Tag: interesting

What is “Natural”?

The Trans Alaska pipeline. The bend is due to the fact that it's sitting on a faultline. (Image via the USGS)

Back in 1991, Jay Anderson wrote and interesting article (free pdf) on how exactly to go about measuring “naturalness”.

After all, anywhere you go in this world, you’ll find it has been impacted by humans to some degree: agriculture in Brazil is affecting rainfall patterns in the remotest parts of the Amazon basin; and soot and anthropogenic chemicals gently, and subtly, contaminate the remotest Antarctic Ice Caps.

Anderson came up with three things to look at, but I think the two key are:

  1. how much things would change if you removed people,
  2. how many native species there are compared to how many their were in the past.

I think it’s important to try to at least better define what we mean by the word “natural” as we think about conserving the environment.

The World without Us by Alan Weisman

Anderson’s first point, about how much things would change if you removed the people, also brings to mind Alan Weisman’s book, The World without Us, which imagines what the world would look like if humans disappeared: what would happen to the cities and artifacts we leave behind?

Footprints in the sand of a small bay on the northeastern coast of Trinidad.

Reading levels?

One of Google’s new search options lets you assess sites based on reading levels.

The purpose of this blog keeps evolving in my mind. It is a place for me to keep all the notes and pedagogic reflections that I should be recording, but have not, and would not, be keeping otherwise. It’s also a bit like my writer’s notebook in that I use it to experiment my writing style.

I also hope the site can be useful to other Montessori (or any really) teachers because I have a real, fervent belief that everyone gains when we share as much information as possible.

This blog, being in a public space, should also be friendly to parents who might look in once in a while; this way they can get a fair, if perhaps too revealing, glimpse of my educational philosophy, see where I’m going, and get a bit of an explanation of why I do the things I do.

Finally, I occasionally show certain blog posts to my middle school students. It’s an easy place to link videos like the one about the Northwest Passage. Almost inevitably after I do that though, I’ll find some student perusing through the rest of the blog, usually with the exclamation, “Hey that’s not what actually happened!”

So I try to write posts that are accessible to all these different groups. I try not to shy too much away from using longer words, layered meanings, references, and subtexts, because, after all, if students don’t already get them, this is as good a place as any for them to learn.

Barry Schwartz has an interesting post at the Search Engine Roundtable about the new Google option, as does Adrian Chen at Gawker. Both articles post the graphs for a number of different sites. I’ve not yet seen an actual definition of the what the different levels on the graphs mean, but the Muddle sits almost entirely in the intermediate section of the graph, much like the New York Times’ site. This does not seem like bad company to keep, though I do think I’d like to try for more variety. We’ll see.

Banana leaf plates

(Image by Pamri on Wikimedia Commons)

This one takes me back to the days when I was growing up and going to weddings and Hindu prayers ceremonies at someone’s house. There’d be food, with curry chicken, dhal, buss-up-shot roti, served on banana leaves. Oh … the smell and the taste. I unreservedly endorse using them for serving food; they’re biodegradable and seem to add something to the flavor. Long-term packaging I’m not so sure about, but you never know.

Pumpkin Chuckin

Photo by <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pumpkin_chucked_from_trebuchet_in_ohio.jpg'>Kevin D. Hartnell</a>.
Photo by Kevin D. Hartnell.

Mr. B’s put me on to the World Championship Punkin Chunkin Association, which has an annual competition. There’s a Discovery Channel program about it too.

Although my head-of-school is not partial to us throwing food around, a trebuchet would make a great project for physical sciences next year (Year B).

Environmental imperatives

Amargosa Toad (Bufo nelsoni). Photo from US Fish and Wildlife (M. Burroughs).

NPR had facinating story recently about unlikely groups working together. It’s about a town in Nevada that banded together to save a toad from going extinct. The groups working together include environmentalists and the Saving Toads thru Off-Road Racing, Mining and Ranching in Oasis Valley (aka STORM-OV).

Translation: The economy still sucks.

Jeremy Singer-Vine has cute little tool for translating economics jargon from the Federal Reserve meetings into plain English. The Planet Money Program on NPR used it to translate the FED’s latest plan into something much more readable without, I think, loosing much of the meaning. The design of the tool is quite nice but it must be pretty tricky to implement unless the FED’s statements are much more formulaic than I hope they are.

For example:

FED: Longer-term inflation expectations have remained stable, but measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters.

Translation: Inflation has gone from low to super low.

My favorite part of the translation:

FED: Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in September confirms that the pace of recovery in output and employment continues to be slow.

Translation: The economy still sucks.