Ian MacLellan

So this morning my mother gave me a very good article in the Ideas section of today’s globe: How the City Hurts Your Brain it mentioned Walden Pond of course guilting me because I live a stones throw away from a hill where I could throw a stone at Walden Pond and Thoreau’s cabin. “Why is this post entitled “forget the savannah hypothesis,” you might ask, well I would answer by talking about how some researchers led urban planners to build large open parks that mimicked the African Savanah of our ancesters.  Instead it seems that biodiversity is more helpful:

“However, these Savannah-like parks are actually the least beneficial for the brain. In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.”

After my David Attenborough led ecology education, I know all about biodiversity, man I love insects and monotremes, you can’t forget naked mole rats either. I so rarely get to talk about biodiversity in a public forum, so at this time I would like to tell everyone to check out these two links, the first about how an Antarctic island is more diverse than the Galapagos and the second about Wired Magazine’s ten favorite newly discovered species of 2008. You get to hear later in this post about how I love Antarctica don’t worry.

This article quoted another great study that looked at how food choices are related to habitat of humans, which makes sense if you think of us as a species:

“Related research has demonstrated that increased “cognitive load” — like the mental demands of being in a city — makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad, or indulge in a unhealthy snack. This is the one-two punch of city life: It subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it, from fast-food outlets to fancy clothing stores. The end result is too many calories and too much credit card debt.”

I spent a good amount of time last year drawing buffers around vernal pools to show how proximity to roads affected salamander populations and believe it or not the stress of the noises decreases populations, who would have guessed.

The article also made a great point about some intelligent urban spaces, which although nothing new, is well said:

“Ralph Waldo Emerson advised people to “adopt the pace of nature,” while the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted sought to create vibrant urban parks, such as Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, that allowed the masses to escape the maelstrom of urban life.”

Us New Englanders believe Emerson and Thoreau can solve all our problems. Man I really need to start sitting by Walden more often, it’s just a 25 minute run away.

Tesla would argue with this quote from the article, “it is the “concentration of social interactions” that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge — one of the densest cities in America — contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.”   I oftentimes feel like my mind doesn’t work like that. It instead makes crazy leaps and bounds to start projects and come up with ideas. But I checked today and I haven’t done anything amazing. But wait Tesla, who basically invented the American electrical system, worked in isolation and believed that only in isolation could great revolutionary ideas really transpire and create something original. I’ve always been a Tesla man myself, he dreamed big and didn’t let the man(Edison) try and put him down as he worked to come up with the ultimate solution in renewable energy, “free energy.”

The only person I know of who lives a similar life to an 18th-century intellectual is my friend Piers MacNaughton’s mother. She has a group of friends that meet in where else but Cambridge and walk the old-school walk, discussing everything from poetry to physics. Pretty cool. She is also a famous prize winning and New Yorker published poet and we don’t all get to live that life, sadly. These kids at Groton tried to restart the sort of intellectual debate that used to rage at the old Groton School, “Lunar Society,” which would meet once a month to discuss everything a proper intellectual and politician should now. They tried, but in this day and age it’s hard to do such a thing.

The article doesn’t come to any big conclusions, but it really doesn’t have to, it’s in the ideas section.

I took the articles words to heart and went for a quick run on the trails of Lincoln, which were good and slippery then went out into “nature” again with Cadi, Stephen, and Heather to find me some good ice. I miss good ice sometimes. I did choose the fancy chocolate cookies that Stephen and Heather made instead of going for the salad, whoops, nature lost.

One of the things I oftentimes look for in nature is ice dendrites. They are called dendrites because they are similar to the branching structure found on neurons. Really good and clear ones are hard to come by and so far this year I have found any nice ones. Here is a shot of one from last December on one of the meanders of the Nashua River in Groton, Massachusetts. I was out in the woods almost every day that winter and only found good dendrites on one occasion.

Today we went on a walk just a little ways down the road with Cadi. There weren’t any really good dendrites, but there were some hopeful signs that they are still possible.

I also love the layers that form in ice from all the freezing and thawing, especially the layers of leaves and the ice shapes that get left on tree trunks.

I’m not quite sure what draws me to ice. It’s random and complicated, which I like. I was really into the fractal programming assignments in my applied math class, so it makes sense for me to like this chaos. I really shouldn’t admit these sorts of things on the internet, what if somebody reads this far down? I also just freaking love winter, which I better because I am planning a 4 day backcountry adventuring trip with Piers for this Wednesday to Saturday. We are probably staying in the Carter AMC hut, just North of North Conway and East of Mt. Washington, sadly it wont have hurricane force winds all day like Mt. Washington. If you ever need something to make you feel better about how bad your weather is check out Mt. Washington’s weather.

My dad has been working tirelessly the past couple of days on converting his Dell XPS 420 from Vista to XP, even though all the sources in the world(the internet and the guides) say you can’t. He’s a smart cookie, though I figured out his secret: he get’s all his solutions in dreams! For two days straight he would go to bed late, almost as late as my normal bed time!, then wake up at 6:30 after having some crazy epiphany about how to copy some stoogdoog files from the datacore and then adjust the flux capicator to make everything work. This is an especially useful skill because he can a. fall asleep in less than a second, no matter what the condition, even in a Die Hard movie! and b. he somehow remembers all his dreams. Maybe he makes up all his dreams and really finds the answer on some XKCD forum, but like Leprechaun, I hope he is real. I never was able to catch the Leprechaun, but did get his jacket one time, with one of my traps.

This post was really hard to write for some reason, my mind was somewhat more all over the place than normal. So I did like fourth, fifth, and sixth form at Groton and asked Piers for help, because he was the organized one ur clique. Piers is a magician and by asking him for help, he somehow decided that he was going to start write a blog post for this blog once a week. I have worked tirelessly for years to try and convince my roommates they should have blogs and all attempts have failed until tonight, when I won, maybe just because it was my birthday?