Liz's Bloglet - Saturday 29 July 2006

I just returned from a week spent doing my best to help a few people in rural Mississippi impacted by Hurricane Katrina. I saw a once middle class family whose house will soon be finished, if they can find the money to buy kitchen appliances, furniture, and carpeting. I saw an elderly man whose world is crumbling just like his house, on which he only let us put a band-aid. I saw a disabled couple with no resources, a condemned house, and a FEMA trailer.

I took no pictures of the people we met or their property. The internet is full of pictures of the devastation of Katrina. I just want you to know that it's been 11 months and people are still living in houses that ought to be torn down and little travel trailers and there is no end in sight. If you gave money before, give more. If you haven't yet, now is the time. The Red Cross is there. Habitat for Humanity is there. But volunteer labor is running thin because the weather is hot and funds are running short as the public has lost interest, or thinks things are better. They aren't. The Presbyterian Church USA is committed to the region through 2013, and I do not find it hard to believe that there will still be need then.

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10:30:13 PM, Saturday 29 July 2006

A few things that can be done:

Be consistent in denouncing the violence of both sides - especially when it is deliberately aimed at civilians (or targets where great civilian "collateral damage" will be the result).

Pray for the emergence of new political leadership on both sides - both of which seem bereft of creative, courageous, moral, or even pragmatic leadership.

Challenge any religious voices that seem utterly one-sided, completely neglecting the suffering and legitimate grievances of both sides.

Pray for new ways for Christians and our churches to join our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters in finding real and practical solutions for a just peace in the Middle East where two states can live with security and democracy.

And pray for better solutions than endless war to solve the real threats of terrorism in our world, because if we fail, all of our children will be at risk.

From Sojourners _
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09:46:08 PM, Friday 21 July 2006

It is 86 degrees at 9:40 at night. Please kill me. That is all. _
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09:41:29 PM, Friday 21 July 2006

Got an interesting rock, bone, or feather you'd like identified?

Does this sentence strike you as incorrect? _
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07:07:52 AM, Saturday 15 July 2006

The amazing story of physicist Emilie du Chatelet. Although popularly known only as Voltaire's lover, she was also his co-author and teacher and the person who brought Newtonian physics to France.

After a life spent fighting society's preconceptions and her own self-doubt, she died, as many great women have, from an unwanted pregnancy. _
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02:56:28 PM, Friday 14 July 2006

For all the science I've done this summer, my greatest conclusion is that Girlyman is awesome. There are several other new bands who have picked up the dense harmony awesomeness--Dear Nora, Azure Ray, the Futureheads--but Girlyman is just the best. That is all. _
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01:00:45 PM, Friday 14 July 2006

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" -- indeed, if I happen to be a privileged white male using Western European languages!

Hugo Schwyzer is an awesome blogger who infuriates me 49.99% of the time. Here he discusses the famous head-butt and privilege and is just awesome. _
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11:04:16 AM, Wednesday 12 July 2006

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04:49:35 PM, Tuesday 11 July 2006

Because I haven't posted them in a while and because I think they're two of the more important things to be found on these intarwebs, I give you, again,
The White Privilege Checklist and The Male Privilege Checklist

Update:Daily Effects of Straight Privilege _
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03:27:04 PM, Sunday 9 July 2006

If you live in one of those places that is currently having bad air quality, please consider cutting back on the driving, not mowing your lawn, etc for a few days. Those of us in the so-called sensitive populations would really appreciate, you know, being able to leave the house. Updated with much cooler map. Atlanta's air quality does, in fact, suck. _
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08:37:01 AM, Wednesday 5 July 2006

As the Mexican presidential election is still undecided, keep an eye on the Bush administration. _
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10:31:48 AM, Monday 3 July 2006

Power corrupts _
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10:11:09 AM, Monday 3 July 2006

Congratulations, Tim and Amy.

We had a wonderful weekend with Johnnies in our house and two good friends being awesome together. _
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11:36:14 AM, Sunday 2 July 2006

Wait, that's not what "ecology" is

I purposefully started out my ecology posts with typical theoretical ecology with little introduction, because that's what ecology is mostly all about. Of course, all average Americans think ecology is synonomous with environmentalism and would have been very confused by all the talk of energy flows and nitrogen cycles. How did we get from there to here?

Most sciences do their work in laboratories with closed, controlled systems. A physicist, chemist, geneticist, even most microbiologists can assume that how things work in the lab is pretty much how they work in the "real world".

So, quick thought experiment: design a laboratory set-up that simulates a stream. You need water, obviously, and it will need to move downhill and probably recirculated, like a flume. You'll need some sediment that is a lot like the stuff on a stream bottom. That sediment will need to be colonized by bacteria, algae, and fungi, as then also by small invertebrates and larger invertebrates. You might want some fish, and some frogs and snakes. So how many of each of these things do you want, and what species. How big will your flume need to be so they cann all co-exist? What might be unimportant so you could leave it out? What temperature will you maintain it at? How? Will you provide it with sunlight?

Now, imagine a forest in a lab. All of the above questions apply, as well as the obvious question of how big is your lab. What I'm getting at, obviously, is that we can't create our own experimental conditions--we have to work with what's available.

So if I'm interested in understanding how a mature (old-growth) forest handles leaflitter breakdown on the forest floor, I need a mature forest. If I'm in the Eastern US, I have a problem.

If I'm a stream ecologist interested in how carbon produced by algae in the stream is handled differently than carbon that enters the stream from leaves falling in, I need a stream with a forest around it. I also need a stream with relatively few other carbon inputs--if a wastewater treatment plant is adding human waste carbon just upstream from my experiment, I won't be able to examine what I was hoping to. The fundamental reason ecologists care about conservation of the natural world is that we want to understand it, and every human induced (anthropogenic) change is one more complication in our understanding.

I actually study urban streams. I am fascinated by how and why they respond to the different changes that our development has on them. Do I hate cities? No, I love living in them. Do I hate people? No, I love them, and want them to have streams that are safe for their kids to play in. I enjoy studying the complications, but it would be crazy for me to act like the complications don't exist. Am I a rabid environmentalist? _
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03:49:22 PM, Thursday 29 June 2006

Trying to do work with iTunes on shuffle when Aaron Neville doing "Louisiana 1927" came on. I leave in 3 weeks for a week in Gautier (I think it's 'go-shay'), Mississippi to drywall and paint and hopefully help. I've read everything Presbyterian Disaster Assistance has given me I've been faithfully reading St Casserole's blog, but I still forget, sometimes, just how awful it was. That song always reminds me. _
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03:33:29 PM, Thursday 29 June 2006

Religious based bigotry...let's end it now and forever. These ads have started running in our local independent weekly. Obviously, they're aimed at Christians, so they may run more in the South than elsewhere, but watch for them because they're awesome. _
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09:20:41 AM, Wednesday 28 June 2006

First olive grove planted in England The guy is even calling it a "climate change farm." _
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09:11:47 AM, Wednesday 28 June 2006

Although the first steps of ecosystem ecology were studying energy flows, modern ecosystem ecologists study flows of other things through ecosystems. Folks in our lab are huge fans of nitrogen and its physical, chemical, and biological movements and transformations, also known as biogeochemistry. Nitrogen is the most common gas in our atmosphere, and as a result has evolved to be a part of the chemical make-up of all living things on the planet. The vast majority of flora and fauna are made up of proteins, which are made of amino acids, which like most organic molecules are long chains of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms, but amino acids are special because they also have nitrogens.

Nitrogen is so common and so important, yet most things on earth struggle to meet their needs for it. That's because nitrogen gas, a molecule of two tightly bound atoms, is ridiculously stable. It doesn't dissolve easily in water and a large amount of energy is required to break the bonds. The main natural, abiotic methods of getting nitrogen to the earth's surface are lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions. Obviously, these happen infrequently. Animals have no good way of obtaining it except from their food. Luckily, many plants and microbes have evolved methods of "fixing nitrogen", breaking the N:N bond in order to use it.

Fixing nitrogen is expensive. Relatively rare metals are required. In all organisms that fix nitrogen, an enzyme called nitrogenase is involved, containing iron and molybdenum, and vitamin B¹², which contains cobalt, is also required. An energy source is also required. Many nitrogen fixers are photosynthetic themselves, such as cyanobacteria (also called blue green algae), while others live symbiotically with plants (such as those on the roots of legumes). In any case, the net result is the dinitrogen gas is turned into ammonia (NH₃) which is quickly reduced to ammonium (NH₄⁺) under normal conditions (I have now learned how to do subscripts and superscripts, thanks to Martin).

Many plants take up and use ammonium as their nitrogen source. In addition, many bacteria get their energy from nitrification, the transformation of ammonium into nitrate (NO₃^-) as part of chemoautotrophy (generating their own energy from chemical energy). Plants frequently prefer to get their nitrogen in the form of nitrate, for a variety of very exciting reasons. Some bacteria, in addition, get their energy from denitrification, transforming nitrate back to dinitrogen gas.

All of these transformations of nitrogen, and a few other minor ones, are going on all the time in the soil and water all over the earth. Each transformation varies depending on things like current concentrations, light, temperature, oxygen levels, and pH. When people add more nitrogen to a system, whether in the form of ammonium or nitrate, from fertilizer, animal waste, or human waste, things change.
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01:31:21 PM, Tuesday 27 June 2006

The children are our future _
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11:54:09 AM, Tuesday 27 June 2006

Happy birthday, Title IX! Thanks for opening doors to math, science, vocational training, and, of course, sports. You have made my life unmeasureably better and have done the same for countless other women and girls. You've taken a lot of crap from people who don't understand you, but those of us who count think you're awesome. _
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10:04:54 AM, Tuesday 27 June 2006

Ecology is the study of living creatures and their interactions with their environment. I study streams and am fascinated by all manner of slimy and crawly things, but by philosophy I am an ecosystem ecologist. The easiest way to understand that is to start by explaining the other major schools of ecological thought. Population ecologists study a single group of a single species at a time, say the lions of the Serengeti; they look at how birth, death, immigration, and emigration rates change and why. Community ecologists study the interactions of several species, for instance the plants in a forest; they look at differences and competition among the species.

Ecosystem ecologists are aware that the flora and fauna have names, but we study everything in big chunks. The most common chunks are energy levels or trophic levels, determined by how things get their energy, which is their position in the food web. At the bottom would be creatures that make their own energy--plants, algae, and photosynthesizing or chemosynthesizing bacteria. The next level would be creatures that consume them, those that eat them while they're living, the grazers, and those that eat them when they're dead, the detritivores. Then come the first level predators, and then the predators that eat the first level predators, etc.

Obviously, no food web really works neatly in levels like this. Many predators eat some plants. A malnourished cow will eat insects or even small mammals. Detritivorous shrimp eat the corpses of sharks. That's how living things are. That's one of those ways ecology is not physics.

We can study these things by taking gross measures. We can measure photosynthesis rates, or rates of primary production directly. We can measure changes in biomass over time and estimate net rates of production and consumption. Most of these processes, however, are really hard to measure accurately. Therefore, most of the time we use proxies and then models which have been established by lots of research to provide accurate estimates. Changes in the ratio of common and rare isotopes of nitrogen indicate how many trophic levels an animal is removed from the plant which originally produced its energy. Changes in oxygen levels in a body of water over day and night tell us how much energy was produced and consumed in that time.

Population ecologists will tell you ecosystem ecologists put everything in a black box and don't care about what's inside, but for myself I want to study the box precisely because what's inside the box is so exciting. _
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04:54:33 PM, Monday 26 June 2006

There is no "Boy Crisis" Boys' test scores have increased over the past 20 years, just not as much as girls'. More boys are going to college, it's just that even more girls are. Low income boys and non-white boys are not doing well, but neither are low income girls and non-white girls. The crisis in the American educational system doesn't seem to be any different than it was 20 years ago, it's just that right now wealthy, white girls are doing somewhat better than wealthy, white boys. And we all know that nobody's ever supposed to do better than wealthy, white boys. _
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11:59:34 AM, Monday 26 June 2006

So here's the thing. I hope to have my PhD as my present to myself for my 33rd birthday. To do this, I need to pass my prelims in the next 9 months or so. Prelims take different forms depending on institution and department. Ecology at Duke requires a oral examination encompassing both a defense of a dissertation proposal and a comprehensive exam. My dissertation proposal is doing well, and within the area it's concentrated on I'm feeling pretty good. Comprehensive knowledge, however, is another thing entirely. For that part, I will need to know the history and major theories of ecology and biogeochemistry, plus have working knowledge in other disciplines that are closely related to my research, including hydrology, hydraulics, geomorphology, biochemistry, microbiology, mycology, and phycology.

Therefore, I'm going to use this blog to practice explaining history, theories, concepts, and general mess clearly and concisely. The annoying feminist/religious/political/movie/pop culture blogging will of course not stop, but expect to see more science as well. Hopefully, in addition to helping me practice and keeping me honest about working on it everyday, this will serve as a useful introduction to ecology, which most days feels like the most misunderstood science on the planet. _
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09:57:19 AM, Sunday 25 June 2006

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12:33:30 AM, Sunday 25 June 2006

I recommend everyone go read the AskMeFi through-the-fly versus up-and-over thread immediately. _
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12:10:04 AM, Sunday 25 June 2006

The bus ride home last night Words of duty and hope from an attendee of the Presbyterian General Assembly, which passed the recommendations of the committee on Peace, Unity, and Purity. Has schism begun or healing started or is it just time for everybody to go home and get back to what really matters? _
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06:26:55 PM, Saturday 24 June 2006

The Onion nicely skewers the anti-science attitude which seems to be all the rage among folks of all political stripes these days

As always, anyone who thinks scientists lie about evolution, alternative medicine, and global climate change are welcome to stop enjoying the benefits of science. _
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04:47:45 PM, Saturday 24 June 2006

We saw my dad perform in Carousel with the Davidson Community Players last night. The acting, singing, and dancing were all excellent. The play, although not performed that often, has several of the most familiar Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes: "June is Busting Out all Over", "Blow High, Blow Low", "You'll Never Walk Alone". It is hard, however, to wrap one's head around a play whose moral seems to be "Domestic violence is okay if you really love her." _
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04:32:42 PM, Saturday 24 June 2006

Since some hockey team with the word Carolina in its name won some championship, now is a good time for a friendly Public Service Announcement from a real, live North Carolina native.

Carolina by itself is not a noun referring to a place, it is an adjective (or possibly a noun referring to one of two public universities). People are from North Carolina or South Carolina not just "Carolina". Carolina is an adjective which is useful when referring to flora and fauna (Carolina Chickadee, Carolina Jessamine) or other things which are meant to include both states, like, say, sports teams.

North and South Carolina are very different places. One has several large cities, the Outer Banks, and the Blue Ridge Parkway. The other has Charleston, Myrtle Beach, and was burned by Sherman. We have different food styles and completely different accents (several in each state, and they don't really overlap). We've been separate states since before the country formed.

If you say "Are you headed back to Carolina?" to me, my logical inference is you cannot remember which state I'm from, and can't be bothered to admit it. If I couldn't remember if you were from, say, Connecticut or Massachussetts (two little tiny states very close together), I would say "Are you headed back to Connecticut, or is it Massachusetts?" and you would tell me and then I would know.

That is all. _
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07:07:06 AM, Thursday 22 June 2006

Presented without any additional commentary: Ann Coulter: the problem with evolution is all them women and biologists _
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07:23:41 AM, Wednesday 21 June 2006

Hey Remi, we need to go to the comics store!
in 1899, Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla decided to end war forever. With Twain's connections and Tesla's inventions, they went into business selling world peace. So, what happened? Only now can the tale be told - in which Twain and Tesla collided with Edison and Morgan, an evil science cabal merging the Black Arts and the Industrial Age. Turn of the century New York City sets the stage for a titanic battle over the very fate of mankind. _
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09:44:59 AM, Friday 16 June 2006

The first chapter of my thesis has now been published and is available in the Online First section of the journal Environmental Management Not to be confused with the Journal of Environmental Management or the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management or the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

I think you can see the abstract even if you don't have access to the article. I guess that means it will be out in the August issue. So, um, that's good for my CV. Update: I think that I found a permalink which will actually work. PDF form of the article still not available, though _
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03:27:30 PM, Wednesday 14 June 2006

For the love of all that is decent and good please make the pain stop. _
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02:31:28 PM, Wednesday 14 June 2006

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) meets tomorrow and I'm terrified of the results. The two big, controversial, doomsday topics of conversation are divestment of the denomination's assets in Israel until a solution is reached there, and adoption of a statement that basically says that the ordination of homosexuals is a complicated issue on which we cannot agree, but we should stay together as a denomination and allow dissent--allowing individual presbyteries to ordain people who dissent from the current standards for ordination if the presbtery judges the person worthy of ordination. I know very little about the former issue and don't have a really strong opinion about it--ugly charges of anti-semitism and war-mongering have been flung from both sides. The second issue may well lead to a schism in the next week.

My congregation here in Durham is firmly on the far left side of things, but also very committed to the denomination. There are very few things at the meeting that will change our feelings, although it would be nice to not live in fear of some sort of anti-gay witch hunt that could destroy our Session and Diaconate. There are many congregations that are similarly far to the right of things, and no longer committed to the denomination. There are very few things at the meeting that will change their feelings and they are very likely to leave the denomination no matter what happens.

The congregation I grew up in, and many congregations I've been associated with or have friends who attend, is much more moderate with a membership with more diverse viewpoints. Those are the places I fear for if the denomination splits. I think the congregations as a whole are supportive of the denomination and its newest statement, but I worry that the ugliness that is about to happen will hurt people I care about. _
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09:07:31 AM, Wednesday 14 June 2006

A few photos fixed up and uploaded to flickr, with a few comments. As a taste, I give you the view from the rock where I brushed my teeth: _
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09:40:35 PM, Monday 12 June 2006

Awesome blogger The Happy Feminist is doing a series on mushy liberal values. So far she's done tolerance, which I read and thought "That's the best expression of my values that I've ever read" and then she posted emphathy and I thought "No, that is the best expression of my values that I've ever read. So, if you're full of mushy liberal values yourself, go read it. And expect more mushiness to follow.

Now I'm off to write up benthic organic matter protocols (really, I am, I swear) and then tonight start the processing and uploading of pictures of glaciers and mountains and nutrient diffusing substrates and bald eagles and such. _
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01:56:06 PM, Monday 12 June 2006

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