The $7 million dogwood blossom

Not perfect — there is a brown spot on it; but beautiful, surpassingly rare, a creature of the serendipity of nature, it is a natural dogwood blossom in Dallas County, Texas:

What we came to see - the magical dogwood blossoms.

On April 5 Kathryn and I joined David Hurt and a jovial band of hikers for a trip into Dogwood Canyon in Cedar Hill, Texas. The physical formation of Cedar Hill upon which the city of the same name and several others stand, is one of the highest spots between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. It is an outcropping of chalk, a formation known as the Austin Chalk, that runs from Austin, north nearly to the Oklahoma border.

This rock formation creates a clear physical marker of the boundary between East and West. Dallas is east of the line, Fort Worth, Gateway to the Old West, is 30 miles farther west. On this outcropping is married the plains of the west with the oaks and forests of the east. Within a few miles of the line, the botanical landscape changes, cowboy prairie lands one way, forest lands the other.

On the chalk itself, the soil is thin and alkaline. The alkalinity is a function of the chemical composition of the chalk underneath it.

Dogwoods love the forests of East Texas with their acidic soils. Early spring produces fireworks-like bursts of white dogwood blossoms in the understory of East Texas forests. Dogwoods die out well east of Dallas as the soil changes acidity; driving from Dallas one can count on 30 to 60 miles before finding a dogwood.

Except in Dogwood Canyon. There, where entrepreneur David Hurt originally planned to build a family hideout and getaway, he found a stand of dogwoods defying botanists and the Department of Agriculture’s plant zone maps, blooming furiously in thin alkaline soil atop the Austin Chalk.

(continued below the fold)

Geologist finds meteor crater - on Google Earth

Geologist Arthur Hickman used Google Earth to look at part of Australia he was studying. In the satellite photos provided by Google Earth, Hickman noticed something no one else had seen: An impact crater.

For his alertness, Hickman had the 270-meter crater named after him.

• Note on the discovery at Ogle Earth
• Original story source as best I can tell, Science Alert - Australia & New Zealand
• Note at Google Maps Mania
• Tip of the old scrub brush to Bouphonia, and Friday Hope Blogging

Baltimore’s orgy of cartography and geography

The ad says “Come visit Utopia in Baltimore.” With an orgy of maps like that planned, it should be a Utopia for somebody: Geographers, cartographers, historians, and anyone interested in travel.

Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum hosts an outstanding exhibit of world-changing maps through June 8, a Festival of Maps; the entire town appears to have gone ga-ga on the idea. Baltimore will be Map Central for a few weeks, at least.

The Baltimore Sun (one of the truly great newspapers in America) described some of the cartographic gems on display:

Among the treasures is a huge and beautiful map of the fossil-embedded geological strata that underlie England and Wales. That masterpiece, published in 1815 by a pioneering geologist named William Smith, offered evidence used to support Darwin’s theory of evolution and set the stage for creation-vs.-evolution debates that still rage.

Then there’s the map researched by a doctor named John Snow in the 1850s. It allowed him to trace the source of a cholera outbreak in London to a well used by residents of a single neighborhood.

And there will be charts prepared by geographer Marie Tharp of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, a mountainous rise in the mid-Atlantic seabed, based on data gathered by American submarines during World War II and later used to provide evidence of how the Earth’s crust has evolved through geological time.

The Smith and Snow maps anchor key events in science, the origin of paleontology and one of the greatest examples of public health sleuthing. To have both of those maps in one exhibition is a great coup for the Walters, and for Baltimore.

The exhibit also features a map of Utopia drawn by Sir Thomas Moore. Other maps were drawn by Benjamin Franklin, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Here’s a video description of one of the more remarkable pieces on view, a map of London, on a glove:

from www.baltimore.org posted with vodpod

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Surely there is material here for the Strange Maps blog.  Here’s a still of the glove, from the collection of The National Archives, UK:

Below the fold, a partial list of some of the other exhibits and events planned in and around Baltimore, which will convince you, I hope, that it is indeed an orgy worth getting a ticket to see.

Baltimore remains one of my favorite towns, despite the loss of my Johnny Unitas-led Colts, despite the Orioles’ recent mediocrity; it’s a place of great history, great neighborhoods, and good food. Crabcakes from several sites, dinner at Sabatino’s, maps in the museums. Utopia indeed.

Plants refuse to listen to climate change skeptics

March 20 brought the Spring equinox, but our daffodils have been up for a couple of weeks. Spring comes a little earlier every year.

That fact, and news stories like these below must cause great angst in the bowels of the offices of U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and other places climate change deniers hold sway. One can almost imagine some poor sap of a Coburn minion laboring away long into the night trying to devise legislation that will prevent Canadian thistles, redbuds, marigolds, wheat, soybeans and corn from reading about climate change or going to see Al Gore’s movie, and getting the wrong ideas.

I hope that minion is imaginary.

Here’s story #1: The Tuesday Science Section of the New York Times carried a story by Jim Robbins, “In a Warmer Yellowstone Park, a Shifting Environmental Balance.” Longtime readers probably know of my deep affection and ties to Yellowstone and the Mountain West. So of course this story catches my eye.

Robbins details an interesting set of changes being studied by Robert L. Crabtree, who is “chief scientist with the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center in Bozeman, Montana”: Invasive Canadian thistle, an exotic weed harries cattlemen throughout the world for the ways it destroys pasture land; despite its name, this thistle is an exotic from Asia, accidentally introduced to the Americas. The Lamar Valley in Yellowstone, formerly a wetland, continues to dry as a result of rising temperatures and lack of usual rainfall (a predicted effect of global climate change). Canadian thistle loves drying wetlands, and has invaded along the Lamar River. Officials fought the invasion for several years, but the fight seems lost.

The changes are dramatic, to observant ecologists:

Enter the pocket gopher, a half-pound dynamo that tunnels into the ground near the surface. The gophers love the abundant, starchy roots of the plant and burrow beneath it to harvest the tubers. What they do not eat they stockpile under plants or rocks.

The expansion of pocket gophers and thistle is not gradual, Dr. Crabtree said, but a rapid positive-feedback loop. As the gophers tunnel, they churn surface soil and create a perfect habitat for more thistle. In other words, the rodents help spread the plant. And more plants, in turn, lead to more pocket gophers.

“The pocket gophers are unconsciously farming their own food source,” said Dr. Crabtree. Their numbers here have tripled since the late 1980s, he said.

For their part, grizzly bears have discovered the gophers’ caches and raid them. As a result, the Lamar Valley is pockmarked with holes where grizzlies have clawed up bundles of roots. Bears also devour gophers and their pups.

Dr. Crabtree thinks the bears started feeding in earnest on the new food source in 2004 — a poor year for another bear staple, the white bark pine nut. Now, he adds, they seem to be eating the gophers and roots more routinely.

Tom Oliff, chief scientist for Yellowstone, confirms that the growing season for the park has expanded 20 days a year since the mid-1990s, which may explain the spread of Canada thistle. Mr. Oliff said the park reduced control efforts because evidence showed that the plant ebbed and flowed and that the range would probably shrink on its own.

One doesn’t have to be a fan of the Craigheads or a biologist to be dimly aware that the Yellowstone ecosystems are intensely studied and intensely threatened. Climate change played a contributing role in the cataclysmic fires in the park in 1988; reintroduction of wolves still sparks some controversy, though the return of a top predator has already produced other dramatic changes in Yellowstone ecosystems. Yellowstone is home and refuge to a wild bison herd, and beautiful and unique — generally revered as a “crown jewel” of America’s features.

Nor does one need to be a climate scientist to recognize the signs of warming listed in the article, and the dangers that are implied: Drying wetlands, invasive species, dying traditional foodstocks for grizzlies, population explosions that almost always are a symptom of serious trouble in an ecosystem.

So I was surprised, dumbfounded even, to see The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE claim this as a good story. Why?

Something absolutely unheard-of before: an entire New York Times article talking about Global Warming but… with no hint of impending doom or catastrophes:

In a Warmer Yellowstone Park, a Shifting Environmental Balance by Jim Robbins - published: March 18, 2008

Destruction of wetlands, displacement of native species, upset of the ecological apple cart — and this is “no hint of impending doom?” (While you’re at the NY Times site, also see this story, about how warmer temperatures threaten the grizzly.)

Here’s story #2:

Cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., now appear weeks earlier than they used to. April 5 was the date of the debut of the blossoms 30 years ago, according to a story at National Public Radio, but they are out already and will have peaked by the end of March this year.

Washington’s blossomless Cherry Blossom Festivals (the dates for the festival have not kept pace) provide one more indicator that spring comes earlier. A geographer from Virginia Tech, Kirsten de Beurs, uses remote sensing satellite data to look at the dates plants spring forth, and has determined that spring is moving up 8 hours every year. (Go to the NPR site and listen to the story.) (This science is called “phenology,” the study of the timing of biological phenomena.)

Here’s the problem for climate change deniers: How can they convince the birds, bees, grizzlies, and especially the trees and flowers, that they shouldn’t be acting as if the climate were changing? How can the climate change skeptics get the Canadian thistles to stop invading, the Japanese blossoming cherry trees in the Tidal Basin to delay their blossoms, the bluegrass of Kentucky to delay its greening, the prairies of Kansas to delay the wildflowers and grasses?

Have all those plants been suckered in by Al Gore’s movie? Don’t those plants know that Anthony Watts has shown that the weather measuring stations across the U.S. are placed wrongly, and so there cannot be warmer weather?

Church authorities got Galileo to lie low on the issue of heliocentricity centuries ago; but according to the legend, as he left the room where he had agreed to keep quiet, he muttered, “but still, it moves,” referring to the motion of the Earth about the Sun. This is the problem of the climate change deniers: Still, the climate changes.

Canute couldn’t command the tides not to flow; climate change deniers cannot command the flowers not to bloom. That force that through the green fuse drives the flower? It’s the destroyer of skepticism, too. Climate change skeptics curse it today.

Satellite photo composite: “Land surface phenologies across CONUS in 2000 revealed by hree AVHRR biweekly composites.” From USA National Phenology Network (USANPN)

• Project Budburst: You can be a citizen scientist, and help climatologists and geographers map the coming of spring. Details here. Contact Barron Orr at the University of Arizona, barron@email.arizona.edu.

More carnivalia, stoned version

Oh, remember to check out the latest 4 Stone Hearth.  This carnival of archaeology was posted at Our Cultural World last week, its 34th outing.

John Hawks has a post featured about Neandertal’s roaming habits, all determined from a tooth.  Interesting archaeology, interesting anthropology, and just how can they tell all that from one tooth? Hawks’ blog has articles I’ll use in U.S. history, world history, psychology, and maybe economics.  One of the best things about 4 Stone Hearth is the way it points to outstanding sources.

Got a tagger in your classroom?  He (rarely a she) may be interested in ancient taggers — if we may call them that.

If you live on the Pacific coast, or in the Caribbean, should you worry about your local volcano?  A Very Remote Period Indeed pointed to a paper that suggests the hominids found at Dmanisi were a family killed by a volcanic eruption — perhaps your local volcano can help you become immortal, after a fashion?

Also featured is an article about language development at a blog I only recently discovered, Not Exactly Rocket Science.  It’s another blog worth watching.

Gresham’s Law: DDT disinformation crowds out facts

I love irony.

Henry VIII devised a novel way to save money. He ordered coins be minted containing silver, as during the reign of Henry VII, but he ordered that the purity of the silver be reduced. Edward VI continued the policy so that, by the time of the rule of Queen Elizabeth I, royal advisor and financier Sir Thomas Gresham observed that most of the old, high-silver content coins were out of circulation, hoarded by people against future inflation, allowing the lesser-valued money to circulate. Gresham told Elizabeth the bad money drove out the good money.

The principle had been observed earlier by Aristophanes and others. It is known in modern economics as Gresham’s Law, since 1858 when British economist Henry Dunning McLeod decided to honor Gresham by naming the rule after him.

The bad drives out the good, the cheap drives out the more expensive, gossip drives out good information – the principle is widely observed in areas beyond economics.

And so it is that with regard to DDT, the good information about the dangers of DDT and the benefits of restricting use of the chemical has been driven out of the marketplace by bad information claiming DDT is safe, and ignoring the significant benefits reaped when massive use of DDT was stopped.

And here’s the irony: DDT-happy critics of good environmental policy now claim to be the good information driven out by the “bad” information of DDT’s harms. No kidding. A columnist named Natalie Sirkin, in a column delivering almost nothing but bad, vile information, says bad information drives out the good, never once noting the irony.

The defense of DDT was, from the beginning, a lost cause. A few of us vainly hoped that science would prevail. We soon found that Gresham ’s Law, which states that bad currency drives out good currency, applies to science as well as to economics.

No kidding it applies. Do a Google search for “DDT” today and you’ll find all over the internet the disinformation of Gordon Edwards’ ghost and junk science purveyor Steven Milloy. You will have a difficult time finding any solid study showing how DDT nearly killed off the American bald eagle, however, and you’ll have to do a targeted search to learn of any dangers of DDT — information on human toxicity is almost impossible to find, though it’s easy to find many recountings of Gordon Edwards’ bold drinking of a teaspoon of DDT before lectures.

(Natalie and Gerald Sirkin write for the American Spectator; at this writing, Google features warnings on all of their material at the time of this writing, saying the site host may try to insert “malicious software” on your computer — so I have not linked there. This problem should sort itself out, I hope.)

(The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) works to get a history of the agency up on the ‘net; a lot from the DDT ban era is now available at the EPA site for scholars; Milloy will not be happy to have factual rebuttal officially and easily available.)

Below the fold, I’ll offer a point-by-point rebuttal of the bizarre claims in favor of DDT and against the noble public officials who worked to restrict its use.

Geography revolution, next wave: Ready in your classroom?

Depression presents a serious occupational hazard, moving back and forth between the classroom and business, classroom and internet. When do administrators and legislators get serious about catching up education?

Microsoft plans a product announcement at the end of this month. Rumors claim it’s a new version of Photosynth. Photosynth mades “3D” touring by computer possible for almost any destination.

I’ll wager not a single classroom in the nation is ready to make this work. If you disagree, I’d love to hear about the class that can make use of it.

System requirements for Photosynth won’t tax the computers that most high school gamers use, but they are beyond most of the classroom computers I’ve seen in the last five years.

Probably more to the point, curriculum designers in public schools don’t even have Google Earth on their horizons. Photosynth? I’ll wager it’s not even on the radar screens of GIS users in the nation’s Council of Governments (COGS).

Geography is an exploding discipline. GIS and computerized map programs make cell phone companies go, not to mention oil and gas exploration, coal mining, air pollution monitoring (for building new power plants, for example), and road building. GPS helps drive express shipping, and all other shipping. RFI and GPS together are revolutionizing retail.

You must know how to read a map just to get a job delivering pizza.

But 9th grade geography classes? The exciting stuff is absent today.

At the Texas Education Agency (TEA), officials fret about how to stop science from being taught in science classes, for fear the facts will skew the religious beliefs of their children. They need to worry about their children not even getting hired by the pizza delivery company for being ignorant of nature and science, and the maps that show them. In a competitive, technologically savvy world, inaction, dithering and damaging action by the TEA mean our kids won’t even have a prayer.

Relevant posts:

• Explore ancient Rome, in 3-D, from your computer

Indians and energy: Public symposium on history, economics, politics and culture in the Four Corners

Glen Canyon Dam
by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)
Oil on canvas, 51″ x 77″
Glen Canyon Dam, Colorado River Storage Project, northern Arizona. Image courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation.

Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies will host a high-powered symposium in April, “Indians and Energy: Exploitation and Opportunity in the American Southwest.”

The symposium is set for Saturday, April 12, 2008, at McCord Auditorium in SMU’s Dallas Hall, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Teachers and community college professors may earn up to 7 hours CEU credits. Registration is available on-line. The $20.00 fee includes a luncheon; conference-only registration is an amazingly inexpensive $5.00.

Conference organizers are looking at a second wave of energy resource development in the Four Corners region, especially, following on earlier development of uranium ore extraction, and coal-fired power generation.

The symposium and the resulting book of essays will provide an historical context for energy development on Native American lands and put forth ideas that may guide future public policy formation. Collectively, the presentations will make the case that the American Southwest is particularly well-suited for exploring how people have transformed the region’s resources into fuel supplies for human consumption. Not only do Native Americans possess a large percentage of the region’s total acreage, but on their lands reside much of the nation’s oil, coal, and uranium resources. Regional weather patterns have also enabled native people to take advantage of solar and wind power as effective sources of energy. Although presentations will document histories of resource extraction and energy development as episodes of exploitation, paternalism, and dependency, others will show how energy development in particular has enabled many Indians to break from these patterns and facilitated their social, economic, and political empowerment.

My second job out of high school, and through much of my undergraduate days, took me to Farmington, New Mexico, and far around the area for the Air Pollution Laboratory at the University of Utah’s Engineering Experiment Station, to measure air quality and effects of air pollution resulting from the Four Corners Power Plant, as the San Juan Generating Station was under construction.

I’m planning to attend the symposium.

Especially after last Saturday’s sessions for history teachers at SMU (the Stanton Sharp Symposium), I highly recommend these programs for their ability to charge up high school teachers to better classroom work. This is history, and economics, at its best, looking to improve public policy and help people.

Planned presentations are listed below the fold, copying the information from the website for the symposium.

Kosovo: Running it up the flagpole

Living through history: Independence for Kosovo looks more likely; residents work to pick a flag for the new nation. Several serious hurdles remain; Russia promises to block UN action to support Kosovo independence from Serbia, in the Security Council.

That flag chart on your wall could be obsolete in the near future. What do your geography and world history students know about the new nation of Kosovo?

• Image: One proposal for the new flag of Kosovo, with no national symbols, no Albanian red, no double-headed eagle; image from New Kosova Report

Resources:

• Reuters story — European anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in rehearsal for independence; Albanian flag to do double duty?
• Naser Rugova interview in New Kosova Report
• Los Angeles Times, Kosovo plans to assert independence on February 17, 2008
• Wikipedia report on Kosovo flags
• BBC, “Countdown to independence” (December 8, 2007)
• “Flashback to Kosovo’s war,” BBC
• Kosovo history timeline
• History of Yugoslavia (which included Kosovo), in maps, from BBC

2008 economy: 8 views

The Christian Science Monitor presented a series of eight different views of the world economy for 2008: 2008, a look ahead. Since the Monitor is one of the better newspapers on Earth, the series presents outstanding reporting with important insights into economics.

These are custom made for warm-ups and student projects:

1. Why the era of cheap food is over
2. Global elections watch: All eyes on U.S. race
   
3. Global flash points: How to spot signs of peace
4. As oil passes $100, the question: will it stop?
5. The Olympics in China: a moment for pride - and world scrutiny
6. As violence ebbs, the next hurdle for Iraq is political progress
7. Will nations build on climate-change momentum of 2007?
8. How a credit crunch may hurt the world economy

• Photo: “In high demand: A Chinese corn farmer in Guiyang. Maize prices rise as global demand goes up for its use as food – including such uses as corn syrup (soft drinks) – and fuel, such as ethanol.” Chinese Newsphoto/Reuters, via Christian Science Monitor

January 28: Anniversary of Pueblo capture

January 28 will be the 40th anniversary of the capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo by gunboats from North Korea (or Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK), which led to some of the more interesting hoaxes of modern times.

Just watching the calendar in this 40th anniversary of 1968.

Park your camel, the music’s begun

As long as we’re in Mali anyway, why not arrive a couple of days early for this other music festival? Michael Kessler writes about the Festival du Chameau in the Sydney Morning Herald, “The sound of the desert blues”:

A week ago, when the doctor was jabbing me with yellow fever, polio and hepatitis shots and supplying malaria tablets, I’d tried imagining what a camel festival would look like. The Festival du Chameau [in its third year in 2008] is the brainchild of Tinariwen, the international darlings of world music - a group of Touareg nomadic musicians, purveyors of the desert blues, whose political past combined with their hypnotic electric guitars make them local heroes in this, the Adrar des Iforas region of Mali.

Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Stephanie Nolen accompanied a group of Inuit musicians to Mali, documented in a blog for the newspaper, Trail to Timbuktu; from her reports, we know the festival is underway, music is on the dunes:

There’s no down-in-front with a camel, really.

The 8th Festival in the Desert began a couple of hours ago, with several thousand people sitting and standing in the cool, white sand at the edge of the oasis at Essekane. The sun set just as the event kicked off, silhouetting robed men, veiled women and camels on all the surrounding ridges. On the small, raised stage there were speeches by notables including the local governor and Mali’s Minister of Culture.

Then the music began, with the opening provided by Tamnana, a traditional ensemble of men and women from Essekane who drum, chant, clap and ululate. They’re a big hit with the locals, and it turns out that demonstrations of musical appreciation hereabouts take the form of camel tricks. When the spirit moves them, nomads on camelback suddenly charge down from the dunes to the front of the stage, where they coax their camels down to “walk” on their front knees – a much-admired feat. Or they dismount and launch sudden sword fights with phantom opponents, before swinging back up and charging the camel back and forth in front of the stage a few times. It’s the Tuareg version of the mosh pit, and it’s magical to watch, but it does tend to blot out the action on the stage.

Inuit performers from Canada, in the sands at the Essakane Festival, Mali, 2008; photo by Stephanie Nolen, Toronto Globe and Mail.

News still travels slowly out of Mali’s desert, though. Most of the news about the Mali Festival in the Desert comes in the form of festival veterans spreading the music, in other, far-flung venuues.

Influences of the Essakane Festival of the Desert reach Salina, Kansas, where the Salina Journal talks about the music of Toubab Crewe, a group of North Caronlians who have performed at the big Mali festival in the past.

Oregon feels it, too: MacArthur Foundation grant recipient Corey Harris, a veteran bluesman whose work was featured in the PBS series on the blues, especially his work in Mali with the late Ali Farka Toure, performs at the Rogue Valley Blues Festival in Ashland, Oregon, on January 18 (that’s the Southern Oregon Mail Tribune, not Mali Tribune).

Mali, and Africa, have much more than just these few festivals. Why should we concern ourselves with the Essakane festival at all? Africa. PopMatters carries a column by journalist Mark Reynolds, reviewing events and arts in Africa in 2007, with a look to 2008. It’s a survey of events and publications, but it’s a good backgrounder for a high school student in Africa concerns, an article that should suggest connections to be made in geography, history, government and economics courses.

Thanks to Ann at Peoples Geography for the correction — Sydney Morning Herald.

Festival au Desert Essakane! January 10-12, 2008

BBC’s internet services carried this slide and sound account of the 2007 Essakane festival in far off Mali; this is one music festival I would really like to attend. Snippets of songs crop up on NPR or PRI (especially The World), and on PBS, and in record stores with really savvy staff — or where Putumayo discs are on sale. Everything I have heard from these festivals is very, very good.

Robert Plant helped make it famous with his 2003 performance. But its fame is relative; it’s famous only among a select group of people — those who have heard the music.

from news.bbc.co.uk posted with vodpod

.

Photos and sound from BBC: Images and interviews by Paula Dear; some images by Richard Stafford. Audio slideshow produced by Tom Housden.

The festival is set for January 10-12 in 2008. Who is playing? Where are news stories? Where are the CDs? Here’s the official website.

Geography teachers, think of the possibilities this festival offers for fun in the classroom! Adam Fisher wrote about it for the New York Times a couple of years ago:

My real aim is Essakane, an obscure desert oasis a half-day’s drive beyond Timbuktu, and the site of what’s billed as the “most remote music festival in the world.” It’s a three-day Afro-pop powwow held by the Tuareg, the traditionally nomadic “blue people” of the Sahara.

It’s a tribe often feared for the banditry of its rebels and respected for the fact that it has never really been conquered. Historically its great power came from its role in the trans-Saharan trade in gold, slaves and salt. Even now, Tuareg caravans make the 15-day journey south from the northern salt mines to Timbuktu on the Niger River. They rest their camels during the day and use the stars to navigate at night. The skin tint of the nomads comes from the indigo dye they use for their turbans and robes, which leaves a permanent stain.

What more exciting stuff do you have in your classroom on the Tuareg? Does it resonate better with your teenagers than this story would?

Addictive quizzes on world geography

Well, this is fairly addictive: The Travel IQ Quiz from TravelPod

I’d love to have every kid in the class with a computer to take this thing, or pieces of it, to drill on it, and I’d love the ability to add new stuff to it.

How’d you do? What do you think — are there classroom possibilities here?  (I’ve tried to make the widget work, below . . .)

This Traveler IQ
challenge is brought to you by the Web’s Original Travel Blog

Follow a graduate student to Antarctica

Penguin Burgers appears to be a blog of a graduate student who will be off to Antarctica on a project, working with a team at North Carolina State University.

The blog appears to be rather an afterthought, an add-on. But consider: What if your class were able to follow this guy to Antarctica, and keep up regular communication with him through the blog?

There’s some great potential there. I plan to watch. Looks like this fellow is really looking forward to the trip.