A Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America
Ranges are an interesting problem with butterflies, since their biogeography is both very heterogeneous and in some cases rapidly changing. Also, a key feature of their breeding ranges is not so much when they are there, but how many times they cycle through broods over the warm months. So the maps are interesting: Continue reading A guide to the butterflies (book review)
Monarchs and Milkweed: A Migrating Butterfly, a Poisonous Plant, and Their Remarkable Story of Coevolution
The monarch butterfly begins a springtime northward migration by flying a good ways north, where females lay eggs and die. Then the eggs hatch, the caterpillars feed and metamorphose, and the newly minted butterflies then fly further north, and this cycle happens again. This happens a few times. The southward migration is different. The butterflies, which are across large areas of temperate North America, fly all the way south to their Mexican wintering grounds.
Continue reading Monarch Butterflies and Milkweed: An amazing new book
The Tantrum that Saved the World is a kickstarter fueled campaign to produce a children’s book about climate change.
The book will come in two parts. the first part is the story about a small girl child who finds out about, and attempts to address, global warming (more or less … you’ll have to read the book to find out the details!). the second part is about the science of climate change, expanding on the first part.
According to Michael Mann, “We wrote this book because, in our view, nothing like it exists. It educates by entertaining kids. It encourages action by inspiring them.” For her part, illustrator Megan Herbert wanted to turn her “frustration about climate inaction into something positive, to tell myson that I care about the world that I’m passing onto him. I want all kids to understand the challenges ahead and to be inspired to act positively rather than be overwhelmed.”
The book will be printed in an eco-friendly way, especially the eVersion of it!
Check out the video:
Other books by the same authors:
GRANDMOTHERS CHAIR
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines
Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding Climate Change
And why not? Minnesota tends to lead when it comes to finding ways for government to do good.
Minnesota State Auditor Rebecca Otto is running for Governor in Minnesota, and moments ago she announced the details of her much anticipated “Healthy Minnesota Plan.”
Here’s the link for the details.
Obamacare was good, better than what was there before, but it came out of the gate as a compromise between the usual opposing forces in Washington. Many of you not in Minnesota may not know this, but Continue reading Minnesota Candidate Proposes Cost-Cutting Single Payer Health Insurance Plan
Hold on, this may take a moment to connect:
I’m sure you all have cable and/or satellite setups and thus see the Mythbusters
Here’s the Myth: Continue reading Mythbusters on Head-on Collisions
You need to get a copy of How to Discipline a Toddler: A Parent’s Essential Guide to Disciplining Toddlers, Dealing with Toddler Tantrums, and Addressing Other Toddler Behavior Problems
Things that work on toddlers: Continue reading How to handle your out of control toddler
Carbon Brief has produced a US based (sorry, rest of the world) interactive graphic that accesses an extensive underlying database that shows everything about the electricity generation that there is to know. Each generation plant, each type of electricty, capacity, etc. and you can view the information by state, by type of energy, and with some other toggles.
Here is an example. Continue reading The Best US Electricity Generation Graphic Ever, No Kidding
Interesting, amusing, a story involving Russia that will probably not make you cringe.
It is presumed that the object in question was brought from Cuban waters to Florida by Irma, the Hurricane.
From here:
A 1,200-pound Soviet buoy that surfaced off Dania Beach looks like it belongs in a James Bond movie. Script — which the Library of Congress says is Russian for Hydrometrical Service of the USSR — is painted in black on its side.
Exactly where the rusty, Cold War-era relic came from, and what it was used for, remain a mystery.
Workers at Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park pulled it off the beach just days after Hurricane Irma swept through town. They think it floated 350 miles from Cuba, given Cuba’s historically close ties with the Soviet Union.
Bill Moore, the park’s maintenance mechanic, locked eyes on the 12-foot buoy at the same time Coast Guard members did. He marveled at it, thinking, “You don’t find that too often.”
The Coast Guard’s administrative offices are next to the park’s headquarters. “They came running down here with their dog,” he said. “They tried to confiscate it.”
But Moore retrieved it before the Coast Guard could, he said. The buoy was too heavy to budge, so Moore tied a rope around it and with a skid-steer loader dragged it up the embankment and then brought it to the park office’s parking lot.
I’ve heard the story a half dozen times, and every time it is different. But only a little different, and most if not all of the versions I’ve heard are basically correct. Very wealthy individuals and corporations have a stranglehold over the government, and in many cases, call the shots. The only time they are not calling the shots is when a strong movement opposes them, and such movements inevitably weaken and die.
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
The enemy in this particular story is not Barry Goldwater, or the Koch Brothers, but rather economics James McGill Buchanan. Of course, Charles Koch ends up being a disciple of Buchannan’s approach, ad do others. And that is where the money comes from.
MacLean’s key point is that this is not Continue reading New Book: Democracy in Chains
The news is bad, and is being widely covered. Here I just want to make a remark or two about the link between big fires and global warming.
As of last report, there are 15 known dead and 150 or more missing. Hopefully they are only virtually and not actually missing; there is a lot of confusion and communication resources are in many cases down.
Wild fires are tricky in more ways then one. It is easy to get caught in one (I’ve manage that myself), and it is hard to predict or fully understand why some years have more than others. There has been a long term trend nationally towards fewer wild fires, for several reasons, most of which have to do with human activities. The most significant part of that trend is that humans caused many, huge, often deadly wild fires in the past. The worst wildfire ever in Minnesota, in terms of Death toll, was during World War I and had mainly to do with farming and railroads being a bad mix. Cutting lots of land to farm provides the fuel, and in those days, railroads were travelling tinderboxes sparking fires everywhere they went. Continue reading Tragic and Unprecedented California Deadly Fire
Facebook apparently knew quite early on that Russian agents were manipulating Facebook feeds and Facebook users in order to influence the American election, favoring Trump and working against Clinton.
But they publicly denied that they had any of this information, and went so far as to delete information about this in a report. The report contained details about Russia that Facebook legal and marketing teams removed before the report’s release.
Then, as you may know, they eventually admitted it.
The result of this long and inexplicable delay may have set back by months our understanding of the whole Trump-Russian scandal.
Watch this for all the gory details:
Continue reading Is Facebook Covering Up Russian Hacking Of The 2016 Election?
I usually focus on science books, but suddenly there are some deals on key classics that should still appeal.
A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy
Recounting the final year of the Civil War, this classic volume by Bruce Catton won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for excellence in non-fiction.
In this final volume of the Army of the Potomac Trilogy, Catton, America’s foremost Civil War historian, takes the reader through the battles of the Wilderness, the Bloody Angle, Cold Harbot, the Crater, and on through the horrible months to one moment at Appomattox. Grant, Meade, Sheridan, and Lee vividly come to life in all their failings and triumphs.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – 10th anniversary edition: A Year of Food Life
In every area of life, but especially in the overlapping realms of technology, science, and health, misunderstanding how things work can be widespread, and that misunderstanding can lead to problems.
In the area of voting, the main problem seems to be the expenditure of great amounts of outrage and concern over things that are not real. At the same time this happens, things that are real matter a great deal.
I’ll give you one example. Remember the special election for the Congressional Representative for Georgia’s 6th district, earlier this year? Several media outlets reported “voting machines stolen,” which, in turn, caused great outrage and concern on The Internet because, well, voting machines had been stolen.
Now, pause for a moment and think what this means.
by MM