Firstly, do not walk around on your tippy toes with a hunched back. This is a dead giveaway that someone is being sneaky. Walk with your back straight like a lighthouse and your feet flat like the ocean. No one ever suspects right angles of being sneaky. Also, don’t smile while you’re sneaking. Smiling is for people who have something to hide. And for happy people. But mostly for those hiding something.
He’s just waiting here until he grows enough to reach the rest of that strawberry.
Once upon a time... a small b(l)og monster climbed out of his swamp and found a strawberry.
Drastic Measures: 8 Wild Ways to Combat Invasive Species: Scientific American Slideshows.
Way 9?
Invasive Species Café.
The Invasive Species Café (ISC) is an idea that I’ve had for a couple of years. It is based on the gourmet vegetarian/locavore/vegan/”green” restaurants that have popped up around Columbus. These restaurants are, to say the least, wildly successful.
ISC would start out by hiring local hunters and trappers to collect invasives and bring them to the restaurant. The menu would be designed to focus on invasives and things that we aren’t necessarily used to eating. It would be a play on the whole ‘people eating endangered species’ thing with an environmentally sustainable spin to it. These are animals and plants that we cannot over-fish and cannot over-hunt.
The menu would be designed by bringing together trackers (they’re often experts on edible plants and animals), gourmet chefs, and scientists. Each season the menu would be updated based on what things are available and what species are of most concern.
Eventually the menu would expand to invasives in other parts of the country. The whole restaurant would be run as a not-for-profit and would fund and train collectors in invasives for the restaurant. The restaurant would create a job market in collection of invasive species (every individual specilizing in a few species, like Garlic Mustard, Bighead Carp, Ide, European Flounder, Tubenose Goby, etc.) Emphasis would be placed on environmentally sound collection (NO TRAWLING).
There would be a gallery/shop in a different part of the restaurant that would focus on local artists and artisans making things out of invasive species. Japanese beetle’s wing necklaces, anyone? This is where excess pelts could be sold as raw materials or to artists in exchange for a low rate to buy their work for the gallery/shop.
The restaurant could potentially be used as a forum for research concerning invasive species (Are they edible? What can they be used for? How can we create demand? Nutritional information?)
Local foods would make up the rest of the restaurant ingredients, although only as necessary. Imported non-invasive foods would be avoided, but would be used when absolutely necessary.
A few ingredients/animals inspiring this.
Canada Geese (From what I’ve heard, they’re delicious and omelets from their eggs are fantastically rich.)
White-tailed Deer (Overpopulated species are accepted into the ISC menu.)
FRONTLINE/World Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground | PBS.
And this is why I try to think before I replace or update my old electronics. This is also why I like my aluminum-body electronics.
I have so much to say about this, but it’s too depressing to go over at the moment.
A good solution is finding somewhere that will ACTUALLY recycle your e-waste (or just be more careful with what you use).
http://e-stewards.org/ seems to be reputable, intelligently run, and responsible.
6 Easy Steps to Make Your Graph Really Ugly.
I cannot emphasize how true this all is.
I have a feeling that the accuracy on these things is suspect at best. It’s likely, because everyone fell so far below the average, that people estimated badly when it came to how much garbage they produced, but I put it together anyways just so I could look at it.
These data are from the survey of the students that I complained about before.
The goal here isn’t so much to be informative as it is for me to have fun…
These obviously lack elegance, but I still had a paper to write when I did them.
BBC News – Ocean debris turning Hawaiian beach ‘into plastic’.
This beach is more plastic than it is sand, even when you dig.
This is terrifying. The worst bit is that people don’t seem to care.
Darwin Tattoo Progress Report: I’m not entirely sure how I feel about using the Nature 200th anniversary cover as the image of Darwin (I still prefer the old-man-face Darwin) but I really really like the additions of the animals integral to his theory around him.
The barnacles on the left (his right arm) look a little weird unless you know the famous barnacle story (“Where does your dad keep his barnacles?”) and Charles’ relationship with the crustaceans. The Galapagos tortoise is where he’s resting his elbow, so I don’t want to get rid of him, but I already have a silhouetted one above him that I, quite frankly, like more. The bottom one is taking up a lot of prime real-estate on the arm that could be used for better things.
I love the orchids and the pigeon and the finch (though I am not too sure about that hand position) and particularly love that marine iguana (which actually looks more like a green iguana that was colored vaguely like a marine iguana).
I don’t know much about the sponge, but I can swing with that.
I snuck in a dodo in negative space/white on the right. I like him. He’s cute. I would have done multiple layers of animals but Nat said, upon looking at it, that it stopped making sense visually when I did that. Apparently I was the only one who could still see it because I’d been staring at it for so long.
The silhouettes are not going to end up being a huge patch of black. I am so far from being okay with that. I’m considering figuring out what to do with Darwin later and starting on the animals. I want a kind of…. well… let’s leave that to another post in the future because it’s a long explanation and I am beginning to border on TLDR here.
I like the DNA. It took a while to get the colors to match up to nucleotides, though. I’ve decided the time was totally worth it.
I emailed my artist for advice a few weeks ago. We’ll see what he says once he gets back to me.
Occasionally, when I am working on some visual there is an intermediate stage where things look batshitcrazy and nothing like I want them to when I finish it.
Once in a blue moon, I save this midpoint because it amuses me.
This is one of those times.
That is all.
This isn’t actually a joke.
So I’m in this class that I am carefully going to avoid naming here. Part of this class is to get student opinions via a survey the rest of the class fills out (in… out… both).
So here I am, late Sunday, working on finishing filling in surveys for tomorrow and am instead learning more than I ever wanted to know about college students…
I wish I were kidding, or this were the only example of this kind of thing. This would be forgivable in an ESL student, but most of these kids are native speakers.
Apparently NO kid in the class can use affect vs effect right. The number of times that I saw this was amazing.
There’s also no consistent way of spelling a couple of words… in the same survey.
So… punctuation is…. fun.
It's those darn homonyms again.
How saft is my food? Is saft good? Bad? Carcinogenic?
He was so distracted by "Pharmaceutical" that he completely missed that there there.
I'm fairly sure I went with a belt-tightening pun in that response. I doubt he got it.
Let me clarify once again. These are primarily native speakers in college who are sophomores and up.
This is not a drill. Panic.