Liz's Bloglet - Thursday 24 July 2003

Another thing I've done since becoming hooked to the internet (finally) is joined Lifemapper. It's SETI-at-home for the biological crowd. It uses known collection points of taxa from various museum collections combined with geological/geographical/climatological/ecological layers to calculate expected habitat ranges. Mostly, the assignments are for rare species in their native habitats, but occasionally they do more speculative calculations, like the possible range of the snakehead (an oldie but goodie blogmass meme). _
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09:13:47 AM, Thursday 24 July 2003

TNT showed the Law & Order/Homicide two-parter send-up of Kenneth Starr last night. If there ever was a public figure who deserved to be spanked by McCoy, it was Starr. Beautiful. _
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05:34:32 PM, Wednesday 23 July 2003

Stay informed. Speak out. Save AmeriCorps _
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10:21:14 AM, Wednesday 23 July 2003

It seems likely that blaming the absence of WMD's on poor intelligence and saying "Clinton bombed those embassies based on poor intelligence" was part of the gameplan all along. Because, I mean, after all, Clinton lied about sex. _
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03:33:13 PM, Tuesday 22 July 2003

I'm trying out Opera. Mozilla and Netscape require far too much RAM to run on this little computer and IE 6 seems to suck. I kind of like this, even with the banner ads. It's certainly faster than any of the others. I'll definitely give it some time before I pay money for a browser, though. _
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03:46:59 PM, Tuesday 15 July 2003

During a random channel surf last night, Remi and I stumbled upon "The Brendan Leonard Show" on ABC Family...and it was actually very funny and clever. It seems to just be a bunch of kids with a video camera. The sketches we saw: 1)obstacle course lined with banana peels to test how slippery they really are 2)Brendan's older sisters mocking a home video of him from childhood in which he talks about going to a petting zoo, then tries to go down a slide and falls off, then talks about falling off 3)Brendan asks one of his friends to videotape a moving car, he passes it off to another friend, who passes it off to another friend, and a game of video "telephone" ensues. _
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09:30:48 AM, Tuesday 15 July 2003

Bill Moyers interviews Jon Stewart and offers hope for American journalism. _
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09:17:30 PM, Monday 14 July 2003

Moveon.org has set up an easy way for you to sign a petition and send a personal message to your congressfolk encouraging them to support a congressional investigation of the good ole "what the president knew and when he knew it." No matter your political persuasion, this surely appears to be a question worthy of investigation. _
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08:37:32 PM, Monday 14 July 2003

After many delays, with causes ranging from hurricanes to massive oil leaks, the final bug collection is complete. Let the thesis commence (immediately following the identification of roughly 42,000 bugs). _
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05:55:02 PM, Saturday 12 July 2003

I'm interested in hearing opinions on this "privacy policy". How can you claim that a publicly available webpage is "confidential"? By linking to this, am I breaking the rules? For that matter, by referring me to it, was Google? _
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10:32:58 AM, Thursday 10 July 2003

It's always upsetting when an important bill comes before the Senate and I get email messages saying "Contact Senators Zell Miller and Saxby Chambliss and tell them how you feel." Yeah, like they care. _
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11:58:42 AM, Wednesday 9 July 2003

An article from the Santa Fe New Mexican raises questions about how SJC is run and why Balkcom (president of the Santa Fe campus) left. Why shouldn't the dean, who is always a long-time member of the faculty, have more authority than the president, who is always an outsider of some sort or another? Just because other schools don't do it that way? Isn't it good to separate the authority into "fund-raiser" and "person who knows what's going on on campus"? Shouldn't the dean, a representative of the faculty, have ultimate say in any changes in the Program? _
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11:54:39 AM, Wednesday 9 July 2003

_
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10:08:41 AM, Wednesday 9 July 2003

Because it keeps coming up, I want to point the world towards the complete text of TITLE IX OF THE EDUCATION AMENDMENTS OF 1972 CHAPTER 38 - DISCRIMINATION BASED ON SEX OR BLINDNESS. You see, it's not just some federal rule about letting women play sports, and I defy even the biggest football junkie or oppressed wrestler to tell me that barring discrimination based on sex or blindness in public education is a bad thing. _
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11:39:25 AM, Tuesday 8 July 2003

You could take my word for it that nobody is monitoring stream restoration projects, but here is a good illustration. _
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11:15:37 AM, Tuesday 8 July 2003

Far be it from me to say that a former Monsanto executive and MBA/lawyer probably is not interested in doing a very good job as the temporary head of the EPA. Oh wait, I just said it, didn't I? _
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11:10:34 AM, Tuesday 8 July 2003

Am I the only person who heard about this and wondered why John Ashcroft couldn't just get Justice O'Connor to go up in a small plane like the last two people who got in his way? _
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12:41:40 PM, Monday 7 July 2003

After two years, my computer is finally hooked to the campus network. Expect more frequent blogging, as I will no longer have to walk to the computer lab (although I probably still will, because a G4 beats a Pentium 133 any day). _
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06:12:32 PM, Wednesday 2 July 2003

A pretty amusing review of Ann Coulter's Treason

In some ways, the nutso American brand of archconservatism mirrors traditional anti-Semitism. Jew-haters proclaim that Jews control the media, international finance and almost everything else of importance -- but, somehow, Jews have accumulated a 2,000-year history of expulsions, pogroms and, finally, the mass murder of the Holocaust. It is the same with American liberals. They control everything, and yet, somehow, the White House, both houses of Congress and, with the exception of several delis in New York, the entire business community are in the hands of conservatives. It's hard to figure. _
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09:30:36 AM, Wednesday 2 July 2003

Bill _
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09:30:44 AM, Tuesday 1 July 2003

I had a good week relaxing, singing, fluting, talking to kids and my folks and my aunts and people I've known forever, rock-hopping, helping Remi cook, and just in general being in a different place and doing different things. It was also nice to be surrounded by liberal Presbyterians again, and to remember that there are quite a few people out there who share my views of the world (we're just very well dispersed). Now I'm back here, where it's still raining thanks to Hurricane Bill, and I'm still waiting to finish my field work. _
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01:42:12 PM, Monday 30 June 2003

Mr. Kalkavage made it into a Metafilter post. _
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07:14:05 AM, Monday 30 June 2003

Priceless. _
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11:28:10 AM, Thursday 19 June 2003

We were supposed to go out today to collect the penultimate bug sample. The USGS recently added a gage at one of my sites. It usually runs at around a foot deep, which is a nice wading depth. The current depth of 10 feet, however, is not so nice for wading. _
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06:47:00 AM, Tuesday 17 June 2003

Register of Ecological Models A fantastic alternative to inefficient journal searching and primary author contacting. _
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12:54:07 PM, Monday 16 June 2003

An editor with the gift of writing headlines _
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12:32:44 PM, Monday 16 June 2003

And we could have paid for AmeriCorps with the taxes on dividends no stinking problem. Warren Buffet explains why it's fair to tax the hell out of his dividends. _
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07:54:12 AM, Monday 16 June 2003

So much for AmeriCorps. Thanks for destroying a really good program that was working, Republican stupid-heads. _
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06:26:50 AM, Sunday 15 June 2003

Did I mention Buffy? And also Buffy. _
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10:09:47 AM, Friday 13 June 2003

The City That Ate Georgia. My mom will be amused to know that Jasper County is now part of metro-Atlanta. _
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01:45:35 PM, Thursday 12 June 2003

Also, based on the Postal Service limited tracking abilities, I think it's pretty likely Buffy is in our mailbox right now. So if Remi sees this, he might want to go and let her out, because our mailbox is pretty small. _
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01:19:04 PM, Thursday 12 June 2003

I share the surface of my desk (we each have a leg-hole and a set of drawers but there's nothing to separate our coke can piles) with a pretty interesting person who just got back from a month of learning about dendrochronology (quick, resurrect your Greek skills and parse that one). She was at the University of Arizona, which is the birthplace of the modern study of tree rings (and here I thought there weren't any trees in Tuscon). It's a pretty interesting field of study--there's a lot more to it than just thin ring=little rain, thick ring=lots of rain. _
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01:08:41 PM, Thursday 12 June 2003

Matt Kondolf is a super-cool fluvial geomorphologist (and chair of the Portuguese Studies program) at Berkeley who is part of our stream restoration working group through NCEAS. He has edited an extremely cool looking book coming out soon. _
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12:45:36 PM, Saturday 7 June 2003

Because country music sometimes rocks:

DID I SHAVE MY LEGS FOR THIS

Flowers and wine
Is what I thought I would find
When I came home from workin' tonight
Well now here I stand
Over this frying pan
And you want a cold one again

I bought these new heels
Did my nails
Had my hair done just right
I thought this new dress
Was a sure bet
For romance tonight

Well it's perfectly clear
Between the t.v. and beer
I won't get so much as a kiss
As I head for the door
I turn around to be sure
"Did I shave my legs for this?" _
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10:59:54 PM, Wednesday 4 June 2003

Summer rocks. _
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11:22:56 AM, Tuesday 3 June 2003

I made a few changes to the sidebar. It's nice to have a little free time. _
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06:20:55 PM, Sunday 1 June 2003

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