"Biodemography of human ageing"

This article in the March 25th 2010 issue of Nature magazine confounds the rest of that issue's Insight Review of human ageing. For someone not versed in the field of demographic statistics used in this article, the graphs and conclusions are unique. By examining a kind of running average of life expectancy, the author is able to talk about the continuing increase in life expectancy.

"Humans will continue to suffer senescence -- but the process is not intractable. Mortality has been postponed considerably as a result not of revolutionary advances in slowing the process of ageing but of ongoing progress in improving health. If progress in reducing mortality continues at the same pace....then in countries with high life expectancies most children born since the year 2000 will celebrate their 100th birthday -- in the twenty-second century. "

"Two views of our planet's future"

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAXWELL HOLYOKE-HIRSCH
Nature article by Dr. David Orr, (Oberlin College) in this April 28 2010 review of books written by Stewart Brand and Bill McKibben. Each book advocates societal responses to anthropogenic climate change, with Stewart Brand advocating technological solutions and Bill McKibben advocating local interventions. Dr. Orr has also written his own book on solutions, entitled Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse.

The article is well written and the even the comments section contains interesting citations by volunteers.

2008 Autumn in Review

When the snow came to the high country of Colorado, in September, I left on a series of explorations. I had traveled to CO to understand more about the ecology of small rivers and streams in the Southwest that I had been trying to restore with Wild Earth Guardians. After learning the ecological integrity assessments practised by the Colorado Natural Heritage Program, I knew I needed more time to wander, and think. I found lots of the former and not enough of the latter. I visited a couple dozen riparian areas in New Mexico and Arizona, some were revisited restoration sites, others were new sites. Figure a couple days hiking around each place, and that about explains the last months. I attended talks on the history of vegetation change in the SW, and even gave a talk on the subject at a symposium put on by the Arizona State Museum.

I was traveling pretty much constantly, camping in my van wherever I found myself at the end of the day. Autumn in AZ is beautiful...fall colors and balmy temperatures mix to make a lot of lucid dreaming... and finding an awesome girl to travel with helped sweeten the deal. I think the highlight of the last few months was backpacking for a week in Aravaipa Canyon, a slot canyon that straddles the Sonoran desert / Pinon Juniper ecosystems, and I'm hoping the GIS I did there will materialize into a job next fall. After that Alexandra and I retired to the beach in Mexico for the month of December.

Still trying to get paid to do what I love, and living on a shoestring in my obedient old van with an obstinate laptop while I appreciate what a vow of poverty means.

Locust Functional Neuroanatomy

From Maplike Representation of Celestial E-Vector Orientations in the Brain of an Insect. Heinze et al (2007); Science 315: 995. These are some of the central circuits encoding orientation via polarized light signals. The complexity of the celestial polarized light vectors should not be underestimated, either.