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Lookabout Menu Home Page internal links: Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami U Ohio (RedHawk Red) |
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Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University: |
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Biomechanical Riding & Dressage: A Rider's Atlas An animated Rider's Atlas prepared for those in dressage and in other equestrian disciplines who wish to see what goes on beneath the surface of their mounts. These are tools for the novice who wants to visualize what is going on in the horse as well as for the professional judge or trainer. Enjoy. This site specializes in Shockwave Flash, QuickTime and GIF movies which animate the gaits of the horse at the level of skeletons and muscles. All the possible transitions among walk, trot and canter are shown. The movies relate help understand techniques for riding. Bemome your horse's coach (as your horse coaches you)! If horses could read, they'd love this! |
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Attitude Alley: the Gruesome Brothers Do Dressage A calendar featuring The Gruesome Brothers, who are two overfed and underexercised American Morgan Horses plus a German Sport Horse (a Wurttemberger) who is a lover of Teutonic Cuisine (his motto: Immer die Mahlzeit!). All three are Charter Members of the Clean Plate Club. The Morgans were born perfect and are waiting until the Universe catches up (my guess is that it will be a while). You are welcome to look here, but this is insider dressage---er---humor. I post the monthly adventures of the Brothers, whose reason for existence is to domesticate humans (their standards are lofty). |
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Flip 2 the Bird Thermodynamics for the entropically challenged (that means neat freaks) and the terminally messy. Chaos rules here as uncertain order: complexity makes nests here. Selections feature the Drinking Happy Bird in any number of its manifestations from amusing gadget to nifty Carnot engine with duelling oscillators. Click on the colored text to visit "Thirty Seconds in the Life of the Drinking Bird: the Movie," dippy thermodynamics labs where entropy rules and enthalpies don't roam (but the predictions are cloudy all day), mathematical models and whatever else happens to be here. Things change on this site. |
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Two Dog Zone: How I Spent My "Summer" Vacation... Natural history in the Top End of Australia (June-August 1996, which was Southern Hemisphere winter). See the sights as my digital camera and I went exploring this amazing piece of Gondwanaland. See the Two Dogs (alcoholic) Lemonade logo atop a road race car at Emma Gorge! Included are such delights as the stromatolites of Hamelin Pool at Shark Bay (erode in peace), magnetic and cathedral termitaria, aboriginal art at Chamberlin Gorge and Nourlangie, the amazing beauty of Yellow Waters on the Alligator River (crocs-R-us), the Daintree Rainforest (with cyclone-adapted palm trees), Lizard Island goannas which join your picnic and the strange things black noddys do at Heron Island. Not to mention the even stranger things that Pisonia trees do on a coral cay like Heron Island. Are these the world's most vindictive trees? I include a few bird sightings and addresses of some first rate birders and birdwatch locations in Australia. |
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Premium HawgWash This section includes anything not on the other pages which happens to attract my interest. I got really tired of hearing about banded woolly bears and the weather. So I went out and captured a passel of the critters (Isia isabella). Then I weighed and measured them. It is indeed possible to know a wide- or narrow-banded woolly bear when you meet one: but having made the bandwidth determination, what does it mean? The results of my measurements are here, along with connections to Cincinnati weather data for the appropriate years. Do these beasties really predict the previous winter? You be the judge. And the saga continues as this year's woolly bears have two bands (does this have something to do with El Niño)? And as a benefit: Connect to the Ig Nobel Prize home site! Dedicated to trivial truth and puffed personalities, the journal continues the tradition of mutual exchange of uninformed opinion... |
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Sowbug OutReach Society Here is the Sowbug Outreach Society (SOS)! Did you know the cute little animals (really woodlice) make great pets and are more educational than an ant farm? If this is your first contact with these animals, prepare to be astonished.. |
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Science Fiction and Imagined Intelligence It is a curious observation that a species which counts itself as really smart (Homo sapiens) should have so much trouble recognizing intelligence. Or considering that it is worthy of the "sapiens" epithet, which means "wise." For 20 years or so I have collected art which illustrates intelligent aliens. I include my favorites here, with artists listed along with the stories they pictured. I began to notice that much of the illustration was not particularly imaginative, but self-congratulatory and inversely hubristic (stuck inside limits and proud of it). Of course, editors have had much to do with what gets published, so artists have taken to doing cover art for sci fi books and publishing collections of what they REALLY like to imagine... |
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