Here and There

Some good stuff to share with you:

This just in the from the Cleveland Engineering Society (for all my engineer pals who read this blog regularly):

The 1st Annual Fall Engineering Extravaganza will take place in Cleveland on Wednesday, October 3 from 7 am to 4 pm at LaCentre, 25777 Detroit Road, Westlake, OH 44145.
Theme of this conference and trade show is Engineering a Sustainable Future. Keynote speakers include Holly Harlan, founder of the E4S Network and Chris Korleski, Governor Strickland's Director of the Ohio EPA. Lots of fascinating breakout sessions on topics such as:

Sustainability and the bottom line, utilization of agricultural waste products in value-added products for sustainability and lots lots more. For more info, go here. Wish I could go, but I can't take off that day. Maybe some of our Akron engineers will attend and get some good ideas for the mayor's "greenprint" for Akron.

Here are a couple of links for some fine online reading:

A new Tangled Bank is up at Balancing Life. What is a Tangled Bank? It's a carnival of science weblog articles, named after Charles Darwin's famous metaphor:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.

This week's Tangled Bank is full of fascinating articles on the origins of cattle, ten habits of highly effective brains, and where to order DNA double helix bracelets (very cool!).

Finally, not a science blog, but one well worth adding to your blog reader:

Aphra Behn -- Danger of Eclectic Shock, named after the first professional woman playwright. In this British blogger's latest post, she describes building a very unique book shelf (not case).