nature's funniest home videos

Trap Jaw Ants

Andrew Suarez gave a talk a few weeks ago at BU. He played these videos and I laughed so hard I was sobbing. Sobbing in the seminar room. Best talk ever.

a very protest christmas

Visited Occupy Boston awhile ago to see a lecture from a volunteering UMass Boston econ professor. Lots of thoughtful question and answer. This was during the camp expansion, which coincided with the Sachem Bridge occupation, drawing the cops away during the move - well organized.

Also thematically related is the Low Anthem concert I went to last night. I was late late late because of an improvisational dance performance I was in with a visiting choreographer Michael Jahoda, kind of similar to a thing I did last year with Monica Bill Barnes, both loads of fun.

Anyway, so I only caught the last few songs inside the venue (Somerville Theater), BUT then the band went outside and proceeded to play for another hour, entirely folk classic singalongs. It was an impromptu night of outdoor occupation. All about community participation, improvisation, voice, and good lighting. Here's my cell phone cinematography: my first youtube video!

at the end of the world, cockroaches and jellyfish

All week, my 5th grade students have been asking me if I'm tired, if I'm getting enough sleep. One kid mentioned that under my eyes is dark and his mommy uses makeup for that. Thanks, kid. I guess I need some more sleep. Good thing we've got this long weekend coming up.

I'm unwinding from the week by watching a documentary to be found at leadwithlove.com, which is for parents of gay kids who are having trouble coping with the truth. It's kind of mesmerizing, with bad infomercial cinematography, but a good message, interesting interviews. There's this one kid named Rico, who looks just like Spock in profile.

I don't know.

Yesterday, I went to the New England Aquarium's Educator Appreciation Night. Free food, free shamelessly heartstring-yanking Disneyesque IMAX 3D movie narrated by Morgan Freeman, free livestrong bracelets that say "Myrtle" and books about icebergs, stop n shop tote bags, and other fabulously useless shit. In return, we're encouraged to bring our students to the aquarium for educational programming. Felt weirdly like a pharmaceuticals pitch. Apparently on the Harbor Cruise, which I missed, there was wine and beer and swank dinner things.

Today in class, Stephanie and I made pesto from the basil in the outdoor garden, served it to the kids on pasta. During 2nd period, Stephanie had to leave early and I got to run an impromptu lesson on moon phases. I confess: I love teaching. I love asking kids questions and treating them like adults and getting them excited about things. I love having a chance not to be the teachers I had in primary who were over it, and going through the motions. Everyone deserves better. I love having a kid explain to me with confidence how the moon changes shape or the earth blocks the light from the sun and I love BLOWING THEIR MINDS with the truth. SCIENCE IS AWESOME. It sells itself. I love the enthusiasm that I'm forced put on that then sinks into the cracks in my skin and becomes actual enthusiasm and I leave tired but happy, or at least feeling like I have successfully without religion or philosophy found a portion of purpose.

I'm hitting the field tomorrow, more for a hike and bit of exploratory scouting. On the way back I'm going to keep my eye out for a pink unitard to complete my watermelon Halloween vision. Because, you know, there'll probably be one lying on the side of the freeway. Ha ha.

save the world club

I taught my first lesson in the outdoor classroom this week. I also had my GLACIER fundraiser this Wednesday and raised over $900 with lots of help from my fellow fellows. A happenstance corporate sponsor may donate some serious educational tech.

I feel so self-righteous I could order a fair trade latte and explain to someone that it's really not that bad for the environment to fly it all the way over here, because I mean, LOOK OVER THERE I'M LAZY AND I NEED THE COFFEE AND WHEN I DON'T GET IT I WRITE IN ALL CAPS AND DON'T USE PUNCTUATION!!! OR TOO MUCH PUNCTUATION!!!)!!(@)(#!! OR INAPPROPRIATE PUNCTUATION!!

So nobody's perfect.
Here's the garage sale in full swing at Marsh Plaza.

Add caption

I also went to the Right to the City/Occupy Wall Street protest that Destry was a marshal for. Saw some people get arrested at the B of A. All pretty orderly. Here are some videos.

Charlie Rose

...turned me on to these simple but engaging educational videos by Salman Khan, a good example of lead learning and my future supplement to TED Talks.

yellowstone national park

Back from my camping trip! Dad was a chipper camper, and we had a lot of fun. I have about a trillion pictures of microbial mats, spouting geysers, landscapes landscapes landscapes, my parents, and Jackson Hole, WY. Here are a few highlights uploaded onto my mom's flickr (well, more than a few...).

Looking forward to coming home to my roomie family, adding Dan Kamen returned from South Africa, with Romain and Brandy and little kitty still close-by across the street. I'll be teaching science for my fellowship at Curley K-8 School, taking hoop/trapeze and aerial silks, classes, research, good times and autumn leaves.

In high school I learned that fall was the season of the tragedy archetype, the season of the fall from innocence in Genesis, when the dignity of man is backlit by his unfortunate circumstances. Spring is all about rebirth, Summer about romance, Autumn about tragedy, and Winter about satire and irony. But fall was always my favorite season, not because of the melancholia, but because of the colors. I never really understood the seasonality of literature anyway. I prefer the seasonality of temperate forests.

the last great american road trip

If you can't reach me in the next week, it's because I'm passing through California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. And my phone might be off.

Armed with books from the San Diego public library, tents, trail mix, and a good rapport with my parents, the Abramoff-Zhengs are going north to say sarcastic things about nature while secretly enjoying it. This'll be dad's first time camping, at the ripe age of 74, as opposed to me and mom who have been all over this spinning pear. I'll uh.. put up some photos when I get back.

The nature of adjectives

I spent the day sieving soils at BU. I blasted some music in a small windowless lab on the 3rd floor and made a day of it. It's a little weird how much fun it is to sing really loudly and terribly by yourself in a building you know is empty.

When I came home, Becky, Steve and I rediscovered the natural order of adjectives, where be basically spent an hour figuring out the list you get when you pull up the wiki page for "adjective", reproduced below.

1. quantity or number
2. quality or opinion
3. size
4. age
5. shape
6. color
7. proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin, or material)
8. purpose or qualifier

Example: One steamy big old square white American swimming pool.

ESA

There's been an interesting discussion in ecolog (ecology listserv) lately centering around one of the biggest conferences of the year happening right now in Austin, TX. It has to do with whether or not the public should be able to attend the conference. I think it's a pretty good idea. Inviting people to learn about the research we're doing fulfills the only important purposes we have (education and advocacy, am I wrong?).

A bit of talk on the subject here.

Glog II: Return of the Glog

K-12 educational tools like Glogster provide great ways to procrastinate. Like with powerpoint, you can waste hours producing content-free, effects-heavy bullshit. You can even embed media and link out, just like blogging, facebook, google+, etc. Now I can let people know that I'm eating a sandwich with text, picture, video, audio, and cartoon avatars. Brave new world!

Here's my first shot at a Glog below. Notice how the video doesn't even kind of work, but you can find it here. It's actually a pretty cool NASA animation of seasonality around the globe.

Climate science cross cross post

other blog

Glog and Cafetorium

All last week I was the Program Coordinator for a summer educational program for middle school girls called Techsavvy.

I was in charge of carting 27 middle school girls to and from various classes, labs, and activities at different institutions. This was part of my training for the teaching fellowship that will fund me next year.
It was rewarding I GUESS.
Mostly it was exhausting, because middle school girls are godless harpies, descending upon each other with cliquey-ness and cell phones, full of hormonal energy and covered in glitter that NEVER WASHES OFF.
Before they even knew each others' names, there was a clique of five girls, and they were deciding to all wear blue the next day. On Wednesday, they wore pink.
Some girls were cute, some were intelligent, some were well-behaved, and some could NOT SIT DOWN ON THE MOTHERFUCKING BUS. I'm glad to say that for the entire week, I did not swear and I maintained control of the group, using some common-sense discipline tips from Becky. I guess this means that a middle schooler is not much different from a 1-year-old. They think everything is about them and have short attention spans, but ultimately respect your authority and want you to like them.

I spend the weekend decompressing at Rachel's mom's place near Las Vegas' less attractive sister, Atlantic City. We jumped around in the waves. The family puggle looks like Samuel L. Jackson. Fun fun fun fun.

This week begins a different kind of teacher workshop, where I meet up with the teacher I'll be working with during the school year and we plan the curriculum. I'm paired with an awesome lady who teaches science to grades 3,4,5 in JP. Today a woman who looked and sounded like Sarah Jessica Parker told me about using technology to teach kids. I learned two new words:
Glog - online poster, etymology unknown
Cafetorium - dual use cafeteria and auditorium

Me and the kids.

Risk Society: A rant about the environment

First, the article below is old. You can read it or not. What is says is that disasters knock out capital but then create jobs, and in the long run, have little effect on the economy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301195.html

Disasters also attack the psyche, setting up an “Us v. the Earth, Us v. the Hand of God, No enemy but cruel fate” sense of underdoggedness. We get knocked down, and can’t do anything but get back up. It’s cute, how in the wake of such events we have a sense of purpose. Let’s all clean up the house.
We don't talk about global warming anymore, or even climate change. So let's talk about variability, risk, and disaster.

According to the IPCC, it is “very likely” (90% probability) that we will have more heavy precipitation events (re: floods) and heat waves in the rest of the 21st century. It is “likely” (66% probability) that we will have more droughts, tropical cyclones, and extreme high sea levels (tsumanis excluded). And these estimates are pretty conservative, given your average scientist’s discomfort with predictive climate models and their ability to quantify error. So we know about the linear trends: hotter, less ice, more shipping lanes in the Arctic. All things that we can plan for: get a fan, move north, have lots of money, invest in A/C companies. But what about the climate changes that are inherently difficult to plan for? What if extreme weather events occurred more frequently, with greater intensity, and with greater variability? Me and IPCC think that it is “likely” that this is happening. And anecdotal evidence seems to be on our side, even though we should try our best to ignore this kind of evidence.
So what? Do we continue to be fucked? Are insurance companies cleaning up on the new risky world we live in, or are they losing out when entire cities get leveled and they are supposed to shell out millions to flash flood insurance cardholders? On this topic I’m reminded of a book that I once read an excerpt of, maybe the most pretentious book that I ever took seriously:

Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage

There’s a lot of jargony bullshit in here where verbs get nominalized for no reason and you end up with sentences like “Connected to the recognition of modernization risks are ecological devaluations and expropriations, which frequently and systematically enter into contradiction to the profit and property interests which advance the process of industrialization.”
But let’s wade through that to the basic point, which is that modern society is obsessed with assessing and preparing for the ever-increasing risks that we created for ourselves with modern innovations like nuclear power, industry, and general assholery.

So now our social inequality comes in new flavors, instead of the rich and the poor, we have the insured and the uninsured. Fun fact: weather-and-water-wise, if you live in the Northeast US, you are automatically insured! Even better, move to Canada. Just stay away from the Southeast US, tropics, Iceland, Miami, NOLA, Holland, and all islands, even and especially Australia, anything on the Ring of Fire, and any country whose GDP is less than 500 billion. Try your best to be rich, white, and male.

Environmental economists can talk about incorporating the externalities, holding industries responsible for the true cost of their pollutants, dividing up common areas (like fisheries) into shares or sectors, but all of this is virtually impossible because pollutants move around, fish move around, everything circulates everywhere and it is difficult to decide who the payee is (Everybody? Everybody who eats fish? Everybody downstream of your factory? Everybody who has an extra finger?)

At this point in the if game, I usually start to imagine that Plato got his way and we have some kind of mythology that makes us all brothers and sisters and children of the same almighty being that holds us together and makes us care for one another. Oh wait, monotheism. Thanks, theists, you’re doing a GREAT JOB.

After I get pissed off at religion for a while, donate $10 to Planned Parenthood, and consider biking more often, I think of Evolution, my Bible and explainer of mysteries. We are a species like any other, approaching its carrying capacity. We’re probably not even there yet. Technology keeps improving, and we, like beavers and sulfur-reducing bacteria, have the capacity to dramatically change our environment. Like sulfur-reducing bacteria, we will assist in one of a handful of mass-extinctions that Earth has experienced. But Earth doesn’t care. It will still be around after we fuck ourselves out of existence. And we will not have lasted a fraction of the time that dinosaurs were around, so in the great scheme of things, epic fail, humanity, epic fail.

There’s hope! Not that we won’t go extinct, because that is by definition just a matter of time. But we might do well for our race for a few more million years if we can harness the energy that lurks in all the corners of our existence: wind, solar, water, nuclear. It doesn’t take much to make energy and most of the technology already exists. It doesn’t take much to dispose of waste safely and most of the technology already exists. The political will doesn’t exist, but maybe it will if some economists can demonstrate that even in our short-sighted election-cycle-driven sense of time, we can save loads of money if we do it right the first time. And in the long run this means less crazy shit weather and nuclear leaks and oil pipes exploding for everybody. We have to manage our risks, not just our wealth. In every dystopian novel when a society switches from wealth-centered to risk-centered, you know that you’re at the beginning of the end of the world. I think we’re all a little obsessed with our own destruction. Like a flaming upturned car on the side of the highway, we want to slow down and watch it burn up. Natural disasters give our 24-hour news cycle something to do. But the uninsured is not our Colosseum, because many of Earth’s processes will fuck us all equally.

Also, stop having fucking babies. We would have absolutely no problems whatsoever if we controlled the size of our population. If you’re looking for the one-stop shop easy solution to climate change and poverty, stop having motherfucking babies. I understand that this is difficult because reproduction is the biological purpose of life, but sometimes you have to trust that most of your genes are swimming around in someone else’s progeny, and take one for the team. I also understand that implementing any sort of policy on births is controversial, ethically messy, and creates a weird demography for a while. I don’t know how to solve that but nobody cares what I think anyway.

Comments?

radical marriage lantern festival

...is the name of my new band, starring Becky and Steve:

...and me playing the corn cut-out, which sounds pretty much like an upright bass.

Some days after Romain and Brandy's awesome farm wedding, I went to the JP lantern festival, because there's nothing better than the four elements colliding in a big zen paper calamity.

and some hipstamatics in the Forest Hills Cemetary

Clinical EP

Also, Libby taught me a new word today: Wugazi. It's what you get when you mash up Wu-Tang and Fugazi, and it's also the kind of word you want to whisper into the ears of sleeping children ...wooooo.....gaaaaa.....zeeeee....
Free download here.

Sarcastic Mystery Puzzle Time

I approach the Apple Store genius bar, balls shrinking from the 33924 watt air conditioning system. The genius is named Trent. Actually, I can’t remember his name but he reminds me of Trent from Daria. Discs in his ears, product in his hair, and …is that an ankh tattoo-ed on his forearm?

Dialogue -
Trent: So what’s wrong with your phone?
Rose: It just won’t turn on. I did all the troubleshooting steps online..
Trent, looking up my phone’s port-hole: The fluid indicator in here changed color, so your phone must have gotten wet.
Rose: Oh, weird! I guess it has been raining a lot lately? I definitely did NOT wade through a river in Western Mass with my friends Carmella, Rachel and Destry with my phone in a little sack, fall over twice, help Carmella rescue Destry from an untimely death, but only after taking both the cider wine (which we were drinking only minutes earlier) and Destry’s shoes safely to shore.
Trent: …okay, I’ll set you up with a new phone.

Guess which sentence I omitted from the actual conversation?

In totally unrelated news, I had a great weekend full of hiking, swimming, farming, pizza-making, vegetables, roofs, ice cream, friends and sunshine.

Music tips from Questionable Content

Jeph Jacques (whose Northhampton-based hipstodrama webcomic I shamefully read) is right, the new Bon Iver album IS really good (you can stream it on NPR). I feel like he's stepping into the void left behind by Sufjan Stevens when he wandered off the reservation and made Age of Adz, which makes me feel anxious and weird, kind of like watching Tron, Brazil, and Clockwork Orange on three different screens in a room filled with pink marshmallows that have been microwaved for 30 seconds.
Yuck. Plus, you can't go wrong with songs named after cities. Perth is actually the name of my computer, because all computers, bikes, and massive data sets should have names, don't you agree?

Thematically related but technically unrelated picture of the day is a still-shot of Pina Bausch, late international dance genius, in Nelken (Carnations)

Miss America in the Sunshine

Still searching for the best route to work.
Recently returned from a meeting in Connecticut, where the words of the day were either "satoyama" or "traditional New England". Loads of plant pictures for you. Here are the choicest.

Corpse flower (get this...amorphophallus titanum)

belly of the beast

Pitcher plant flower

I'm starting to think that maybe I need a camera that isn't also my cell phone. Then again, I'm so nearly blind that I don't appreciate excellent picture quality too much, as my own reality has such terrible picture quality. Why should my photos be better than my life?

The Womb of Harlow

I'm qualified.

Decompressed with a weekend at Megan's farm, complete with Carmella, Destry, Rachel, Megastar and her parents, and caboodles of poodles.
Jumped in the lake, rambled the farm, munched the greens, watched a locavore doc and panel featuring Pauline (Momma Harlow). Created feasts. Slept in a nest.

I'm filled with nutrition, balm, conversation, and inky ambitions for the sole of my foot.

O victory forget your underwear we're free

I watched Howl: the movie, finally, this weekend. Sometimes the animations felt tacky, like too many styles mixed together, but at other times I liked them. At any rate, having James Franco read the entire fucking thing over the course of two hours was well worth my animal soup.

Also reminded me of Bill's thesis (Howl) and my thesis (Howl): Parts I-IV. Don't know if I ever put any of these photos up anywhere, but here are a few.

Holy

For Carl Solomon

Moloch

She Likes It

Rockland

Fig newtons, soup, raw fish

Eat it, written exam.

Also, hi life! I can see you in the distance, closer than real life, further away than a life.

I finished this 12 hour marathon and went into my office, where there was a massive plastic toad on my desk with a post-it note stuck to it that said, "How was it?" I then immediately called Rachel on the phone (henceforth, cancer stick!) and went and sat on a random curb in Kenmore and tried not to sound like I was going bats. I then purchased some raw fish and ate it. And then I watched some Parks and Recreation, and now I will sleep until I wake up naturally (but with my blinds closed, because with my blinds open I naturally wake up at motherfucking 5:45am. Who DOES that?)

Typing feels weird. My hands feel weird typing. Lots of typing today. I hope my written exam is more coherent than this.

Ok, bye!

By special request

Caroline suggested I give this figure a home here. It is from a paper published in PNAS I think, and has been posted up on our office door for a couple of years now:

Liberal arts courses of the future

I was talking to Destry just now about a common topic in the Ramer/Abramoff/Cames/Grigelevich (whew!) household: Amherst college course titles.

Becky has frequently posited that course titles follow the format: [actual subject] and the [noun] (i.e. Lacan and the Word and the Body and the Law and Women in Asia from 1801-1899). Following Strizzle's suggestion that I teach Ecology and the Penis someday, I was inspired to create a whole curriculum. Feel free to add your own! The more obscure the better:

Proust and the Lost Time: A survey of gay nightlife in Auteuil from 1900-1905

Conservation and General Mills in Mexico from 1945-1953

Foreign Policy and the Lithuanian Judiciary

Babar and the French Colonial Imagination: Domesticity as Subversion

Signage and Punctuation: Slow Blind Child

Evolution and the Balls <- this would actually be super interesting (check out papers by AP Moller and AH Harcourt from the 80s and 90s for an excellent discussion on primate testes-to-body size ratios as a function of sexual dimorphism and promiscuity)


Back the the books!

Beware the Himalayan blackberries

All you need for preamble is that I am reading a paper and this is from the Methods section:
"Each of the sample sites was surveyed, unless it was deemed too dangerous for student access due to a combination of factors such as dogs, areas being used for various illicit activities, homeless encampments, or extremely steep slopes covered in Himalayan blackberries."

Go the Fuck to Sleep

I'm on this great new diet. It's called: Poor and Busy. Admittedly, this diet can lead to sickly waifdom or morbid obesity, depending on habit. My habits tend toward off-brand Trader Joe's nutra-grain bars (e.g. "This fig walks into a bar"), the really old pasta in the finzi lab walk-in fridge, and carrots, which are portable, pre-washed, and sold at cvs. Earlier this week, Carmella sent some chives, spinach, and herbs via our Australian couchsurfer, Lachie, which are much appreciated.

I was looking at my old stats notes, and noticing that when I get bored in class, I don't stop taking notes, I just get wildly off topic. Tucked into the corner of a page full of SAS code is a class cast of characters:
Prof Tim (starring Harrison Ford)
Exacerbated Dumb Questions Lady ("Excuse me, WHY do we care about the sample size?)
Caffeinated Vocal Affirmations Girl ("mmm...mmmhhmmm...ohhh...mmmHMMM..." WE CAN SEE YOU NODDING I'M GLAD YOU GET IT NOW SHUT UP)
Girl with water fountain ponytail that blocks my view of the board as it bobs around on her head
Guy that looks like Rocky Balboa.
Probably never making it into the feature film that gets made about my blog in 50 years when they've systematically made films about every blog that has more than 5 readers....and then get to me.

Also, I'm going to try and get my laundry done tomorrow before the rapture, taking place at 6pm (Local time everywhere, so check with Australia first to decide whether or not to repent). I hope they take Teds Nugent and Haggard because I don't want those dicks on Earth anymore making death threats or torturing gay kids. They can hang out with Jerry Falwell in whatever sexless, hateful cloudfest they've got going on up there.

Colleague and cool mom Aryn sent me the world's best children's book, reproduced in total, illegally, for you:

Quag for short

words for wet land:
dune slack
swale
mire
morass
quagmire
slough
sump

pictures from the last few weeks:

jp's "wake up the earth" festival. the world cries for about a month as it wakes up. i have a funny video of a zumba class in the rain that i'm not going to burden the internet with.

bat rescue

mass general

Letterwoman

Word of the day:
podzolization - Iron and aluminum and organic matter leaching from a specific layer of soil (A/E) to a specific deeper layer of soil (B)

Had a productive day of studying and hanging out with the roomies plus Rach at Fiore's (cafe). Should get back to chopping tofu but wanted to share:

I flipped through my notes just now and copied down the (commonly used) acronyms. These are they:
NEE, NEP, NPP, GPP, R, NDVI, TCBA, AGWI, AGWB, CWD, Q10, Ps, Rp, Rr, Ra, Rh, Rd, DOC, DON, ON, DIC, DIN, SOM, OM, MRT, PDB, FACE, O, A, E, B, C, CUP, NIR, TBCF, BCF, PAR, APAR, AET, TSR, EM, ECM, AM, VPD, LAI, T, E, ITCZ, GHG, cV, AN, TBGC, AL, PLFA, HPLC, GC, HBEF, HFEMS, WHRC, REDD, IRGA, LiCOR, P-M, M-M, CEC, AAC, CUE, NUE, WUE, LUE, TLF, C-C, PFT, IBIS-2, CENTURY, GSL, ED, DBH, HATS, LATS
and that's not including any molecules.

Every discipline makes up its own vocabulary, but this one makes up it's own texting-worthy shorthand. Good for EBE, GE, and ES.

Hi Mary!

Maybe you are reading this!

I visited my friend Mary in the hospital today. She has an amazing attitude that puts hypothetically sick me to shame. And I hope she gets better lickety-split.

<3

p.s. The love emoticon pictured above apparently made it into the Oxford English Dictionary this year. Brave new world.

Nerds!

I've had an exciting week. And I'm excited about science. The downside is that I'm working too hard, waking up too early, and generally freaking out. For two nights in a row my dreams have been 80% about root and soil research and 20% about being lost, meeting old friends, being in imaginary cities, having whimsical superpowers, and all that normal dream stuff. It is really sad. I didn't even know I could HAVE a science dream until I dreamt that root proliferation also depends on oxygen concentration and pore space, which is, I thought upon waking, probably true.
In other news, here is a picture of some equipment.

I was at Harvard Forest on Tuesday (yeah, they have a forest too) and got to hang out around these soil respiration chambers that a postdoc installed. They are automated, which means that when they close, it is with a very satisfying PSSSHHHHHHTTTTTT sound of a piston being turned on by an electrical setup housed in a giant tupperware. The absolute #1 BEST thing about outdoor research is that everything interesting is kept in a giant tupperware. So when you are walking around a forest and it looks like IKEA is having a kitchen sale scavenger hunt, you know science is happening.
Also, today is the first day that I was mistaken for a Dr. by a piece of mail.

....it was just a newsletter, but still!
In closing, here are some glam shots of plants: