So the lack of entries recently is due to the fact that we moved into a new apartment this past weekend (officially a condo, actually, which we’re renting) and not only have I been spending most of my time unpacking, I have also been continuously tired and sore from the movement of both furniture and many, many boxes of books down from the old fourth-floor apartment. (The new place, fortunately, is barely one flight of steps up into its spacious and amazingly quiet wonders.)
But lucky for me, there are other people out there keeping up with some of the things I had been hoping to cover here. So I present to you a collection of links of recent happenings which I dub to be of import, random findings of last week, and other general updates:
Recap of the Chicago Eco-Transportation Show
TreeHugger highlights some of the vehicular and non-vehicular transportation options present at the show as well as the discussion afterwards on sustainable transportation in Chicago. (I hope to follow up more on this later with a set of links to bicycle, pedestrian, and public transit resources in the city.)
And speaking of sustainability-related shows, there are several important ones coming up in Chicago this fall. The first is by the eco-transportation show sponsors, Foresight Design Initiative, who are putting together Sustainable Convergence ‘06, to be held Wednesday, October 6th, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. See sustainable design art exhibits and visit displays from sustainability-minded businesses throughout the city while enjoying good food and drink. There’s a discount on tickets purchased before Labor Day.
The second event is not completely scheduled yet, but promises to be exciting. Worldchanging is holding a tour for their upcoming book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, and Chicago is one of their planned stops. The book comes out November 1st, so I’m assuming the tour will be sometime after that. Check out their site for more info as the date gets nearer. There have also been several calls for volunteers.
Injecting the oceans with iron to help fight climate change?
So I ran into the story above from a discussion about it by the green geek. Apparently a company called Planktos, Inc. has experimented ’seeding the ocean’ with iron to stimulate plankton growth. Why do this? David Kubiak of Planktos explains it this way in a TreeHugger interview:
“The most important insight to communicate is this: the most urgent planetary crisis we currently face is not global warming; it is the widening CO2-induced disaster in the seas. In tandem with the escalating plankton die-off, marine surface waters are now suffering increasingly toxic levels of carbonic acidity. Together these effects are threatening not just vital ecosystems, fisheries and the entire marine food chain, but also the planet’s primary oxygen supply.”
Extra iron makes plankton grow, allowing them to take in more carbon dioxide, and thus put out more oxygen.
I haven’t had the time recently to read or think about this more in-depthly, though I’m hoping to do so. If anyone knows more about this I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on it, particularly if you’ve heard any major criticism; neither article here seems to contain much, which I think is a little surprising.
The ecology fund uses money paid by their advertisers to help purchase wilderness, plant trees, and more. Maybe it seems cheesy and overly simplistic, but hey, if it works, then you should be clicking away.
Religion and the Environment Initiative
Somehow, in the same week in which we were gearing up to move, I not only made time to attend my first meeting of UChicago’s Religon and the Environment Initiative (REI), but also became an officer for the group! I’ll be their secretarial support and hopefully helping to put together cool events throughout the year discussing issues of, well, religion and the environment. We have a pretty snazzy website for a student group: check it out here; it includes listings for local events of interest, such as an upcoming conference here in Hyde Park at the Lutheran School titled “Emergence: A Better Vision of Nature, Science, and Religion?”
Recent Coverage on the Poincare Conjecture and the Fields Medals
I’m not sure that I ever followed math news before, but I guess this is the effect of marrying a mathematician. It means that I feel obliged to note that the Fields Medal was presented Tuesday to several mathematicians, among them Grigory Perelman, who in 2002 proved the Poincare Conjecture. It seems, however, that he has turned down the award, making the title of a recent NYTimes story, “An Elusive Proof and Its Elusive Prover” perhaps even more apt. The story also gives, I think, a pretty good introduction to the Poincare Conjecture, for those less familiar with mathematics. Along with this, Slate has a piece on the importance of the proof, called “Who Cares About Poincare?”
