Daily Archives: October 2, 2007

Petition to get Bush off his rich boy, elitist ass and help Darfur

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Did you know that the genocide in Darfur has been raging for over four years? Millions of Darfuri people continue to face the threat of murder, rape, torture, malnutrition, and displacement each day.

After years of delay, the U.N. finally authorized a joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission for Darfur in July.

Although this is a crucial step towards ending the violence, the peacekeeping mission will fail without significant support from the U.S. and the global community.

Please help us make sure that President Bush gets the message before it is too late for the peacekeepers to succeed!

Click
here to sign the Save Darfur Coalition’s petition urging President Bush
to take the steps needed to help end the genocide before more innocent
lives are lost, more women and girls raped, or more villages are burned.

Secrets of Sputnik Emerge 50 Years Later

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MOSCOW (Oct. 1) – When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph.

But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age.

Secrets of Sputnik Emerge 50 Years Later – AOL News

Even Scavengers Get The Blues

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We’ve had cloudy, overcast and mostly rainy weather here in SE Florida for the past several days. I’m too lazy to look it up; suffice it to say, it’s been drippy for a while.

This is wonderful news for the area in general. Although Lake O’s only up a couple of inches, the topsoil is well-saturated. That means that the flowers are happy, and any more rain will percolate into the aquifer rather than running off as it is wont to do if the soil be dry. We haven’t gotten as much rain over the Kissimmee River valley as we’d like — and the precip as a whole is waaay behind schedule for the past 24-30 months. Nonetheless, something’s better than nothing, mostly.

However, all this overcast and wet ground is hard on the soaring birds, especially those who are migrating or who need to travel long distances to find food. Continue reading →

Bye-bye Fall; Bye-bye Colored Hills; Bye-bye Winter chills…(sing to the tune of “Bye-bye Love”)

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WHEN DAYS SHORTEN and nights grow cooler in late summer and fall, trees such as maple, oak and beech cloak themselves in the bright shades of autumn. No colors are more central to this palette than the yellows, oranges and reds of sugar maples, which range from eastern Canada through the mid-Atlantic states, west to Minnesota and south along the Appalachians into Tennessee. Also prized for timber and maple syrup, sugar maples highlight the foliage displays that draw millions of people outdoors for nature’s autumn fling.

But fall is gradually becoming less colorful in the Northeast, thanks to rising temperatures, and the next 100 years of global warming could wipe out much of the region’s fall color and the tourist trade based on it, as well as its sugar maple industry. …

American Heritage – National Wildlife Magazine

Thoreau’s Notes Help Track Climate Change At Walden Pond

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MAY 10, 1853, was a warm day outside Concord, Massachusetts—an early spring day when a New Englander outdoors would “begin to think of thin coats,” noted Henry David Thoreau. Walking from Concord towards Saw Mill Brook, Thoreau jotted down what he saw. …

Today, nearly 160 years later, Thoreau’s detailed observations form the basis of a long-term study of how climate change is altering the timing of seasonal biological events—or phenology—and how such shifts may in turn impact the wildlife and wild places of an entire region. …

Walden Warming – National Wildlife Magazine

Raises the question: Today, bloggers write and write and write, have all sorts of opinions, and write and… but do we know how to observe?  And how useful will our output be in the long run?  HDT wrote in little notebooks, and we’ve been reading him for a century and a half.  Perhaps it pays to consider quality, not just quantity.

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