Well, this is fairly addictive: The Travel IQ Quiz from TravelPod
I’d love to have every kid in the class with a computer to take this thing, or pieces of it, to drill on it, and I’d love the ability to add new stuff to it.
How’d you do? What do you think — are there classroom possibilities here? (I’ve tried to make the widget work, below . . .)
13 Comments | 
Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, On-line education, On-line learning, Technology in the classroom, Travel | Tagged: Classroom technology, Education, geography, Technology, Travel | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
No, unfortunately, not at either the State Board of Education/Texas Education Agency nor the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
At a better place, perhaps. A permanent exhibit on evolution, “Explore Evolution, opened October 1 at the Texas Memorial Museum at the University of Texas. The exhibit, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, explains evolution for students. It appears essentially the same at six different museums in the Midwest:
Explore Evolution permanent exhibit opens Sept. 10 at NU State Museum
Lincoln, Neb., Sept. 7, 2005 — Using cutting edge research, a new exhibit at the University of Nebraska State Museum gives a modern shine to Charles Darwin’s 146-year-old theory on evolution. The permanent exhibit, Explore Evolution, which opens to the public Sept. 10, was developed by a consortium of six partner museums led by the NU State Museum and prominently features the work of two UNL scientists.
The project is made possible by a $2.8 million, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s Informal Science Education program and consists of nearly identical permanent exhibit galleries at six partner museums in the Midwest and South — regions where evolution education is controversial. Other components of the project include a Web site, inquiry-based activities for middle-school children in the form of a book titled “Virus and the Whale, Exploring Evolution in Creatures Small and Large,” and collaborations with five statewide 4-H programs.
“Interested 4-H’ers will have the opportunity to explore exciting scientific concepts and cutting-edge research methods,” said Bradley Barker, UNL 4-H.
Priscilla Grew, director of the museum, said the exhibit is a big win for Nebraska.
“By funding the Explore Evolution project, the National Science Foundation has elevated UNL’s State Museum into a national leadership position in museum science education,” she said. “Evolution has been called the cornerstone of modern biology. The scientific understanding of evolution is fundamental to advances in modern medicine, agriculture and biotechnology. It is essential both to scientific research on the biodiversity of today’s world, and to the scientific interpretation of the fossil record through geologic time.”
The museum exhibit features seven current research projects, each presenting a major discovery about the evolution of life by a leading scientist or team of researchers. Through graphics and interactive displays, museum patrons explore evolution in organisms ranging form the smallest to the largest.
UNL’s contributions to the project are significant. While the exhibit galleries were built by the Science Museum of Minnesota, a team from UNL played major roles in the creation of the artwork and content. Judy Diamond, professor at the NU State Museum, wrote the original grant request for the project and is the team leader on the project. Research from two UNL scientists — virologist Charles Wood and geologist Sherilyn Fritz — is featured in two of the seven sections of the exhibit.
Wood’s research takes him to central Africa to study how the HIV/AIDS virus is transported from mothers to their infants. Wood’s research showcases the virus and how it evolves rapidly in newborns, with new strains being produced that are resistant to the infant’s immune system.
Fritz, working with Edward Theriot from University of Texas at Austin, used core samples from Yellowstone Lake to investigate the evolution of an organism called a diatom. Sampling tracks the diatom’s evolution from the lake’s formation 14,000 years ago and shows how diatoms — which are good barometers of climate change — developed within the first 4,000 years of the lake.
Other scientific endeavors featured in Explore Evolution include Cameron Currie’s work on farmer ants and their coevolving partners; Kenneth Kaneshiro on sexual selection among Hawaiian flies; Rosemary and Peter Grant on Galapagos finches; Svante Paabo on the genetic ties between humans and chimps; and Philip Gingerich on fossil discoveries of walking whales.
3 Comments | Biology, Education, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science, Texas history, Travel | Tagged: Biology, Education, Evolution, Museums, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Photo by Susana Raab for The New York Times; caption: “The writer Flannery O’Connor’s desk and typewriter in her bedroom at Andalusia, her farm near Milledgeville, Ga. She was a master of the Southern Gothic.”
From the Travel section article of the New York Times, February 4, 2007, by Lawrence Downes:
I was met at the door by Craig R. Amason, the executive director of the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation, the nonprofit organization set up to sustain her memory and preserve her home. When the affable Mr. Amason, the foundation’s sole employee, is not showing pilgrims around, he is raising money to fix up the place, a project that is a few million dollars short of its goal. The foundation urgently wants to restore the house and outbuildings to postcard-perfection, to insure its survival. Last year the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation placed Andalusia on its list of most endangered places in the state.
For now, the 21-acre property is in a captivating state of decay.
There is no slow buildup on this tour; the final destination is the first doorway on your left: O’Connor’s bedroom and study, converted from a sitting room because she couldn’t climb the stairs. Mr. Amason stood back, politely granting me silence as I gathered my thoughts and drank in every detail.
This is where O’Connor wrote, for three hours every day. Her bed had a faded blue-and-white coverlet. The blue drapes, in a 1950’s pattern, were dingy, and the paint was flaking off the walls. There was a portable typewriter, a hi-fi with classical LPs, a few bookcases. Leaning against an armoire were the aluminum crutches that O’Connor used, with her rashy swollen legs and crumbling bones, to get from bedroom to kitchen to porch.
There are few opportunities for so intimate and unguarded a glimpse into the private life of a great American writer. Mr. Amason told me that visitors sometimes wept on the bedroom threshold.
1 Comment | Books, History, Literature, Technology, Travel, Typewriters | Tagged: Flannery O'Connor, Georgia, Literature, Media, Technology, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I love a good tuba tune — I love all the low brass. Tuba Christmas is one of the great joys of this season. It may be better than the sing-along “Messiah!”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a good slide show on Tuba Christmas in St. Louis this year.
Not to brag, but there are 21 Tuba Christmas events set for Texas this year, equal to the total of California and New York together. (That link shows events in all states.)
1 Comment | Art, Music, Music education, Travel | Tagged: Music, Travel, Tuba Christmas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
This is an encore post, from a year ago. That was the last official reunion of the Pearl Harbor veterans, though I suspect a few will be there today, unofficially. New resources at the end of the post:
______________________________________
December 7, 2006
Today is the 65th anniversary of Japan’s attack on the U.S.’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Our local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, has a front-page story on survivors of the attack, who have met every five years in reunion at Pearl Harbor. Today will be their last official reunion. The 18-year-olds who suffered the attack, many on their first trips away from home, are in their 80s now. Age makes future reunions impractical.
From the article:
“We’re like the dodo bird. We’re almost extinct,” said Middlesworth, now an 83-year-old retiree from Upland, Calif., but then – on Dec. 7, 1941 – an 18-year-old Marine on the USS San Francisco.
Nearly 500 survivors from across the nation were expected to make the trip to Hawaii, bringing with them 1,300 family members, numerous wheelchairs and too many haunting memories.
Memories of a shocking, two-hour aerial raid that destroyed or heavily damaged 21 ships and 320 aircraft, that killed 2,390 people and wounded 1,178 others, that plunged the United States into World War II and set in motion the events that led to atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“I suspect not many people have thought about this, but we’re witnessing history,” said Daniel Martinez, chief historian at the USS Arizona Memorial. “We are seeing the passing of a generation.”
Another article notes the work of retired history professor Ron Marcello from the University of North Texas, in Denton, in creating oral histories from more than 350 of the survivors. This is the sort of project that high school history students could do well, and from which they would learn, and from which the nation would benefit. If you have World War II veterans in your town, encourage the high school history classes to go interview the people. This opportunity will not be available forever.
There is much to be learned, Dr. Marcello said:
Dr. Marcello said that in doing the World War II history project, he learned several common themes among soldiers.
“When they get into battle, they don’t do it because of patriotism, love of country or any of that. It’s about survival, doing your job and not letting down your comrades,” he said. “I heard that over and over.”
Another theme among soldiers is the progression of their fear.
“When they first got into combat, their first thought is ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’ The next thought is ‘It might happen to me,’ and the last thought is ‘I’m living on borrowed time. I hope this is over soon,’ ” Dr. Marcello said.
Dr. Marcello said the collection started in the early 1960s. He took charge of it in 1968. Since Dr. Marcello has retired, Todd Moye has taken over as the director.
Other sources:
While this is not one of the usual dates listed by Congress, you may fly your U.S. flag today.
— End of encore post —
Other resources:
9 Comments | Famous Battles, Fly your flag today, History, History museums, Travel, veterans, World War II | Tagged: Flag etiquette, History, Pearl Harbor, Travel, veterans | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
When a director wants a movie to demonstrate the British government, we get shots of Whitehall and Big Ben. When it’s the U.S. government to be invoked, the U.S. Capitol appears. A quintessential Russia image is the Kremlin. The Eiffel Tower evokes France. High school geography, history and government students should be able to recognize these sorts of landmarks to identify the nation or area in question.What about new landmarks? Brussels probably least penetrates the U.S. psyche of all the major European capitals. It’s a beautiful city, though, and a fun city, in my brief experience. Tradition and modernity mix and intermingle. While I stayed in a modern hotel, I strolled through plazas hundreds of years old. The city is easy to navigate, especially since it seems smaller than London or Paris, and until recently, it was largely unmarked by very tall buildings.
What will the landmarks be of the next 40 or 50 years? Dallas’s skyline shines at night with green neon outlining the city’s tallest building. Several other buildings retrofitted lights in blue, red and white, partly to compete — and of course, there is the red neon Pegasus, the symbol of the old, Dallas-based Magnolia Petroleum Co., which was bought up by Mobil, now a part of Exxon-Mobil. Lights give interesting ways to make new landmarks at night.
Brussels leaped into the bigtime with the recent opening of the Dexia Towers, a building that is lighted on the outside by a series of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) of various colors, at each window of the building. Will this become a hallmark of Brussels?
What other new structures will become common symbols in the next couple of decades?
Doesn’t this photo make you want to go see the thing? 150,000 LEDs can be programmed for elaborate displays. Go see other photos at Room at the Top.
Leave a Comment » | Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Globalization, Landmarks, Travel | Tagged: Brussels, geography, landmark buildings | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Thanksgiving? Texas had it first. No kidding (unless you count the Vinlanders, who probably were grateful to be out of Greenland, but left no records that they ever actually had a feast to say so — but see the comments in the posts linked at various places).
Mrs. Bathtub is in the hospital. Nothing major, but it appears the staff who should have signed her out yesterday all headed off for Turkey Day and may not return until mid-December, so Mrs. Bathtub languishes at the expense of the insurance companies because security is tight and there are only enough sheets to get her down two stories, and she’s on the third floor (and the people-with-unknown-fathers at the hospital have sealed the door to the balcony anyway — that’s got to get you thinking). So Mr. Bathtub is frantically reading the back of the Libby’s Pumpkin can, and you can imagine what antics are up in the kitchen today. Blogging will be sparse.
So it’s reprise post stuff, mostly, today. If you need more, go here:
Here’s the main reprise post, text below (there were some good comments last year); Margaritas and nachos do sound good, don’t they?
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Patricia Burroughs has the story — you New Englanders are way, way behind.
Palo Duro Canyon during inversion, Winter 2001, site in 1541 of the first Thanksgiving celebration in what would become the United States. Go here: www.visitamarillotx.com/Gallery/index3.html, and here: www.tpwd.state.tx.us/park/paloduro/
Update, 11/27/2006: Great post here, “Top 10 Myths About Thanksgiving.”
_______________________
Resources for 2007:
1 Comment | Abraham Lincoln, DBQ sources, Fly your flag today, Food history, Franklin Roosevelt, George Washington, Historic documents, History, James Madison, Rachel Carson, Separation of church and state, Texas history, Thomas Jefferson, Travel | Tagged: food, Historic documents, History, Thanksgiving, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
This is cool. Natural phenomena, the stuff that makes geography really interesting — where and what is this? (Pictures from August 2007)
Suddenly the shoreline north of Sydney were transformed into the Cappuccino Coast.
Foam swallowed an entire beach and half the nearby buildings, including the local lifeguards’ centre, in a freak display of nature at Yamba in New South Wales.
One minute a group of teenage surfers were waiting to catch a wave, the next they were swallowed up in a giant bubble bath. The foam was so light that they could puff it out of their hands and watch it float away.
Perhaps a good geography warm-up: Where are these pictures from? What is the phenomenon shown in the photos? Why might it be unusual for these people to be swimming in the ocean in August?
8 Comments | Geography - Physical, Natural history, Natural resources, Science, Travel | Tagged: Australia, geography, natural phenomena, ocean foam, wave action | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Yellowstone National Park is just a cool place. If you’re not using it for anything in your geography and U.S. history courses, you’re missing out.
Here’s a ten-minute video that the producers hope you’ll show far and wide to encourage television stations to pick up the series. It’s a ten-minute pilot for “Travelers’ Tales,” featuring outdoor writer Tim Cahill, a founder of Outside magazine, and photographer Tom Murphy.
Here are some of the points you might use in class:
The video features a lot of snow, elk, bison and coyotes, hot springs flowing into a river making swimming in January feasible, Mammoth Hot Springs and the travertine pools, and the cold northern desert of sagebrush and juniper.
Geography, not answered in the video (map or internet exercise):
Geography, answered in the video:
2 Comments | Adventure, Bell Ringers, Geography - Physical, geology, Natural history, Natural resources, Travel, Warm-up exercises | Tagged: geography, geology, Lesson plans, Tim Cahill, Travel, video, Yellowstone | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Interesting on-line news publication, The Entrepreneur, carries on-the-ground report of Cameroon’s new anti-malaria program: Integrated pest management with a touch of DDT.
While the treatment of complicated malaria now requires a cocktail of sulphate drugs, Cameroon has reinstituted Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, DDT for the prevention of malaria transmission. The organic chemical, DDT, to which the malaria vector was formally thought to be resistant, has been recommended as an effective insecticide against mosquitoes. According the principal officer, “that DDT was kept out for a long time could have given room for mosquito’s resistibility to be naturally eradicated, hence, making it again a good insecticide.” The treatment and proper use of mosquito nets is being recommended as a preventive measure.
[Update, 2018: No one noticed I’d spelled “Cameroon” incorrectly?]
1 Comment | DDT, Malaria, Public health, Rachel Carson, Travel | Tagged: Camaroon, DDT, Malaria | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Having a brand new canyon is sort of a once in a lifetime experience. It might even be more rare than that.
Texas’s Canyon Lake Gorge opened to the public last week — a gorge, a canyon, that was carved out over a couple of days in 2002 when flood waters charging over an overtaxed dam cut through soft soils and soft rock to expose millions of years of sediments. Dinosaur footprints were exposed by the flood, too.
A torrent of water from an overflowing lake sliced open the earth in 2002, exposing rock formations, fossils and even dinosaur footprints in just three days. Since then, the canyon has been accessible only to researchers to protect it from vandals, but on Saturday it opens to its first public tour.
“It exposed these rocks so quickly and it dug so deeply, there wasn’t a blade of grass or a layer of algae,” said Bill Ward, a retired geology professor from the University of New Orleans who started cataloging the gorge almost immediately after the flood.
The mile-and-a-half-long gorge, up to 80 feet deep, was dug out from what had been a nondescript valley covered in mesquite and oak trees. It sits behind a spillway built as a safety valve for Canyon Lake, a popular recreation spot in the Texas Hill Country between San Antonio and Austin.
The reservoir was built in the 1960s to prevent flash flooding along the Guadalupe River and to assure the water supply for central Texas. The spillway had never been overrun until July 4, 2002, when 70,000 cubic feet of water gushed downhill toward the Guadalupe River for three days, scraping off vegetation and topsoil and leaving only limestone walls.
Canyon Lake is southwest of Austin, almost due west from San Marcos about 20 miles. The lake backed up from a 1960 flood control project dam built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — the new Canyon Lake Gorge is managed jointly by the Corps and the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority.
Watch carefully, dear reader: Creationists will soon start to claim that the rapid cutting of this canyon verifies a young age for all canyons, and shows that the Earth’s geology can indeed be very young. But that claim will gloss over the fact that while the gorge was cut quickly, it was cut through sediments that took millions or billions of years to lay down. The Associated Press reports problems with such a hypothesis:
The sudden exposure of such canyons is rare but not unprecedented. Flooding in Iowa in 1993 opened a limestone gorge behind a spillway at Corvalville Lake north of Iowa City, but that chasm, Devonian Fossil Gorge, is narrower and shallower than Canyon Lake Gorge.
Neither compares to the world’s most famous canyon. It took water around 5 million to 6 million years to carve the Grand Canyon, which plunges 6,000 feet at its deepest point and stretches 15 miles at its widest.
The more modest Canyon Lake Gorge still displays a fault line and rock formations carved by water that seeped down and bubbled up for millions of years before the flooding.
Some of the canyon’s rocks are punched with holes like Swiss cheese, and the fossils of worms and other ancient wildlife are everywhere. The rocks, typical of the limestone buried throughout central Texas, date back “111 million years, plus or minus a few hundred thousand years,” Ward said.
Six three-toed dinosaur footprints offer evidence of a two-legged carnivore strolling along the water. The footprints were temporarily covered with sand to protect them as workers reinforced the spillway, but they’ll be uncovered again eventually, Rhoad said.
Tours for the new gorge are booked for the next six months. Details on how to reserve space can be found at the website of the Gorge Preservation Society (GPS).
5 Comments | Geography - Physical, geology, History, Natural history, Science, Texas, Travel | Tagged: Canyon Lake Gorge, Floods, geography, geology, History, Natural history, Science, Texas, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Tehran 24 ran a photo of a huge clock somewhere in Tehran, under the headline of “The World’s Biggest Clock.”
But is it more than 37 feet across, like the flower clock in Las Colinas, Irving, Texas?*
What is the biggest clock in the world? Surely there are some bigger.
* This site says the Tehran clock is 15 meters across — bigger than Las Colinas. The clock faces accompanying the bell of Big Ben are 7 meters across. For a panoramic view of the belfry of Big Ben, see the Parliament website.
3 Comments | Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Travel | Tagged: Big Ben, geography, Travel, World's biggest clock | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Part of the Smithsonian Museums, the National Portrait Gallery remains one of my favorite museums in Washington. It is off the Mall, tucked away at Eighth and F Streets, NW, D.C., (above the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metrorail station – Red, Yellow and Green lines). Free admission, great art, but far enough out of the way to almost guarantee no crowds.
If you Google “National Portrait Gallery,” you also get the gallery of the same name in London, which is not part of the Smithsonian. Another great gallery, but don’t confuse the two.
My continuing search for images of Millard Fillmore turned up this one at the NPG:
The artist is unknown. It’s oil on canvas, and rather a specialty of the NPG — it’s not the official White House portrait. Some of the portraits of presidents come with cheeky commentary or history, since they are not the official portraits usually approved by the president in question himself.
Fillmore’s portrait by an unidentified artist dates from about the time he retired from the House of Representatives in the early 1840s. In the years following, he devoted himself to reconciling the growing differences among fellow Whigs in his native New York State a task for which this hulking and amiable politician was well suited.
“Hulking?”
Check out the other president’s portraits for a usually different view (Lyndon Johnson hated the portrait the NPG has of him, and Richard Nixon never looked better, nor Thomas Jefferson younger); see what else is there that you might use in the classroom.
The NPG has the added advantage of being a short walk from Washington’s China Town, where we used to dine happily at a restaurant named Szechuan, when such cuisine was rather new in the U.S. Several eateries in the area feature dim sum on Sunday mornings, for those days one would rather commune with good friends over delectable tidbits and a good Sunday newspaper, instead of sitting in a pew. Debra Winstead, a former colleague from the University of Arizona, introduced me to the joy of dim sum in D.C. a few years ago.
Good art, good food, good friends. No wonder Washington is such a livable city these days.
2 Comments | History, History and art, History images, History museums, Millard Fillmore, Museums, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Every Texas road traces history.
Some routes and sites are better known than others — few really know about Elvis Presley’s tours in Texas. Stanley Oberst knows, and he has shared it in a book. The Dallas Morning News featured a story on Oberst, listing some of the main sites one could visit to see where Elvis and Texas met. (Photo of Elvis signing autographs in Dallas, 1955, from Stanley Oberst’s collection)
You drive about 20 miles north of Tyler, along gently rolling U.S. Highway 271. A few hundred yards over the Gladewater town line, past a liquor store and a fireworks stand, you come to a rock-strewn patch rimmed by pine trees.
And that’s where you’ll find it: the spot where the Mint Club once stood, where a raw-boned 19-year-old rocker named Elvis Presley played in what many argue was his first concert in Texas.
It’s a far cry from Graceland. But for Stanley Oberst, a retired Plano teacher headed to Memphis for today’s 30th anniversary of Elvis’ death, this is sacred ground. Here, Elvis began his yearlong tour of Texas in late 1954, honing his chops and whipping up a whirlwind that would thrust him to stardom.
Stanley, 60, a lifelong fan, would like to see Elvis’ tour in Texas memorialized – perhaps as the “Hound Dog Highway” or “Pink Cadillac Trail,” after the custom-painted car that transported him around Texas. It must have looked like a spaceship speeding past farmers on tractors before landing in Gladewater.
For now, Stanley has written a book, Elvis Presley: Rockin’ Across Texas. And as he drives to Memphis to sign copies, he winds through East Texas, pausing at places where Elvis left his mark.
Oberst’s tour, on his way to Memphis and the anniversary commemoration of Elvis’ death, includes several stops.
Don’t confuse this book with the CD set “Rockin’ Across Texas,” which covers a 1970s-era tour.
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Stanley Oberst’s Elvis Tour of Texas, The Pink Cadillac Tour along Hound Dog Highway: Stops listed below the fold.
7 Comments | History, Music, Texas, Texas history, Texas Music, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Bug Girl has all the details — spiders being closer to her blog’s core topic — but this news is just about 90 minutes from here, much closer for North Dallasites.
Did you see the giant web at Lake Tawakoni State Park? It was on the CBS Evening News tonight, and it’s all over the blogs today. The Washington Post has this delightful quote (delightful to those of us who think of all the West Nile virus that won’t be spread):
“At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland,” said Donna Garde, superintendent of the [Lake Tawakoni State] park about 45 miles east of Dallas. “Now it’s filled with so many mosquitoes that it’s turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs.”
Ah, the screech of millions of mosquitoes, about to be eaten.
By the way, DDT kills these spider very well. DDT spraying, in such a case, is a favor to the mosquitoes — spiders can be significant contributors to pest control.
And, it’s pronounced tuh-WOK-uh-nee. Named after a local tribe of Native Americans, “a Caddoan tribe of the Wichita group.”
1 Comment | Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Natural history, Science, Texas, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
You are currently browsing the archives for the Travel category.
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 