You don’t want this event that is supposed to start your life together to come at the expense of the environment or workers in another country.”
( Read More )
Tires Meant to Foster Sea Life Choke It Instead
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, February 18, 2007
A mile offshore from this city’s high-rise condominiums and spring-break bars lie as many as two million old tires, strewn across the ocean floor, a monument to good intentions gone awry.
The tires were unloaded there in 1972 to create an artificial reef that could attract a rich variety of marine life, and to free up space in clogged landfills. But decades later, the idea has proved a huge ecological blunder.
( Read More )
Essay: Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior
By DANIEL GOLEMAN, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.
“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”
Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.
( Read More )
Books on Science: The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.
Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.
Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach.
( Read More )
Questions for Drew Shindell: Political Heat
Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON, The New York Times, February 18, 2007
Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example? Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone’s interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.
( Read More )
RESTORING HISTORY The tent in 1909.
Call It Serendipity: A Missing Piece of Washington’s War Tent Is Found
By EMILY B. HAGER, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
For nearly a century, a large oval-shape linen tent where George Washington is believed to have slept during the Revolutionary War sat on display in Valley Forge, Pa., with a gaping hole in its roof.
But now a combination of luck and forensic detective work has led to the discovery of the missing section of fabric — snipped out, historians believe, by a memorabilia seeker — and to the discovery that the tent was originally striped blue and white.
( Read More )
How Green Was My Wedding
By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times, February 11, 2007
Kate Harrison’s idea of a fairy tale wedding goes something like this:
Gather more than 150 friends and relatives at an organic farm for a prewedding day of hikes and environmental tours.
Calculate the mileage guests will travel and offset their carbon dioxide emissions by donating to programs that plant trees or preserve rain forests.
Use hydrangeas, berries and other local and seasonal flowers for her bouquet and the decorations, instead of burning up fuel transporting flowers from faraway farms. Design an organic autumnal menu (same reason). Find a vintage dress to avoid the waste of a wedding gown that will never be worn again.
“It’s well worth it to start your life together in a way that’s in line with your values and beliefs,” said Ms. Harrison, 28, a graduate student at Yale, who is to marry in October. “You don’t want this event that is supposed to start your life together to come at the expense of the environment or workers in another country.”
( Read More )
Tires Meant to Foster Sea Life Choke It Instead
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, February 18, 2007
A mile offshore from this city’s high-rise condominiums and spring-break bars lie as many as two million old tires, strewn across the ocean floor, a monument to good intentions gone awry.
The tires were unloaded there in 1972 to create an artificial reef that could attract a rich variety of marine life, and to free up space in clogged landfills. But decades later, the idea has proved a huge ecological blunder.
( Read More )
Essay: Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior
By DANIEL GOLEMAN, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.
“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”
Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.
( Read More )
Books on Science: The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.
Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.
Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach.
( Read More )
Questions for Drew Shindell: Political Heat
Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON, The New York Times, February 18, 2007
Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example? Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone’s interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.
( Read More )
RESTORING HISTORY The tent in 1909.
Call It Serendipity: A Missing Piece of Washington’s War Tent Is Found
By EMILY B. HAGER, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
For nearly a century, a large oval-shape linen tent where George Washington is believed to have slept during the Revolutionary War sat on display in Valley Forge, Pa., with a gaping hole in its roof.
But now a combination of luck and forensic detective work has led to the discovery of the missing section of fabric — snipped out, historians believe, by a memorabilia seeker — and to the discovery that the tent was originally striped blue and white.
( Read More )
