Our Changing World

A musical slideshow of Edward Burtynsky's photographs. These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction.

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You may not be able to see the captions from where the photos are from due to the YouTube watermark, so here they are:

• Nickel Waste River. Ontario, Canada.
• Tire Mountains. Oxford, USA.
• Flattened City. Three Gorges Dam, China.
• Shipbreaking Beach. Chittagong, Bangladesh.
• Oil Drum Cliff. Ontario, Canada.
• Computer Harvest. Guiyu, China.
• Concrete Forest. China.
• Uranium Waste Desert. Ontario, Canada.

Please visit www.worldchanging.com for more info.

Global Warming Ads

The US non-profit organization Environmental Defense has launched a couple of ads which it hopes to serve as a wake-up call for Americans. In their campaign they hope to educate people about the dangers of global warming and with the urgency that we must act. The ads end with the message, "There is still time." I really hope they are right.

Ad #1:

Ad #2:

What I’ve been up to

I have been pretty committed to my training, sticking to my strength training and increasing my endurance training every-week. I have also been trying to plan upcoming events for the next few months and my annual summer backpacking trip. I will be going on my first rock climbing trip to Canmore, AB in May and at the end of May I plan to run my first ever half-marathon. May shall be a month of firsts for me.

Also now that I know my summer vacation schedule, I have began to plan my annual backpacking trip. This year I will be heading to Mount Assiniboine Provincal Park in British Columbia. We will be spending a week backpacking in and around Lake Magog at the base of Mount Assiniboine. I have the major details planned, but there is still alot to do.

I have began another blog at http://resptherapy.wordpress.com. This site will deal with my professional side of life. I plan to not let this blog fall behind just because I’ve started another one. It should work well, now I can post both my work and play without having worlds collide.

Tomorrow morning I have my Senior Men’s Basketball Championship game and win or lose, hopefully win, basketball will be over for the year.

Come Monday, my life could be thrown a little curve ball, I have been summoned for jury duty and Monday is jury selection. If selected I can probably expect to spend the next few weeks in a courthouse.

Ousland and Horn reach North Pole!!

Mike Horn Borge Ousland have safely reached the north pole today. Since leaving Cape Arktichesky Russia on January 20, 2006 they have dealt with total darkness, extreme cold, open water, pesky polar bears, broken skis and this past week Mike has been ill requiring a double dose of antibiotics.

They struggled to complete this arduous journey and I’m sure tonight they will be relieved to have their first real day of rest and obviously celebrate their accomplishment.

To read more about their adventure check out Borge’s blog of the journey here.

First-Ever Carbon-Neutral Adventure Racing Team

Clif Bar & Co., the leading natural and organic energy bar maker, and Team Silly Rabbits, one of North America’s best adventure racing teams, have joined together to make the 2006 adventure racing season climate neutral for the Silly Rabbits. Clif Bar will off-set the carbon dioxide emission created by Silly Rabbits’ race travel by buying an equivalent amount of renewable energy credits. They are purchasing the credits through Native Energy, a wind generator farm. Carbon dioxide is the leading cause of global warming.

Appreciation and enjoyment of the natural world are key components of adventure racing so it only makes sense that a team try to acheive carbon neutrality in their racing endeavours. This is not a bad idea and I think I will keep it in mind when planning more details for my first sprint adventure race in the fall.

Running with others may be better for your brain

Great, I find this out just after I finish a nice solo run.

Social isolation delays the positive effects of running on adult neurogenesis

Alexis M Stranahan, David Khalil & Elizabeth Gould
Department of Psychology, Princeton University

Social isolation can exacerbate the negative consequences of stress and increase the risk of developing psychopathology. However, the influence of living alone on experiences generally considered to be beneficial to the brain, such as physical exercise, remains unknown. We report here that individual housing precludes the positive influence of short-term running on adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus of rats and, in the presence of additional stress, suppresses the generation of new neurons. Individual housing also influenced corticosterone levels—runners in both housing conditions had elevated corticosterone during the active phase, but individually housed runners had higher levels of this hormone in response to stress. Moreover, lowering corticosterone levels converted the influence of short-term running on neurogenesis in individually housed rats from negative to positive. These results suggest that, in the absence of social interaction, a normally beneficial experience can exert a potentially deleterious influence on the brain.

Nature Neuroscience; Published online: 12 March 2006

So, what does it all mean? Well, it is known that running causes an increase in the stress hormone corticosterone which can cause a reduction of neurogensis (creation of new brain cells). Despite that running causes an increase spatial awareness and boosts connections between neurons. So Princeton reseachers tried to find out to what may explain this anomaly.

Researchers studied the effects of running on adult rats that were placed in groups and on there own. Running in a group caused a similar stress hormone elevation to isolation running, but the rats running in a group had an increase to neuron generation. The rats in isolation were vulnerable to the negative effects of the hormone.

There is hope for solo runners though. It seems that the rats in isolation that ran for a very long time, did see some brain benefit as compared to their peers that ran for a short time in isolation.

Beer flows from taps in Norway!

A woman thought she was in heaven when beer instead of water flowed from the taps in her apartment in west Norway. (more)

Learning to Navigate

In order to prepare for my first adventure race I have begun to learn the skill of navigation/orienteering. So far I have been learning from different books and indoor practice exercises with maps. I registered for an Intro to Orienteering course and a Rogaine (Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance) to develop and practice my skills.

Well that plan has all changed, the intro course and Rogaine event has been cancelled. These events where to take place at a near by Canadian Forces Base but it has now become a training ground for troops departing for Afghanistan. The next time the base will be available will be in the middle of October, over a month after my planned adventure race.

This wouldn’t be that big of a deal but because I live in a smaller city we do not have a local or regional orienteering club. This is the only orienteering event every year around here and is put on by our local Alpine Club (yes, a province with no mountains has an Alpine Club). The nearest orienteering club is 500km away in Edmonton. There is still a chance that there may be another learn to orienteer course to be put on this spring but if I plan to get some practice in a real event I might need to do a little road trip this summer.

Statistics for everyone.

Looking over statistics for most people can seem very mundane and even overwhelming at times. Also it is difficult for alot of people to translate the facts and figures of statistics into real meaning. Thankfully a great number of people have been working on ways to make statistics more understandable for everyone. One such person is Mark Newman, he has produced a world map that gives each territory a size proportional to it’s population (Webb R. Cartography: A popular perspective. Nature 2006 Vol 439:p800). What make Newman’s map unique is the algorithims used that keeps geographical distortion to a minimum.

As the world recently reached a population of 6.5 billion people on Feb. 25th, I find it interseting to note that China and India account for about a third of the world’s population, while Russia and Canada the two largest geographical areas are reduced to little buffer areas along the arctic.

Hans Rosling (professor of International Health, Sweden) is the co-founder of the brilliant site Gapminder.com. Gapminder is a non-profit venture for the increased use and understanding of UN statistics. They have a wonderful interactive presentation for the 2005 Human Development Report by the UNDP. This presentation uses these interactive graphs to help us visualize the complex global trends of human development.

I think it is work like these men have done that can all help us better understand the world we live in and the world we are creating for our children.