Bird of the Day: Blue-winged Parakeet
Chariots for Hire
Bicycle Rickshaw Driver Taking a Break in Tamil Nadu
A Worldly Point of View
Emory’s Language Lab
Diversity in American universities is on the rise: just a little under a quarter (23%) of Harvard’s undergraduate enrollment consists of international students. At Columbia University, over a quarter (26%) of the university’s enrollment are international students. The story is the same at other top schools around the nation. UCLA, Boston University, Cornell and NYU all boast international student levels at around 15%. Here at Emory, the picture is roughly the same. Most of these international students in American universities hail from Asian countries, but there is plenty of exchange from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the world as well.
At Emory, many international students specifically come from China, India, South Korea, and Japan. Having spoken to these foreign exchange students, it is clear that international admissions to a top-20 American university are incredibly competitive, even more so than they are here. One friend told me that he was the only student from his entire town (a suburb of Calcutta, so quite a lot of competition) to attend a top-30 American school; even with his extremely impressive credentials Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Hoopoe
Rhyothemis variegata
Field guides and online descriptions of this dragonfly dub her the ‘Common Picture Wing’. I ask you to take a good look at her delicate wings – the architecture of the joints on the back of her thorax, and the colored patterns of the papery wings that carry her so gracefully through the air. I ask you to ask yourself – why is it called the Common Picture Wing?
Walton Ford, Come To India!
In my last post, I walked along a border–the one separating the land of nostalgia from the land of meaning–and am still not sure which side of the border I was on. One person’s memory lane is full of madeleines, and another’s may have no particular there there (so be it, glass houses and all). The link to Brother Blue is the puzzle. Can anyone, out of context, realize who that man was and what he accomplished from that little bit of Lear jive? I do not know. But recycling is an ethos that India is instilling, so I go with it.
The thread linking Thoreau and Brother Blue for me the other day kept un-spooling, and led me back to my favorite living artist:
The Forest For The Trees
“Nature is my manifestation of God.
I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
Architects taking their inspiration from nature isn’t an innovation, in fact, its retrieving what has often been forgotten. Sometimes that inspiration leads them outside of the building process altogether and into the sphere of Art, or to be more precise, into the sphere of Land Art Installation. Continue reading
Modern India, Bootstrapping
It may have seemed implied in the previous post that looking backwards is the only amazement India offers. Not so. To outsiders and locals alike, in India sometimes the Shock of the New is the only path forward. This week in The New Yorker there is an article (click on the image to the left to read the abstract, but either full subscription or pay-per-article is required for the full text) about one of India’s many new billionaires, and his private sector approach to a moonshot.
We could distinguish his approach from the entrepreneurial bootstrapping initiatives we highlight on this sight in a few obvious ways (ok, a few billion obvious ways), but why bother? We need only say we like it. And in a place with thousands of years of experience making things work against all odds, we can also say we have hope. Even optimism.
Mystical India, In Practical Terms
There have already been plenty of posts on this site that give the perspective of non-Indians living in or visiting India. Here is another good example of an Indian describing a local feature of life that, to the non-Indian, is more of a phenomenon. And so the style of delivery, while quite different from that of this man, is equally intriguing (fair warning: the accent is stronger here, but you can train your ear to understand)–both men talking about old stuff, rather genially and humbly, but clearly aware that they are sharing with the world something of value that might have been overlooked because it has been hiding in plain sight for so long.
The style of delivery, in fact, is as interesting as the content itself, if you are a non-Indian trying to figure out what makes the place called India so worthy of attention. It is not what Robert Hughes called the Shock of the New, translated from art to service or organization; it is another example of the Shock of the Old. And the style of delivery reinforces just that.
The joking self-effacement–no Silicon Valley-type innovation or technology, but we get by in our own way–belies an organizational philosophy made tangible that would be the envy of many organizations around the world.
Bird of the Day: Asian Koel
One Minute View From Above
Biophilia: E.O. Wilson, from Thoreau to Theroux
In December 2010 the Oxford English Dictionary (fondly called the OED) added 2,400 entries, including “biophilia“. But E.O. Wilson published the term (as well as it’s city kin) in 1984 in the book of the same name.
My attention was on the forest; it has been there all my life. I can work up some appreciation for the travel stories of Paul Theroux and other urbanophile authors who treat human settlements as virtually the whole world and the intervening natural habitats as troublesome barriers. But everywhere I have gone–South America, Australia, New Guinea, Asia–I have thought exactly the opposite. Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmlands the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind. Continue reading
Just For The Fun Of It
Bird of the Day: Changeable Hawk Eagle
The Wind Lens
After the earthquake in Japan earlier this year, critics of nuclear energy are clamoring for the retreat to the ‘safe’ and ‘reliable’ fossil fuels so commonplace of this age – the fossil fuels which are rapidly depleting due to the glut and the delusion of surplus of today’s culture. Not enough critics of the world’s energy policies are on what we at Raxa Collective consider to be the ‘right side’ of the argument – the one keeping the environment clean and safe. Nuclear energy is perhaps cleaner than burning fossil fuels for electricity, but even the slim chances of a catastrophe like Japan’s are enough to sell the public back to the gas-guzzling camp. But who is fighting for the third choice? The safe, the clean, the green – wind and solar power, the still-in-development responsible option
for civic-minded citizens wanting to lower their carbon footprint.
As explained in the link above, Japan’s Kyushu University is currently researching the most efficient form of harnessing wind power, and is developing a simple and cost-effective solution to the problems posed by the widely used ‘tri-blade” wind turbines of today. The main issue at hand is that the common turbine’s blades are too heavy (which is the case because lightweight materials are too weak), and more wind energy is necessary to spin the turbine, producing less energy than the potential. Kyushu University’s solution? The Wind Lens – a simple but ingenious addition to either existing or modified turbine designs which can double (or even triple) the energy output of the devices. The mechanism, in essence a ring around the turbine’s blades, acts in respect to wind much the same way a magnifying glass does to light – it takes the existing wind power, and thanks to the physics of pressure, concentrates the energy in such a way that the wind is forced through the tunnel at a significantly increased speed, resulting in a great increase in energy output. Environmentalists, intellectuals, and a few key organizations. Also, the Japanese. Continue reading
Conciliating Human Nature and Conservation
When we started this site a few months ago we had the primary objective of sharing what was happening in our field work, starting with Michael in Kerala and myself in Nicaragua. Writing from Morgan’s Rock, or from Kerala, may have made the posts feel focused on only two locations. Others have joined in along the way, thankfully, so it is a much broader spectrum geographically and otherwise. Some of us are back on campus now, and our task remains the same: getting important ideas and examples related to entrepreneurial conservation, and community-based problem solving, out there in a creative forum.
I have decided to bring my work–at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology and at Cornell Outdoor Education–as well as some of my “book learning” onto the page here. The main reason for doing the latter is to show that, to put it bluntly, we are not making this stuff up. Even on our most innovative days in the field, someone has thought about it or done it before, somewhere, sometime. And that is good news. So today I thought I would share a bit on the interplay between our basic tendencies and our better selves. Continue reading
Captivating Vision
Mary Ellen Croteau’s “Nested Caps/eye”
Even the most enthusiastic recycler gets bogged down by bottle caps. Their chemical make up is different from the bottles they top, so often they don’t fit into the categories of those ubiquitous numbers that are ascribed to other plastic items.
Artist (and self proclaimed Agitator) Mary Ellen Croteau has a history with statement art and commenting on the quantity of plastic waste has been part of her work for some time. She’s used both bags and the caps to create work that is both captivating and provocative. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Intermediate Egret
A Few More Dots
Seth’s reference yesterday to one of the writers who most influenced me, combined with Amie’s reference today (do give a moment to her link on Niemann’s brilliance) to autumn, caused some sort of mnemonic chemical reaction. It started by thinking about the quotation of Thoreau overnight. By the time I saw Amie’s mention of autumn this morning, I suddenly remembered a trip I took to Walden Pond in the autumn of 1979. Continue reading
Landscape Yearnings
Beaver damage
As someone who enjoys the outdoors and the wonderful silence that nature provides, I have recently begun to feel the emotional effects of being surrounded by metal and concrete. I, along with millions of others, am living in Buenos Aires and I am counting the days (8) until I have the opportunity to leave the city and enjoy the serenity of grass and the ability to see the stars. Recently I have had the good fortune of being asked to do some exhibitions of my work including many of the photos that I took while down in Patagonia.
Organikos 