Green Gal

I just want to quickly share with you a conversation I had with my Environmental Club friend about healthy food on Facebook Chat. It gives me hope that not all teenagers are junk food addicts: Patricia oh, are you planning on bringing anything for the env club partay on Wednesday? I wanted to bring cookies but we only have whole grain flour and I don't know if everyone would like that Me I'm probably just going to buy some cookies and bring them I like whole grain cookies :) if you put enough frosting on them or something they'd be good lol Patricia Yeah my mom's a health teacher so I'm used to whole grain but I don't know if everyone else likes it! Me lol yea we eat pretty healthy at my house most people end up liking healthy foods once they try them...I think it's just a matter of getting used to them most healthy foods taste better than gross stuff if you really savor them...the bad foods often make you feel bad after eating them, but healthy foods taste

For my second semester senior year Economics project, I was to choose an economic issue of interest to myself and find eight articles from various angles. I had to write an introduction to the topic, write paragraph analyses of each article, and then come up with my own solution to the economic problem. I chose Native American Reservations as my topic. Here is the opening paragraph of my project: Games of gambling and luck are nothing new to Native American people; their culture includes traditional games of chance, so it's not entirely arbitrary that Native American reservations often maintain casinos that otherwise would not be able to exist in certain states, like California, where gambling is illegal. Along with casinos, other industries such as golf courses, natural resource mining, and sports facilities have generated a much-needed income for many tribes and have improved conditions for the Native American people themselves, as well as boosted the economies of local communiti

Imagine the San Francisco Bay Area during the most recent Ice Age at the end of the Pleistocene epoch: a lush, green valley that San Francisco Bay now fills; coasts that extend 12 feet farther into the sea than they currently do; abundant wildlife and megafaunal mammals, like mastodons, short-faced bears, camels, llamas, saber-tooth cats, and mammoths; new human inhabitants who are fortunate enough to happen upon this eden of life, but unfortunate enough to have to deal with the fierce short-faced bears and cats that are larger-than-life and deadly. I just watched an 11-minute segment from KQED Quest about the Bay Area during the Ice Age. It centered on these unique "rubbing rocks" along the Sonoma Coast. These boulders, the narrator says, tell an "ancient story." There is some polish on these rocks that was not created by wind, water or other geologic causes, and some of the polish is found 10-12 feet above the ground, indicating that it was made by something large

"Be careful whom you call a Neanderthal. You may be one yourself. Or at least you may have Neanderthal ancestors. That's the conclusion of a study being released Thursday that examined DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones more than 35,000 years old." I read this article saying to myself, well duh, haven't they read Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear and the Earth's Children series? Her book includes relations between the neanderthals and modern man. If you haven't read that series, I highly recommend it! Check out the NPR article on the subject here: "Hey Good Lookin': Early Humans Dug Neanderthals" by Joe Palca . Notice that one of the geneticists mentioned in the article is now working at UC Santa Cruz. Yeah Santa Cruz!