27 March 2025

Harris & Ewing Collection

The Library of Congress online includes the 41,000 photographs in the Harris & Ewing Collection, all searchable.


A 1914 photograph of U.S. diplomat Alvey Augustus Adee, the 72-year old Second Assistant Secretary of State, who rode his bicycle to work and took annual bicycle tours in Europe until World War I.

1911 photograph of a street in Bogota, Colombia.

Camp Dix in 1918.

Entrance to Glacier National Park in 1914.
 


"Arthur Kochler, wood identification specialist of the Department of Agriculture, says the piece of wood he is holding is 12,000,000 years old. It is a fragment from a fossil log of redwood, 7 feet thick, found by workmen of the Reclamation Service buried 150 feet below the bed of the Yakima River in Washington. The log was petrified, buried in the lava flow from volcanoes which have been dead for millions of years, 11/30"



16 March 2025

Lost species

How can we lose a plant species? Especially one that is common and naturally occurring? Well, this is such a concern that every year we "celebrate" a Day of Commemoration for Lost Species. And the list keeps growing.

11 March 2025

UNESCO World Heritage list in the US

 You don't need to travel to Europe or South America to visit UNESCO World Heritage Sites. There are multiple sites within an easy drive of Rutgers. And there are even more all throughout the US (28, to be precise), with the National Park Service and the Department of Interior maintaining a list of future candidate sites to list. Here is a list/map of the US sites.

What should be added? What is a site that is significant to the entire world's population?

10 March 2025

FlowingData's warning about dishonest charts

 In the GISciences, people often cite Mark Monmonier's How to Lie with Maps. It is a very accessible guide to the ways that maps can trick us and how cartographers, even well meaning ones, can create maps that mislead.

So I am quite taking with the chart equivalent. FlowingData has posted an accessible explanation about Dishonest Charts that can help us both as the creators of charts but also as critical readers of data that need to be wary of what at first seems obvious.


28 February 2025

Serious about recharge

 Drought-challenged areas can get serious about the water supply. Consider this story from Texas where the community acquired land that was the aquifer recharge zone as a way of protecting their water supply.