The fate of my eggs...

...does not belong within the realm of anyone's moral compass but my own!!! This makes me SO FURIOUS:
Workers' Religious Freedom vs. Patients' Rights
If my religion were white supremacy, would that give me a right to deny services to all non-white people in my profession? If you don't believe in birth control, then don't work in a profession where your job description entails providing birth control! It's like a PETA activist being employed at Cabella's and then refusing to sell anything related to hunting! Or a Jewish person taking a teaching job at a Catholic school, and then claiming they shouldn't have to teach the lessons that contradict their faith! Yes, you should be free to believe what you want. But so should I, and I believe that birth control, and in some cases abortion, are healthy, important, and the morally correct thing to do with my body and my life. If anyone stands in the way of that, they are infringing upon MY religious freedom AND health, not just "patients' rights". And when the uterus in question is MINE, then the only morals that can be imposed upon it are MINE. Think birth control and abortions are immoral? Then don't take it or have one. I won't encourage you to or secretly stuff condoms in your mailbox. In turn, I ask that you not take my prescriptions away from me (there are pharmacists who DO that!). Don't you dare try to prevent me from doing what I think is morally correct for ME. KEEP YOUR LAWS OUT OF MY BUSH, BUSH!!!!!!

Orioles won on a SUNDAY!

Yes, it's true. Today the Orioles beat the Angels, the team with the best record in MLB, 5-2! Why is this so noteworthy? No, not because the O's suck in general. Because they haven't won a game over their last FIFTEEN Sundays! It was becoming like a curse or something. The more amazing thing is that they won with Garrett Olson as the starting pitcher (hahaha)!

The Phillies are losing right now, but it's only 5-2 in the 4th. Maybe they can pull out an amazing comeback like they did yesterday! Check out this line score:



Isn't that crazy? That would've been an exciting game to be at. I miss Citizens Bank Park!

Oh, sweet!!! Shane Victorino just smashed a 3-run home run to tie the game! Those Braves are going DOWN.

Madeline

This is an old picture of Madeline, but it captures her current spirit. Poor thing wants to go outside all the time! I've tried to explain to her that it's too dark and there are too many mosquitoes and I've showered so I don't want to put on more bug spray. But we were out in the backyard earlier this evening and as I was putting sticks in the compost bin, Madeline started trying to attack the sticks like they were string toys. Then I started throwing them, and she chased them, although they were a little too big for her to get her mouth around them (and she usually only "fetches" paper wads and broccoli stems). She's just like a dog, it's so funny! But what was really hilarious was the dirty little trick I pulled to bring her back inside - I ran across the yard, up the steps, and inside, waving a stick behind me, and Madeline bounded after me the whole way. She was kind of pissed off when I then threw the stick outside and closed the door :) Hmm, maybe next time she goes under the porch I can coax her out with a stick instead of cat treats! It's so weird, I've never met a cat as dog-like as she is.

I haven't mentioned the Orioles in a while because it is sad. They've been slipping further and further below .500. They lost to Toronto twice yesterday, and I am scared to check the standings. They are losing to LA now, but Jay Payton just hit a 2 run double, so now they're only down 5-3 in the 7th. Maybe they can do it!

Settling In

It has been over 3 weeks since I moved in to my first home (as a homeowner, that is), and I am settling in pretty well. I've even started hanging pictures and only have one box left to unpack. However, I'm heading into week #2 with a broken AC. It hasn't been too bad so far, but tomorrow is supposed to be a high of 99 F, which I think is the hottest it's been since I moved here. I was initially dragging my feet on getting it fixed. Now the problem has been diagnosed (need a new compressor), but not yet solved, as Steve the AC guy was gonna try to find a low-cost compressor from some discount vendor he knows. Low-cost would be fantastic, but I will call him tomorrow, as Madeline and I are getting antsy! On Saturday night I slept at a friend's house after a party, which besides being a great way for me to meet some lovely women in my new town, was also a nice respite from my tropical-feeling home. Thanks Carolyn! I may have to sleep under my desk in my lovely air-conditioned office tomorrow night! This is pathetic, I've become too used to modern creature comforts! I should remember back to the hot summer nights spent in my grandparents non-ACed homes.

Anyway, here are some pictures of my new, humble little dwelling:







I don't have many from inside, but I'll wait until I get everything bought/ unpacked/ put-away...and host a visitor w/ a digital camera (don't want to waste film on some ordinary rooms!) And here is the poor little garden I started. Actually, the marigold seedlings are coming up quite well, the mint looks decent, and the tomato isn't dead (bought the mint, tomato, and basil plants from the garden store). The basil is being thoroughly enjoyed, but unfortunately not much by me. Does anyone know of any good organic insecticides for sweet basil? I'm quite naive and new at this!

Blacksburg, VA

Andrew and I spent a day in Blacksburg en route to moving me out to North Carolina. We took a short hike on the Dragon's Tooth trail, which follows the AT for a bit. It was a beautiful day until the hike back to the car when it POURED on us!









These little raccoons must've known the rain was coming. That's probably what they were trying to tell us with all that chattering! They drew attention to themselves, and we saw them climb into their tree hole. I think I've only seen raccoons going through garbage cans or dead on the side of the road and never thought they were very cute, but these little guys sure were!

See this one climbing the tree:


And this one with his cute little face peeking out of the hole:

Newfoundland

I am terribly behind in my blogging, so much so that probably no one - except for Kate, Andrew, and my mom - is checking my blog for updates anymore :) St. Johns, Newfoundland was a really nice trip. I'm glad I was able to break away from the ASLO conference for a little bit to do some running, sightseeing, and hiking. Up by Cabot Tower you could see some remnant icebergs that had drifted into the cliffs (kinda hard to make out in this photo - remember my digital camera broke, and my old Minolta just doesn't seem as good). Anyway, the color of the water around the ice chunks was really pretty:



On the last day of the conference I slipped out early to do an out-n-back run/hike of the East-Coast Trail (http://www.eastcoasttrail.com/trail/). It was an overcast sky, but still beautiful scenery! I ran/hiked about 18 miles (including the 3 miles to get from the hotel to the trailhead). It was a good workout!










My attempt at a self-portrait :)

Assault on Science

I've been meaning to blog about my marvelous trip to St. John's, Newfoundland, but have not had the time nor the internet connection. Now I have the latter but not much of the former, so instead I need to bring attention to an extremely important current issue:
http://lasciencecoalition.org/
It's scary and troubling that this stuff is happening. Here are the important points outlined in an e-mail I received from the Ecolog list-serve:

Point 1: The Louisiana law, SB 733, the LA Science Education Act,
has national implications. So far, this legislation has failed in
every other state where it was proposed, except in Michigan, where
it remains in committee. By passing SB 733, Louisiana has set a
dangerous precedent that will benefit the Discovery Institute by
helping them to advance their strategy to get intelligent design
creationism into public schools. Louisiana is only the beginning.
Other states will now be encouraged to pass such legislation, and
the Discovery Institute has already said that they will continue
their push to get such legislation passed.

Point 2: Since Gov. Jindal's support for teaching ID clearly helped
to get this bill passed in the first place, his decision to veto it
will stick if he lets the legislature know that he wants it to stick.

Point 3: Simply allowing the bill to become law without his
signature does not absolve the governor of the responsibility for
protecting the public school science classes of Louisiana. He must
veto the bill to show that he is serious about improving Louisiana
by improving education. Anything less than a veto means that the
governor is giving a green light to creationists to undermine the
education of Louisiana children.

I don't understand what it is about the United States that makes these ID issues constantly arise. It is pretty much only the U.S. where this happens - other countries realize teaching religion in a science course is a horrible notion that doesn't even deserve a speck of consideration. The implications are scary for both religion and science - mixing both is a detriment to both. Even though I'm not a Louisiana resident or in any way associated with the state, I'm really embarrassed for their legislature, their governor, and the citizens who support turning their science classes into a joke. Spread the word and urge Gov. Jindal to veto this bill!

Rape in the U.K.

My God. I had no idea that this was the state of things in Britain. This is unspeakably awful. I realize that some of this "culture of skepticism" regarding rape still exists here the U.S., but it is nowhere near the magnitude of 95% of rape cases not resulting in conviction. For anyone who thinks women's rights are no longer an issue of concern in developed nations, read this article. This needs to change now.

Giving

I found this article comforting, in a way. I sometimes feel so guilty about how fortunate and selfish I am, especially when disasters strike, such as the earthquake in China and cyclone in Myanmar. Or when I open my inbox. Yes, I voluntarily signed up to receive e-mail news and donation solicitations from Save Darfur, Human Rights Campaign, Global Exchange, Susan G. Komen, etc. I signed up because I supposedly care, but it's pathetic how often I ignore those pleas for money that I know would be well spent. I am very impressed that Peter Singer gives over a third of his income to charity, whether his annual income is $4K or $4million. The numbers in the news lately have been staggering. Tens of thousands dead in each disaster, and I would guess exponentially more whose lives have been tragically, unimaginably altered. People have been comparing the Chinese government's response to the current disaster to that of the 1976 earthquake where about 240,000 people died. Reading about this reminded me of something I read in "When the Rivers Run Dry" by Fred Pearce. He wrote about an event that occurred in 1938 during the Sino-Japanese War. In an attempt to stop the invading Japanese army with a wall of water, Chinese troops inserted explosives into the Huayuankou dike on the Yellow River and blew it up. The death toll from this foolish act of war: 890,000, nearly all of them Chinese. Pearce saw a photo of the river valley taken in July 1938 and said the only other photo he had ever seen with such devastation was of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. I'm really poor at history, but I find it troubling that although we're taught about very important historical events such as the Holocaust and Hiroshima, there are many events of equivalent magnitude that aren't covered in great depth or even mentioned at all.

Endangered Species Day

May 16, 2008 is Endangered Species Day in the U.S. Happy Endangered Species Day everyone! There have been some small victories lately. Polar bears have finally been listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, although most scientists agree they should be listed as "endangered". In the Pacific Northwest cutthroat trout have been given a second chance at making the endangered species list after a ruling by the U.S. Appeals Court that they were wrongfully denied status by the Bush administration, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. This press release mentions some interesting facts:

The Bush administration has only protected 58 species of plants, animals, and fish to date, compared to 522 species protected during the Clinton administration and 231 during the elder Bush’s tenure. Under this administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service has not protected a single U.S. species in 712 days. This is by far the longest period without a new species being protected since the landmark federal law was passed, surpassing even James Watt, who, under President Reagan, in 1981 and 1982 went 382 days without listing a species.

“The Bush administration denied coastal cutthroat trout protection not because the species doesn’t need to be protected, but because of hostility to the Endangered Species Act,” said Greenwald. “Decisions about how to protect our rivers and fish need to be based on science, not politics.”

That last point is so important. As a scientist, especially as an ecologist, I find it so frustrating when careful, high-quality, often expensive science is simply brushed aside because it doesn't fit someone's narrow-minded agenda. But I also understand that some of the blame falls on us - our inability to effectively communicate science and the implications of our results to policy makers and voters. Some people just don't understand how important it is to preserve biodiversity and understand our natural resources. Some things can't be replaced, but it's difficult to convince someone of that who only ventures outside their air-conditioned office for a round of golf or something. How do we get people like that to care about bacteria in the ocean sediments off the Bahamas, for example? Or more importantly, get them to appreciate the ecological connections between those bacteria and the rest of the ecosystem? Something to think about on Endangered Species Day!

Yes!!!

This is huge! I can't tell you how happy I am to see such long-overdue progress. I am confident there is more to come in the next few years. Basic human rights and sensible justice will always triumph over bigotry.

AMEN!

...to Marie Cocco's column in today's Post. How awful that such things still happen in our modern American society.

I don't understand Congress!

When I had Mrs. Schofp's NSL Government class as an ignorant, naive 10th grader, I thought a three-branch government with bicameral legislature made perfect sense and was the best system possible. Now I read about stuff like this and want to bang my head against a wall. Congress sucks. We need a new political party - one that won't waste my tax $ and actually accomplishes something! I bet the Green Party would be more efficient if voters would give them a chance.

Anyway, the quality of my blogging is compromised now because my digital camera broke :( And I would rather not waste film on things like the "brutti ma buoni" cookies I made and Madeline making funny faces, even though they'd be interesting enough to post. But Andrew lent me his camera for a while so I took some pictures of the flowers in the courtyard of the building where I work. If I have some reading to do, I like to come out here instead of sitting in my office:

Adding color to the greening of America

I've been going through my electronic "to read" list and finally got to this article. It made some excellent points, and elegantly illustrates that "not only is environmentalism a human rights issue, it is also an economic opportunity." I agree! I think a massive move towards "green collar" jobs will occur out of necessity in the near future (see Stephen Colbert's interview with Van Jones).

To CG and anyone else who doesn't understand ecology

Regarding your comment to my April 20 post, I have not yet read the article you recommended on littering immigrants, but I will assume you are right and that littering is indeed a problem (but isn't it a problem everywhere - see the link in my April 15 post). However, this border fence is indeed an environmental disaster - I would guess more so than littering - and I will try to explain why. First, there's the easy-to-understand issue mentioned by one of the scientists in the Post article: in some regions the fence will cut off animals from their water supply. Alternative supplies are not easy to find in a desert, so this could be lethal for a population. Second, I'll explain all those issues that I mentioned in my posting that "government asses have no clue about". The ones I listed were dispersal and migration constraints, habitat fragmentation, inbreeding depression, and the keystone species concept. Each organism has its own habitat requirements, including a certain amount of space. That space needs to be large enough (which for many of the endangered large mammals is quite large) so that each individual can meet its energetic needs and stay within its range of environmental tolerances (e.g., temperature, moisture, pH, salinity, etc.). If a barrier is created and the organism can no longer disperse freely, its ability to survive and reproduce is compromised due to many direct and indirect effects (e.g., an isolated population on a remnant habitat becomes too dense, leading to food shortages, leading to local extinction). Besides local extinction, one common outcome of habitat fragmentation and reduced dispersal is inbreeding depression: the population may survive, but decline drastically in numbers, leading to a loss in genetic variation. A loss of genetic variation makes a population more at risk for extinction if disease or another disturbance were to befall the population. Separate from dispersal and habitat fragmentation is the issue of migration. As the Post article mentioned, the U.S.-Mexico border is an important migration route for many animals. Impeding migration could have no impact or multiple impacts, depending on the species. For some species, it will impede their ability to reproduce or reach seasonal feeding grounds. But furthermore, other species that do not migrate may be dependent on those species that do, and thus may be indirectly affected by the impeded migration. Migrating species may transfer nutrients between habitats or otherwise interact with the other species in those habitats in important ways. One example I can think of is from research done by an INHS ornithologist. I can't remember what bird species it was, but there is a certain species that gives out alarm calls when a predator is approaching. These alarm calls are understood not just by its conspecifics but by the other bird species in the community as well. If the alarm calling species fails to migrate back north, the other bird populations dwindle because that species is no longer around to warn them. This brings me to the keystone species concept. A keystone species is a species who has a disproportionate impact on the environment, compared to its biomass. Wikipedia has a decent explanation. For example, Paine's classic study shows that when the starfish, an important predator, was experimentally removed from the intertidal ecosystem, the result was not simply an ecosystem with no starfish, it was a total collapse of the ecosystem - the starfish's prey, the mussels, took over and drove all the other species to local extinction. Sometimes the impact a species has on an ecosystem is not apparent until that species is removed. Even if a species isn't a keystone per se, every organism interacts with other species and its environment, so its removal can still impact other species. The main point here is that you can't look at this border fence issue and say, "well who cares, only the antelope, jaguars, and ocelots are going to be affected". Because the reality is that a lot more organisms than we know are going to be indirectly affected, and these indirect effects won't become evident until it's too late. Everything is connected, and most of those connections are really hard to discern but are nevertheless important. This is not "gloom-and-doom" or unrealistic, it's a scenario that's already played out in so many over-developed and fragmented regions where we've lost biodiversity. I think it's really sad, but maybe you're one of those people who needs to visit places in person to appreciate their significance and irreplaceable qualities (hopefully you're not one of those people who has no appreciation for nature unless there's $ involved :) I think ecology (not just general biology) should be required for every high school student to understand this basic stuff about how nature works.

Orioles tied for first place!

So far this weekend there was good news and bad news in sandracookie's World of Baseball. The bad news is that in what is probably the only baseball game that Andrew and I will get to attend this season, the Orioles suffered a heart-breaking loss last night to the White Sox when the 5-5 tie was broken in the bottom of the ninth inning by a Brian Anderson RBI. What was really frustrating was that the Orioles had given themselves the same opportunity in their half of the 9th when they had the bases loaded and only one out. However, it was an exciting game to watch, and the good news is that the Orioles had won the first game of the double-header on Saturday afternoon in exciting fashion - a 3 run 9th inning which included 2 errors and a wild pitch by the Sox (thanks reliever Octavio Dotel!). This game was needed as ammunition for the taunting Sox fans sitting behind us during the night game. Further good news is that Boston has lost their last 4 games, the Yanks have lost their last 3, and thus the O's are now tied for first place!!



This is how the AL east standings should stay, with the team with the highest talent-to-$$$ ratio on top!!! Also, the Phillies won last night when Ryan Howard broke out of his slump with a 2-run homer. The Phillies are now 14-11, only 0.5 game out of 1st place.

Happy Earth Day, Planet Earth!

Here is a perfect example...

...of the Bush administration's dismissive, careless anti-environmental policies and cocky, unconstitutional above-the-law attitude. This goddamn border fence is just as illegal as, if not more illegal than, the immigration it is supposed to prevent. I do not know how many specific laws there are prohibiting illegal entry into the United States. But according to this article, the Bush administration has "waived more than 30 environmental and land-management laws" in its hurried determination to build this disaster to wildlife. The DHS spokeswoman is quoted as saying, "For a number of miles, we've determined that it would have only insignificant impact." Bullshit. We all know that the administration, Congress, Senate, and other government asses have no clue about the importance of plant and wildlife dispersal and migration, habitat fragmentation, inbreeding depression, keystone species concept, and other relevant aspects of community ecology, and they won't listen to those scientists who do know about such things. The DHS spokeswoman further proves this point by saying that the fence could actually help the environment by reducing trash by border-crossing immigrants! Does she think the American people, especially us environmentalists, are idiots? This is even more ridiculous than the whole cutting-down-trees-to-prevent-forest-fires gimmick. Can you picture a bunch of Mexicans LITTERING as they attempt to sneak stealthily over the border? I commend those brave scientists who are so outraged that they actually plan to lay in front of the bulldozers, and I commend the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife for taking this issue to court. Thankfully, there are only 274 days left in the Bush dictatorship. However, I'm honestly not sure how much better Obama, Clinton, or McCain would be on this issue. They all voted for the initial bill, but I don't know if they favor the waiver of environmental laws. Those of us who care enough will have to write letters and lobby our representatives and new President for a plan that is not environmentally destructive, more cost-efficient, and more effective at addressing the root of the immigration issue.

Article about Catholic priest abuse

This is a really good blog posting by the president of Chicago Theological Seminary about the Catholic Church sex abuse problem. I totally agree - it is not homosexuality that causes pedophilia, it is "immature sexual identity and a negative attitude toward sexuality".

Orioles SHUTOUT the Yankees!