Earth Sangha

http://www.earthsangha.org

We took a group of Youth Conservation Corps kids to Earth Sangha. A great place that puts their Buddhist principles into action by serving the community with programs that combine social programs and ecological restoration.

Wolf Trap National Park

For the last 6 months i have been working with a gardener named Phil Goetkin who focuses on native plants conservation. Here are some of his creations which I helped to install and or maintain. We often use hybridized cultivars in displays but are working towards establishing more strict native gardens.

Wow. This should help... a lot!

http://roots.psu.edu/en/node/886

The Second Ammendment

Moving the stand from quadrat to quadrat caused it to became a little tweaked by the end. A third support leg will need to be attached to keep the camera in position... as well as a spike to prevent the stand from sliding.

Stand Take 2

The stand performed pretty well on its initial test run.

Stand in the Place Where You Live

Yesterday I designed, attempted to assemble... cutting my thumb, then redesigned a new stand for photographing groundcover. The design is really simple, but it will be much easier to wield on the hillside than the original wooden tripod. Depending on how it performs I may add a third support in back for stability. A 1/4" 20 thread eye bolt and some vinyl pads hold the camera in place. The setup cost under 10 bucks.

Scion

A funny thing happened while I was searching for some freeware that would help me manage all the duplicate personal photos on my hard drive... I managed to go off on a tangent, searching for "public domain image analysis algorithms". ScienceDirect directed me to some very helpful articles, one of which mentioned a company called Scion. The good folks at scion.com have available a program called Scion Image. it is used for analyzing medical and other images for research. At the very least it counts pixels, which will provide an interesting comparison to the SamplePoint method of quantifying plant growth. The manual is 107 pages. Once I get through that, maybe I'll be able to batch process the files and export the info directly into a database. We'll see.

Winter hiking

This is an article published in today's Washington Post about a trip Stephanie and I took to Harper's Ferry earlier this month:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/21/AR2010012101364.html