Sculpture And Animation In The Interest Of Nature

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Art or craft, we are inclined to sculptures and animation for reasons we cannot quite explain–sometimes just for fun, sometimes for contemplation, sometimes both simultaneously. What it means is best left to those experiencing it.  We categorize it as friendly to the themes we care about on this site, so hope to see more of his art. From the Asia Society’s website we learn that

U-Ram Choe is a Korean artist born in 1970 in Seoul. He is best known for his meticulously designed kinetic sculptures made of acrylic and stainless steel, each animated by robotics developed and programmed by the artist. Continue reading →

Tell Them It Cannot Be So

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The Guardian and New York Times are the two newspapers of record in the English language that have invested well in coverage of environmental issues.  This news below is not welcome and we hope it is not final.  Why did we learn this news in the Guardian?  Can we influence the reversal of this decision?

The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk. Continue reading →

Mystery Bestseller

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GetImage

 

Click the image of the book cover to go to the page in Guardian’s bookstore where it is available.  Click here to look at its standing on their best seller list.  Then, someone please explain its standing as the bestseller this week based on this synopsis:

Provides information on the fundamentals of biological oceanography. This book covers the properties of seawater which affect life in the ocean, classification of marine environments and organisms, phytoplankton and zooplankton, marine food webs, larger marine animals, life on the seafloor, and the way in which humans affect marine ecosystems. Continue reading →

Beauty Of Munnar – Tea Plantations

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Munnar is famous for its tea plantations, most of which are privately owned. With its rolling hills, sparkling waterfalls, sprawling tea estates and undulating valleys, Munnar has all the makings of an ideal hill destination.  The ‘discovery’ of Munnar dates back to the 1870’s when British Resident JD Munro recognised the agricultural  potential  of the region and started planting crops such as coffee, cinchona, sisal, tea and cardamom. The pioneer planters found that tea was best suited for the area.  Continue reading →

Cause For The Ages

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noise-465

Click the image to the right to go to the story at the New Yorker website. We are not the only generation to be concerned about the boundaries between the beautiful and necessary sounds of life, and the excessive sounds of noise pollution. Even a century back in New York, sound had its judges and quiet had its activists:

…Sound does not persist, neither across space nor across generations, so the tremendous rattle of horse-drawn drays, the clink of cupboards, the sneezes and shuffles of domestic life fall into the vacuous, silent crevices of history. “How did diners respond to the switch from pewter to china?” Schwartz wondered aloud. “How did a midwife register the sound of a new baby coming into the world? How did a person walking out in the woods register the sound of thunder or lighting?” In the course of nearly two decades of research, Continue reading →

Thank You, Zambia

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Zambia's leopard

Zambia’s leopard numbers, as well as those of its lions, are too low for a sustainable hunting industry, says its tourism minister. Photograph: Brendan Raisbeck/Alamy

Click the image above to go to the whole story. No easy answers: sometimes hunting is the solution to conservation needs–refer to the US Fish & Wildlife Service for plenty of excellent case studies.  But big game hunting has an intuitively dangerous ring to it.  Zambia has made a decision for their territories:

Zambia has banned the hunting of lions and other endangered wild cats such as leopards because it sees more value in tourism than blood sport, the country’s tourism minister said. Continue reading →

Visitors To Cardamom County

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Since we border the famous Periyar Tiger Reserve we are familiar with unexpected wild visitors and welcome these guests from the national park. Yesterday we had Nilgiri Langur, Southern Rustic, Common Grass Yellow and the Bush Hopper Butterflies. Continue reading →

The Virtual Realist

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Jlanier

Jaron Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the web before it engulfs us all. (Robert Holmgren)

Click the image to go to the story in Smithsonian, a noteworthy thought on where we are, and where we are going, with the internet:

…And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, Continue reading →