Category: Useful websites

2010 – Most Extreme Weather Since the Year Without a Summer

Paths of hurricanes in 2010. The North Atlantic hurricane season was the 3rd most active on record. Visualization from NOAA's excellent Historical Hurricane Tracks interactive map.
Forest fires in the Amazon. Image from NASA.

Jeff Masters has an impressively detailed post laying out the argument that 2010, with its record setting snowstorms, droughts, heatwaves, flooding, hurricanes, etc, had the most extreme weather since 1816, the year without a summer.

Looking back through the 1800s, which was a very cool period, I can’t find any years that had more exceptional global extremes in weather than 2010, until I reach 1816. That was the year of the devastating “Year Without a Summer”–caused by the massive climate-altering 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora, the largest volcanic eruption since at least 536 A.D. It is quite possible that 2010 was the most extreme weather year globally since 1816.

— Masters (2010): 2010 – 2011: Earth’s most extreme weather since 1816? on Weather Underground.

Hurricane Earl approaching the Carolinas. Image by Zach Frailey.

Notes

NOAA’s Historical Hurricane Tracks map is an excellent interactive webpage, and data source.

What’s Needed for a Nation’s Peace

The Fund for Peace has been doing a lot of thinking about what it takes for a country to be considered peaceful, and what it takes for a state to fail. For the last seven years they’ve been putting together maps of the world with an index of how stable different countries are.

Finland - the most sustainable state, at least according to the Failed State Index.

While it’s pretty in-depth and makes for rather sobering reading, it’s worth taking a look at the criteria they’ve come up with to determine a country’s stability. It may be useful to include some of this information in the cycle where we focus on peace.

Their criteria for instability include:

  • Demographic pressure (such as having too many young adults, as we’ve seen in Egypt)
  • Amount of refugees and internally displaced peoples (refugees are people who’ve crossed international borders). Both leaving or entering refugees can undermine stability.
  • Historical Injustice – communities can have an understandably hard time forgetting the past, just look at Isreal/Palestine.
  • Brain Drain – when countries start to fail, the first to leave are the ones who can afford to. Yet these intellectuals and professionals, with their college degree are vital for creating a stable and prosperous country.
  • Inequality – especially when driven by active discrimination (wealth inequality is something to watch out for).
  • Economic decline – pushes trade into the black market and increases criminality and corruption.
  • Illegitimacy of the state – if people don’t believe the people in government have everyone in the country’s best interests at heart, and are only looking out for themselves and their friends, then there’s probably going to be trouble.
  • Public Services go kaput – It’s a really bad sign when the government can meet people’s basic needs – like picking up the garbage.
  • The Rule of Law goes kaput – when you’re ruled by the caprice of men, and your rights under the law are not respected, you may begin to consider and agitate for other options for government.
  • Personal Armies – forces that are tied to individual leaders, like private militias or super-secret police for example, are very damaging to a country’s cohesion.
  • Fighting elites – healthy countries need robust arguments in their political class – think checks and balances – but it can go too far and lead to things like extreme nationalism and ethnic cleansing.
  • Invasion – both overt invasion and covert meddling in the affairs of a country are unhealthy for that state’s stability.

It’s also very nice that you can download their index data as a MS Excel spreadsheet, which you can let students analyze to answer their own research questions. For example, I was wondering what was the difference between the best, the worst and the USA, so I plotted this graph.

Comparing the best (Finland), worst (Somalia) and the USA using the Fund for Peace's Failed State Indicies.

The USA is much closer to Finland than Somalia, thank goodness, but should probably watch out for that Uneven Development (wealth inequality).

I think something like this would make a good experiential exercise for the science of geography.

National Academy’s Books are Now Free

How People Learn from the National Academies Press.

The National Academy Press has just made all of its publications free for downloading (as pdf’s). Of particular interest is the Education section which includes titles such as:

There are 20 books in the Education section, and while many of the books in the other sections are quite technical, there are some gems among the 4,000 available titles.

Guide to U.S. Geology: For Teachers

The Coastal Plain, one of the three major geologic provinces of the southeastern United States. From the Teacher-Friendly Guide to the Geology of the United States (Picconi, 2003).

J.E. Picconi, from the Paleontogical Research Institution, has a nice website that describes the geology of the different regions of the U.S..

This image shows the low-energy, offshore environment of the grey shales like that of Coon Creek. From Picconi (2003).

The site has a nice clean design, and is readable to anyone with a basic grasp of geology and geologic time.

I’ve looked at the the section on the southeastern U.S., which even a section on the different, official state fossils.

I particularly like the icons they use to show the environments in which the different fossilized organisms once lived.

Poor Mom

My students are playing SPENT (previous post), and some of them have figured out how to easily make it to the end of the month even while living in poverty. Unfortunately, lots of moms are going without crucial medication.

At least this will contribute to a nice discussion of ethics and morality.

Velasquez and other, (2010) have a nice explanation of “What is Ethics?“.

Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. … Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one’s ethical standards. … feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one’s standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded.

—Velasquez et al., 2010: What is Ethics?

While the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great definition of morality:

The term “morality” can be used either
1. descriptively to refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society or,
— 1. some other group, such as a religion, or
— 2. accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.

—Gert (2008): The Definition of Morality (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

In fact, given how difficult it is to win the game without making some hard moral choices, a couple very interesting questions for a Socratic dialogue would be,

“Can someone survive in poverty while living ethically?”

and, to follow up,

“Does this push poorer people into being unethical and immoral, and towards crime?”

I’m curious to see where a dialogue might lead, especially if it leads back to our discussions of wealth distribution.

Counting syllables

If you need a little help finding how many syllables are in a word so you can use it in your haiku, there’s the How Many Syl.la.bles website.

Screen capture from the How Many Syl.la.bles website (Grade Level Technology, 2009).

It also suggests related words if you need a differently-syllabic synonym.

Where disciplines meet
creativity emerges
from the shaking chrysalis

Food and Nutrition

Darya Pino from Summer Tomato has a cute little flow chart to help you identify “Real Food” in the supermarket. It takes the conservative approach to eating shared by Michael Pollan, who recommends only eating thing your grandmother would have recognized as food, and Food Politics‘ Marion Nestle’s interdiction against foods with more than five ingredients.