LITERACY & NUMERACY

my name is vanessa. i'm a masters student at the university of british columbia, studying pacific salmon ecology. i like to think about science from a social perspective.

[prettystuff]

[vanessammartin]

on the lookout for native wild flowers

[vanessammartin]

good morning

[currentsinbiology]

A guide to the EPA data under threat by the Trump administration

Several highly publicized campaigns are taking place to save the data maintained by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from becoming inaccessible to the public under the Trump administration.

“There is no reason to think the data is safe,” says Gretchen Goldman, research director at the Center for Science and Democracy, a program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The administration, so far, hasn’t given any indication it will respect science and scientific data, especially when it’s inconvenient to its policy agendas.”

That data, kept in dozens of databases, represents decades of monitoring the American environment in fine detail. For example: the EPA collects data on the chemical composition of pollutants and their geographic distribution. Here is a list of data sets that gives an idea of the breadth of scientific knowledge that resides with the agency.

The EPA’s data sets are under threat. The agency collects information on everything from the chemical composition of pollutants and their geographic distribution to emissions modeling. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

[morbidology]

[morbidology]

Panjin Red Beach is located in the north east of Beijing and is appropriately called this due to the seaweed which turns to a bright red colour in Autumn. It has become known as the “home of the cranes” and is the home to 260 different types of birds, including the endangered Crown Canes and Blacak Beaked Gulls, and 399 different types of wild animals.

[vanessammartin]

Look at all we’ve earned! ...We are tough enough to put up with being ignored and interrupted and underestimated every day and laugh it off together. We’ve made it. This is the good life.

Kristi Coulter

https://medium.com/@kristicoulter/https-medium-com-kristicoulter-the-24-hour-woman-3425ca5be19f#.dh4lc1xgr

[vanessammartin]

A limited time

A strange delight To own a body. Collection of heart, bones, teeth-- mine of soft thighs, curving hips, collarbones framing shaft of neck topped by pale moon head. To be steward of skin and jangling nerves, harsh, peppery, mournful emotions. Sharp edges, bright colours held together by tendons and viscera. Separate but same.

[vanessammartin]

This is not a family that picks you back up.

vanessa minke martin

[grace--upon--grace]

Be selective in your battles. Sometimes peace is better than being right.

(via thatkindofwoman)

Grace. Remembering how to have grace.

[simpleisnewluxury]

[vanessammartin]

the texture, the texture, the texture !

the colour treatment, the colour treatment, the colour treatment !!

i wanna eat it or cuddle it or lie down in it.

[vintageanchorbooks]

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (via vintageanchorbooks)

[tattooideas123]

[vanessammartin]

In relationships, it’s easy to sit around telling each other how great we are, but it can escalate things. Especially in romantic relationships, it creates these expectations around commitment and priorities and how we plan to treat the other person. There’s this period at the beginning, when it’s first emotionally and physically intimate, where you have to take care, because there’s a dopamine hit every time you receive validation from the other person. You might mistake the physiological response for love, but it’s an addiction like so many others. Being in love changes your brain, and it’s an immense undertaking. 

“Dopamine is part of the brain’s reward pathway, and it’s released to encourage animals to repeat behaviors, typically those that are key for survival such as eating and reproduction.” - scientists say

[vanessammartin]

I think depression is examination you can't turn off: Once you start the examination you can't stop it, and it kind of settles on you. But if you can somehow change the spigot you get incredible curiosity. Because if you're examining things all the time, when you're depressed, the hard thing is you're examining yourself and your life and how many things can fail."

David Lipsky on David Foster Wallace via Rolling Stone 

[xaoss]

[vanessammartin]

Being an author in the age of Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr might mean something very different from what being an author meant in, and to, previous eras—something more conversational, more collaborative, more communal.

Megan Garber

[makeyrmomsad-blog]

YEAH

[vanessammartin]

I’m really into this photo. Obviously, this woman has the proverbial balls to proclaim her love for a part of her body that too many women deride and criticize. I would be seriously challenged to put that word on my upper thigh for life. This tattoo is a reference to Beyoncé’s 2013 song ***Flawless, where she confronts beauty standards and the overwhelming pressure, abetted by social media, to look good every moment of the day. The phrase, ‘I woke up like dis,’ has been spoofed one million times since she produced the song, becoming a cultural touchstone for women of my generation. It’s important that our pop stars talk about this (although it can be hard to take from Beyoncé, who curates an impeccably beautiful image for her face, body, and personal style). I have the impression that this tattoo adorns the body of a woman who already subverts mainstream conventions for beauty or style. The confidence and irreverence in the design and placement of this tattoo is unbearably sexy. I love it.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for a woman to own her sexuality. For a long time, I felt asexual, afraid of my sexuality and how my body is perceived by others, what they might conclude about my personality because of how I use it. I prioritized my intelligence, relegating my body to an otherness category, detached from who I am. Care for my appearance has been like housekeeping, not self-love. Confronting representations of women’s bodies in advertising (and even private Instagram accounts) has been alienating and confusing: I am not that thin / sexy / tanned / happy / carefree / stylish, so I must not be a woman. It is easier to distract men from my body than to recognize myself as a sexual being. With women, a little self deprecation works like a charm. Walking along a public beach in my bikini, I am actively not there, picturing nothing below the neck should my artificial swagger crumble under the scrutiny.

In conversation with women my age, we reflect on the injustice of time. We will never be as conventionally beautiful as we are in our mid to late twenties (nor, perhaps, ever as ruthlessly targeted by the opinions of others). We will curse our disinclination to be photographed, as we hungrily consume Facebook archives of our taut stomaches, pert bottoms. That golden time is already passing. But I’m only just beginning to see those parts of my body. My legs (too big for knee-high boots and cigarette trousers) have been shaped by the miles I’ve run on the trails I love. My stomach is strong from hours of laughing helplessly while tagging fish or on sleepovers with friends. I’m making progress on that. But the challenge of being an individual (i.e. myself, not a pin-up trope) in a society where sex is coveted and taboo, where women are lusted after and manipulated, but not respected or educated about their sexual identities, that is perhaps a lifetime of work that won’t end when my body is no longer “flawless.”

[vanessammartin]

I like to think that this title comes from a real dinner.

[vanessammartin]

On my reading list

My computer isn’t the snappiest piece of technology, and I’m consistently loading 15-20 different Safari tabs that I haven’t gotten through reading yet. So I thought I’d post them here to give my desktop a break. You can take a gander, if you’d like:

Oxygen Limitation of Thermal Tolerance (Science)

Morgan Heim’s multimedia storytelling (iLCP)

270 reasons why women choose not to have children (The Huffington Post)

The 15 Year Layover (GQ) --> and anything else by Michael Paterniti

Bait Ball simulation (Boil Up)

Improving the presentation of logistic regression using R

Killer tips on sound design (StillMotion)

What we’ve learned from the She Does podcast (Story & Heart) 

Brown bears opting for vegetarian diet (The Japan News)

Aerial photos of Wood Buffalo National Park by Paul Colangelo

Shawn Barber raising the bar (The Toronto Star)