30.10.04

Dead Wood

Life-giving Dead Wood "At Risk" Many forest species are in deep trouble because of the removal of the dead and dying trees they need, campaigners say. WWF, the global environment group, says insects, plants, birds and mammals are all suffering because of an increasing tendency to remove decaying timber. It says old and dead trees mean forests are often in much better shape and more able to resist pests and other perils. ... A WWF report, Deadwood - Living Forests, says a third of forest-dwelling species rely on dead or dying trees, logs, and branches for their survival. -- via SciTech Daily Review

This is among the reasons to be leery of post-wildfire logging. It's true that areas that have recently burned are often especially fire-prone. Not all biomass in an area is actually available as fuel, due to moisture or size. But a fire passing through can make available to the next fire what it leaves behind, by killing and drying the snags. So it seems logical to want to remove them. But a just-burned ecosystem is at its most vulnerable (the α phase of the adaptive cycle), so intrusions can easily cause damage -- for example, by provoking erosion. The presence of dead wood can be critical for the recovery and maintenance of some species (after all, they've evolved for thousands of years with no high-tech logging to take away the snags).
Stentor Danielson, 20:15, ,

28.10.04

It's Thursday, And You Know What That Means

I'm not real happy with the quality of the drawing on either of my comics for this week, particularly the one that goes with the column. My column -- the last thing I'll have to write about this election for the Scarlet -- goes by the long but accurate title Candidates Get Real About Terrorism, Get Blasted By Critics.
Stentor Danielson, 16:59, ,

Hobbit Update

The New York Times did a better job with the Homo floresiensis story, using the side-by-side skulls photo for the front page and drawing females for both the "hobbit" and the normal human in the graphic on the jump. I do have one small nit to pick, though. The story says "They were a downsized version of Homo erectus, the eastern cousin of the Neanderthals of Europe." From what I understand, Neanderthals are more closely related to modern humans than to Homo erectus -- some people even classify them as a subspecies of Homo sapiens.
Stentor Danielson, 16:16, ,

27.10.04

Hobbit Women

"Hobbit" Discovered: Tiny Human Ancestor Found In Asia Scientists have found fossil skeletons of a hobbit-like species of human that grew no larger than a three-year-old modern child. The tiny humans, who had skulls about the size of grapefruits, lived with pygmy elephants and Komodo dragons on a remote island in Indonesia as recently as 13,000 years ago. Australian and Indonesian researchers discovered bones of the miniature humans in a cave on Flores, an island midway between Asia and Australia. Scientists have determined that the first skeleton they found belongs to a species of human completely new to science. Named Homo floresiensis, after the island on which it was found, the tiny human has also been dubbed by dig workers as the "hobbit," after the tiny creatures from the Lord of the Rings books.

This is pretty neat (though I'm disappointed that they didn't go all the way and name it Homo hobbitus or Homo Tolkieni). But I find it odd that, while the stories in National Geographic (above) as well as the Sydney Morning Herald focus on the original female skeleton, and talk about H. floresiensis as "she", both sites used an illustration of a male "hobbit." I don't know if an illustration was made of a female, but there are at least photos of the skull (next to a H. sapiens skull, thus bringing out the "whoa, they're tiny" angle) available. Count this as another data point in the bias toward illustrating ancient homonids as male.
Stentor Danielson, 16:57, ,

Recycling Buildings

Demolished Buildings Getting A New Story ... Officials at PNC Financial Services, for example, plan to recycle more than 70 percent of the downtown Pittsburgh building they recently began deconstructing, a trend being seen at more demolition sites nationwide. ... "Rather than knocking it down and carting it off to a landfill, if you deconstruct a building and reuse its parts elsewhere, you're saving labor, materials," said Alan Traugott, a founding member of the US Green Building Council. "You are trying to avoid going for new virgin materials and all the embodied energy and associated environmental impact that reflects," he said. The practice has become more common, Traugott said, as a distribution network for used building materials has sprung up. Pittsburgh-based Construction Junction, a nonprofit retail store for used and surplus building materials, saves thousands of doors, windows, and cabinets for reuse every year, according to its website.

This is a nice bit of quiet environmental progress. What's especially interesting is that construction material recycling has an array of non-environmental savings. I wonder how much those factors alone are sufficient to push companies toward more recycling, and how much the environmental concern is necessary either to sustain the practice or just to jolt them out of their inertia. I would suspect that the initial development of the distribution network -- which has some big upfront costs and risks -- required a bit of idealism.
Stentor Danielson, 15:27, ,

26.10.04

Bush Sox

Everybody's dying to make analogies between the World Series and the presidential election. Usually they pick a Disney storyline in which the big money and historic dominance of the Yankees/Republicans is defeated by the scrappy and good-hearted Red Sox/Democrats. But I think there may be room for the reverse analogy. If Bush wins the election, he will be like the Sox.

Whoa, hey, where are you taking me? Aaaaah ....

UPDATE: OK, now that I've fled to my secret bunker far from Massachusetts, I can explain the analogy. In the first two games of the Series, the Sox made eight errors and yet still managed to win both times. Similarly, if Bush wins it will be despite a series of errors -- on Iraq, homeland security, the budget, etc. -- that ought to have handed this election to Kerry.
Stentor Danielson, 13:31, ,