http://chumphries.org/blog Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:23:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Pigeons are one of the "meats of the future" mentioned in this piece on Discover Magazine's website by Emily Anthes. She makes the point that environmental concerns may lead us to look for meat in new places, specifically species that are often considered vermin or invasive pests. Personally, I think ... http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=46 Pigeons get a lot of flack for their tiny brains, yet scientists have long been interested in how the birds manage to find their way home even from unfamiliar places hundreds of miles away. I wrote a news article for Technology Review about a device that actually measures the brain ... http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=44 I was interviewed for this piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer on a battle over some pigeons roosting under a bridge. It's a classic story of trying to keep pigeons away from a place they want to nest. These are persistent birds and they manage to find ways around deterrents all ... http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=43 Library Journal lists Superdove as one of its picks for the top Sci-Tech books of 2008! http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=42 (This is a piece I wrote for the blog So simple a beginning: the Origin of Species at 150 years, an experimental collaboration between academics and science writers with the goal of producing a set of commentaries in a blog-like format on each of the chapters in Charles Darwin's landmark ... http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=41 I appear in this week's Time Out New York in a section called "My lecture in one minute," about my talk later today at the New York Public Library. It was actually a fun exercise, like the "elevator speech" we're all supposed to have about our work. http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=40 I'll be reading from and talking about Superdove on Thursday, March 26 at 5:30 pm at the New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library at 188 Madison Ave in Manhattan. http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=39 Recently I've been guest-blogging about pigeons for the mental_floss website. This first post gives a few surprising facts about pigeons and the second talks about the history of eating pigeons. http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=38 Yesterday I visited Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, which has a beautiful photograph of a pigeon in flight by Roe Ethridge. It's part of a series of pigeon photographs using birds trained for work at Universal Studios. Here's another one that I love; it has the softness and creamy stillness ... http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=37 I just finished up a visit to my hometown of Albuquerque, NM, where I had a really successful reading and booksigning at Bookworks, an independent bookseller. Superdove was also written up in the Albuquerque Journal (subscription required) in a piece by David Steinberg. http://chumphries.org/blog/?p=36