Posted on 25th February 2008 by Judy Breck in art | biology
audubon, billed, cornell, ivory, ivory-billed, ivorybilled, pileated, search, wildlife, woodpecker, woodpeckers
This learn node is about one elusive bird: The Big Woods Conservation Partnership is on the hunt to spot more Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. You can follow the search or join it to attempt your own sightings by clicking here where you will learn about the search and how you can spot the difference between ivory-billed and pileated woodpeckers. Long thought to have gone extinct, the Ivory-billed woodpecker seems only to have gone into hiding. The present hunt’s many aspects includes this recent story of attempting spotings from a helicopter: Onward and Upward in the Search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The illustration show in this post is by John James Audubon, who drew these biggest woodpeckers of North America in the 19th century when they were plentiful. You will be successful in hunting this beautiful bird in New York City in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art where a painting by Joseph Barthomew Kidd, based on Audubon’s drawing hangs in the American Wing.
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Posted on 23rd February 2008 by Judy Breck in astronomy | general science
discover, galaxy, galileo, map, milky, milky_way, survey, way
This learn node focus: To keep up with what is known about our home in the cosmos, the Milky Way Galaxy, online knowledge clusters provide authoritative, up-to-date information and images. The images above are from Sloan Digital Survey, and collaboration of cluster of over 150 scientists and 25 institutions. A December 2007 SDSS news release describes the discovery that The Milky Way has a double halo, as illustrated in the drawing on the left side above. The image on the right of the theoretical model galaxy is from a January 2008 announcement of continuing SDSS surveys studying dark energy, the Milky Way galaxy and giant planets.
There are many excellent Milky Way nodes of knowledge in the open Internet. Galaxy Map, a Web site that is the work of a single expert, has a node on Our Home Galaxy with rich details. Astronomy Picture of the Day has many Milky Way images, including, for example, on on The Milky Way Near the Southern Cross.
And how do we know we live in something called a galaxy and where did our home get its name? Rice University’s Galileo Project explains:
Galileo thought that what had previously been seen as a milky luster in the sky was no more than than these invisible stars. The Milky Way then was just the view of these far distant stars from earth. Nebulae or nebulous stars were in fact actually a number of small stars clustered together. Galileo went on to prove this assertion by sketching out two “nebulae” which were indeed clusters of stars.
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Posted on 19th February 2008 by Judy Breck in history | literature
dante, divine_comedy, inferno, paradise, poetry, purgatory, works
This learn node is a digital landing page that points to a virtual paradise of open material online about the works of Dante Alighieri. The above image is from the magnificent multimedia collection at the University of Texas called Danteworlds. The materials in the UT project combine “artistic images, textual commentary, and audio recordings–through the three realms of the afterlife (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise) presented in Dante’s Divine Comedy.” A links page points to four Dante websites that contain the text of the great poem (and much more!) at: Columbia University, the University of Virginia, Princeton University, and Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze’s Dante Online – which calls it subject:
The greatest poet of Italy, generally acclaimed with Shakespeare and Goethe as one of the three universal geniuses of western European literature, Dante Alighieri was also a prose writer, rhetorician, theorist of his own Italian vernacular literature, moral philosopher, and political thinker, with an immense variety of literary output.
Truly a wondrous labyrinth, Dante open Internet resources are formed by the rich interlinking of ideas and information among the major sources mentioned above, and to myriad more facts and facets of that can be connected, like this one from a Yale University open course on Modern Poetry transcript:
And the endnotes we have here are worth contemplating. In a sense, Eliot’s notes are a kind of extension of the poem, part of the poem. These lines bear the note “four”:
“And below I heard them nailing shut the door / of the horrible tower.” [The speaker of those lines that Eliot is alluding to, half-quoting, is Dante's Count Ugolino in the thirty-third canto of The Inferno.] The traitor Ugolino tells Dante that his enemies imprisoned him and his children in a tower to die of starvation.
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Posted on 10th February 2008 by Judy Breck in engineering
bridge, bridge_collapse_video, collapse, disaster, I-35W, I35w, minneapolis, minnesota, tacoma_narrows
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On August 1, 2007, the Interstate Highway 35W bridge that crosses the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed during the afternoon rush hour.
The video above captures the collapse itself. A a Web feature called
35W Bridge Collapse In Minneapolis at Science Museum of Minnesota Community looks at many subjects related to the disaster. Included is a link to the official website of the building of the replacement:
I-35W St. Anthony Falls Bridge which gives these features for the new bridge:
- 100-year life span
- 10 lanes of traffic, five in each direction—two lanes wider than the former bridge
- 189 feet wide—the previous bridge was 113 feet wide
- 13 foot wide right shoulders and 14 foot wide left shoulders, the previous bridge had no shoulders
- Light Rail Transport-ready which may help accommodate future transportation needs
- Design-build project complete in 437 days.
- Designed to be aesthetically pleasing and fit in with its environment
Another bridge disaster that is very famous is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. A Web exhibit at the University of Washington Library offers this invitation:
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened in 1940 with the third longest suspension span in the world. Four months after traffic began crossing the bridge it collapsed. On the webpages here the University of Washington Library interfaces the story of the bridge with narrative and images from its historic collections. Engineering students can visit these pages to virtually live a professional nightmare.
This Google Sightseeing map views the replacement bridge that crosses the Tacoma Narrow today
Posted on 8th February 2008 by Judy Breck in art | biography | history
art, artillery, history, memorial, memories, oral, solider, veteran, world_war_I
In this history learn node, the World War I soldier shown is my grandfather Clarence L. North (1884-1969). In his obituary, which is posted on my family website, his role in assisting General John Pershing is recorded. Grandpa would have loved the Internet. He was a very innovative guy: as the obituary records, he invented cinder-brick! By posting his story here, I am putting his memory a bit into recorded history. Perhaps future scholars of Pershing’s war management and/or the history of brick manufacturing will add Grandpa in as a footnote somewhere, citing the obituary. By posting Grandpa here, I have created an online node where one can learn his story in the vast Internet network.
Biography of people alive today is being preserved with new, robust digital methods. A good place to find out examples of this kind of preservation is the Library of Congress Blog, where for example the new recording of people recalling history is described in this post: Library Preserves Voice of Last Living World War I Veteran.
Remembering World War I in a different way are memorial structures and spaces. These are studied in The Open University’s Arts and History course on the Commemoration of War, which includes this page on The Royal Artillery Memorial.
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Posted on 5th February 2008 by Judy Breck in agriculture | biology
nematode genome banana insect control learn
To explore a learn node to study and report on something for biology, why not the common nematode. The “What are Nematodes?” webpage at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln begins:
Nematodes are the most numerous multicellular animals on earth. A handful of soil will contain thousands of the microscopic worms, many of them parasites of insects, plants or animals. Free-living species are abundant, including nematodes that feed on bacteria, fungi, and other nematodes, yet the vast majority of species encountered are poorly understood biologically.
You can click from this explanatory page to something of an illustrated parts list for nematodes called: Interactive Diagnostic Key to Plant Parasitic, Freeliving and Predaceous Nematodes. Shown here is one of the head appendages. Bananas are a fruitful place to observe nematodes in action; excellent materials for that topic can be found on IITA Research to Nourish Africa’s Banana Nematology pages. Described there is nematode damage and symptoms caused not by “a single nematode species attacking bananas, but a complex of several species.” Nematodes can also play role in insect control. A University of Florida article explains how biological control nematodes work. The Nematode.net Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University in St. Louis is an detailed repository of nematode facts and images, the picture of the Meloidogyne hapla at the top of this post.
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