Thursday, September 30, 2010

The Bears are hungry in the Rockies

http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/41831
This year, bears are wrestling with very challenging conditions. One of them is lack of food, a shortage of berries and other foods that bears normally rely before hibernation has sent into conflicts with humans in the Rocky Mountain West. This lack of food caused bears that used to live in the mountain come into the cities. We can found bears are foraging in garbage cans, such as in; golf courses, cities centers, and many others place. And in the late spring snows, which blanketed the high country, pushed bears to lower elevations earlier, delayed or even destroyed the crop of fruit-producing shrubs bears favor, such as huckleberries and hawthorns. Conflicts between wildlife and humans almost always center on food. When supplies of nourishment are low in the mountains, bears move closer to the valleys, where people live and livestock is conveniently located.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Advantages of Maps in Environment Science

Maps are very important in studying science, especially environment science. The first reason why maps are important is we can know more about the world, we know more about where we live now. We need that information because each environment that spread among the world are different. For instant, environment in  Northern Africa is totally different with environment in Indonesia (South East Asia). Africa has desert and Indonesia has tropical jungle. And because of the difference, the animals and type of plants that can grow are different too. In desert we can find palm trees and camels. In tropical jungle we can find huge trees and also "orang utan" that similar with monkeys.









The second reason why maps are important because by map, we can know what does a country rich of or lack of. Maybe some country is rich of humans population, in other word it means that one country had a lot of humans there. Maybe some country is lack of humans population, it means that the country is need more human to develop a better country.

There are also so many kind of maps in this world. 2 of them are physical map and population map. Physical map is type of map that supplies our knowledge with data about the earth. From physical map we can know where is China, and also where is Argentina, and others.
This is a physical map of the earth

And the other one is population map. Population map is type of map that overview about the population density in various parts of the world. For instant, there is map called U.S. Population map. By the name, it overview the population density in United States of America.
This is a population map of the United States of America

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Characteristics of Chaos

1.  Butterfly Effect
The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. Although this may appear to be an esoteric and unusual behavior, it is exhibited by very simple systems: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position. The butterfly effect is a common trope in fiction when presenting scenarios involving time travel and with "what if" cases where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes.


2. Unpredictable
Chaotic system is totally unpredictable. We can prove it by doing the Chaos Game Dots. We can't know what number will be shown by the dice in the next step and so on.

3. Instability
Chaos also has a characteristic called instability. It means that chaos is easily change. Take for example if we build a tower from a deck of card. It won't be 100 % stable. It can be ruined easily with a simple softly wind.



Thursday, September 9, 2010

My Goals

By taking this class, I want to know a lot about environment science. I want to know about the ecosystem and circumstances around me, so I can more understand about our nature, our earth, how to save it, how to manage it, and how to make a good living in harmony with the nature. I think a good environment will support and give a lot of benefits to our life.
Our life is very depents on the natural resources around us.  If there are a lot of people have knowledge about the environtent around they live, there will be more resorurces we can save too. At the end we can save the world from it's damage. I wish there also more sickness we can handle, so  there will be more and more peolple live healthy and happily. But the most of all,  sure I want to pass this class well.