Author Archives: olikellopas

11 Ideas for Homemade Crafts

by olikellopas Posted on February 12, 2013

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11 Ideas for Homemade Crafts

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Congress takes a big hit of hemp-farm legalization

by olikellopas Posted on February 7, 2013

Congress takes a big hit of hemp-farm legalization

By Susie Cagle

MisterQuill

Good news for troubled farmers and stoney bros who like hemp beanies: Yesterday, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013 was introduced into the U.S. House by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.). A companion bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate later this month.

Let’s be honest here: A Democrat from Oregon seems like an obvious pick to back a hemp bill. But Kentucky’s Massie is bucking the pervasive American right-wing perception of hemp as a smokable, dangerous narcotic and not a sustainable industrial material.

“Industrial hemp is a sustainable crop and could be a great economic opportunity for Kentucky farmers,” Massie said in a statement. “My wife and I are raising our children on the tobacco and cattle farm where my wife grew up. Tobacco is no longer a viable crop for many of us in Kentucky, and we understand how hard it is for a family farm to turn a profit these days. Industrial hemp will give small farmers another opportunity to succeed.”

This is the fifth time a federal hemp bill has been introduced since 2005, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in its chances of success. However: The first four times, it was mainly sponsored by Ron Paul. This time the bill has 30 cosponsors, eight of whom are Republicans.

Already 19 individual states have legalized industrial hemp farming. If change is ever going to reach the federal level, it’ll likely have to come from conservatives who can make a strong economic argument and trot out some nice beer-drinking Southern Joe Farmers wearing hemp overalls. To convince scared conservatives of the difference between “marihuana” and hemp, some anti-drug scaremongering is probably on the horizon, too.

Maybe the U.N. was wrong. Maybe 2013 shouldn’t be the Year of Quinoa — it should be the Year of Hemp.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Fish DNA database aims to fight seafood fraud and promote conservation

by olikellopas Posted on February 7, 2013

Fish DNA database aims to fight seafood fraud and promote conservation

By Susie Cagle

Matthew Kenrick

Over the past few years, the FDA has been compiling a fish DNA library to help combat seafood fraud. But despite its best efforts, many sushi eaters and other seafood diners are still chowing down on mislabeled and unsustainable fish species on the regular.

Now a Canadian team has gone a step further, compiling a DNA barcoding library of tens of thousands of Atlantic ocean fishes, and making much of it available directly to other research scientists and the public. You can thank Canadian biologist Paul Bentzen and his colleagues at Dalhousie University. Yes, despite the funny name, this is a real university. From Phys.org:

According to Paul Bentzen, Professor in the Department of Biology, “With growing pressures from fisheries, climate change and invasive species, it is more important than ever to monitor and understand biodiversity in the sea, and how it is changing. Our database provides a new tool for species identification that will help us monitor biodiversity. The availability of ever easier to use DNA sequencing technology can make almost anyone ‘expert’ at identifying species — and all it takes is a scrap of tissue.”

He continued, “There can be many steps in the supply chain between when the fish leaves the water and when it appears on a plate. With many desirable species becoming ever more scarce and expensive, there will always be temptation to substitute a cheaper fish (or an illegally harvested one) for a legal, more expensive one. We know it happens. DNA data never lie, unlike some seafood labels and restaurant menus. With the DNA database, it will be easier to detect seafood fraud when it happens.”

The database aims to fight fraud with readily available public information. The problem: It’s only searchable by wonky scientific names and jargon. That means it’s useful to other scientists, but not so useful to regular people. Until this kind of info gets funneled into an easily parse-able application, consumers and policy-makers will likely just feel like they’re drowning in data.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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USDA report predicts all manner of end-times for crops and forests

by olikellopas Posted on February 7, 2013

USDA report predicts all manner of end-times for crops and forests

By Susie Cagle

Darla Hueske

Climate change will absolutely devastate American agriculture and forests. Don’t believe me? Ask the feds.

The Department of Agriculture released a new analysis of cropland and climate, showing that bets are off after the next 25ish years. From USA Today:

“We’re going to end up in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively impact crop production,” said Jerry Hatfield, a laboratory director and plant physiologist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and lead author of the study. “In fact, we saw this in 2012 with the drought.” …

Farmers will be able to minimize the impact of global warming on their crops by changing the timing of farming practices and utilizing specialized crop varieties more resilient to drought, disease and heat, among other practices, the report found. …

By the middle of the century and beyond, adaptation becomes more difficult and costly as plants and animals that have adapted to warming climate conditions will have to do so even more — making the productivity of crops and livestock increasingly more unpredictable. Temperature increases and more extreme swings in precipitation could lead to a drop in yield for major U.S. crops and reduce the profitability of many agriculture operations.

Warmer weather, the USDA predicts, will also help weeds grow, potentially stunting grains and soybeans.

So OK, we’ll all be starving, but at least we can still appreciate our nation’s other beautiful planted scenery, right? That won’t be destroyed by massive wildfires and swarms of insects, right? Ha-ha, wrong. From the Associated Press:

Dave Cleaves, climate adviser to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said climate change has become the primary driver for managing national forests, because it poses a major threat to their ability to store carbon and provide clean water and wildlife habitat.

“One of the big findings of this report is we are in the process of managing multiple risks to the forest,” Cleaves said on a conference call on the report. “Climate revs up those stressors and couples them. We have to do a much better job of applying climate smartness … to how we do forestry.”

The bright side: We’ll have the last laugh in the faces of climate change deniers everywhere when we’re all starving, burning, covered in bugs, and broke from spending billions on trying to manage it all.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Building Better Kids, Vocabulary Edition

by olikellopas Posted on January 31, 2013

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Over at City Journal, E.D. Hirsch argues that the most important function of education is vocabulary development:

There’s a positive correlation between a student’s vocabulary size in grade 12, the likelihood that she will graduate from college, and her future level of income. The reason is clear: vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities—not just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking but also general knowledge of science, history, and the arts. If we want to reduce economic inequality in America, a good place to start is the language-arts classroom.

….Why should vocabulary size be related to achieved intelligence and real-world competence? Though the intricate details of cognitive abilities are under constant study and refinement, it’s possible to give a rough answer. The space where we solve our problems is called “working memory.” For everyone, even geniuses, it’s a small space that can hold only a few items in suspension for only a few seconds. If one doesn’t make the right connections within that space, one has to start over again. Hence, one method for coping and problem solving is to reduce the number of items that one has to make sense of at any moment. The psychologist George A. Miller called that process “chunking.”

….Words are fantastically effective chunking devices. Suppose you put a single item into your working memory—say, “Pasteur.” So long as you hold in your long-term memory a lot of associations with that name, you don’t need to dredge them up and try to cram them into your working memory. The name serves as a brief proxy for whatever aspects will turn out to be needed to cope with your problem. The more readily available such proxies are for you, the better you will be at dealing with various problems.

I don’t actually have an independent opinion about this, but my mother, the former fourth-grade teacher turned ESL teacher, has become convinced that vocabulary is indeed the single most important key to learning. So I’m linking to this article for her. If Mom says vocabulary development is key, then by God, I’m going to make you all read about it.

So how do we go about building vocabulary? Hirsch has a bunch of suggestions, but here’s one that leapt out at me:

Nearly every child in France attends a free public preschool—an école maternelle—and some attend for three years, starting at age two. The preschools are academically oriented from the start. Each grade has a set curriculum and definite academic goals, and the teachers, selected from a pool of highly qualified applicants, have been carefully trained.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the French conducted an experiment with 2,000 students to determine whether sending children to preschool at age two was worth the public expense. The results were remarkable. After seven years of elementary school, disadvantaged students who had started preschool at age two had fully caught up with their more advantaged peers, while those who had started at three didn’t do quite as well, and those who had started at four trailed still further behind. A good preschool, it turned out, had highly egalitarian effects. A very early start, followed by systematic elementary schooling, can erase much of the achievement gap, though the payoff isn’t fully apparent until the later grades—a delayed effect that is to be expected, given the slowness and cumulativeness of word-learning.

Well. This certainly appeals to my biases. No, wait. Let’s say that in a more sophisticated way. My Bayesian priors suggest that these aren’t just spurious correlations, but plausibly causal agents. Vocabulary, baby!

(But seriously. There really is a lot of evidence that learning during our very early years is crucially important. See Jon Cohn’s “The 2-Year Window” for more.)

The whole piece is interesting. As I said, I don’t have a deep understanding of this subject, and I’m not asking you to buy into everything Hirsch says. But it’s worth a read. Via Sullivan.

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Building Better Kids, Vocabulary Edition

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Vets, PTSD, and Kids: A Google+ Hangout with Mac McClelland and Military Moms VIDEO

by olikellopas Posted on January 18, 2013

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For her story on how PTSD affects the wives and children of returning vets, Mac McClelland spent countless hours with military moms Brannan Vines and Kateri Peterson. This morning, the three of them sat down again—online this time—to answer reader questions in a Google+ hangout. The complete conversation, hosted by our multimedia producer Brett Brownell, is below.

Read or listen to the magazine story read by Mac herself.

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Vets, PTSD, and Kids: A Google+ Hangout with Mac McClelland and Military Moms VIDEO

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Quote of the Day: Bill? What Bill?

by olikellopas Posted on January 17, 2013

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From Florida governor Rick Scott, explaining the virgin birth of the law that turned Election Day into chaos in his state:

It was not my bill….I didn’t have anything to do with passing it.

It’s true that Scott signed the bill mighty quietly, but sign the bill he did. And he defended it tooth and nail after that. But I guess sometimes the buck doesn’t stop at the top after all.

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Quote of the Day: Bill? What Bill?

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The 32 most alarming charts from the government’s climate change report

by olikellopas Posted on January 14, 2013

The 32 most alarming charts from the government’s climate change report

By Philip Bump

Just reading about the government’s massive new report outlining what climate change has in store for the U.S. is sobering. In brief: temperature spikes, drought, flooding, less snow, less permafrost. But if you really want to freak out, you should check out the graphs, charts, and maps.

For the more visually oriented bunker builders out there, here are the 32 most alarming images from the 1,200-page draft report. (Click any of them to embiggen.)

Things will be different.
Analysis suggests that temperatures could rise as much as 11 degrees by the end of the century. On this chart, note the lines labelled SRES A2 and SRES B1. Those are the two greenhouse gas emission scenarios used as worst- and best-case scenarios in many of the charts that follow.

It’s possible that sea levels could only rise eight inches. It is also possible that they could rise over six-and-a-half feet.

Over the past 30 years, we’ve already seen hundreds of billion-dollar weather disasters — heavily centered on the South and Southeast.

We will be hot.
Over the past century, temperature changes have varied by region.

Depending on the emissions scenario, we could see an average of four degrees of temperature increase — or 10 degrees across the country.

Under the worse-case emissions scenario, annual days over 100 degrees will spike in the Plains, Southwest, and Southeast.

The whole country will see more frost-free days — but particularly in the Southwest.

We will be wet.
Precipitation has been increasing across the country …

… but that increase isn’t uniform.

We will also be dry.
Under a higher-emissions scenario, the southwest will see far less rain.

Drought will increase significantly …

… and we’ll see significant increases in water withdrawal.

Very heavy precipitation — far bigger storms — will increase dramatically in the Northeast.

Flooding in the northern Plains and Northeast will increase.

We will be itchy and sneezy and diseased.
Carbon dioxide increases will lead to more pollen, exacerbating allergies.

The natural range of ticks will expand.

Alaska will become a totally different state.
Under the higher emissions scenario, Alaska could see temperature increases of nearly 12 degrees.

That increased warmth will mean faster thawing of the permafrost, which is very, very bad news.

We will need boats, if we live on the coast.
The U.S. has seen huge population growth on its coasts, which is bad news.

Sea-level rise will affect different areas to different degrees — but note the map at lower right. On the Georgia coast, “hundred year” floods could happen annually.

In New York, which has seen sea rise quickly …

… the boundaries suggesting where a hundred year flood would stop will keep moving inland.

North Carolina will see rising whatever-they-call-its, too.

Across the country, airports built near the ocean, often on fill, will become more subject to flooding.

Power plants in California will be threatened by flooding.

Seattle will see huge areas of the city made vulnerable to flooding and surge. (You can read the details here.)

Or, in summary:
Here’s what you can expect depending on where in the country you live.

If you really want to sleep poorly tonight, open the full report and search for your state. If the temperature is only expected to go up five degrees, consider yourself lucky.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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The 32 most alarming charts from the government’s climate change report

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Corn on Hardball: Will the Far Right Keep Congress from Acting on Gun Control?

by olikellopas Posted on January 12, 2013

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The Obama administration’s gun task force is set to deliver its recommendations next week. But if gun control legislation gets to Congress, even a moderate bill could run up against hard opposition from today’s Republican leadership, who are worried about catering to their supporters on the far right. DC bureau chief David Corn and The Grio‘s Joy Reid talk about what will happen when the gun control debate hits Congress on MSNBC’s Hardball.

David Corn is Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He’s also on Twitter.

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Corn on Hardball: Will the Far Right Keep Congress from Acting on Gun Control?

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Rum promoter won’t be allowed to hold shark-killing tournament

by olikellopas Posted on January 11, 2013

Rum promoter won’t be allowed to hold shark-killing tournament

By Philip Bump

A tame shark in the Dominican Republic.

From the Associated Press:

A popular rum promoter is drawing the ire of environmentalists for his plan to hold a shark-hunting tournament in the Dominican Republic similar to one he organized after the release of the movie “Jaws.” …

The newspaper Listin Diario recently quoted [promoter Newton] Rodriguez as saying that the country’s tourism industry suffered and people grew afraid of sharks after the blockbuster hit “Jaws” was released in 1975, leading him to organize a shark hunt a year later.

Well, idiot, first of all they already killed that shark in Jaws (via explosion) so you don’t need to worry about that. Second, a number of shark species are already endangered. Third, some 73 million sharks a year are slaughtered, many to fuel the sketchy trade in shark fins as phony medicinal treatment.

The Dominican Republic’s natural resources minister has happily kiboshed Rodriguez’s plan, though I’m not entirely certain that, in his wisdom, he’d even bother to apply for a permit.

As a public service, we figured we’d let you know the name of the rum Rodriguez promotes. It is: Barcelo. You’ll want to avoid it, given that aficionados clearly run the risk of damage to both the heart and the brain.

Source

Activists slam Dominican shark hunting tournament, Associated Press

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Rum promoter won’t be allowed to hold shark-killing tournament

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