David Dobbs: Reef Madness : Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”
A city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit. Each quarter must be A CITY WITHIN A CITY. The quarter must integrate all daily functions of urban life (dwelling, working, leisure) within a territory dimensioned on the basis of the comfort of a walking person; not exceeding 35 hectares (80 acres) in surface and 15,000 inhabitants. Tiredness sets a natural limit to what a human being is prepared to walk daily and this limit has taught mankind all through history the size of rural or urban communities.
One of the attractions of my own city, Montpelier, is that I can walk across it comfortably in well under half a day -- and can walk out of it, and into the countryside, in about 10 minutes, which is also how long it takes me to reach the city center. Despite that there is little mass transit, I rarely use a car.
Krier's point about quarters -- that they must integrate all daily functions of urbain life -- seems spot on to me when I think of the cities (and parts of cities) that I've found most agreeable.
Atop other Obama appointments, this is one I suspect America's scientists will welcome. From the Washington Post:
Report: Holdren to Lead White House Science Policy
By Joel Achenbach
President-elect Obama will announce this weekend that he has selected physicist John Holdren, who has devoted much of his career to energy and environmental research, as his White House science adviser, according to a published report today.
The Obama transition office would not confirm Holdren's selection. Last night, asked by The Post to comment on the science adviser search, Holdren responded by e-mail that he would be unable to comment because of his work with the Obama transition team.
The report today appeared online at ScienceInsider, a news blog published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Holdren served as president of AAAS in 2006.
A teacher in West Virginia rallied her students to fight to keep the right to recycle -- presumably for the civic (and eco) learning experience. John Tierney argues she's missing a better teaching opportunity:
If we want our children to be scientifically literate and get good jobs in the future, why are we spending precious hours in school teaching them to be garbage collectors?
That’s the question that occurred to me after reading about the second-graders in West Virginia who fought for the right to keep recycling trash even after it became so uneconomical that public officials tried to stop the program. As my colleague Kate Galbraith reports, their teacher was proud of them for all the time they spent campaigning to keep the recycling program alive.
My colleague Andy Revkin suggests that the West Virginia students might be learning something useful about the interplay of economics and ecology, but I fear they and their teacher have missed the lesson
Phil. Inquirer: Four part series disembowels the Bush White House version of the EPA
Many reporters have dived pretty deep into the legal and regulatory changes wrought at the EPA in the last eight years and into the scientist-administrator Stephen Johnson who imposed them at the behest of the George W. Bush administration... But no other newspaper that the Tracker knows of has torn into the agency with as thorough, focussed and full-hearted a pummeling as seen in the Philadelphia Inquirer for four days this week. ....
Sometimes it’s good to let one’s anger show and these reporters do. The pace, enthusiasm, and rhythm of the prose is like that of a flogging of a misbehaving crewman in an old Royal Navy sailing ship.
Despite what you may think, the universe is not necessarily a friendly place. Sure, things here on Earth have been pretty stable over the past few millennia, allowing human civilization to gain a foothold. But that could change at any time. Disaster lurks everywhere, from the deepest reaches of space to the very bowels of our planet. We've recruited nine prominent Canadian scientists (and one science fiction writer) and asked them to imagine how they think the world might end. We bring you The Quirks & Quarks Guide to the End of the World -- it's cataclysmically fun!
Our top ten list of civilization-destroying events:
1. Dr. Ray Jayawardhana, Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, explains what will happen when the expanding sun engulfs the earth and roasts the planet.
2. Dr. Vicki Kaspi, a Professor of Physics at McGill University, explores the irradiating effects of a giant gamma ray burst.
3. Dr. Laura Ferrarese, a Senior Researcher at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, suggests that a rogue black hole may set its voracious appetite on Earth.
Eva Sollberger of Seven Day has posted a charming video feature about the Christmas tree farm run by Jim and Steve Moffatt, of Craftsbury, Vermont -- a family that occupies a major part of my first book "The Northern Forest," which I wrote with my friend Richard Ober. I spent a lot of time with the Moffatts, some of the finest people I've ever known. This video captures their wonderful combination of humor, intelligence, and virtue.
As Science News reports, drawing on a paper in the Nov 6 Nature(paid subscription required), climate change -- in particular a lack of the fluffy snowpack that lemmings depend on as cover for ground-level foraging -- appears to be putting the hurt on lemming populations in Norway. This crimp in their diet has left some to starve to death and may be the reason that a particular area in south-central Norway has not seen one of the famous lemming population booms since 1994.
Lemmings are famed for their population booms: Occasionally, across small regions, their numbers can briefly swell a hundredfold. Dramatic increases of the rodents typically occur every three to five years, says Nils Christian Stenseth, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Oslo in Norway.
But at one site in south-central Norway, lemming populations haven’t spiked in such a way since 1994, he notes. In the Nov. 6 Nature, Stenseth and his colleagues suggest that climate change has interrupted the normal boom-and-bust cycle of lemming populations.
The effect is spreading to the rest of the ecosystem:
With the recent lack of population booms among lemmings, predators such as arctic foxes and snowy owls have turned their attention to other prey, including ground-nesting birds such as ptarmigan and grouse, whose numbers have declined.
The good folks at Neuroanthropology drew my attention to a pair of videos showing how chimpanzees work together to corral, kill, and then eat colubus monkeys. Amazing stuff.
The embedded video below shows a hunt from the rather chaotic point of view of cameramen chasing the chase at jungle-floor level. Impressive enough in itself:
Even more riveting, however, is the second video, which can't be embedded but which can be seen on YouTube. It mixes from-the-ground footage with aerial shots taken with infrared cameras to show how a team of five chimps -- a driver, three blockers, and an ambusher -- work to funnel the colobus monkeys into the arms of the ambusher. The driver climbs into the treetops and sets the colubus into motion. The blockers on the ground, outracing the tree-swinging colubus, move in front of them and then climb to create a sort of gate through which they'll corral the prey. The ambusher climbs to a spot beyond this gate. The trap works: One of the colobus flees right into the ambusher's tree, and soon becomes a meal.
This is more than a little unsettling to watch: It looks remarkably like a scene from Patriot Games, the Harrison Ford movie, in which CIA agents in Washington, D.C., watch a live satellite infrared feed of U.S. commandos executing a lethal nighttime raid on a purported terrorist came -- a scene in which we watch the D.C.CIA team becoming uncomfortable at the silent savagery they're witnessing -- and ordered -- from a world away.
And so, watching this, we feel a bit complicit as well -- at once impressed and horrified. Well we might. As the narrator in the embedded video notes, these hunts, though disturbing, may be the evolutionary forerunner of the kind of coordinated teamwork that has allowed humankind to accomplish so much -- not just higher scales of coordinated lethality, but agriculture, government, cave art, orchestra music, you name it.
There's a history-of-science aspect to this too: I find it interesting to see the emphasis on the social/evolutionary aspect of this hunting. This reflects not just changes in the scientific view of such behavior but changes in the larger zeitgeist since Jane Goodall began reporting more heart-warming chimp behavior in the early 1960s. When chimpanzee hunting was first discovered in the 1970s -- a far less idealistic time than the early 1960s, a time when the U.S. in particular was in turmoil over its involvement in Vietnam -- the most prevalent public reaction was horror, and the most prominent debate even in the scientific community was whether chimp hunting meant that humans, being close cousins to chimps, were not inherently gentle beasts but savages inclined to organized violence.
Since then, though, ethology and primatology has increasingly focused on how primates show sophisticated social behavior -- the social brain theory and so on -- which in turn has steered the interpretation of hunting away from issues of savagery and toward this stress on social cooperation. Meanwhile the larger American culture, seems to me, has moved from a highly moralistic view of military action -- one in which the soldiers were blamed for the war in Vietnam, for instance -- to one that is at least implicitly more cognizant of our misadventure in Iraq as a expression of social dynamics we're all part of. We aren't as eager to see people as either savage or pacific; we're more ready to see them as part of a social organism.
Does the culture drive the science or the science the culture? I've gotta think the answer is Both.
Hat tip to the excellent Neuroanthropology, which features some good references to both scientific and pop literature on chimp hunting and its implications.
A friend asked me the other day why he hadn't heard more this year about the question of whether global warming was driving more and bigger hurricanes. The Knight Science Journalism Tracker suggests he's just not reading the right papers. It brings a good round-up of how coverage on that question has shifted:
The debate over the effect of a warmer climate on tropical cyclones has undergone a nuanced shift in the last year or so, as illustrated in a brace of news stories today. The natural, first question was whether the world is seeing more hurricanes and their kin. That turns out to be complicated.... The new filip is whether, even if the total is not changing much, one ingredient for perfect storms - heat - is getting more potent. Thus if the recipe comes together in the mixing bowl just so, one gets a loftier, moister cake from the oven. Or, to hazard a more technical take, warmer sea surface temps seem to bring a larger tail toward the strong end in the distribution of storm strength if not numbers.
The Tracker then details a Nature story on this subject as well as a number of mainstream press treatments:
Wall Street Journal Dan Fitzpatrick, Alyssa Abkowitz put the numbers in plain English: worldwide the most intense tropical cyclones are bulking up by 4 mph per decade, and by 16 mph in the North Atlantic (Style Note: this just means N. of the equator - but “North Atlantic” may evokes for many readers the ocean off Greenland, icebergs, sinking Titanics, etc). A prominent quote is given to a hurricane fan but global change skeptic, William Gray, who says the authors might be playing games with data ; NY Times Kenneth Chang ; SF Chronicle David Perlman puts “probably aided by global warming” in his lede, and follows up with the lead scientist calling Katrina and Gustav “a harbinger of things to come” ; Houston Chronicle Eric Bergerstresses that the report relies entirely on satellite images less likely to be skewed than are reports from ships or on land ; USA Today Doyle Rice writes flatly that the shift is due to global warming ; Christian Science Monitor Eoin O’Carroll has an odd line: “at the same time the intensity of weaker storms has not increased.” Ken Chang’s story from NYT, listed above, says it similarly. Hurricanes are categorized by wind speed. Is this like saying the weight of people between 110 and 120 pounds has not changed? That is, if weaker storms did intensify much they’d no longer be weaker storms. Maybe it means the numbers in the weaker categories are not up due to any overall shift of distribution toward the muscular side. (Late Addition - it’s by quantile so it makes sense, and for which I’ve added the plot above) ; LiveScience Andrea Thompson ; BBC Richard Black ; Reuters Deborah Zabarenko ; Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield follows his talent for making clear how news effects readers. It is not hurricane intensity that’s up in his telling, but their ability to cause devastation ; Science News Sid Perkins gathers pithy quotes from other top people in the field, including this one: “category 2 and 3 storms in the 1950s are now category 4 and 5 storms” ; AAAS ScienceNOW Richard A. Kerr finds an authority to say this study is a big advance ; Sarasota Herald Tribune Anna Scott; Talahassee Democrat Angeline J. Taylor
