Wild Poinsettia

 The story of the taming of the wild poinsettia. I had no idea.

Mapping out the Scottish Gritter Spreaders

Where is Spready Mercury? What is For Your Ice Only? To help answer those questions, Scotland has created a live web map called the Trunk Road Gritter Tracker, that tracks their ice trucks with those entertaining names.

 

 

 

Paper: Evidence That Changes in Community Food Environments Lead to Changes in Children’s Weight

Excited to announce that capping more than 10 years of collaborative research, the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has published our paper, Evidence That Changes in Community Food Environments Lead to Changes in Children’s Weight: Results from a Longitudinal Prospective Cohort Study. A project with a long timeline deserves a long title, right? A special thanks to all of our collaborators and staff along the way.

Geohealth job in Europe

It is amazing to watch in real-time as geohealth continues its expansion from a small niche to a regular specialty. One more bit of evidence is this announcement of a post-doctoral position at the University of Twente, which mostly skips past the posturing and definitions and, instead, moves right into the specifics. And, like every conversation about human health these days, the description begins with COVID and then moves on to other areas.

 

 

COVID and design readings

Some pieces on redesigning our environment due to COVID-19

• Restaurants with very little outdoor space have been amazingly creative in shaping new dining spaces
• Different ways to use plexiglass instead of 6 feet spacing
  
• A Dutch proposal for a portable social distancing bench
• Kyle Chayka writes in The New Yorker that Coronavirus will change architecture
  
• On the other hand, Starchitect Norman Foster says it won't change our cities much
• Urban theorist Richard Florida talks about why density is not doomed by COVID-19

 

TodayFood reporting National Park news

 You know it is going to be an odd story when TodayFood is reporting on a news story in a National Park.

Let it flood?

Walter Hood's proposal to let the monuments around the Tidal Basin slowly get inundated is remarkable: 

"Let the waters be free," writes Walter Hood in his proposal. "It could start with living in a wetland rather than draining it." Hood, whose Hood Design Studio is based in Oakland, Calif., also calls for "a prophetic aesthetic ... that is really telling the truth about a place."

And the image from Field Operations, in NPR's Landscape Architects Unveil Plans To Save The National Mall's Tidal Basin, is downright haunting.

Tomorrow: Understanding and Managing the Risk of COVID-19

SEBS Virtual Science Cafe: Don Schaffner presents “Understanding and Managing the Risk of COVID-19” 

Dr. Schaffner, distinguished professor and extension specialist in food science, will present his experiences working with the general public and the news media during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on helping people to understand the risks posed by SARS-CoV-2 and how to minimize them.

The conversation is on Tuesday, October 13, 2020 at 11:30am, but advance registration is required.

 

 

CIP Codes

 In case it comes up, here are the CIP Codes for a few of our programs:

B.S. Landscape Architecture 040601
B.S. Environmental Planning and Design 040401
M.L.A. Landscape Architecture 040601

Exploring the National Parks

As part of the National Park Service guide to its parks, it has curated topic guides to the websites. For a topic, like Civil Rights, they provide a brief overview of the topic and then give the visitor link to a variety of parks where they could learn more about the topic.

 

Sample Topics

Civil Rights

Industry

Literature and poetry 

Presidential sites

Explorers and Exploration

Sample Features

Homes

Grasslands and Prairies

Waterfalls and Gorges 

Monuments, Memorials and Statues

 

Of course, some topics are too general to have a list associated with them. For instance, there is a fabulous guide to Cultural Landscapes without a list. And the guide to Natural Sounds is unexpected and remarkable.

 

One of the NPS' most popular events

 This week is a popular time for the National Park Service; it is Fat Bear Week. There will be lots of news coverage (CBS, WaPo, Smithsonian), plenty of voting, and a spike in searches on Katmai and Fat Bear. This is really a science awareness program to show people how Katmai National Park's amazing bears fatten up before the onset of the harsh Alaskan winter. So, watch some videos and vote for the fat ones.

Dialect Map

Aschmann's map of North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns is an enormous labor of love. The accompanying information about individual spoken traits adds details that enrich the maps. But my favorite part may be the close-up map of New Orleans that shows more distinct dialects inside those levees than in the entrety of the American West. I have been a sucker for this sort of stuff for years, including the old Joshua Katz maps and the Harvard dialect surveys.

 

Crowdsourced neighborhood mapping

Maps Mania undertook the exercise of mapping out a London neighborhood (or neighbourhood) using crowdsourced input to determine the boundaries. The neighborhood they mapped, London's West End, is a particularly undefined area and the submitted results show it. But, when combined, the final result seems a somewhat plausible. And the idea behind it remains pretty interesting.

Subpar Reviewers

 Amber Share turns horrifically bad one-star reviews of our National Parks into art that she calls, Subpar Parks.The art work is beautiful. And, as sophisticated commentary on attitudes to the parks, the reviews she has chosen are masterful.

Hudson Higlands Fjord Trail

 Take a hike (in the near future) on SCAPE's Hudson Highlands Fjord Trail from Cold Spring to Beacon.

Memorials

 

Knowledge

 

Knowing is not enough, we must apply. 

Willing is not enough we must do.

- Goethe

 

Maping the potential sports spread of coronavirus

This new feature from ESPN hits the trifecta of COVID-19, sports, and mapping. It uses maps to show the spatial reach of a single college football game. And, by extension, it shows how far and how many places could be touched by the COVID spread from that single game. Their examples are from Tuscaloosa, Lincoln, and Los Angeles.

The maps are fascinating and really make the story.

Project reusing seaweed

Kathryn Larsen shows an alternative to thatched roofs on Daily Dose of Architecture.

 

A return

 

 

 

Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947), The Call of the Sun, 1919