Exploratorium

Sound map of natural conditions of the United States by the National Park Service, estimating how places would sound naturally, without human influence. 

The trend is higher sound levels in wetter areas with more vegetation. This is due to the sounds of wind blowing through vegetation, flowing water, and more animals (especially birds and frogs) vocalizing in more fertile locations.

“When you’re President of the United States, you don’t make many new friends, and I’m not giving up the old.”

This week, we’re sharing stories of ‪#‎LGBTQ‬ history in our holdings. On Saturday, join us online for our second National Conversation, held in Chicago, on LGBTQ human and civil rights: http://bit.ly/1UB5sCs

John F. Kennedy met Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings at Choate prep school in 1933. They started the ‘Muckers Club’ to organize Choate’s pranksters, and were almost expelled when the headmaster heard about the Muckers’ plans to treat the school gym to a pile of horse manure. JFK also learned that Lem was gay shortly after they met.

In 1937, JFK and Lem travelled to Europe together. Possibly most adorable part of their European adventure was their adoption of Dunker, a dachshund puppy they met near Nuremburg.

In the 1940s, JFK enlisted in the Navy and Lem joined the Naval Reserve; they kept up their friendship through letters.

The two stayed friends throughout JFK’s rise to the Presidency, a risky decision. In the 1960s, gay Americans faced institutionalized discrimination, especially in government and politics, and this could spell the end of civil service for gay individuals and people associated with them.

As his political career progressed, JFK continued to rely on Lem’s help and friendship. As JFK put it: “When you’re President of the United States, you don’t make many new friends, and I’m not giving up the old.”

Saudi Aramco.

See also my post from 3 years ago, “Why don’t oil companies hire climate deniers?” listing all the oil companies taking climate action (many are not publicly traded).

Dam removals shows promise restoring ecosystems! From the very excellent open source science journal, Elementa.

The prolonged history of industrialization, flood control, and hydropower production has led to the construction of 80,000 dams across the U.S. generating significant hydrologic, ecological, and social adjustments.

With the increased ecological attention on re-establishing riverine connectivity, dam removal is becoming an important part of large-scale river restoration nationally, especially in New England, due to its early European settlement and history of waterpower-based industry.

To capture the broader dimensions of dam removal, we constructed a GIS database of all inventoried dams in New England irrespective of size and reservoir volume to document the magnitude of fragmentation. We compared the characteristics of these existing dams to the attributes of all removed dams over the last ~25 years.

Our results reveal that the National Inventory of Dams significantly underestimates the actual number of dams (4,000 compared to >14,000). To combat the effects of these ecological barriers, dam removal in New England has been robust with 127 dams having been removed between ca. 1990–2013. These removed dams range in size, with the largest number (30%) ranging between 2–4 m high, but 22% of the removed dams were between 4–6 m. They are not isolated to small drainage basins: most drained watersheds between 100–1,000 km2.

Regionally, dam removal has re-connected ~3% (3,770 river km) of the regional river network although primarily through a few select dams where abundant barrier-free river lengths occur, suggesting that a more strategic removal approach has the opportunity to enhance the magnitude and rate of river re-connection.

1. Don’t derail a discussion. Even if it makes you personally uncomfortable to discuss X issue…it’s really not about you or your comfort. It’s about X issue, and you are absolutely free to not engage rather than try to keep other people from continuing their conversation.  

2. Do read links/books referenced in discussions. Again, even if the things being said make you uncomfortable, part of being a good ally is not looking for someone to provide a 101 class midstream. Do your own heavy lifting.

3. Don’t expect your feelings to be a priority in a discussion about X issue. Oftentimes people get off onto the tone argument because their feelings are hurt by the way a message was delivered. If you stand on someone’s foot and they tell you to get off? The correct response is not “Ask nicely” when you were in the wrong in the first place.

4. Do shut up and listen. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of listening to the people actually living X experience. There is nothing more obnoxious than someone (however well intentioned) coming into the spaces of a marginalized group and insisting that they absolutely have the solution even though they’ve never had X experience. You can certainly make suggestions, but don’t be surprised if those ideas aren’t well received because you’ve got the wrong end of the stick somewhere.

5. Don’t play Oppresion Olympics. Really, if you’re in the middle of a conversation about racism? Now is not the time to talk about how hard it is to be a white woman and deal with sexism. Being oppressed in one area does not mean you have no privilege in another area. Terms like intersectionality and kyriarchy exist for a reason. Also…that’s derailing. Stop it.

6. Do check your privilege. It’s hard and often unpleasant, but it’s really necessary. And you’re going to get things wrong. Because no one is perfect. But part of being an ally is being willing to hear that you’re doing it wrong.

7. Don’t expect a pass into safe spaces because you call yourself an ally. You’re not entitled to access as a result of not being an asshole. Sometimes it just isn’t going to be about you or what you think you should happen. Your privilege didn’t fall away when you became an ally, and there are intra-community conversations that need to take place away from the gaze of the privileged.

8. Do be willing to stand up to bigots. Even if all you do is tell a friend that the thing they just said about X marginalized group is unacceptable, you’re doing some of the actual work of being an ally.  

9. Don’t treat people like accessories or game tokens. Really, you get no cool points for having a diverse group of friends. Especially when you try to use that as license to act like an asshole.  

10. Do keep trying. Fighting bigotry is a war, not a battle and it’s generational. So, keep your goals realistic, your spirits up (taking a break to recoup emotional, financial, physical reserves is a-okay), and your heart in the right place. Eventually we’ll get it right.  

- See more at: http://theangryblackwoman.com/2009/10/01/the-dos-and-donts-of-being-a-good-ally/#sthash.boXPnORw.dpuf

A SocImages Collection: Police, Black Americans, and US Society

Compiled by Lisa Wade, PhD

Why are relations between black America and the police so fraught? I hope that this collection of 50 posts on this topic and the experience of being black in this country will help grow understanding. See, also, the Ferguson syllabus put together by Sociologists for Justice, the Baltimore syllabus, and this summary of the facts by Nicki Lisa Cole.

Race and policing:

Race and gun laws in practice

When force is hardest to justify, victims of homicide by police are most likely to be black

The failure of racial profiling

Stand Your Ground increases racial bias in “justifiable homicide” trials

In simulations, people are quicker to shoot at people perceived as black

The war on blacks: Arrests for marijuana possession

NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy

Perceptions of black men and boys as inherently criminal:

Framing children’s deviance

Race, clothes, and perceptions of criminality

Who’s afraid of young, black men?

Whose deviance do we notice?

Media portrayals of Mark Duggan and Mike Brown

Racial bias and media coverage of violent crime

Proof that Americans have less empathy for black people:

The racial empathy gap

The death penalty, race, and the victim

Can black men be sexually assaulted?

Racial disparity in imprisonment inspire whites to be tough on crime

Failure to understand when non-white people distrust the police

Evidence of the consistent maltreatment, misrepresentation, and oppression of black people in every part of American society:

Racial wealth gaps that harm black children

Fetishization and mocking of black women’s bodies

The portrayal of black women as ugly

Racism kills: New data on stress and mortality

Racial differences in childhood asthma

An elite university degree does not protect against racism

Race and pre-term births

Race and the initiation of treatment for breast cancer

Racial bias in presidential pardons

Racial bias in law firms

Nearly half of black scientists mistaken for janitors or assistants

Racism in ballet

Racist antics at college parties, a collection

Race, criminal records, and employment

Percent of children with a parent in prison, by race

Racial minorities have to wait longer at the polls

Cultural invisibility: What color is “flesh”?

Race, education, and earning potential

College graduation and unemployment among blacks vs. whites

Special education eligibility by race and region

Black churches still going up in flames

Whites, blacks, and kidney failure

Racial bias in jury selection

Whiteness as the standard of beauty

White vigilantes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Distrust for black entrepreneurs

Racialized representations of evolution

Black invisibility in Hollywood

Black/white disparities in prison sentences

The children of the prison boom

The sudden convergence of addiction treatment and whiteness

And murder

On violent resistance:

Angela Davis: “No idea what black people have gone through.”

Stokely Carmichael: “The U.S. taught us very well how to be violent.”

Malcolm X: “We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”

The situation now:

“How much do you think people can take?”

Zimmerman’s acquittal hurt race relations

Race and beliefs about the ongoing fight for civil rights

Many Americans overestimate and fear racial diversity

150 years of racism: Attitudes in the American South

The average white American’s social network is 1% black

W.E.B. DuBois (1934):

The colored people of America are coming to face the fact quite calmly that most white Americans do not like them, and are planning neither for their survival, nor for their definite future if it involves free, self-assertive modern manhood. This does not mean all Americans. A saving few are worried about the Negro problem; a still larger group are not ill-disposed, but they fear prevailing public opinion. The great mass of Americans are, however, merely representatives of average humanity. They muddle along with their own affairs and scarcely can be expected to take seriously the affairs of strangers or people whom they partly fear and partly despise.

For many years it was the theory of most Negro leaders that this attitude was the insensibility of ignorance and inexperience, that white America did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro.  Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people.  Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.