Is that print copy so important?

I was about to print this notice, perhaps in multiple copies on colored paper in an eye-catching font, to place strategically around the public workstations.  The irony of doing so stopped me.  Hopefully, you also will give careful thought before you use more energy, paper and print supplies.

Reported by the Center for Information Technology, November 25:

"Since the start of the semester on August 27th, Oberlin College has printed 745,885 pages. That's 5.58 trees consumed, 2,022.1 kg of CO2 produced, and 127,319 equivalent bulb hours used."

Presumably, that's just the printing done at public printers, and doesn't take into account the reams of paper used in offices.

Yikes.  It's especially worrisome when we see large number of printouts left behind on the printer.  They couldn't have been that important, eh?

Some lines you've not heard before

Snippets of paragraphs from new books received November 5.  They speak for themselves. Come read!

Over 1000 seals were dying in year as a result of marine debris entanglement [from off-shore fishing practices] in Australian waters.
Fur seals and sea lions.

This minuscule angle would be formed by drawing lines from the top and bottom of Lincoln's eye on a penny in New York and have them come to an apex in Paris. Dreams of other worlds.

The phyla were, after all, born in the sea, and so, if we want to see them, to the sea we must return.  Telling our way to the sea.

There is a full-fledged moral economy of inaction to ensure that our response to climate change and energy scarcity falls short of what is required. The future is not what is used to be.

Need we be paralyzed by the existence of limitations to our ability to gain fully accurate knowledge?  Absolutely not.  The why of things.

Indeed, our self-concept is defined in large measure by how the self fits into not one but many groups of other human beings.  The making of the mind.

Upon stepping out of my tent around midnight for relief from the sauna-like atmosphere, I found the group alive with scorpions... the place was seething with them, with barely room enough to place a foot between the pale, translucent bodies.  Chasing kangaroos.

The sound of dozens of hoofs hitting the road rippled towards us like thunder, and then in a flash the herd burst around the corner.  Consumed: food for a finite planet.

What kind of fundamental theory of particle physics is it that can't predict the masses of its constituent elementary particles?  Farewell to reality.

A Flurry of Publications by Faculty and Students

The following publications were recently indexed in the Web of Knowledge.  Oberlin faculty, staff and students are indicated in bold font.

Getschow C. M., P. Rivers, S. Sterman, D. C. Lumpkin, and K. A. Tarvin. 2013. Does gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) response to heterospecific alarm calls depend on familiarity or acoustic similarity? Ethology 119:983-992. [OhioLINK EJC] also @ Wiley Online Library.

Goderis S., B. M. Simonson, I. McDonald, S. W. Hassler, A. Izmer, J. Belza, H. Terryn, F. Vanhaecke, and P. Claeys. 2013. Ni-rich spinels and platinum group element nuggets condensed from a Late Archaean impact vapour cloud. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 376:87-98. [OhioLINK EJC]

Grether, G.F., C. N. Anderson, J. P. Drury, A. N. G. Kirschel, N. Losin, K. Okamoto, K.S. Peiman.  2013.  The evolutionary consequences of interspecific aggression. in
Year in Evolutionary Biology.  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1289 48-68.

Hinckley T. M., P. Chi, K. Hagmann, S. Harrell, A. H. Schmidt, L. Urgenson, and Z. Zeng. 2013. Influence of human pressure on forest resources and productivity at stand and tree scales: The case study of Yunnan pine in SW China. Journal of Mountain Science 10:824-832. [OhioLINK EJC]

MacInnes M., S. Kozimor, K. Boland, and J. Rowsell. 2013. Dithiophosphinates as an approach to the separation of actinides and lanthanides. Abstracts of Papers of the American Chemical Society 245.

Oertel C. M., C. C. Easterday, L. R. Dedon, and M. Zeller. 2013. Chiral inorganic motifs in two polymorphs of hydrothermally synthesized Pb2O(C6H5COO)(2). Abstracts of Papers of the American Chemical Society 245.

Free Access to Elsevier Publications of 2013 Nobel Prize Winners

Scientific publisher Elsevier is providing free access to Elsevier-published research from the 2013 Nobel Laureates in the fields of Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Economics. Thank you, Elsevier, for granting open access to a significant body of research.  Begin at the Elsevier Nobel tribute page.

elsevier.com

"Elsevier congratulates the 2013 Nobel Laureates and their prominent findings in the fields of Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Economics. We feel honored to have had the opportunity to work with these remarkable scientists, either through publishing their ground-breaking work in our journals and books or in their role as editors, editorial board members and reviewers. In recognition of these extraordinary scholars, we have made a collection of their work, published with Elsevier, freely available."