they're almost done. In one year, they'll be releasing the results of a decade-long survey of ocean species called The Census of Marine Life. The LA Times just did an article about this amazing project (with nifty photos):
The scientists set three goals. First, they would build a global
registry of every marine life form, worms to walruses, as a baseline
for research and public policy. Second, they would map where each
species lives and travels to better understand its habitat. Lastly,
they would assess the relative abundance of each organism -- past,
present and future.
Most marine biologists are specialists who
work alone or in small groups. The census has changed that. About 2,000
scientists in 80 countries have joined forces in the largest
collaboration in the history of ocean science. ...
"This was a field
in need of a revolution," said Ann Bucklin, who heads the marine
sciences department at the University of Connecticut. "It has opened up
global oceanography."
By next year, the online database will contain photos, DNA codes and
websites for at least 230,000 unique species, including more than
16,000 fish, scientists said. ...
The
list would be longer, but researchers used DNA analysis to cut more
than 50,000 "aliases" -- different names for the same creature -- from
the species list. The worst case of multiple identity was a breadcrumb
sponge, Halichondria panacea, which had 56 names around the world. Now it will have one.
The whole project cost $650,000,000 (yes, that's millyuns.) I love the scope of the project alone. And the fact that it's (aptly) being compared to mapping the human genome. I love that this brings together my two original obsessions: taxonomy and mapping. But you know (you know) what I love the most. That's right, the actual maps.
The one above is an interactive map of the projects they're running. Click on the dots to get an incomprehensible overview. Here's one of the cooler maps. Created by satellite tagging 47 white sharks, they discovered an area of concentrated activity between Hawaii and Baja they call the "White Shark Cafe." Awesome. Unless you're a surfer.
There are also a number of super depressing ones like this one, which tracks the "relative abundance of marine life by human cultural period," and another one which shows concentrations of life in the ocean in 1960 and 1990. But you knew there couldn't be a marine-life census without a save-the-whales mentality, didn't you?
But this brings me right back to one of my originary questions: what is this obsession with quantifying and charting everything? I mean, I know what it is: it's useful; it's necessary. We can't do science, we can't understand ourselves or the world without numbers and measuring and diagrams and charts. And maps. And that's part of it. But there's also the intuitive obsession, the part that just loves binding the world in the lines drawn on a piece of paper. Not needs to, loves to. It's what we drool over in these blogs.
And the lines aren't the same as the artist's lines, although we draw them quite beautifully, often. The lines aren't there for their own sake, but for their relationship to something in the real world: a number of actual creatures, a route of actual migration of actual creatures, an area of concentration of scaly, cold, swishy bodies. And yet we love the lines more than we love the slimy, cold bodies; as much as we love what they mean.
i'm trying to discover the history of the discovery of mutation for my novel.
In the novel, which takes place at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century, the characters are on Mars without adequate protection from radiation, so they're all dying of radiation sickness and don't know it. (It's complicated.)
When did people start understanding genetic mutation?
In the course of researchy googling, I came across this diagram to the left. I have no idea what it means, but it looks cool.
I wonder, do we have a mechanistic view of the universe because our science makes it seem that way, or do we have a mechanistic view of the universe because our most obvious metaphors for physical processes are machines, and then we draw diagrams that make stuff look like machines?
I don't believe that chromosomes look like this, no matter what you say. LA LA LA LA I'm not listening!
the above image is from the opening titles for the Fox TV show New Amsterdam, which I've been watching with slightly but steadily decreasing interest in its usual TViness, but increasing interest in its geographical sensibilities. The opening titles show a quick animation of New York City getting built up from its original shape as a village at the lower end of Manhattan.
The premise is that a Dutchman from the seventeenth century goes to the New World and is killed there saving an Indian woman. She turns out to be a shaman who brings him back to life and keeps him alive until he finds his one true love.
So he lives through nearly four centuries, marrying many times and fathering sixty-three children, only to become an NYPD homicide cop in the present. One day, in the pilot, he has a heart attack and dies on a subway platform. When he revives later, he realizes that this means that his one true love was on that subway platform, and that this is the beginning of the end. Now all he has to do is find her.
Here's a trailer that sums up the show's premise:
It's not a very good show, although Lasse Hallstrom directed the first episode. The acting is not strong (the Danish lead actor's accent isn't convincing, and affects his affect), there's no chemistry between the lead and the woman who might be the one true love (she gets the boot at the end of this first short season), and there's nothing particularly unusual or standout about the show.
Except for the use of the city in history.
This is something that was done to a lesser extent with the showAngel, which took place in Los Angeles and featured a 250-year-old vampire who had lived in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Angel
frequently took us back to earlier eras--in other places as well as
LA--showing us the protagonist's involvement in historical moments.
But it was never done as quite such a love song to a particular city.
In New Amsterdam the protagonist, who names himself
alternately "Amsterdam" and "York," stays in New York throughout his
immortality, and possesses both generalized and personal knowledge of
the history and happenstances of each place. What Amsterdam knows about
the city is layered, often subtle, and broad in the field. The amount
of research they must do for this show is awesome.
The immortality conceit allows a very intimate, and story-driven, view of history which is satisfying to the narrative-obsessed on every level. What's even more satisfying is that this intimate and story-driven view of history is utterly tied not just to place, or to city as imaginative construct, but to geography, in all its weird and complex splendor.
By "geography" here I mean it all; all of it: social history, metonyms, reputations of people and places, the strange continuities that remain in a place even after the public stops going there, architecture and arts, physical transformations and how to track them, land use, recreation, the replacement of one population by another, the way people in a place are always doomed to repeat that place's history, as if geography were destiny, which, as we all know, it is.
The makers of the show eschew the cheap, shallow history of time-travel shows like "Quantum Leap" or "Dr. Who," which understand a historical era in terms of costuming and a single zeitgeist. Instead, they make choices which are often as interesting and complex as they are TV-awkward and clueless. For example, in the present, Amsterdam's sidekick/confidant is his sixty-year-old son, Omar. Omar is a biracial (black and Dutch) former trumpet player who now owns a club where Amsterdam hangs out. Amsterdam married Omar's mother in the late forties, against the desires of her wealthy, conservative, black father.
All of which is kind of amazing. Amsterdam may well be the first major TV protagonist (of a non-ensemble show) to have a biracial child. BUT, the jazz from the relationship comes from the role-reversal: Omar is now old enough to be Amsterdam's father, and acts like it. This role-reversal only enables Omar to be the magical negro, while giving Amsterdam a kind of racial cred he couldn't get any other way. And Omar seems also to be tied to New York in a way inexplicable for someone who was once a musician and presumably traveled a great deal. His ownership of the bar is a device that keeps him in place, available at every moment to serve Amsterdam. So, that line of inquiry is ambivalent about racial issues.
Or another example in a recent episode: Amsterdam is a painter during the era immediately preceding WWI. He's a cheesy representational painter (of course) during modernism; and they stupidly have him altering his own personality to become tempestuous and to have him cheatin' on his wife. Gah, moronic stereotypes.
But what that episode is actually about is the origins of ... you guessed it ... organized crime. Amsterdam is investigating a mob hit on the school-teacher scion of a (strangely) Dutch-named crime family who happens to look exactly like Amsterdam-the-pre-war-painter's son. Throughout the episode the usual flashbacks are to a time when Amsterdam--whose wife was starting to age (he himself remains perpetually 35) while his son, Rosie, was becoming a man--had an affair with an artist's model (gah! moronic stereotypes!)
Amsterdam confirms that the murdered boy is actually his great great grandson through his son Rosie, and tortures himself throughout the episode that his home-breakin' ways were what drove Rosie to crime. Then, once he's solved the murder, he sits down in the last few minutes of the show with his aging grandson--the murdered boy's grandfather--to find out why Rosie became a criminal. Well, guess what? It wasn't Rosie at all. Rosie was a schoolteacher in the teens and twenties, and it was the grandson who turned to crime during the great depression. "I made some choices" the old man says, and that's that.
I'm not sure how much of this was intentional--because after all, the acting and direction and even writing in the show is muddy--but in this one episode they've layered a number of factors and influences guiding the outcomes of individuals within movements of history. This crime family comes from a cultured, but presumably economically unstable artist's family. As is very realistic with such families, the son becomes a teacher, another culturally, but not economically, capitaled sector. So during a time of severe economic downturn, the grandson--who presumably has access to his parents' cultural and social capital, but not to any sort of economic safety net; and who lives in a city vast enough to support minor crime networks within neighborhoods--turns to organized crime.
Two generations later, the family's wealth is assured and the family returns to the cultural and social luxury of a low-paying, high-ideals job like teaching. It's all in there: the class and economics issues; Americans' strange love/hate relationship with high culture and learning, and violence; our contempt and reverence for the arts; our need to relate the great movements of history to our small, personal faults and triumphs, only to discover that the great movements were caused by great movements instead, and our individual choices were as drops in the ocean.
And there's even a lovely throwaway in there: the son's name, "Rosie," is short for "Roosevelt," which suggests that he was named after Teddy, but also suggests much more subtly that Amsterdam has a history with the New York Dutch Roosevelt family.
Every episode has stuff like this.
So I'm torn about this show. I'd love for it to get better, for it to become a conduit for this kind of thinking, and a quality drama as well, but I'm not hopeful. I haven't heard much buzz about the show and it doesn't seem to have legs. Oh well.
wow. Taxonomy sorts out all life on Earth, in the present day, in the future, and all through the past. ... Classes will take us up one further rung. Mammals for example, all suckle their young ... except when they use formula ...
It's a great idea, but maybe a songwriter should have written it.
"... and he evenutally created this map, which is where the title of the book comes from, that showed, in a sense, all the deaths in this neighborhood radiating out from this single point on the map ... and so at this moment of great terror and death and destruction, a new clarity emerges ..."
it's actually a little counterintuitive, if you don't know your current geography very well (and I don't). I mean, you expect bad pollution from the former Soviet Union, China, and India, but Peru? Zambia? The Dominican Republic?
• Dzerzhinsk in Russia, a Cold War chemical weapons site
• Linfen, heart of China's coal industry
• Kabwe in Zambia, site for mining and smelting of metals including lead
• Haina in the Dominican Republic, where battery recycling and smelting have left huge concentrations of lead in residents
• Ranipet in India, where more than 3m people are affected by tannery waste
The Blacksmith Institute, an NGO, which concerns itself with the health issues brought by industrial pollutions and "brings resources and expertise to local groups and agencies in developing countries to solve sthese problems, one site at a time," in this map focused on
"the accumulating and long lasting burden building up in the environment and in the bodies of the people most directly affected," said the institute's director Richard Fuller.
"There are places where life expectancy approaches medieval rates, where birth defects are the norm not the exception, where children's asthma rates are measured above 90%, and where mental retardation is endemic," the report says.
It's an aspect of poverty that we don't much think about, a double bind in which populations depend upon whatever industry happens to arise locally, or be placed there, yet that industry so pollutes their environment that it becomes worse than a lack of industry would be.
Yes, you can do something! Go to this donor page and pick a cleanup site to send money to.
Robynn at nonogirl radio turned me on to this nifty family tree diagram of bands related to the nineties band Cap'n Jazz. The diagram is interactive; click on the band for info, catalogues, liner notes, etc.
André Skupin's In Terms of Geography, which organizes the overlapping topic areas covered in contemporary critical geography using the metaphor of a topographical map.
one of the exhibitions I knew about before my New York visit, and one that I most looked forward to seeing, was Places and Spaces: Mapping Science, a physical exhibition with a more extensive online component, examining how traditional mapping techniques may be used to define the contemporary fields of science.
Today, the word "science" encompasses myriad arenas of physical and abstract inquiry. This unique exhibition, at the Healy Hall in midtown Manhattan, uses innovative mapping techniques to physically show what and where science is today, how different branches of science relate to each other and where different branches of study are heading, where cutting edge science is erupting as archipelagos in the oceans of the yet unknown - and - how it all relates back to the physical centers of research. The world of science is turned into a navigable landscape.
I was very excited but ended up disappointed.
The exhibition consisted of printed out images (even the matting was printed). No original documents. It would have been more exciting to see these images online in high resolution. Unfortunately the online component is also disappointing because the images are so small that you can't view them in any detail. It would have been better if they had spent the money they spent on printing buying more server space and putting really large, high res, detailed images up online. Then, if they had to have on site exhibitions, they could have built kiosks, or projectors. Otherwise, just distributed CD-ROMs.
This would have been more appropriate to the topic: virtual or metaphorical space. Ideal space. Something could have been made out of the exhibition being virtual and drawing the viewer's attention to the "space" they were entering and to the possibility of external linkage.
That said, the content of the exhibition is very exciting. It was well curated: a good collection of pieces illustrating an interesting idea. The exhibition was divided into: historical maps of geographic space, historical maps of ideas, and then maps of science. There was a very beautiful (but difficult to read) light installation at the end of two maps, one a more typical topical map like the others, and one that showed the geographic locations of article citations to show the geographic spread of ideas. I won't get into further detail on the maps themselves. All the exhibited maps, plus more examples, are available on their website, although you'll get a better view of the exhibited ones if you check out the physical exhibition.
I found it interesting that most of the maps seemed to operate on the principle of organizing topics according to citation importance, as determined by how often an article or study is referred to. This is also reminiscent of the internet, where hit count (quantity) is often more important than the quality of the reference. There's not much information about how this is done, so we can't know if any of these references are perhaps negative: scientists ganging up to laugh at a silly or universally repudiated idea. Maybe a work is cited because it has no influence at all. Scientists can be a clique as much as anyone else.
This traces the influence of formally ratified ideas but not of any other types of influence. It also makes the taxonomy of science entirely self-referential---even subordinating real world application to articles discussing real world application.
It would be thrilling to create a taxonomy/map of science based on topic areas and connections provided by the man in the street. Each person would create a map and then the maps would be morphed together to make a consensus idea of the world of science. Since it's all perception anyway, it wouldn't be a Fool's World Map where the makers just take a few of the most ridiculous misperceptions they can find and use those. If done scientifically (i.e. with a proper sample) this would be just as legitimate, and in some ways more so, than the maps created by the scientists themselves.
Because the most fascinating part of all this is that these maps, which create powerful consensus in how science is to be taxonomized, also create a sense that "science" is an actual physical place that can be mapped, whose contours can be revealed; that the landscape of science is somehow fixed and knowable, even though everyone provides the meaningless caveat that it is not. There is, of course, no such terrain, and science (like science fiction) will always be exactly what we mean when we point to it, and no more.
I had an argument with a friend about the legitimacy of Chinese herbalism. (He's white, male, pushing 40 and hysterical about scientism.) The faith he put into the scientific method was as astounding as the contempt he had for anything that did not employ it. The fact that, for example, a certain ointment has healed burns for a thousand years, and has been tested in a variety of ways over that time, got no traction with him. Only clinical trials (whatever those are, he couldn't say) could determine whether a medicine could truly heal.
Ultimately, as interesting as it is, what this exhibition does is help cement (or at least reveal) this magical thinking about western science as a hard physical location, a physical destination that you actually can reach, and one that renders all other such supposed destinations fantasy. Ironically, it was in thinking about this that I articulated for the first time, for myself, that "science" is rather a culturally determined set of precepts and prescriptions---and proscriptions---more like an ethical system than the final definition of reality.
The exhibition ends August 31st so get yourself down there if you're in New York. And don't forget to check out the online exhibition, which is more comprehensive.
i really wanted to title this post "frankenfood in Frankreich", but I decided long ago against snilly (snarky and silly) titles for my posts on atlas(t).
Via kartentisch I found out that the French chapter of Greenpeace got into trouble with a google maps mashup marking Monsanto fields of genetically engineered (GE) maize in France. EU law requires that the locations of fields of GE crops be made public to minimize the risk of non-GE crops being contaminated, but France has been slow to make this into national law. A French court recently ordered French Greenpeace to remove their GE map.
So Greenpeace has responded by going into the fields in the south of France which are not now otherwise marked, and marking the actual fields with crop circle "x's".
GE grains haven't been adequately tested for human consumption and they're putting new GE strains out there all the time. At this point, we don't really have any idea of the dangers GE crops might expose us to. These grains "introgress" to neighboring fields, i.e. their seeds fly over into neighboring areas on the wind, or carried by birds and other animals, and hybridize non-GE crops. So these genetic elements are entering our environment and even our "organic" food supply in an uncontrolled manner.
in nearly 20 percent of the investigated cases, neighbouring conventional and organic maize fields in Spain are contaminated by GE organisms, without farmers and consumers even knowing about it.
Check out the links on the Greenpeace page for information on what you can do about it.
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
-- George Orwell
Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always economical and always sexual. The textures that bind them together are daily re-written through a word, a gaze, a gesture.
-- Irit Rogoff
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