Monarch Butterfly Migration

Thursday, 23 February 2012

There's a show on NOVA about monarch butterfly's called The Incredible Journey of the Butterfly's. It's 52 minutes and you can watch the full episode online.
I knew that they migrated to Mexico, but that turns out to be only part of the story.

There is a cycle of 4 generations to the Monarch Butterfly's:

• 1st generation is the start of the return trip, they fly from Mexico to Texas
• 2nd generation flies from Texas to Michigan
• 3rd generation flies from Michigan to Canada - each of these 3 generations live only about a month
• But the 4th is the amazing one. That generation flies all the way back to Mexico. They also live for 9 months, 9 times as long as the other 3 generations.

The show reminded me of when i saw thousands of monarch butterfly's on the shore of Lake Erie. It turns out that the hardest part of the journey is the start, flying over the Great Lakes to Michigan. The ones i saw had just completed that part of the trip. But they still had a 2,000 miles to go till Mexico.

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Internet TV

Tuesday, 5 April 2011

I don't have cable anymore but i hardly miss it. Here's how i watch practically any tv show with just an internet connection.

This is my setup in the living room with a computer connected to my TV and using a wireless keyboard and mouse.
The most popular site that most people have heard of is Hulu. There are plenty of sites that are similar to Hulu, they have a limited number of shows with commercials every 15 minutes. Side Reel is a site that brings all of those other sites together, eg Nbc.com, ComedyCentral.com, Hulu.com, etc.

I also like watching old PBS shows like Nova. They have tons of great shows there.

Now the start of the "Questionably Legitimate Sites." These look and act like Hulu but they get they have tons of TV shows and movies that aren't on Hulu. The first thing to remember here is never to download anything. Just hit the play button, you don't need any special exe viewer they try to get you to download. JUST PRESS PLAY.

The best site is Project Free TV. They have almost everything. Fancast is pretty good too. If you want to watch Live TV as it's being broadcasted there's Fomny. It's not great and doesn't always work well but you can get live streams from various FOX, NBC and the History channel. Yesterday i watched the NFL draft live on NFL.com
Typically i use Project Free TV, today i just watched the new Mythbusters episode. It was new on Wednesday and i'm watching it at 6PM on Thursday. It's basically like an online TiVo.

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