This past weekend I went on a group bike tour of five compost sites in Western Queens, NY, in the neighborhoods of Astoria, Long Island City and Sunnyside. The sites were as diverse as the borough’s residents, ranging from barrels in community gardens to a one-acre rooftop farm. And the compost was as stinky and […]
Data is everywhere. Dedicated citizen scientists can advance “professional science,” even without any dedicated funding, by learning to intelligently navigate and draw conclusions from the oceans of largely un-analyzed public data that we swim through every day. This story from The Boston Globe is a fantastic case in point:
As you may have heard, last week in Stockholm a bunch of lucky stiffs talented, hard-working scientists (and one fiction author) got to meet the King of Norway. Science-y highlights include the Physics prize, which went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for some fancy tricks with carbon (specifically graphene); the Medicine prize, to Robert G. Edwards for inventing the test tube baby; and the Chemistry prize, to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi, and Akira Suzuki for, ah, some other fancy tricks with carbon (plus palladium). That’s all well and good.
The collection, housed at the University of Padua’s Center for the Study of the Alpine Environment, was manufactured in the 19th century or before. Each specimen consists of a 7.5x5x1.5-inch book-shaped box, executed in the wood of the subject tree, which opens to display samples of that tree’s seedling, leaves, flowers, seeds, fine roots, sawdust, charcoal, and ash. The spines are bound with samples of the tree’s bark, and of course everything is labeled. [Thanks, loondawg!]
I’ve been interested in collecting woods for a long time. The International Wood Collectors Society is the premier collectors organization, and they promulgate a “standard sample block” measuring 6″ x 3″ x 1/2″. The smaller IWCS-size samples are much cheaper than these wooden “books” offered by Worlds Wood Library, but there’s no denying the elegance of this ideas as a display. The common name is cut into the book’s “spine,” and the latin binomial into its “cover.”
According to the anonymous hacker-proprietor of Teravolt.org, shining a 250 mW green laser through a hanging drop of scummy plant water will project shadows of all the little microflora on the wall and you can watch them flitter about with the naked eye. The embedded video is nothing short of amazing. I felt just like that cat.
