The Oyster’s Garter

There is no place on earth, no matter how remote, untouched by humans. We are mighty: we can trawl the deep, explore the South Pole, and fish every single island in the South Pacific. But as every young nerdling knows, with great power comes great responsibility. “The Managed World” series in the Oyster’s Garter explores the hard choices that come from a human-dominated world.

Green is in, but for how long? As the number of “environmentally friendly” products and messages grows and grows, people are starting to see the tradeoff that need to be made. Do you care more about organic or local, salmon or renewable energy, energy-intensive paper or petroleum-based plastic?

The New York Times seems to think this is a public relations problem. They label the phenomenon “green noise” and claim it’s “static caused by urgent, sometimes vexing or even contradictory information played at too high a volume for too long.” So their solutions focus on reducing the volume of information.

But that’s wrong. These are real tradeoffs that can’t be fixed by a sleeker message. The recent Wired piece on “Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What it Means to be Green” gets at some of these problems, albeit in a tediously self-satisfied way. (Calling yourself environmental apostates is SO Bjorn Lomborg.)

Wired decided that it cared most about climate change, and made this list accordingly:

1: Live in Cities

2: A/C Is OK

3: Organics Are Not The Answer

4: Farm the Forests

5: China Is the Solution

6: Accept Genetic Engineering

7: Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work

8: Embrace Nuclear Power

9: Used Cars — Not Hybrids

10: Prepare for the Worst

Now, you can take issue with these individual points - and I do. For example, I think their Farm the Forests point - that old growth forests should be razed and made into carbon-sequestering furniture, and new forests should be planted into order to trap more carbon - to be both ludicrous and incorrect. Nonetheless, the Wired article is thinking in the right direction. They focused on a particular issue instead of pretending that all environmental goals are automatically compatible.

We can’t have everything all at once. Living in San Diego, I buy local produce, which is grown in the high desert with water from the San Joaquin delta and Colorado River, all pumped for hundreds of miles over mountains at huge energetic expense and at serious ecological cost to the delta. The part of our electricity that is renewable comes from wind farms, but the windmills kill migrating birds. So, as we try to figure out what world we want, the question is not “should we make compromises” but “what compromises should we make?”

The human egg is notoriously camera-shy. While sperm wiggle around for the microscope every time an undergrad with lab keys has a few beers, ovulation had never been caught on camera…UNTIL NOW. Check out these incredibly clear photos (SFW) of the egg bursting forth from the ovary.

Of course,  those photos exist because surgeons were preparing to do a partial hysterectomy on the woman. So that egg’s fate (like that of most eggs) was similar to that of the falling blue whale in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Ahhh! Woooh! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my… well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a… tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what’s this roaring sound, whooshing past what I’m suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I’m dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There’s an awful lot of that now isn’t it? And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me? Hello Ground!
[dies]

SeaWeb and Project AWARE are sponsoring a Depressing Ocean Photo Contest. Ok, they’re calling it Conservation Photography, but depression is what they’re aiming for:

We challenge you to enter your most engaging environmental photos that illustrate the pressing marine issues and the solutions that aim to reverse the rapid decline of our ocean’s health. Beautiful wildlife imagery is abundant and often implies that our oceans are healthy. This contest is a unique opportunity for you to illuminate the challenges our ocean faces. Photo entries may depict environmental issues including, but not limited to: unsustainable fishing practices, pollution and debris, ocean dumping, oil spills, global warming and climate change, the effects of sea level rise, coastal development, endangered and threatened ecosystems.

Along with fame and fortune, they’re offering swanky prizes.

• Seven nights accomodations at the Plaza Resort Bonaire with six days of unlimited shore diving for two, with Tuesday night beach BBQ and round-trip airport transfers — a total package worth approximately US $1,700.
• A $250 Gift Certificate to Backscatter Underwater Video and Photo.
• A signed copy of “Wild Ocean” by authors Dr. Sylvia Earle and Wolcott Henry.
• Carbon Offsets through NativeEnergy from your home and car for one year plus carbon offset for one round-trip air flight valued at US $192

OMG! Signed by Sylvia Earle! And a trip to Bonaire to see invasive tunicates coral!

Broadsheet linked to a Newsweek article on the Nerd Girls, a group of female engineers at Tufts. According to the article, The Nerd Girls are:

challenging the notion of what a geek should look like, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personas, or by simply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and more traditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and high heels.

Well, it’s nice that they are trying to recruit more women into engineering, and I hope they have fun building their solar race car. (Cause, dude! Solar race car!) But damn, I think their message sucks. I don’t think nerd girls with dorky glasses are going to think, “Wow! Engineering looks fun, and I can wear 3″ pink heels to work!” I think they’re going to think, “Wow. Engineers look and act just like the popular girls at school who make fun of me, and female engineers seem to be required to be Sex in the City-type hot. And their web site lacks functionality and has no content. *click* Oooh! Ancient Roman D20 up for auction!”

The Nerd Girl message reminds me of that standard movie trope, the hot woman who eats a ton and never exercises yet magically remains thin. (e.g., the Gilmore Girls.) A Sexy Lust for Steak is supposed to demonstrate bold nonconformity while never actually not conforming (by being chubby, for example.) The Nerd Girls seem to be cut from the same cloth - the sexy fashion thing is supposed to demonstrate that they’re different from those Other Really Nerdy Ugly Girls while they still conform to societal expectations to be hot above all else. This is not a nerd revolution, it’s a permutation of “Just be yourself! Ummm…as long as yourself is perky and thin.”

Then again, maybe I’m not being fair. Maybe I should pay more attention to fashion and footwear. After days and days of pondering Vogue and watching Sex in the City, I believe that I’ve hit upon the perfect outfit. Knee-high boots, distressed jeans, fashionably draped coat - soon oceanographic fashion will TAKE PARIS BY STORM! (erm, hopefully not literally.) Can I join the Nerd Girl reality show now?

Did anyone else hatch baby chickens in preschool? I always thought the chicks, no matter how fluffy, had an evil gleam in their eye, and was kind of relieved when they were packed off to the farm. Relive those halcyon days with this photoseries on chicken development. Also check out the development of a Cecropia silkmoth from egg to caterpillar to full-fledged moth.

Via Boing Boing

Because of all the traffic on this post, I wanted to clarify that I am completely convinced that there is lots of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre, and that it is a serious environmental problem. My issue with the plastic:plankton ratio is that it doesn’t accurately measure the amount of plastic.

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation is great at raising awareness of the problem of trash in the North Pacific Gyre. They’ve tirelessly lobbied for political change, coined terms like “plastic soup,” worked in the schools, and are sailing the Junk raft to Hawaii as we speak. However, as part of their quest to make the enormity of the plastic problem understood, they’ve been claiming that there is six time more plastic than plankton in the North Pacific Gyre. The 6:1 ratio has appeared in PBS, The Seattle Times, and has been repeated all over the internet.

Though I admire Algalita’s work, the 6:1 plastic:plankton ratio is deeply flawed. Worse, it is flawed in a direction that undermines Algalita’s credibility: It may vastly underestimate plankton and overestimate plastic. Here’s why, based off the methodology published in Moore et al’s 2001 paper in Marine Pollution Bulletin.

(more…)

Did my previous post on anatomically correct heart-shaped jewelry leave you unsatisfied? Fear not, dear reader. Here’s another lovely heart-shaped necklace, in still-beating red or formalin white. If you prefer brains or teeth or ribs, there’s a little something for you too.

Or if you are more into tech than bio-goo, you could make floppy disk earrings.

Via Boing Boing

Jocelyn Ford of the the Science Friday blog lives in Beijing, and she has posted an account of the on-the-ground repercussions of China’s plastic bag ban. China banned extremely thin single-use plastic bags, but not the thicker bags more common in the US. Ford admits that the new bag surcharge has made her more careful about bringing her own bags to the food market, but worries that banning thin bags has only led to more widespread use of thick bags:

Take my local hole-in-the wall shop that sells stuffed pancake (yum!) Until last week, the shop did takeaway orders in ultra thin bags less than 0.025 millimeters, or 0.00098 inches thick. It’s now upgraded– the shop not only uses thicker bags, it’s ordered bags with the shop name on them. The shopkeeper proudly told me they were “environmentally friendly.” Looks to me like the new regulation has encouraged him to add to the garbage and pollution problem. The tiny bags are not easy to reuse.

In a classic case of the law of unintended consequences, Ford says that many shops have also started to give away free paper bags, which create more air and water pollution than plastic bags. (It’s true! See this handy chart from the Washington Post.) Ford believes that China should have legislated biodegradable bags - except, as she point out, they are made from corn.

So are biodegradable bags a solution? The corn starch bags Ford mentions are still under development, and they are based off ethanol biofuel byproducts. Since corn ethanol biofuel has proved to be food-price debacle, this is probably not the solution. Most commercially available biodegradable bags are based off a mixture of corn starch and petroleum-based polyesters. While they do biodegrade (which does solve the problem of cute large animals choking and drains clogging), it means that biodegradable bags are both competing with food supplies and polluting the environment with tiny molecular- and cell-sized bits of polyester. Little bits of plastic can be a huge problem at the base of the food chain, due to accidental ingestion by non-charismatic but ecologically critical animals like insects and earthworms

I still think that plastic bag bans are a move in the right direction, but Ford’s anecdotes about the Chinese ban show that a nuanced approach may be necessary. Should all disposable bags, including paper, be taxed? How can the Chinese government encourage people to reuse bags instead of simply switching types of disposable bag? And what approach might the US (when we finally catch up with Ireland, Bangladesh, and South Africa) take to control the plastic problem?

Pepjin Koster, the brilliant inventor of lol oshunz, has collected all the entries. I’m rather partial to the fish-scorning penguins. Wudda!

What if the periodic table had a party? The European Research Commission investigates - and brings the sexy like only Europeans can. Damn, I want the NSF to sponsor parties like this! And that’s not just because I want to be electricity.