Research — AstroDime Transit Authority

Weeds

Weed Science Society of America

Astrodime Transit Authority is working on a video about weeds.

In February 2011, AstroDime Transit Authority got a press pass to visit the Weed Science Society of America’s conference in Portland Oregon. Astrodimer Lena Munday asked members of the society “What is a weed?”

After two years of sitting on the editing room shelves, sam smiley is editing these series of interviews. Combining audio interviews, images from the conference program, and images from a book about plants written in the 1500′s, this promises to be a meditation on the nature of weeds and weediness.

So what is a weed? STS theorist Susan Leigh Starr might call it “boundary object”, something that has different meanings to different groups of people.

I’m stumbling across all kinds of great sources, including an online library of public domain botanical books.

http://www.biolib.de/

I’m also looking at Asa Gray’s article “The Pertinacity and predominance of weeds” written in 1879

http://books.google.com/books?id=_48KAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA234&ots=0iBRBGwJc1&dq=the%20pertinacity%20and%20predominance%20of%20weeds&pg=PA234#v=onepage&q=the%20pertinacity%20and%20predominance%20of%20weeds&f=false

and Gerard’s original text and images from his plant book written in 1633 titled The Herball, or, Generall Historie of Plantes

http://caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/gerarde/index.html

Beyond Yosemite

Astrodime members sam smiley, Bebe Beard, and KumaLisa attended a talk of a group who shares the same spirit as AstroDime with respect to their performances and research. It was part of an MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History. The talk was called “Beyond Yosemite! A Three-part Guide to Reimagining the American Landscape” Jenny Price, of the “Los Angeles Urban Rangers” and a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women posed these questions:

“How are artists reimagining widespread and historically powerful iconic American landscape images? How do they challenge these images to envision nature not as an unpeopled refuge but as places we inhabit? I look at three kinds of art works: paintings and photographs that comment on well-known images; participatory public art events that act out new understandings of landscape; and a project, on the L.A. River (think Grease, Terminator 2), that reimagines a landscape by literally remaking it.”

Here is their truly awesome web site.:
http://laurbanrangers.org/site/

In search of kudzu..travel tales in Georgia and Florida

our wheels. long story.

our digs in Panama City Beach

The first week in January, AstroDimers sam smiley and Lisa Lunskaya Gordon went on a 3 day road trip beginning in Panama City Florida January 3, 2011 and ending in Tifton, Georgia on January 6, 2011.

We went first to Panama City to talk to Betty Pleas Taylor, the great great grandniece of Charles Earl and Lillie Pleas. C.E. Pleas was a botanist, photographer, and did many other artistic and scientific endeavors, and Lillie was a painter and taxidermist. This couple introduced Kudzu to many parts of the U.S. through their plant nursery in the early 1900′s. You can link to a wonderful accounting of this by Lynne Mayhew on this blog:

http://ronmayhewphotography.com/blog/?p=1563

Betty and John Taylor

Eden Gardens State Park where we talked

Kudzu letterhead from early 1900's

The next day, we had a really long drive through torrential rains, but arrived safely and well fed in Pensacola around noon, thanks to the largess of our car, and the proximity of Waffle House.

much needed waffles after long drive

After that we went to the University of West Florida, in Pensacola, Special Collections Library and talked to Dean Debolt, the curator of the Special Collections in the Pace Library. There we saw a lot of great photographic plates from the Pleas photography business..and more of C.E. Pleas’s photo experiments. The web site for the library is here: http://library.uwf.edu/About/SpecialCollections/index.cfm

Dean DeBolt, Curator of Special Collections

Kuma Lisa in archives

Our last leg of our journey took us on a drive to Tifton, Georgia.

There we went to the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health. We talked to Karan Rawlins, Invasive Species Coordinator, and Joe LaForest, IPM and Forest Health coordinator. Karan took us to see all kinds of invasive species right outside the door, and we got to hide out in a kudzu stand. The web site (one of them) that they maintain is, amongst other things, a tremendous resource of images of all kinds of different species..images that people send in, images they create. This is in a public database open to research at http://www.bugwood.org.

Karan Rawlins

Karan and Kuma Lisa in dead Kudzu pile

sam gets eaten by Kudzu

Joe LaForest, IPM and Forest Health Specialist

Currently, I am exhausted but happy, and collecting all my videos and photographs. Lisa picked up her rentacar at Michael Moore’s Auto Body and Paint Shop, and then drove to Atlanta. I’m off to Savannah to do some teaching, and then back to Boston to edit! More to come later…-sam smiley

No not THAT Michael Moore!

Looking for Kudzu

As AstroDime searches for our new themes within the subtheme of “Ecology/Ecología”, we’ve come up with some good leads so far. If you are reading this and know of anyone who has work that works into these themes, please let sam know at rocketscience(at)astrodime.org by January 15, 2011.

Here are our themes..

-Kudzu (science, social, cultural)

-street art/ecologia de callejera

-gulf of mexico (oil spill)

-indigenous perspectives on ecology in the americas.

I’m sure there will be other themes as they develop.

-sam smiley

Facebook Sux

Usually I don’t go off topic and rant like this, but rant I shall, if you don’t mind granting me my soapbox.

I have (had) a facebook account that had an odd name. Actually it was “Basta ya”. This was because originally it was going to be for my band, but time went by and it turned into a family account.

I went to it one day and saw the following:

Of course, people always wonder why you might get banned..

? could it be…i never declared my gender. For a while on facebook you could get away with not doing that. Now you have to..your choice is male or female.

? could it be..I just recently put a picture of the top of my head as my icon. As you can see, this is not my face.

Well obviously i had concerns and questions so I pushed the next button and came to this:

Well..sounds good on the surface. But most names can’t be proven to be “real”. People register with fake names all the time. I know Basta Ya isn’t a “real” name but either are many facebook identities. (It’s a creative process of roleplaying called making your AVATAR)

So I went to the next link to get my account back and make up another name.

I clicked on the above link and this is what i got..

All this brings up a lot of questions. Of course I am under NO illusions that Facebook represents in any way a democracy. I signed a terms of service, Facebook is a corporation..but the rub is..Facebook has the rights of “personhood”

Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010). In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court overrules Austin and a century of federal legislative precedent to proclaim broad electioneering rights for corporations.

So here’s the new version of social networking. People can get “disappeared” by a so called “bot” with an eye for …some algorhythm of transgression beknowst only to facebook. what is that algorythm anyway?

. so where do we live now with our new “cloud computing” and “social networking” ? are we living a corporate bureacracy? a kafka-esque situation in which which nothing is changed unless it goes “viral”?

Being the persistant person i am, i made a brand new facebook page. so “like” it please! it’s called Faceless Book.

http://tinyurl.com/facelessonfacebook

thanks for hanging out at my soapbox

-sam smiley, Think Tank Operator, AstroDime Transit Authority

¡Finalemente!

Well, INtransit V.6: “scientific american”/La America Cientifica is on its way to being pressed! Here is a sample of the front/back cover. -sam smiley

Research trip to Bogotá

AstroDimers sam smiley and Gina Kamentsky just got back from Bogotá Colombia, where we were doing research and video interviews about science and technology in Colombia. We learned even more than we thought possible.

We went to the Museo de Caldas and learned that one of the first scientific journals on the continent was published in the early 1800′s in Bogotá (which was then called Nueva Granada) The periodical was called “El Semanario de la Nueva Granada”.

We visited a hospital and sanatorium museum in Bogotá, we toured the Observatorio Astronomico (built in 1804) in Bogota, we went to an ancient Muisca Observatory (note: it was called by the Spanish, El Infiernito, whether because of the heat, or the large phallus shaped rocks, I dont’ know) We interviewed biologist Brigitte Luis Guillermo Baptist at the Humbolt Institute for Biodiversity, and we saw the beautiful metallurgical craftings of the Muisca at the Museo del Oro. Oh and a lot more happened.

But to be honest, pictures say it better than words so here are a few images from our trip.