Gleanings of the Week Ending March 09, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

What’s Happening to Great Lakes Ice - Compare 2010 and 2013 then watch the video of ice forming this winter

Vibrant Paint Patterns Brighten Up Urban Landscapes - Color in Beirut

The Science of Smart - Infographic.

Visual Storytelling through Intricate Paper Designs - Design in cut in paper always seem appealing to me. I probably include collections of them in my gleanings every time I find them. these are by Australian artist Emma Van Leest.

'Behind The Brands' Oxfam Report Evaluates Social, Environmental Impacts Of World's Largest Food Companies - None of them are doing very well when it comes to women, small scale farmers, farm workers, water, land, climate change, or transparency.

Education Indigenous to Place: Western Science Meets Native Reality - Article from the Alaska native Knowledge Network from 1999. The argument for integrative thinking relative to place rather than deep specialization (which has been the trend for some time in the sciences and medicine) is beautifully made in this article.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #38 - My favorite is oriental dwarf kingfisher. The size and shape of the head/beak make it clear that it is a kingfisher but the colors are extraordinary. I am in awe of photograhers that capture birdlife so vividly. My most recent (and poor) attempt is at the right; at least you can tell that it is a redwing blackbird.

Namibia: The Big Empty, part 1 - A short video from National Geographic

First Confirmed Sighting Of Rare Whooping Cranes At Natchez Trace Parkway - Hurray! Maybe an effort to establish an Eastern Migratory Population of these cranes is succeeding.

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud - TED talk

Learning Threads

Have you ever noticed how learning something new leads to learning tangential things - totally unanticipated at the beginning? It has been happening to me quite a lot lately.

One day this past week I listened to the introduction for the Aboriginal Worldviews course on Coursera and became intrigued by the indigenous worldview that values integration of knowledge more than specialization. I happened to be enjoying Reading the Landscape of Europe by May Theilgaard Watts on the same day and was intrigued by the way she combines geology, botany, zoology, history….and sees it all by careful observation of the landscape. I’d just finished the chapter on France and was so intrigued by the section on roses that I looked on the Internet Archive for the artists she had mentioned from the 1700s ….and found their works plus others. I remembered that my father planted hybrid tea roses along the driveway of our new house in the 60s (one for each member of the family) and wrote an email to him asking if he remembered their names. What a thread: indigenous world view to landscape reading to roses to family history!

It is so much easier to follow a tangential thought now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. A trip to the library or bookstore might have yielded some information  back then but it took so much effort that many threads were simply dropped. And I can remember making the effort and being disappointed by the lack of information the library had on its shelves.

How is this ease of finding exactly the information desired - in seconds - impacting the way we learn? We have an enormous wealth of resources. Are we enlightened by them or overwhelmed? It is natural to be both. I willingly accept the risk of being overwhelmed as the price for finding what I want to know shortly after deciding I want it.

Today - I am celebrating the adventure of following threads for as long and as deep as I want.

The Healthy Matriarch

Many of us enter our 60s without major health problems and have refined our strategies to sustain that health as long as possible. What are the top 5 things you are doing toward a healthy you? Mine are: 

• Take at least 12,000 steps per day (using a Fitbit to measure ‘steps’)
• Sleep 7-8 (but not more than 8) hours per day (also measured by the Fitbit )
• Eat a healthy diet - lots of fruits and veggies, some meat and grains, some fat (olive oil and nuts) - and take reasonable supplements
• Sustain or reduce weight to ‘normal’ for my height
• Continue a high level of continuous learning 

OK - I combined a whole lot in the ‘eat a healthy diet’ item and the ‘continuous learning’ items.

Eating a healthy diet requires tweaking. Your food should help you feel good - not bloated, tired, or break out in hives! Supplements are the backup of diet - not the main event. Take supplements for those vitamins and minerals that you cannot get through diet and keep up with the research. For example, recently there has been quite a lot in the media about the pluses and minuses of taking calcium supplements…with the minuses currently winning when it comes to people that do not have bone density issues already.

‘Continuous learning’ makes it to my top 5 for sustaining health because healthy mind is so closely linked to healthy body. Whatever one does for ‘continuous learning’ needs occasional tweaking too. This year I have added Coursera to my regime and reduced the number of physical books that I read (even though the net books read is about the same…it is just a shift in media type). And I am on the lookout for volunteer activities that will be ‘learning experiences.’

The gist of all this is - articulate what you are doing to sustain your good health. It’s a way to make sure you are focused on the things that are right for you.

Gleanings of the Week Ending March 02, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Point me to a brain area - neuro-anatomy (head - neck- brain - spine) tutorials

Shimmering Mosaic of Earth Made of Stained Glass and Jewels

The World's 20 Most Amazing Tunnels - lots of photos

Windows On Nature: The Ten Best National Park Webcam Sites In America - A list from National Parks Traveler. The collage of pictures at the right shows the snow and fog from earlier this week….a virtual tour of the parks!

4 surprising lessons about education learned from data collected around the world - TED talk

Want To Be In The Dark? Death Valley Is Among 20 Recommended Places

More Antioxidants In Your Diet May Not Mean Better Health - not all antioxidants are equal

Choosing Wisely Lists - information on when medical tests and procedures are appropriate…good information to have before you see your doctor

Jagged Worldviews Colliding by Leroy Little Bear- an introduction to the differences between Indigenous and Eurocentric worldviews

Technology Upends another Industry: Homebuilding - doing the same amount of work with half the staff

Free Online Courses - Coursera

I had mentioned Coursera in several other blog posts (here and here). There was a news story about it this past week - More Elite Universities Offer Free Online Courses - that prompts me to write about them again.

The tangential learning has, on two occasions, been more significant for me that the main topic of the course. I was prompted to learn more about Genetically Modified Organisms by the Obesity Economics course (the topic came up in the forums….and off I went). The Critical Thinking course actually prompted tangential learning by asking students to pick one of 4 topics to practice their critical thinking skills. I picked Population and enjoyed the references provided plus the forum posts the students produced. It increased the critical thinking I do about items in the news.

The quality of the courses is inconsistent. Some of the videos are patched together from live lectures while some appear to be made with a web cam on the speaker’s PC. Almost all the videos switch between the speaker and charts with varying amounts of expertise. Sometimes the charts are created by the speaker as the lecture proceeds (like a white board) and other times they are formal charts. Sometimes the charts are available for download and sometimes not. Most of the courses have multiple choice questions embedded in the lectures although often it is just one question at the end of the lecture….and sometimes the embedded quiz is missing altogether.

The Modern World course is providing a good framework for things I learned long ago in school and via reading since then. Somehow the history courses when I was in school in the ‘60s and ‘70s rushed through the World Wars and what happened afterwards….up to the present. The energy that daround the early history of the US - from colonization to just past the Civil War petered out too soon. And the courses were only looking at the US perspective. World history classes also seemed more enthusiastic about Greek and Roman times than the 1900s. The increased discussion of ‘why?’ is also quite a welcome upgrade. Even in college in the 1970s - I don’t recall the history courses trying to help the student understand the perspective of people at the time to increase the understanding of why decisions or events were happened.

The forums are interesting but overwhelming for the larger classes. Several of the courses I am taking have over 10,000 students from around the world! If the course requires posting as part of the course - then there are a huge number of posts. Some are enlightening….some interesting….but wading through the ones that are not is time consuming/impossible/frustrating.

It is true that because they are “free” and not for credit - people that sign up may not complete the course requirements. Are they collecting data on why people do not complete the course? It is not obvious that they are. I’ve dropped one completely because I signed up for too many courses at one time and have gone into ‘sponge’ mode on another (i.e. just reading the forums rather than posting) because I am just too overwhelmed to dive into posting. Still - I am getting what I want from the second course even without completing all the requirements.

The bottom line of the whole experiment for me is that Coursera offerings are a worthwhile addition to the bevy of activities I use to continue to learn new things.

Bravo to Coursera and the universities that are contributing content!

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 23, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

It’s Getting Hot in Here, So … What, Exactly? - Strategies for adapting to a warmer world

Magnificent Frozen Waterfalls around the World - And people trying to climb them! My effort to capture a winter photo of Taughannock Falls from a few years ago is at the right.

Next-Generation Lithium-Ion Battery Designed - Projected to hold more than 3 times the charge and recharge in around 10 minutes…and available in 2-3 years. In this design the current graphite anodes are replaces with porous silicon nanoparticles.

Photography in The National Parks: Capturing Moonbows in Yosemite National Park - I felt lucky to see a moonbow at Cumberland Falls State Park in Kentucky….glad someone is skilled enough to photograph them and that they happen at Yosemite

What does 200 calories look like? - Lots of pictures….a way to gain perspective on the importance of portion size

Field Guide to National Parks App - From the National Parks Conservation Association; for iPhone and Android. I have not tried it yet and the reviews are mixed. I like the idea of it though.

Global Health Observatory - From the World Health Organization. The map gallery is a good place to browse.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #37 - My favorite images are the Anna’s Hummingbird and the Storks (in silhouette)

5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think

The How-To Guide to Windows 8 - A series of articles (organized by this page) from CIO magazine

3 Free eBooks - February 2013

The Internet has a growing number of online books…and many of them are free. This is my monthly post highlighting 3 that I have enjoyed most this past month.

Bulliard, Pierre. Flora Parisiensis Volume 2. Paris, P.F. Didot. 1776. Available here. This is a botanical text that was produced in France while the American Revolution was happening. Multiple volumes are available at the Internet Archive and all contain many color plates like the one to the left of a tulip. This must have been a very expensive book when it was produced!

Ernst, James A. Drawing the Line, Fine and Commercial Art. New York, Reinhold Publishing Corporation. 1962.  Available here. Skipping ahead almost 200 years from the first book, this book does not contain color. It is a book that encourages action…it's a great way to build up your motivation to make some drawings. Any book that causes me to do something is one that goes on my favorites list!

The last item for this month is not a specific eBook. It is a reminder that many public libraries offer eBooks via their web presence that can be checked out for 2 or 3 weeks. Check to see what yours offers. Many libraries use the Overdrive service to drive their selections;  search the Overdrive list of participating libraries to see if your library is on the list. I’ve read over 100 books on my Kindle from my local library. Right now I am working my way through the mysteries written by Nevada Barr!

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 16, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Bird-of-Paradise Project - from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology - lots of videos of the birds and how the images were captured too

Image of the Day: ‘Goose Bump’ Muscles - mouse hair follicles

Hans Rosling shatters the myth of “developed” versus “developing” nations - TED talk

Videos From Northeast Blizzard - National Geographic’s pick of 6 videos

Amazing Animal Hearts - heart trivia from the National Wildlife Federations. Did you know that a blue whale’s hear beats only 7 times per minute?

Geocaching - technology supported treasure hunting

Thousands of Merged Photos Display Sun's Surface

Desalination Seen Booming at 15% a Year as World Water Dries Up

A US high speed rail network shouldn't just be a dream - Wouldn’t it be nice to have the option to go high speed rail rather than airplane?

Table of Trends and Technologies for the World in 2020 - A thought provoking list of ideas from Richard Watson. His blog posts about the table is here and here (the second one provides a list of references).

Self-Assembling, Origami-Inspired Particles - lots of nanotechnology potential….how long until truly useful reality?

What if…the color in our homes was structural?

I am intrigued by the structural color of birds-of-paradise and peacock feathers. The colors are made by patterns of material instead of pigment. Link the basic research into structural colors to self-assembling nano-particles (here is an article of some recent work in that area)…and the future could hold ‘programmable’ color for our homes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to change the color of a room - or maybe just one wall - during different times of the day? What if the surface also collected or radiated heat (depending on whether the area needed to be heated or cooled)? 

Or what about technology that puts more display glass on our walls with color and/or images appearing just as they do today on computer displays. The technology is probably already developed to do that - although the price is still too high. What about the power it would take to have all the walls of a house being glass displays? Corning Glass has several videos with this vision of the future.

Either scenario points to a world where our the color and surface of the walls of homes will become much more dynamic than they are today!

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 09, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Google Street View Now Covers Grand Canyon Hiking Trails - take a virtual hike in the Grand Canyon

Voyager into Stardust - short video

How Much Do Americans Pay for Fruits and Vegetables? - from National Geographic

HMS Beagle Voyage - visualization for the UK’s Natural History Museum

Frogcicle - a video of a frozen frog thawing…and hopping away!

Color from Structure - structural colors of peacock feathers, butterfly wings, fish and squid outer cells, hibiscus flowers…color producing nanostructures

Little House Books' Mary Ingalls Probably Did Not Go Blind from Scarlet Fever, Study Says - not that scarlet fever was not prevalent during the time…but it does not cause the symptoms (and blindness) described

Tulip fields - patchwork of color from the Netherlands

Coal Cooling Towers Come Crashing Down - 2 videos: one slow motion, the other with cartoonish faces on the towers

BugGuide - a site about insects of the US and Canada hosted by Iowa State University Entomology

Organized Paper Butterfly Installations Evoke Energy - beauty created with small papers

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 2, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Masterful Textured Oil Paintings of Ships at Sea - from Polish Artist Justyna Kopania

Health and Environment: A Closer Look at Plastics - trying to balance risks and rewards

The Whirlpool Galaxy

Morning Glory Muffins - nutrition rich - to start the day

Population Density in the US from 1790-2000 - from Stanford University’s Spatial History Project.

Simon Beck Snow Art - this post is almost a year old…but I only found it recently

Test for Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals Gets Global Seal of Approval - both the international Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and the US Government ….good that they are agreed on how to test for the chemicals

Silhouettes and Moonrise in Real Time - video of a moon rise from a New Zealand mountain top

Archaic Native Americans Built Massive Louisiana Mound in Less Than 90 Days - At Poverty Point…the largest mound was built between rains; the hunter gatherers must have been a lot more organized - and in larger numbers - that previously thought

Romantic Textured Paintings of Couples Walking Together - just in time for Valentine’s Day

Glass as Art

I’ve posed about glass as art before - Corning Museum of Glass, Chihuly at the Dallas Arboretum (here and here), Karen LaMonte’s Reclining Dress made of glass. Today’s post is a series of macro shots of glass paper weights and a vase. Enjoy!

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 26, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

How Much Unsubsidized Solar Power is Possible? - interactive map showing increase incost competitiveness of solar power in the US

World's Largest Natural Sound Library Now Available On-line ... And It's Free - the Macaulay Library archive…a 12 year project to digitize the entire collection has been completeed!

Woodpecker inspires cardboard bike helmet - it absorbs 3 times as much force as polystyrene helmets and is 15% lighter

Hello Robots, Goodbye Fry Cooks - what about the impact of the robotics revolution on human employment/

Vouching again Creationism - a rant about the relationship between school vouchers and the teaching of creationism...how religious teaching is becoming publically funded

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #34 - The last one surprised me….the Indian Robin does not have a red breast like our North American robins

Exploring The Parks: Grand Canyon National Park, A Winter Wonderland - Some year I’ll get to the Grand Canyon in the winter

To Surf a Hundred Million Stars - intro to a zoomable photo of the Milky Way center….spend some time zooming the image (and the others available from the GigaGalaxy Zoom project also linked from this article).

Interior Department Nominates Poverty Point National Monument For World Heritage Site Designation - specifics about Poverty Point but also general information about the World Heritage Site designation

Museum Collections (National Park Service) - the site has been revamped. Take a browse through the collection highlights (click on one that looks interesting and a whole series of items from that same location will appear0. Or use the pull down to select your favorite park!

The rise and fall of artificial gravity - Why has no one built a space station with artificial gravity?

Opinion: The Successes of Women in STEM - there are still roadblocks. Karen Purcell articulates some of them.

3 Free eBooks - January 2013

The Internet has a growing number of online books….and many of them are free. This is the monthly post highlighting 3 that I have enjoyed most this past month.

Shin-bijutsukai (2 volumes from early 1900s). Kyoto: Yamada Geikido. Available here. Art from Japan of the early 1900s. The red leaves at the left is a portion of one of my favorite images from the books.

White, John and Michael Dennin. Science Appreciation: Introduction to Science Literacy. ComPADRE. 2010 Available here. This is the text for Coursera’s Science from Superheroes to Global Warming offering. Even if you already consider yourself ‘science literate’ it is worth perusing for an update on how the issue of illiteracy in this particular topic area is being approached in our colleges.

Leonard, Anna B. and Adelaide Alsop Robineau. Keramic Studio periodical (volumes 2, 10, 13, 16 and 20 from 1900 to 1919). Syracuse, NY: Keramic Studio Publishing Co. Available here. Keramic Studio was pioneering periodical for ceramic artists and potters in the early 1900s. It was full of wonderful images that were emerging in that heady time when so much was changing just before World War I and immediately thereafter. The variety of work depicted - from drawings to finished works - is quite broad. Some of my favorites are the images of peacock feathers in volume 10 show in the clips to the right.

The previous eBook posts can be found here.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 19, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Where US R&D dollars go

Geometric Sculpture by George W. Hart - the ‘skinks’ is my favorite

Tap into the 2013 Natchez Trace Parkway Visitors Guide - available in PDF

What You Don’t Know About Home Burglaries - infographic. 65% of burglaries happen during the day and other factoids

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #33 - my favorite is the Indian peafowl

Australian Heat Wave Is Literally Off the Color Scale

Marc Goodman: A vision of crimes in the future - TED talk

These Days, Darwin Would Need To Know More About Jupiter - What Can Astronomers Teach Biologists? - 4 perspectives

Americans Have Worse Health Than People in Other High-Income Countries; Health Disadvantage Is Pervasive Across Age and Socio-Economic Groups - from the National research Council and Institute for Medicine. Full report can be found here.

 Human Numbers Through Time - the graphics show population growth over the past 2 millennia. It was created in 2004 but I just found it this past week

Spectacular Macro shots of Underwater Corals

The Joy of Free Courses

Years after college, I am still in the mood to start classes in September and January. The rhythm of the school year is evidently one that will last all my life.

It is easier now than ever before to study at your own pace and without traveling to a university. Courses are offered using all kinds media - videos, forums, simulations, readings. And many are free. In some cases, formal credit for the course is offered upon completion.

Coursera is my favorite for free online courses with 212 courses that are freely available. I have enrolled in 3 courses that will start up this month; it’s such a thrill to have a richness of topics from which to choose. I found it challenging to choose just three! I’m signed up for:

The Modern World: Global History since 1760

Science from Superheroes to Global Warming

Critical Thinking in Global Challenges

I’ve already selected another that will start in February (Aboriginal Worldviews and Education) and one in April (Nutrition, Health, and Lifestyles: Issues and Insights).

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 12, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Mexican Hot Chocolate - yum. My variation of this uses hot tea to replace half the milk and stevia instead of the agave. I make it by the (large) cup…and haven’t quite got up the courage to add the cayenne.

Beautiful and Dramatic Thunderhead Clouds - my favorite is the Jason Clark one with the orange of sunset…lightning…and barbed wire in the foreground

12 tips to clean up, de-clutter and revamp your home - from Marlo Thomas. I’m going to try the grapefruit and salt idea for cleaning my bathtub and shower

Interlocking Origami Stars and Prisms by Byriah Loper

Moving through waters of human attention - Apollo Robbins…pickpocket and illusionist

Modern Parenting May Hinder Brain Development - new is not always better

Top Four Reasons Why Diets Fail - Inadequate sleep is one of the 4!

A Very, Very, Very Delicate Balance - rocks balanced by Michael Grab (watch the video)

Slices of Life, circa 1872 - some of the work referred to in the article that was published by Christian Wilhelm Braune in the 1870s is available on the Internet Archive here

Medallion Snowflakes - you don’t have to be a child to enjoy this little project

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 5, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Frosty Morning Walk - photographs from the Prairie Ecologist

Your Amazing, Aging Brain - from Lynne Spreen

2012: The year’s science and tech news in one graphic - from the BBC. How many of these did you spot during the year?

Rita Levi-Montalcini has left the building - the Nobel-Prize winning neurologist died recently at 103

Stunning Satellite Photos of Earth From Outer Space - my favorite is the one of Painted Desert, Arizona

12 Awe-Inspiring Photos of Lightning - the very first one (of the Eiffel Tower) was the one that caught my attention…but all of them are spectacular

Should Jerry Brown Just Ignore His Cancer? - too much medicine?

Tomorrow’s world: A guide to the next 150 years - from the BBC

Gorgeous Otherworldly Photos of Colorful Forests

Antarctica’s Adorable Emperor Penguins - my favorite is the one with the larger chick with a wing/flipper around the small chick next to it

Can You Spot These Camouflaged Animals? - maximize the window before you start to look. Some of these are really tough.