One of my clients is an artist and she has been working on a series of bronze plaques that have engravings of various insects on them. On one of my recent visits to her, she showed me a book she had been looking at by an artist named Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, who has made hundreds of drawings of insects mutated by radiation in places like Chernobyl and other sites in Europe that were affected by that disaster. Earlier this week, coincidentally enough, Wired had a post about Hesse-Honegger that features a great slideshow of some of her excellent drawings. You can read more about her work here.
Last year, there were lots of reports about the huge losses of bee populations in the U.S. due to what is called “colony collapse disorder”. Sadly, things are only getting worse for bee keepers, as the latest survey shows that a full one-third of all managed bee colonies in the United States died over the winter, but only about 5% due to colony collapse disorder. Most of the die-off is being attributed to weather-related starvation and harsh conditions. You know, that “giant conspiracy of government and industry” called global climate change.
Last week, the NY Times had a story about the rise of Roundup-resistant weeds on farms that used Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant GM soybeans, and now there is this story from the Manchester (UK) Guardian about the emergence of huge insect infestations in China, where farmers have been using Monsanto’s GM varieties of cotton. On one hand, this ought to shut up all the people who continue to insist that evolution is “just a theory”, but on the other hand didn’t everybody SAY this was what would happen with GM crops about, oh, a BAJILLION TIMES?!?!
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
