17 September 04
Delicious
Once again, I fall behind the times. It is only this week that I discovered the site del.icio.us. The author of the site describes as a social bookmarks manager. Basically, it’s a website where you can store your webpage bookmarks. This is definitely useful if you use multiple computers since you can have access to your bookmarks from any computer online.
But what makes the approach of the site novel is that you also have access to everybody else’s bookmarks. On the front page, there is a list of the most recently added bookmarks to the system by anybody, and on the side there is a list of the popular topics by keywords. When you post a bookmark, you may enter a list of your own keywords to describe it. It’s intriguing how the whole community starts to converge on using the same keywords for common topics.
It’s a great way to find new webpages on themes you’re interested in, as well as folks who track the same topics you do.
16 September 04
Mojo Crow
My colleagues at the Wildlife Health Center have yet to catch their first crow—a live one, that is. (There have been plenty of dead ones brought in testing positive for West Nile Virus.) Crows are highly intelligent and not easily duped into captivity. So today Yvette set up Mojo Crow in one of the straw bales outside my window.
Mojo Crow is a plastic, life-size battery-operated crow whose wings rotate manically like those plastic flamingoes you see on people’s lawns.
Within five minutes of Mojo’s epileptic frenzy, there were over 200 crows circling high and cawing. They continued to caw as they landed in the eucalyptus trees nearby. But they didn’t come anywhere near, figuring that whatever had gotten to poor Mojo was probably going to do them in too. Mojo might have to be retired and something else will have to be tried. I’m glad I’m not the one having to catch them: this is really tough.
In other wacky news today, a Dodger baseball fan spent $25,000 buying out all the seats in a section of Dodger stadium beyond right field on the off chance that slugger Barry Bonds might hit his 700th home run there later this month (in which case the ball would be worth a great deal more than the $25,000). Well, Barry’s likely to get there well before then, so our enterprising fan has been selling the tickets for well over three times what he paid for them.
13 September 04
Neurodiversity
According to Word Spy, neurodiversity is defined as the variety of non-debilitating neurological behaviors and abilities exhibited by the human race. The earliest citation for this word is by Judy Singer in 1999:
For me, the key significance of the ‘autistic spectrum’ lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of neurological diversity, or neurodiversity. The ‘neurologically different’ represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability. The rise of neurodiversity takes postmodern fragmentation one step further. Just as the postmodern era sees every once too solid belief melt into air, even our most taken-for-granted assumptions that we all more or less see, feel, touch, hear, smell, and sort information, in more or less the same way (unless visibly disabled) are being dissolved.
Here is a wonderfully comprehensive site on neurodiversity. (From Metafilter.)
10 September 04
Cataloging Images
As Numenius mentioned recently, we’re starting to get overwhelmed with electronic clutter, especially digital images.
I installed a copy of iView Media Pro at work on Tuesday—in order to start sorting through the Wildlife Health Center’s thousands of images that I need to use in my work every day. They’re on my hard drive, they’re on CD’s, they’re everywhere. I rarely get enthusiastic about software: it’s there to do a job, and if it doesn’t do it well I get irritated (if it’s Microsoft Word I get riproaring furious), but mostly I just get on with my tasks.
iView gets my enthusiastic vote for most labor-saving device I’m likely to come across this year. If you’ve got pictures coming out your USB lugholes, this might be something to try.
4 September 04
Such … A Deal!
Today we drove to El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley, and hopped on BART to get into San Francisco (called “The City” in Northern California). Our first stop was the California Academy of Sciences temporarily housed south of Market street while their new facility, a grand and expensive proposition designed by Renzo Piano, is built over at Golden Gate Park. We had a fine time drawing the skull of a wild boar and this axolotl that put me in mind of Jenny’s daughter’s Pablo.
Next we headed over to Stacey’s to meet up with Siona. Every experience I’ve had of meeting a blogger in person has been a wonderful combination of the expected—we know each other’s writing well—and the unpredictable. This was no exception. We spent a pleasant time in Stacey’s, found bargains in philosophy (see left), and ended up with a tea a block up Market.
The drive to the Bay Area these days seems to take half an hour longer than it used to. The traffic we hit near Pinole that stayed till after the tolls and then regrouped before Fairfield made us decide to make the next trip by train.
When we got home, we discovered the kittens had made off with an avocado the size of a small melon, seconded it in the bedroom, and eaten a good chunk. I have no idea how you clicker-train a kitten to leave an avocado in the fruitbowl…
30 August 04
The Flying Pinto
Back in our family library, we used to have a book entitled The World’s Worst Aircraft. I think this tale of the ill-fated marriage of a Cessna Skymaster and a Ford Pinto qualifies. (Be sure to see here for pictures.)
7 August 04
Off to the Sierra—A Year Later
On August 10th last year, Numenius and I got married in the hills above Winters. Our planned honeymoon to the Eastern Sierra Nevada never happened because I had a slight mishap, a snapped achilles tendon, and spent weeks on crutches.
So we’re leaving tomorrow to celebrate our first anniversary for a week of camping, meteor shower watching, pondering on old bristlecone pines, sketching, birding, hiking, and generally taking stock of where we are a year later. We will not, however, be blogging, so we’ll see you when we get back.
31 July 04
On Treating A Computer As A Wastebasket
This afternoon we went into Pica’s office to download something from her computer, and as I had a scrap of paper to throw out, I looked underneath her desk and saw a rectangular object with light sides and a dark interior, so I started to throw the paper there. In fact this wasn’t a wastebasket but Pica’s Mac G4 computer.
These perceptual errors always make me think of the theory of affordances, a term coming from the renowned perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson. To quote Donald Norman, “the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords (“is for”) support, and, therefore, affords sitting.”
Gibson explains:
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment…
There is a language which objects communicate to us in. If you see a door with a flat panel rather than a handle on it, you know to push on it to open it. Boxes suggest opening them and looking inside, and if you’re a cat, laptop computers suggest walking over them!
29 July 04
Decluttering The Feline Way
We’ve been on a major tidying tear these past several weeks. Yesterday it was going through the box of all the things that were in our old car Blue, transferring some of them to Nellie the new vehicle, and tossing the rest. Today we cleaned up the space under the glass table in the living room. Clearly the cats have something to do with this binge; they are certainly quite happy to supervise at any moment. Our one reference on the topic, Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui (for more details see the author’s site on Space Clearing), has nothing to say about the role of cats. But it is well known that cats are masters of feng shui, and we are learning what we can.
28 July 04
Apologizing to Cats
Being part English condemns you to apologize for things for which an apology is totally inappropriate, as in, “Sorry, do you mind if I just open the window?”-and must get thoroughly tedious after the third or fourth round. Unfortunately I find myself apologizing to kittens-if THEY get underfoot, if THEY are finicky about their food, if THEY are (much worse) finicky about their litter.
But they’re going to have to put up with it, I’m afraid. Pending approval from the landlord, we’ve decided to keep both Diego and Charlie. We’re out for too much of the time for one cat to be in here, cooped up, by himself and not start becoming neurotic. At least this way they’ll have each other to play with and make mayhem with.
For someone who isn’t a “cat person,” I’ve done a lot of cat stuff in the last few weeks. It’s been entertaining and far more fun than I’d ever have believed. And-yes-sorry to all of you who are bored out of your minds by all this kitten-blogging.