Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with nature

Research supporting that homosexuals are born homosexuals

Prunedish — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:35:35 -0800

What exact research has been done to support the notion that homosexuals are born gay? I’m a person who believes that homosexuals are not born gay. I believe that it’s a choice they make. This often brings me into heated arguments with some of my friends who do believe gay people are born gay. During our arguments they often say that there is research out there to back this up, but they’ve never actually presented me with any of it. This leads to my question. I would like to see what research there exists, both for and against the notion that homosexuality is something you’re born into, preferably showing the methodology that was used, results concluded and researcher/s involved. I’d like to see this research not only to be better prepared for future debates, but to actually understand this topic. Is anybody here aware of anything I should be reading, preferably online but offline is fine also? My own Google searches have turned up the usual for/against arguments, but nothing with the more rigorous approach I’m looking for.

How do I save the planet with computers and stuff? and get paid!?

Gaeacon — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:19:34 -0800

I want to help guide the development of "new" environmentalism... Where should I (educated/trained as an Ecologist) start on a career change into media (online/web development)? better explained... I graduated in June with a Master's in Ecology/Conservation and a certificate called Leaders in Sustainability. I started out in the PhD program, but about half a year in I started thinking a lot about doing something at the interface of environmentalism/activism/science through an online medium. I distracted myself immensely, setting out my grand entrepreneurial vision. I thought I could balance all that....and my very demanding dissertation research abroad.

Well, I couldn't. A couple of years of tortured back and forth, I decided to take the Master's and try to explore the sort of channels I was envisioning. The entrepreneurial vision still exists, although on the back burner a bit. I was faced with the reality that I have a lot to learn, and my ideas need maturation.

I set out to learn more and gain experience. In my last year of grad school, I worked with an environmental non-prof that aimed to engage youth in recreating activism...a lot of interactive, educational pieces at events and festivals. I functioned as an event coordinator/"engineer"/educational programmer....many hats, so to speak. I really enjoyed the broad audience and the "cool" factor of this type of work. The work, however, wasn't paid and would not last forever.

Since graduating, I have worked with The Nature Conservancy. It was a short term position that has been extended by working myself into some new projects....but I am starting to earnestly look forward to what's next. TNC has been a great learning experience - amazing to see conservation on the ground and to be involved behind the scenes with all the different stakeholders. That being said, I still feel my heart gravitating to the entrepreneurial vision I had in grad school.

I know I can't rely on a vision alone, so I need the help of you MeFites to figure out my next steps....

My "vision" rests deeply upon the future of the internet/social networking and the fusing of media with environmentalism/science.

What would be a logical next step to dive into this realm? What kind of jobs can I apply to? I feel like I have been hovering around the conservation world for a bit....and maybe I should be exploring the media side some more.

I am very interested in computers and web development. I don't have much of a "formal" background in computers so I am not even sure which area would be the best (or if I even would have a chance of working anywhere).

What about back-up plan? Should I continue in the conservation world? Perhaps seeking out work with environmental consulting companies?
(OH YEAH, I am in debt and need something that pays at least 30-35k)

Any tips on career change and anything that would help get me closer to my goal would be greatly appreciated. TY

I live in Los Angeles...if that helps

Warmth and nature as far from NYC as possible. Oh, and a tight budget.

anthropoid — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:42:50 -0800

Warmth and nature as far from NYC as possible. Oh, and a tight budget. My friend and I are looking to go somewhere warm and nature-y during the week between Christmas and New Year's. Our ideal get-away is the Grand Canyon, but it will cost too much money. We have access to a car and we're willing to drive. Trying to keep the cost to a few hundred dollars each. NYC is our starting point.

We would prefer some kind of lodging over tent camping, though with our budget, we have to be flexible.

Looking for an adventure. Any ideas?

Self- Improvement Books

thewestinggame — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:26:00 -0800

Book recommendation filter: Can you point me to a book about purity of self/ respect for self/ self improvement through interactions with nature? Possibly with discussions on eating healthily/ exercising and/or with emphasis on gaining clarity of thought. No traditional transcendentalist writers, and please nothing steeped in Christianity.

Memoirs, instructional books, biographies, or anything, really, are all okay!

Help Identifying Weird Old Nature Book

marxchivist — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:01:00 -0800

Help identifying weird old nature book, 1940's to 1970's. Links to images inside. I fished a falling apart copy of this from a trash can at a library where I worked about 20 years ago. I managed to scan three images from it: 1, 2, 3. Somewhere along the line I lost it, I'd really like to get my hands on another copy.

It could have been published anytime from the 1940's to the 1970's. It was 8 1/2 x 11" size, probably about 1/2" thick and had a green dustjacket. I had a page on each animal with illustrations in the above style. I was hoping someone might recognize the pictures.

Thanks!

Looking for book

kemah201 — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:30:21 -0800

I am looking for a book that was used as a textbook for an english composition course at Northeastern University in 1999. The book was a compilation of nature essays including Kerouac. I believe the professor was an adjunct at the time who used the book.

Incest taboos: do animals have them?

thisperon — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:07:47 -0800

How common is incest in the animal kingdom? Do lion cubs of the opposite sex mate with one another? Will a mother bird mate with her son? Do related domestic animals tend to mate with one another without any encouragement from humans?

Wildflowers near Los Angeles?

klangklangston — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:59:45 -0800

Wildflowers day trips from Los Angeles? Girlfriend and I want to see wildflowers in the wild. We live in LA, and would prefer to be able to do this on a single day (she's got some furlough time coming up).

Where are the best? What did you like about them? What's can't miss? What specific dates should we shoot for? What's the best season to see which flowers?

I know very little about the plants in Southern California, mostly because I grew up in the Midwest.

And personal experience is very much appreciated—I've found a fair passel of vague pages on the internet (some Parks Service, some not) that don't really have the "Go here the third week of February" specificity that I'd like, being a total newb and all.

Uh...hang on, just give me a minute.

Demogorgon — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:34:31 -0800

What is the most important scientific question of our time? I volunteer at an observatory for a local amateur astronomers' society and one of the guests at a recent star party came up and asked, "What do you think is the most important question science has to answer right now?" Obviously, there is no right or wrong answer, but after the party was over a lot of us were still talking about this question and I ended up learning a great deal from my fellow club members that I might otherwise not have.
The next time this question gets asked I want to be prepared to offer a variety of answers from differing fields and opinions. I don't expect to represent every answer as an expert, but I'd like to be able to give a few more examples than I was able to, and then correlate them to some book recommendations from the answers in this thread about introductions to your field.
I also think it is important to frame the question in a way that can be meaningfully answered, i.e. "What is the most important scientific discovery about to be made?" or something like that.
Of course, I had my own answer in mind, but as a relative layperson to that branch of study I had a really hard time articulating why it was so important to "science." Therefore, if you are uniquely affiliated with a specific field that you think will produce a game-changer, feel free to get as technical as you're comfortable doing.

Thanks!

Help me find vivid books about man in nature.

Stryke11 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:55:04 -0800

Help me find books of a particular genre, or collection of similar genres. Specifically, books on living in or traveling through nature that have visual, picturesque language about the landscape/scenery/ecology. I just finished reading Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, about his summer spent working in a ranger cabin in the middle of Arches National Park in Utah. While much of the book is preachy about the need for conservation (animals good, people bad) he did an excellent job defining the area and the associated ecology in very vivid, easily visualized terms - like you were actually there.

Randomly, a month or so ago I also read Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac which also had two scenes similar to this, where he worked a summer (similar to Abbey) on a mountaintop all alone watching for fires in a park in Washington state, and a hike of his with friends in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains.

Now these are two incredibly dissimilar in theme books, so while they have the one thing I like in common, they wouldn't normally be put together. When I do my best to search for these "kinds" of writings in Google or Yahoo! I invariably get travel guides, which isn't what I am looking for. Even Amazon's usually helpful "books of similar type" and "listmania" isn't doing the job.

They don't have to be about national parks in the US. I would love some that take place anywhere in the world, in any type of terrain, as long as it's natural and described in good detail.

Thanks!

I don't understand physics. How do atomic orbitals work?

jeb — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:39:32 -0800

I don't understand physics. How do atomic orbitals work? I don't know anything about modern physics beyond the "I watched a trippy special on the Discovery Channel" level Consider this situation: I have one atom of hydrogen. Bound to it is a single electron in the 1s orbital. This electron has a negative charge. As I understand it, the orbital describes a probability density function: if I sample a point in the physical space described by the orbital, the value of that point in associated probability density function is the probability that I will encounter the electron there when I look for it (bonus side question: so if I integrate across the three dimensions of the orbital do I end up with 1?).

Let's assume I set up the following apparatus: I have my atom. At a fixed point from my atom, I have a very tiny electric field meter. This meter will record the strength of electric fields you put it in. I start recording the field strength. What do I see?

a) an oscillating value: the electron being a charged particle creates an electric field that falls off with distance to the meter. When the electron is closest to the meter, it registers the strongest field, and when it is further, it registers the weakest. The rest of the time it careens through points in between (bonus side question if this is the answer: is the output of the meter smooth, continuous, differentiable, etc., because the electron is careening through the physical space the orbital is defined over, or is it just bliz-blaz-bloz because the electron is teleporting to wherever it feels like?)

b) a fixed value: the field the meter would pick up if a point charge equal to the electron was fixed at some point (i don't know, maybe the closest point?) to the meter.

c) a different fixed value: something like the average charge. because quantum mechanics is mad trippy, the charge meter picks up, at all times, the sum of the charge it would detect from a point charge at each point in the orbital over the volume of the orbital.

d) something completely different.

e) Moo. The poster's understanding of the atom is so far wrong that this question cannot be answered.

(Super-bonus question: I'm not in school or anything, but I still want to learn some basics about how these things work. Is this physics or chemistry? Personally, I'm more interested in going up from here into how these work in groups than down into what makes up the various components at this point. Can you recommend any resources whereby I can teach myself? On Amazon, its easy to identify the "Grand Textbook for People Taking Multiple Years of This With Professors, TAs, and Problem Sets" and the "Kind of Trippy Pop Science Book That A Professor Wrote So He Could Get On The Daily Show", but what is in between? I took a lot of math, hard science, and engineering in undergrad, but no physics beyond classical mechanics and no chem so I don't know any of this stuff. I don't want to read a book thats like "Did you know that Quantum Mechanics begins with a 'Q'? That is a very unusual letter, my friends!" but I also don't want to read a book thats like "Page 1: As you can clearly see from the following Lagrangian Chapters 1-10 as listed in the table of contents can be left as an exercise to the reader so your authors have decided to proceed from the beginning of Chapter 11. More specifically, its the eighth page of Chapter 11 so it begins mid-sentence."

Cheap driving trip from LA?

ValkoSipuliSuola — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:03:00 -0800

Where can I go in SoCal for a 3 day weekend? My husband has next Monday off and we would like to take a driving trip somewhere. We live in LA and would like to see some nature - at least what hasn't caught fire yet. A 3-4 hour drive would be ideal, maybe longer.

We don't have any camping equipment, but could conceivably purchase some. The biggest problem is we have a Miata, which has a very small trunk. I'm not sure we could fit a tent and cooler in there even if we wanted to. On the plus side, the car is a hoot and a half to drive, hence the desire to drive somewhere. We also need to do it on the cheap. Any suggestions?

We've looked at Big Sur and Yosemite, but everything's booked.

Help me choose a DSLR.

biochemist — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:13:56 -0800

Can anyone recommend a good action, landscaping, and travel DSLR in the $~1000 range? I tend to travel around and take pictures of nature, which include landscape as well as fast-moving animals. (Low light would be nice too, but I won't hold my breath.) I have read this, but it's from '07. I'd like updated recommendations.

Where does my spirituality lie?

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:33:04 -0800

I don't follow a religion, and my spiritual life feels so empty without one that it bothers me enough to disrupt daily life. I believe in nature spirits, and I have a strong spiritual connection with nature. However, I also feel a connection to Christianity that I can't quite identify. I believe in spirits such as tree, wind, and rain spirits. Not rock, technology, plastic, or any spirits of that sort. I've tried looking into paganism, but I need dogma for a religion to resonate with me.

I find myself spiritually drawn to Christianity, but I'm not sure I believe in God and if I do, I'm not sure I like him. I was raised Christian, and was turned off to it because I never understood why God didn't make everyone happy and also able to appreciate what they had. That, and the vengeful stories.

Despite that feeling, I find myself wanting to rediscover Christianity on a day to basis, and it's usually because I'll come across a Christian whose values resonate with mine.

Does "Christian" and "believes in nature spirits" go together at all? Is there another religion I might be overlooking here?

Klamath Falls, Oregon attractions?

telstar — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:10:41 -0800

Hiking, biking, camping in the Klamath Falls/Crater Lake, Southern Central Oregon area? A friend and I will be spending about a week of outdoor appreciation in the Klamath Falls/Crater Lake area in central southern Oregon soon and I was wondering if anyone had any tips/advice/experiences to share. We're hoping to do a little bicycle touring with camping, any suggestions for that are welcome. (We've been advised to avoid biking on state route 140 in the area, for instance, because it's too narrow and busy.) We're fairly experienced campers and bike tourers, and since this is a "get in better shape" week, we're not adverse to fairly challenging experiences.

How to repurpose my childhood tree?

sciapod — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:25:02 -0800

A tree that I was sentimentally attached to has died. What long-lasting thing can make out of its wood? When I was in second grade, we planted locust seeds in Dixie cups as a class project. I planted mine just outside by bedroom window, and against all odds, it thrived for fifteen years before dying this past spring.

I am inexplicably broken up about losing this tree, which I'd watched grow from a seed with interest and pride. Because this tree was important to me as a child, I'd like to make something from its wood after we remove the tree from the yard. But what should I make?

I'm unsure how to estimate the amount of wood: though roughly two stories tall, the tree is fairly skinny --- perhaps a foot wide at its base. I have family members who are woodworkers, so skill level and tool availability are not a hurdle. Any suggestions you have would be welcome.

Getting away from it all in the UK?

Mwongozi — Wed, 13 May 2009 10:40:34 -0800

Secluded nature style summer holidays/vacations in the UK? I live in the UK, and a friend from the USA will be visiting me for a couple of weeks in the summer. (Sometime around July.)

Despite living here, I've never gone on holiday (read "vacation" if you prefer :) in this country, I've always gone abroad.

Can anyone recommend good holiday destinations in the UK, with an emphasis on seclusion and "getting back to nature". So, good things would be forests, beaches, anywhere without any other people, etc. etc.

Appalachian Beauty

netbros — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:18:13 -0800

In a couple weeks, I am going to Great Smoky Mountains National Park to spend a few days. For those of you with experience there, please recommend the best features of the park. In particular I am looking for what you would consider the best hiking trails, both for forest walks and scenic vistas. The NPS says there are more than 800 miles of trails. Obviously I can't do them all in a few days. I'm in pretty good shape, so elevation change is not an issue. Please share your best experiences in Great Smoky Mountains. Thank you.

City Children need Nature too

twoleftfeet — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 02:40:21 -0800

How can I teach my child, who lives in the city, about nature? We live in a city with parks and vacant lots and trees and perhaps other opportunities for me to teach my child about nature, but I don't know where to begin.

What is this leaf-like insect?

Dreamcast — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 16:31:17 -0800

What is this insect that looks sort of like a leaf? A friend took some photographs of this insect that looks kind of like a leaf, and wants to know what it is. Can anyone identify it?

Photographs here and here.

How to learn to draw trees and nature?

peripatew — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:19:12 -0800

Recommend the best way to self-learn to draw trees and nature. I've a recent fascination with the details of trees, plants, water, terrain, and landscapes.

I'm not interested in people or animals, but rather capturing nature via drawing. Part of my desire to learn to draw comes from a desire to learn more about local trees and plants. I want to create my own catalog of nature, to help me be still, and to take in the details.

I've ordered a few books on regional trees and plant life to help me identify and understand the trees and plants better.

BUT, what would be some good resources to help me get started with this small hobby? I don't have the time to take a class right now, but I might in the coming years. Books? Websites? I appreciate all help, and if my question is unclear please let me know.

What is nature's formulary?

perissodactyl — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:45:35 -0800

Physics-filter: in the context of a diatribe against memorization, a physics professor of mine once mentioned that she fell in love with the discipline because all of modern physics can be derived from a few foundational equations. So, what are they? This was an intro physics course in its first semester, and so, as I recall, my professor offered only a couple of examples: F=MA for all of classical mechanics, which seems reasonable to me, and Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence formula.

What herbs or vitamins or food makes more blood flow to the brain?

lynnie-the-pooh — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:31:23 -0800

What herbs or vitamins or food will make more blood flow into my brain? I am looking for any herb, vitamin, food, or anything else that will help make more blood flow to my brain. I know exercise is great for that as well. Any ideas from you would be great, but I'm not looking for any pill or anything a doctor would prescibe. I'm interested in something more natural and that I can do on my own. Thank you so much!!

Lynnie-the-Pooh

Is there an alternative to harmful herbicides that will kill weeds but not harm backyard wildlife?

feeshbitZ — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 11:47:28 -0800

Is there an alternative to harmful herbicides that will kill weeds but not harm backyard wildlife? My yard is full of weeds. It looks awful. We're having an awful time getting rid of the weeds because there are just too many to manually pull each out. So my husband wants to use a "Weed and Feed" or some similar weed killer on our entire lawn to kill the weeds, then start seeding grass. Here is the problem - I'm an avid backyard birder. With all the bird feeders, birdbaths and bird houses in our backyard, I'd say we have at least 40 birds in our backyard at any given time. Many of these birds are ground feeders - meaning they eat the bugs, worms and dropped seeds from the ground. My husband's proposition to kill the weeds in our yard worries me. I'm concerned that these herbicides will hurt our birds and/or the bugs and worms that they eat off the ground.

So, metafilter community, can you offer any suggestions of methods we can use to get rid of the prolific weeds in our yard without harming the diversity of wildlife we enjoy? Do you know if "Weed and Feed" options will harm the wild birds, insects and worms? So far my research has turned up few alternatives to the "scorched earth" method my husband wants to employ.

Thanks!

Looking for childhood Encyclopedia set.

studentbaker — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:46:40 -0800

I’m trying to remember the name of a set of themed encyclopedias for children from my childhood. Each book focused on a particular theme and had amazing illustrations and images that blew my little mind. The themes I can remember were dinosaurs, the ocean, plants, mammals, reptiles and I believe there was one focused on Native Americans and another on space exploration. I think I had around fifteen to twenty of the books. Each book was a different color. I think a new one came every year or six months, or maybe as my parents could afford them. This was in the late 70's, early 80's.

My mom gave them to a coworker for his children when I was in high school. I recently asked her about the books and she barely remembers books them, let alone the name. I would love to track down and purchase a set.