Cleaning out my draft posts from the past few months. Here are some recent news articles about the natural world I found interesting, but I just don’t have the time to write about them further right now.

• October 31: Scientists Map Ecosystem Services, ScienceDaily, via Restore. See also:
• New cost-benefit model will aid efforts to conserve wilderness, Innovations Report (article is in English, web site is in German).
• Scientists Determine Dollar Value for Ecosystems
• The Nature Conservancy, WWF and Stanford University Launch the Natural Capital Project, The Nature Conservancy
• Additional links: Natural Capital Project, World Wildlife Fund, Stanford University Center for Environmental Sciences and Policy
• October 30: Program will give Longleaf Pines a Fighting Chance (opinion), Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Restore. See also:
• USDA ANNOUNCES NEW CONSERVATION PROGRAM TO RESTORE LONGLEAF PINE FORESTS, Farm Service Agency, USDA
• Conservation Reserve Program Longleaf Pine Initiative (PDF), Map (PDF)
• Links: Conservation Reserve Program, Farm Service Agency, USDA.
• October 26, Lake Desolation, NY: Major moose population expansion expected in Adirondacks, Newsday
• Links: Department of Environmental Conservation, NY
• October 25: NASA Looks at Sea Level Rise, Hurricane Risks to New York City
• October 25: Butterfly Tagging Sheds Light on Migrating Monarch
• October 18: California, US Northeast to Unite on Forming CO2 Market
• October 17: Finding the Right Mix of Trees to Fight Climate Change
• October 4: Can industrial agriculture withstand climate change?, Grist
• September 25: Predicting species abundance in the face of habitat loss. See also:
• Food-Web Models Predict Species Abundances in Response to Habitat Change, PLoS Biology
• Links: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• September 25: Bt Pesticide No Killer on Its Own, Overturning Orthodoxy, Scientific American
• August 18: What’’s Nature Worth? New Computer Models Tell All, University of Vermont
• June 29, Long Island, NY: Clam-or for shells: Project to return mollusks to the bay

I just noticed that the home page of my blog was truncated. Only the letters “Fla” in the blog name were showing up, and nothing after that. Individual posts did not seem to be affected, only the home page.

Very weird.

I “touched” the template and republished the entire blog, That seems to have cleared it up.

If you are encountering problems with the home page, but can read this post, please leave a comment. I will get the email and check into it.

I’ve had a Web presence since, I don’t remember when. It was sometime back in the 1990s, maybe even a decade ago, that I started publishing to Compuserve’s “Our World”. I later registered my own personal domain and re-launched my Web site there.

But what was the subject of Web site number one in 1989?

“When the Web was started, it was started as a mechanism for sharing high energy particle physics data,” said Professor Rebecca Grinter of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.

The creator of that Web site, Tim Berners-Lee, wanted experts to be able to share data on particle smashing, even if they weren’t at CERN in Switzerland where he was doing research. CERN, in Geneva, is the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
– Web reaches new milestone: 100 million sites, CNN.com

Netcraft reported yesterday that the Web now has 100 million Web sites. This is really an extraordinary number. A “domain name” is the top-level name in a link, eg: blogspot.com, yahoo.com, and so on. All the blogs hosted under blogspot.com, including this one, all fall under the same domain name, and only count as one Web site:

There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, which gained 3.5 million sites last month to continue the dynamic growth seen throughout 2006. In the November 2006 survey we received responses from 101,435,253 sites, up from 97.9 million sites last month.

The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft. …
– November 2006 Web Server Survey, Netcraft

I’m continuing to make incremental changes to the structure, layout, and style of this blog. It is my intent that these are improvements to the usability of the blog.

Today I changed the style and layout of the banner to reduce the vertical space – the “critical dimension” of a Web page – it takes up. I can’t eliminate the blue Blogger banner without introducing advertising on my blog, which I don’t want to do. I’d host this blog on my own site before I’d accept advertising.

The other significant change today is that I’ve added a second feed option to the banner. You can now subscribe to email updates of the content of this blog through the FeedBlitz link in the header. If you use a feed reader, you can of course continue to use the FeedBurner link already in the header.

Past changes include:

• Expandable post summaries.
• Resizable content.
• A tag cloud in the sidebar.

Update 13:43 EST: Blogger appears to have passed whatever was blocking its system. I’m able to post and republish my blog. We’ll see what happens …

The blogger community is reporting widespread problems this morning. I’m experiencing them also while trying to update my blog’s template. If you’re reading this, then posting doesn’t appear to be affected, at least for me.

When I wrote about the Sheep & Wool Festival, I mentioned that we bought a broom, among other things. And in the comments, I mentioned that we also bought a blanket.

Here they are.

For the past three years, the Sheep & Wool Festival has issued a limited edition blanket commissioned and designed just for the festival. They had one blanket left from 2005 and I much preferred it over this year’s design because of the stripes. It’s a throw blanket, not big enough for enough a small bed. It’s wonderfully light, soft and warm.

A certificate came with the blanket as well. I tried to scan it to include here, but can’t get that to work today for some reason. It reads:

The Hudson Valley Blanket

Series 2: Number 001

This limited edition blanket has been created using wool grown in the Hudson River Valley. It is the result of a joint project between The Chas. W. House & Sons, Inc. woolen mill and New York State’s Hudson Valley sheep producers. The Hudson River Valley is bordered by the scenic Catskill Mountains to the West and the Berkshires to the East. This is depicted in the blanket design with naturally colored stripes.

The following flocks have contributed wool to this blanket:

Mary Godesky, Red Hook, NY
Jessi & Ethan Page, Salt Point, NY
North Breeze Farm, Millbrook, NY
Wild Apple Farm Ltd., Hudson, NY
Jeff & Debbie Traver, Pleasant Valley, NY
Shepherds Garden, Clermont, NY

[I’ve elided the phone numbers of the growers for their privacy.]

The wool in this Hudson Valley blanket consists of fleeces from Corriedale, Dorset, Columbia, Hampshire and Merino sheep. The employees of Chas. W. House & Sons, Inc. and the Hudson Valley sheep producers hope you will enjoy this quality wool product for many years.

I remembered that the “art” brooms were called plaited brooms because of the way the stems were attached to the handle:

The stems are partially split and plaited all around the handle. The dried stems are used in their natural form, untrimmed. You can even see some seedheads still left on the ends of the stems:

The handle itself is a natural form. This was the most bent one of all those on display. I actually liked it the most. It looks like a classic witch’s broom. It may make an appearance this Halloween!

All the handles of the plaited brooms were carved. Each had a different design. This was the only one which also had ant tunnels on it. Again, I liked that difference this handle had from all the others. It’s a unique piece of hand-work.

Go to:

• Previous: #8 Yarn and Stuff
• Table of Contents

Okay, so the U.S. now has over 300 million people, but where are they?

Here they are.

Credit: NASA image by Robert Simmon, based on data archived by the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC)

This map, based on population estimates made in 2005, charts out the number of people in every square kilometer of the United States.

As has been the case historically, the most densely populated parts of the United States are east of the Mississippi River. Rings of decreasing population density radiate out from the major urban centers of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington along the East Coast. Other cities—Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, and Dallas—punctuate the map in the country’s interior. The west remains lightly populated except for clearly defined urban regions. Like their counterparts in the east, the largest cities in the west (San Diego and Los Angeles in the south; San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose farther north) hug the coast, with the densest populations in Southern California. Other large western cities readily visible here include Portland, Seattle, Phoenix, and Denver.

– New Image: United States Population Density, NASA, Earth Observatory, Newsroom, October 26, 2006

Unusual for U.S. maps, it includes both Alaska and Hawaii, in their geographically correct locations, rather than floating off to the side in little boxes as they usually do. The map also includes all of Canada.

[2006.11.08 12noon EST: Major overhaul. I just moved each section of photos to their own pages. See notes below.]

[2006.10.23 11:30 EDT: Linked title to Sheep&Wool Web site.]
[2006.10.22 22:50 EDT: Added Yarn and Stuff, indexed by category.]
[2006.10.22 20:00 EDT: Added explanatory text. Added photos of Sheep Dog Trials, Broom-making, Hand-spinning.]
[2006.10.22 15:20 EDT: Added photos of “The Scene“, Musicians, Goats, Llamas and Alpacas.]
[2001.10.21 23:55 EDT: Initial placeholder with link to Flickr set.]

Thanks to Bev Wigney of Burning Silo, I decided to move each section of photos to their own page, instead of keeping everything in one huuuuge page. Each of the links in this table of contents will take you to a page with just those photos. At the bottom of each page you’ll find a link to the “Previous” and “Next” sections, and a link back to the “Table of Contents,” this page. As before, each photo on each page links to the Flick page for that photo.

1. The Scene
2. Musicians
3. Goats
4. Llamas and Alpacas
5. Sheep Dog Trials
6. Broom-making
7. Hand-spinning
8. Yarn and Stuff
9. Blanket and Broomstick

These are most of the photos from my Flickr set of the Festival. In the Flickr set, they’re simply listed in the order they were taken, without any explanations. The photos are also geotagged on Flickr, so you can see where they were taken on the fairgrounds.

1. The Scene

As you can see from these photos, it was a perfect fall day. The drive up the Taconic State Parkway was beautiful. The drive took an hour more than we had planned. Because of construction along the road, we bailed for Route 9 south of Poughkeepsie. That area was in peak fall foliage. The Dutchess County Fairgrounds were just past peak; a lot of the leaves had already fallen, but there was still plenty of color on many of the trees.

Go to:

• Next: #2 Musicians
• Table of Contents

2. Musicians

An organ grinder (with a stuffed toy monkey banging little cymbals). Check out the large picture of the organ itself so you can see the beautiful inlay work on the audience-facing side.

Banjoist (dreamy … sigh …).

Nickel-harpist. I’ve never seen one of these instruments before. I did a double-take once I realized what she was doing. Basically a violin with keyed fingering on the strings for different notes and chords.

Go to:

• Previous: #1 The Scene
• Next: #3 Goats
• Table of Contents