Tropical Field Ecology this summer?

A biologist colleague of mine, Dr. David Lemmon, is offering summer field courses to both Pamana (May 21 - June 2, 2012) and the Brazilian Amazon (August 11 - 23, 2012).  For the Amazon trip, you live on an Amazon River boat (shown at left) with excursions into the jungle.

The Amazon trip has been run a dozen times already and the Panama trip is new for this year.  While I've never gone (there are few rocks in the jungle!), I have a number of students who've gone and they've all loved it and told me it was a tremendous learning experience.

There are no academic prerequisites but you have to be in good health, have a valid passport and immunizations, etc.  You don't have to be a student, either, you can audit the course as an interested adult.

Here are a couple of posters with addtional information.  Dr. Lemmon's contact information is on the posters, I'm sure he'd be happy to answer any questions about the courses.

● Tropical Field Ecology - Amazon

● Tropical Field Ecology - Panama

Tell David I sent you!

Scale of the Universe

I've gotten three links this past week emailed to me about this cool Flash animation.

It's called Scale of the Universe by Cary and Michael Huang.  From 10^-35 meters (Planck length) to 10²⁷ meters (the 93 billion light year scale of the universe), it allows you to zoom in or out while providing examples of objects of various sizes.

 Being egocentric humans, we tend to think the "world" is all that we see around us on a daily basis.  What we see and perceive is only a miniscule part of a much, much, much (62 orders of magnitude from small to large) larger universe.  And, to make it even cooler, things behave it completely bizarre ways (at least to us) and very small (quantum mechanics) and very large (relativity) scales.

Humans can use a little perspective sometimes.  We're less than nothing on a universal scale.

Darwin's Birthday

Happy 203rd birthday to Charles Darwin.

This about sums it up...

...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

If you haven't read On the Origin of Species, do yourself a favor and do so sometime.  It just makes sense (much more so than stories of gods strolling in gardens and talking snakes).

Grace Hopper

Many geologists, especially field geologists, are familiar with the expression "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission" - especially when trespassing on someone's land to look at their interesting rock outcrops (I first learned of this expression from my first field geology professor, the late Russell Waines of SUNY New Paltz).

Anyway, for reasons I won't explain (you really don't want to know how my mind works), I wanted to determine the source of this quotation and found that it's often attributed to Grace Hopper.  Grace who? you may ask.  I didn't know who she was either (but I'm sure many readers of this blog may have heard of her).  She was an amazing woman.

Go to Wikipedia and read her biography.