It's Nice to Be Home!

I had class in Portland this week-end and came home to find this on the whiteboard in the garage when I opened the garage door.

Joyous Easter!

Me,Marc,Dad
Los Angeles, California
Easter 1955

Portland Anti-War Protest

While my Archives class was examining and reporting on archival collections at the Oregon Historical Society (see blog post in Adventures in Library School),an anti-war protest was going on right across the street in the Park blocks.
Here's an article about it from the Oregonian. I took these photos when we had our lunch break.

For My Fellow Bird Lovers

I love birds, especially the little woodland ones. If you love birds too, you may be interested in this, from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The naturalist John James Audubon attempted, in the 19th century, to paint every species of North American bird. He got through 435 of them before running out of time and money. Now the University of Pittsburgh Library System, with a little more time and money, has digitized all 435 of the images and mounted them online.

Only 120 sets of the large, hand-colored works — acknowledged as masterpieces of ornithology — are known to exist. Pitt’s Digital Research Library used a high-resolution scanner to create the digital set for the Web, along with reprints from Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, his five-volume text describing each of the birds.

Life in the Clouds

This article, When Life Goes Cloudy by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson, discusses the idea of microbes--bacteria, algae, fungi, and other tiny organisms--living in clouds. The paper in Geophysical Research Letters which she is basing this post on went further, claiming that not only do microbes travel via clouds, but that some of them actually live there - growing, metabolizing, reproducing - until plummeting back to earth when the cloud rains. Some scientists don't believe clouds are stable enough to sustain life, but the idea that the apparently lifeless clouds over our heads contain fully functional complex microbial ecosystems is an intriguing one.

Life finds a way.

Happy St. David's Day!

The daffodils are not quite in full bloom and the weather today was rain, wind, and hail, which is not very spring-like, but we did have the traditional leek soup and then lemon cake and tea for dessert. It is traditional to wear either a daffodil or a small leek in your lapel today, although I did neither.