Bees, Hives, and Hobbies

I was watching Vanishing of the Bees, the other day.  (Netflix streams it.)  It was really interesting .. as much for the issues facing modern pollination in the face of Colony Collapse Disorder as for the view into the strange community of bee keepers.  This is my kind of strangeness, so it got me to wondering what it takes for a hobbyist to get started.

There are bunches of apiary sites out there -- most, poorly maintained -- so it's hard to find a starter kit.  I ended up with tabs open on the Pollinator Partnership, Knox Cellars, and Mann Lake LTD.  Not exactly an exhaustive list, but hopefully it's a nice starting point if you've seen the movie and wanna try your hand at it.  With a reasonable dose of research, would it be possible to create an open hardware project that uses rapid prototyping equipment to build hives on demand?

Denis Dutton at TED

I just watched a fascinating talk by Denis [sic] Dutton at TED, 2010 in Long Beach.  He makes a really interesting case for Homo sapiens' innate appreciation of beauty being explainable by natural selection.  As an ecologist, it's got my mind wandering in all sorts of fun directions, now.

Is our appreciation of beauty just runaway selection based on a sensory bias?  Can part of it be explained as an honest badge of fitness?  Does "beauty" only make you happy because those who are drawn to it are more likely to have offspring that live to reproductive age?  And if you like the feel of a well made tool in your hands, it might actually be a heritable trait.

Journals I Like

I had the idea to fill some space by describing the various periodicals I receive and actually read. They're kinda odd, but peculiarly interesting to me. Well the draft "placeholder" post has been here for six months and they're not getting written. So let's clear the decks:

  [x] Nature : Already talked about this one in this post.
  [ ] Copeia : Yep, that's a society of Ichthyology and Herpetology.  Buy one, get one!
  [ ] Fantastic Man : Because you never know when someone's suddenly gonna demand "vest or cummerbund?"
  [ ] IEEE Oceanic Engineering : Kewl swimming robots, though lately they're mostly militarized.
  [ ] Game Informer : It's not a job, it's a text adventure!
  [ ] Make : Like the anarchist's cookbook ... except written by responsible adults.

Nature

I've subscribed to Nature for about a decade, now.  It predates my biology degree, so there was a good span of time where I bought it not for the articles, but unabashedly for the photos.  I remember it was because I kept hearing news stories lead in with "as reported in the journal Nature, this week," and I wanted to get it directly from the source.  It's not a cheap subscription, but for me it's a keeper.

Nowadays, my friend justkristin gets my hand-me-downs after I read them.  Most weeks, I add a post-it on the front, identifying my favorite item inside.  And although I understand the science content now -- a good set of photos is still just as sweet.  Ah, science pr0n.

One-ness

Scanning through a copy of h+, there's an interview with Andrew Newberg.  He mentions that part of many spiritual experiences involves the parietal lobes of your brain, which are responsible for distinguishing between self and other.  So if you messed with that section of the brain enough, your mind might have no choice *but* to conclude that you are one with everything.  Zen mind, short circuited mind? ;)