Liz's Bloglet - Thursday 29 July 2004

I just received a picture from Tuxedo's rescuer of a homeless kitten from Tuxedo's old neighborhood who appears to be Tuxedo, Jr. We don't need another cat. We don't need another cat. We don't need another cat. _
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10:31:38 AM, Thursday 29 July 2004

It is actually done, really, now. Submitted to the grad school and everything. I will have to pay an obscene amount of money to make pretty bound copies for my committee and department and I suppose myself, but otherwise it will soon be available to mere mortals by download from the UGA library.

To celebrate the final final end of the thesis my Kanguru drive died this morning. Actually it's been in the process of dying for months. There was a trick to wiggling the power switch to make it work and today no amount of wiggling helped. The Kanguru drive contains all of my data plus JMP, among other things, so it dying a few days ago would have been a bad bad thing. But the thesis is done, so it doesn't matter. And their customer support is great, so I should have it back with an unwiggly power switch soon. _
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02:55:23 PM, Tuesday 27 July 2004

Judy the master editor caught quite a few typos. Once I fix those, I am approved. _
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07:13:44 AM, Sunday 25 July 2004

The Georgia River Survey is a volunteer endeavor by four recent graduates of UGA with assistance from various grad students, technicians, and curious hangers-on. They are canoeing down rivers in Georgia (starting as high up as they can and going to the ocean) and doing longitudinal water quality, fish, bug, vegetation, and bird studies as well as taking tons of gorgeous photos. This is a project I've always thought would be fun to do on a river, but they've already done 3, and are hoping to do 2 more before they have to get real jobs. They are currently supported by donations and their own pocket money. _
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10:54:59 AM, Friday 23 July 2004

Duke University to give each entering freshmen an iPod. For academic use, of course. Hopefully, by next fall they will have recognized how badly their grad students need iPods as well. _
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12:39:37 PM, Tuesday 20 July 2004

The thesis is to the advisor. Ordinarily, the advisor would still have many recommended changes to the thesis, but since she is currently relaxing on a little island off the coast of Washington, one expects she may not have much to say at all about the thesis. Now I need to clean my desk, before my officemates set fire to it in desperation. _
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12:16:19 PM, Tuesday 20 July 2004

So I completely missed the fact that the most prolific new member of Metafilter is a)a Johnny, and b)a (former?) very prolific member of the original j-list. Wow, now his verbiage on Mefi makes a lot more sense. He can't help it. He has the disease we all struggle against. _
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09:30:09 AM, Saturday 17 July 2004

I am not a writer. So I offer you quotes from somebody who is, Bill Moyers (via atrios)

And they hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor." The very Jesus who told 5,000 hungry people that all of you will be fed, not just some of you. The very Jesus who challenged the religious orthodoxy of the day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath, who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast, who raised the status of women and treated even the tax collector like a child of God. The very Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple. This Jesus has been hijacked and turned into a guardian of privilege instead of a champion of the dispossessed.

Let's get Jesus back. The Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight-hour work day. Let's get back the Jesus who caused Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop. The Jesus who called a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor - 10 years before the New Deal. The Jesus in whose name Dorothy Day challenged the church to march alongside auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. The Jesus who led Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.
That Jesus has been scourged by his own followers, dragged through the streets by pious crowds, and crucified on a cross of privilege.

But let's do it in love. I know it can sound banal and facile to say this. The word "love" gets thrown around too casually these days. And brute reality can mock the whole idea of loving one another. We're still living in the shadow of Dachau and Buchenwald. The smoke still rises above Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and East Timor. The walls of Abu Ghraib still shriek of pain. What has love done? Where is there any real milk of human kindness?

But the love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book of essays Justice and Mercy, where he writes: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind." _
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06:43:27 PM, Thursday 15 July 2004

On the BBC news last night I heard a pretty interesting commentary. The guy's main point was that the fundamental question now is not whether the war in Iraq was right or wrong or whether the intelligence was faulty or not--it's whether, the next time a question about going to war comes up, Parliament and the British people would feel comfortable trusting Tony Blair with that decision. _
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09:08:52 AM, Thursday 15 July 2004

Engineers don't care why it works as long as they think it does
Scientists don't care if it works or not as long as they understand why
Economists don't care either way if the internal rate of return is okay
Managers don't know unless someone bothers to tell them
Planners know how it should have turned out

from Cullen, 1990, "The turbulent boundary between water science and water management" _
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01:08:27 PM, Wednesday 14 July 2004

I submitted to format check. My thesis is now an 8.5 mb pdf with uniform margins and fonts and styles and resides in the grad school's computer. It will not stay that way for long, because I have to disassemble it in order to fix a few content issues (and give all the figures actual legends instead of placeholder legends). But I am much closer. And now that I know that making pdfs is really easy, I will do it more often. _
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03:52:59 PM, Monday 12 July 2004

A stranger stopped me and said friend do you know Jesus
I surprised him when I said I'm sure I do
Then he handed me a Bible and he showed me where to look
And what to say and how to pray to find the truth
When I tried to talk, he wouldn't listen
When I wouldn't pray, he shook his head
So I gave him back his Bible and I hugged him
I don't think he understood a word I said

I said I think it must have been a different Jesus than the one I met when I was just a child
I thought I recognized the name, but the one I know could not have changed that much

I was gettin' dressed for church one Sunday morning
When a TV preacher used that name again
He's shoutin' Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, as he danced across the platform
Pretty ladies in the front row said amen, amen
It was later on at church tht I remembered
That the devil tempted Jesus with a show
If he'd just say the word, the world would watch him
But when Jesus said the word, the word was no

So I think it must have been a different Jesus than the one I met when I was just a child
I thought I recognized the name, but the one I know could not have changed that much

Now some will use his name to sell you books and records
Some just use his name to curse and swear
We got bathroom Bible thumpers and Jesus-jingle bumpers
People stickin' his name most anywhere
We got politicians who pray to get elected
People praise the Lord and carry guns
How come the ones who use his name so often
Fail to recognize him when he comes

Or they'd find he's always been the same old Jesus
He hasn't changed in spite of what we've heard
Still a friend to sinners everywhere
I've never met a man who cared so much. _
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06:40:37 PM, Thursday 8 July 2004

I have gained many advantages having been born white and middle class. Many more are gained by those born white, middle class, and male. If you don't recognize this at the beginning, it's pretty hard to have a discussion about race, wealth, gender, or bootstraps. _
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01:32:12 PM, Monday 5 July 2004

We get to be a ripple in the water.
We get to be a rock that's thrown.
We get to be a boy on the bridge
Standing over the reservoir.
See the water lap along the shoreline,
The buried forest of a man made lake,
Cemeteries are lying underneath it,
Your heart like a dam when it breaks.
We are floating, we are swimming
And in this moment we are forgetting
What it costs, what it takes
For one perfect world
When we look the other way.

I'm okay if I don't look a little closer.
(I am driving with the tank full.)
I'm okay if I don't see beyond the shore.
(The sun is blistering the blacktop road.)
I'm okay if I don't have to do the killing
(We are talking, cellular and mobile,)
Or know what the killing is for.
(As if it's some kind of cure for this world of woe.)
We are talking, we are driving
And in this moment we are denying
What it costs, what it takes
For one perfect world
When we look the other way.

If you can't see beyond the myth of isolation
If the miracle of daybreak doesn't move you anymore;
Connect the points and see the constellations
As the night comes down on the reservoir.
We are swimming, we are floating
And in this moment we are beholden to
What it costs, what it takes
For one perfect world.
Can we learn to live another way? _
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11:18:06 AM, Monday 5 July 2004

Good friends. Good food. Good fireworks. Good politics. It's our country, too. It's our flag, too. _
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11:14:27 AM, Monday 5 July 2004

I refuse to read another criticism of Fahrenheit 9/11 written by someone who has not seen the movie (or who can't spell Fahrenheit). Any criticism of the movie by someone who has actually seen it needs to actually refute the facts presented in the movie, not whine that the facts are true but make the president look bad. Because the facts are true, and the president does look bad.

Bowling for Columbine was not an anti-gun movie--its fundamental point was "American's shoot each other a lot more often than anybody else, and nobody knows why." Similarly, Fahrenheit 9/11 is not an anti-war movie. A war whose purpose was to capture Osama Bin Laden and remove the Taleban in retaliation for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is portrayed as a very good idea. The movie's fundamental point is "Wars are waged by the rich and powerful and fought by the poor and powerless; therefore, the rich and powerful have an obligation to those who elected them to make sure they are pursuing the right war for the right reasons." I'd like to see a refutation of that. _
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07:34:39 AM, Saturday 3 July 2004

I added Alas, a Blog to my sidebar and removed Oliver Willis, who I've pretty much stopped reading. Alas contributor ampersand (Barry Deutsch) draws a fantastic political comic called, well, Ampersand. It was featured in a book of political cartoonists that I gave Remi for his birthday. Check out "A Concise History of Black-White Relations in the US" and "If Housepets Were Libertarians" for two of my absolute favorites. Update: figured out how to make the links work. Enjoy! _
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12:12:29 PM, Friday 2 July 2004

Native Fish Conservancy is an organization of people of all types who just happen to like our native fish a whole lot. Surprisingly for a nonprofit, they have a cool website (ignoring the terrible spelling errors). Check out the amusing description of the design and construction of a duckweed skimmer and algae skimmer and the recipes for invasive exotic fish. Also, they gave my friend Megan a grant. _
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01:38:54 PM, Wednesday 30 June 2004

I think I've linked to them before, but I just want to plug our local organic farm co-op Locally Grown who grow the best tasting vegetables in the world right in the area surrounding Athens and sell direct to the community. The only corporate money involved is the gas to drive from Walton or Oconee County to Athens and some of their farming supplies. I was never a true believer in organic gardening, but I have always loved fresh picked produce, and this really is the best stuff I've ever had. It may be the care that's taken with it and just how fresh it is more than the use of manure and ladybugs, but it's just so good.. _
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05:07:40 PM, Tuesday 29 June 2004

Atlanta Time Machine shows vintage photographs and modern photographs from the same place. via MeFi, but since I've actually been to some of these places I thought it was cool. I think this would be a fun project for almost anywhere. I've wanted to wander around Athens taking pictures, because it's just a neat looking plae. Maybe I'll check out the UGA library photos soon. _
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05:01:20 PM, Tuesday 29 June 2004

Chiwetel Ejiofor (of Dirty Pretty Things) is included on The Observer's list of 80 people under 40 who they predict will be the most influential in British culture in the coming years. Included in his description is a note that he has been recruited by Joss Whedon to work on a sci-fi project. It sounds like another awesome actor has been added to the Firefly cast. _
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11:58:51 AM, Tuesday 29 June 2004

So I, as always behind on the hip new fashion, now have one of those sexy new gmail accounts. It is hydropsyche at that thingy dot com. This is a larval Hydropsyche and this is a diagram of the net they build to catch their food and this is an adult. Oh, and well you know, etymology and entomology in one cool package. _
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08:44:15 AM, Saturday 26 June 2004

The conference sucked as promised. If you're worried that your tax money is being wasted on a regular basis by pretty much every branch of state and federal government, you are right. I love government and believe it can do wonderful things, and people like me are duped everyday by contractors who just want to make money. Winston-Salem, however, deserves some credit for being a much nicer place than I had thought. The downtown is a nice mix of art deco and remodeled tobacco warehouses with a few modern skyscrapers while the neighborhood immediately adjacent is crammed full of 19th century houses and cracked brick sidewalks straight out of Annapolis. And there's Old Salem, which I didn't go to on this particular visit, but is allegedly actually larger than the colonial bit of Williamsburg. And with it comes Moravian ginger cookies and sugar cake of the gods which they even served us for breakfast. There did seem to be the reputed thriving arts scene with galleries and concert halls everywhere (in a suitable mix of art deco and former tobacco warehouses). There is a good mix of ethnic food, including Thai and Indian on one block next to the over-priced, over-air conditioned Adam's Mark. Now if the Best Western was a little less crappy and a few of the obviously nice restaurants were open for supper... _
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08:16:20 PM, Thursday 24 June 2004

I am staying at my parents house enroute to Winston-Salem for the Southeast Stream Restoration Conference (be still my beating heart). When I went into my bathroom there was a strange sound from the shower. My brother's 17 pound cat, Charlie, was hanging out in there. He was very glad to see me, but never explained why he was in the shower. If you see this, Lee, your cat is very strange. _
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09:01:54 PM, Monday 21 June 2004

I thoroughly enjoyed Saved!. I am so weary of it all, even the gentle poking in this funny, sweet movie at least makes me feel less alone. Although I attended a public high school mostly before the great religiousity takeover of 1994, I experienced plenty of fliers on my windshield telling me I was going to hell. I was told that because my church was not one where people were "born again" or "saved" and we practiced infant baptism that were were not real Christians (and Catholics were even more damned than mainstream Protestants). If some Christians were damned, obviously the few Jews, Muslims, Unitarians, Bahai, atheists, or merely unreligious among us were as well. It was before abstinence only education, but the "True Love Waits" pledges were already being passed around, as well as the SADD pledges to never drink or use drugs. People refused to let their children read certain books, and tried to prevent the rest of us from reading them as well. In this day and age, where formerly mainstream denominations are being taken over by literalists, where abstinence only sex-ed is the rule, where Democratic congress people shout out "under god" in the pledge of allegiance, Saved! is a breath of fresh air, a tiny whisper of, "wait a second, of course there are shades of grey. Of course things aren't simple and absolute like we pretend they are." It shouldn't be outlandish for Christian kids to be friends with Jewish kids and not talk about hellfire. It shouldn't be radical to say "I'm gay and Jesus loves me." I want my religion back. Thanks to Michael Stipe and Mandy Moore, and the awesome Jena Malone and even cute lil Macauley Culkin, I'm beginning to think it's might really be morning in America. _
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11:02:21 AM, Monday 21 June 2004

I was planning on writing some emails this week but, wow, the new Yahoo mail really sucks. I will write, as soon as they work out their problems. _
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10:41:20 AM, Wednesday 16 June 2004

It's 86 degrees already. Long summer ahead. _
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10:19:41 AM, Saturday 12 June 2004

Many of you may know that the winning word in this year's National Spelling Bee was autochthonous. What you may not know is that not only can I spell it, but it is a word that I use daily. Autochthonous matter is a carbon source produced within a stream (i.e. algae and aquatic plants) as compared to allochthonous matter which is a carbon source produced externally (e.g. leaves that fall into the stream). _
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04:36:24 PM, Thursday 10 June 2004

The former director of the Institute had a great thing in the AJC today about ecosystem services. Because the AJC is now requiring registration (and their registration process is arduous enough that I went through the whole thing but still don't have a login because I didn't login within the right period of time) I do not feel guilty about pasting it here in its entirety. If you feel horribly guilty about my crime, feel free to attempt to register and read it. http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/0604/09marsh.html "

"Natural economy's payoff exceeds cost

By C. RONALD CARROLL
Published on: 06/09/04
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The world's economic leaders, the Group of Eight, soon will end their meetings on Sea Island. They will have discussed commerce, trade, industry and probably security, and they will have discussed and promoted economic policies that may affect the lives of the world's richest and the poorest.

To reach Sea Island, they crossed miles of salt marsh and estuaries. While most of them probably enjoyed the scenery, I suspect that they were unaware that they were visiting a different kind of economy, the silent economy of nature. Conceivably one could put a market value on this coastal landscape.

The accounting would go something like this:
- Service charges for growing the young shrimp, blue crab, and many of the fish that are later caught by sport and commercial fisheries.
- Subsidizing insurance premiums against risk from damaging storm surges.
- Substituting for water treatment facilities by filtering and decomposing pollutants that wash down rivers and off coastal communities.
- Maintaining the physical integrity of Georgia's Golden Isles, including Sea Island.
- Providing aesthetic pleasure akin to fine art.
How much is this landscape worth? Priceless.

The salt marshes of Georgia embrace some 400,000 acres, about a third of the salt marshes along the Atlantic coast from Newfoundland to northern Florida. The marsh has been described as a great productive nursery that feeds the young and many adults of blue crabs, shrimp, flounder, menhadden, mullet, oysters and dozens of other species of ecological if not gastronomic significance.

Describing the productivity of the salt marsh is a bit dry no matter its ecological and economic importance. But on a calm spring night, if you canoed into the marsh on an incoming high tide, you would experience a more evocative meaning of marsh productivity. All around you would hear sounds as if thousands of popcorn kernels were popping. The popping sounds are the feeding noises made by enormous populations of juvenile shrimp as they graze upon diatoms by the millions per square yard and on organic detritus, the byproduct of the vast meadows of salt marsh grass and reeds.

The natural economy is the foundation of the human economy of Georgia. Atlanta, often called the economic engine of Georgia among other more pejorative descriptors, is completely dependent on the small watersheds that feed the Chattahoochee and a few smaller rivers that supply Atlanta's drinking, commercial and industrial water.

The many small and large wetlands, especially those along the fall line that demarcates the piedmont from the coastal plain, are the recharge sites for the great Floridan aquifer and others that supply drinking water to South Georgia and North Florida. The trees of metro Atlanta form an urban forest, though smaller in recent years, that filters out air pollutants and helps Atlanta meet Environmental Protection Agency air quality standards.

The same forest counters the urban heat island effect of Atlanta's concrete and asphalt landscape. For all these important environmental services provided by nature we pay essentially nothing.

We too often complain when we are asked to provide some measure of protection for these services. Ironically, we often hear the argument that we cannot protect these natural environmental services because the economic costs are too great or the protective measures are too intrusive on private property rights. Yet, we enthusiastically encourage industries to settle in Georgia because they may provide positive economic benefits and we readily saddle residents with the tax costs of attracting these industries.

Why are we unwilling to pay the cost of maintaining the economic benefits of the natural economy? Perhaps we need to more fully understand the costs we would bear to provide those critical services that are now provided free by nature.

Consider the potential cost of an alternative to one important environmental service: the pollination of our food crops. Suppose pesticides, disease, parasites and habitat loss decimated wild bees and honeybees, as may well be happening. What would be the cost of substituting for these services? How large would the underpaid and overexploited migrant labor force need to be in order to hand pollinate Georgia's peach, apple and pear trees and its fields of melons, squash and pumpkins, if indeed people could do it?

The G-8 meeting was devoted to finding ways to protect and strengthen the world's commerce. We need a new meeting of world leaders to consider ways to protect and strengthen the world's natural economy, a Green-8 meeting.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
C. Ronald Carroll is co-director for science of the University of Georgia's River Basin Science and Policy Center, Institute of Ecology." _
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03:26:16 PM, Wednesday 9 June 2004

I remember Jimmy Carter being president, but, most of my childhood, Reagan was. And I remember being 12 years old and understanding exactly what Iran-Contra was about and being absolutely furious and offending my grandmother by saying so. _
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07:09:50 PM, Saturday 5 June 2004

On the trail of The Great Brain. A family attempts to track down the locations of The Great Brain books on a trip through central Utah. via MeFi _
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08:01:15 AM, Saturday 5 June 2004

I will be in Portland August 2-6 for the Ecological Society of America meeting. I decided I deserved to go to one good meeting this summer and Portland is cheaper to go to and stay in than Vancouver (where the North American Benthological Society is meeting). I'm also going to the Southeast Stream Restoration Conference in Winston-Salem in a few weeks, which I expect will not be any fun at all. _
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11:04:22 AM, Wednesday 2 June 2004

For the next 6 months I am essentially a database manager/lab manager/editing my thesis into publishable form. None of this requires thought. Since I am officially registered for the summer, I was thinking of auditing a class, but the only thing that caught my eye was Biochemistry. I enjoyed Organic Chemistry, big ole nerd that I am, so biochem might be fun. I used to feel inadequate for not having taken it, but I've since learned that several of my friends, with degrees in biology from fancy colleges you've heard of, never even took organic. So I shouldn't feel inadequate, and I should take it because it's interesting and it would make me a better biologist. The only problem is that it meets 9:15-11:15 every single day all summer. I will be out of town some, and I may just not be up to daily class. Since I would be auditing, I wouldn't have to go everyday, but if I'm not actually planning to go to class, it seems like I could just buy the book and read it and not bother registering for audit. Or I could just relax and watch The West Wing and read some trashy books and some good books and enjoy the fact that for a few months my work is pretty mindless. _
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10:23:33 AM, Wednesday 2 June 2004

Finally got West Wing Season 2. Unlike the 1st season, I saw a fair number of these on tv the first time around. My main observation so far connects to several conversations on the blogmass regarding accents on tv. Ainsley has a perfect North Carolina accent. If you've never heard me talk, that's essentially exactly what I sound like. The actor, Emily Procter, was born in Raleigh and went to Eastern Carolina University. I don't think anybody could fake that accent. I wouldn't mind if the North Carolina accent were depicted correctly more often, but I just don't think it's learnable by your average NYC or LA actor. Goodness knows it's impossible to unlearn. _
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09:50:04 AM, Wednesday 2 June 2004

If it's satire, General J.C. Christian, Patriot does it so much better. If it's not satire... _
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09:56:26 AM, Tuesday 25 May 2004

Tuxedo added to my sidebar. Because everybody should see pictures of the cat. _
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04:30:02 PM, Monday 24 May 2004

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