The Heiligenschein

Today was a good day for looking up at the sky, with dramatic cumulonimbus clouds and a midday thundershower (which caused us to hurry home from our morning outing to the gym to rescue the laundry on the line). And I’ve been reading a sky-oriented book, Out of the blue: a 24-hour skywatcher’s guide, by John Naylor, which discusses all manner of optical phenomena in the sky: rainbows, crepuscular rays, eclipses, and so forth. In this book I finally learned the explanation for a phenomenon I’ve viewed from an airplane window many times, and in a different guise, from the ground as well.

What I notice from the airplane window, usually on descent, is a glowing bright halo on the ground and moving with the plane. The glow is at the antisolar spot —the sun on the opposite side of the plane, and once the plane gets low enough its shadow can be seen at the center of the glow. This phenomenon is a heiligenschein, which means ‘holy glow’, and is caused by a self-shadowing effect. The shadows cast by objects, such as trees seen from the plane, in the antisolar spot are directly underneath the objects themselves, and what one sees is just the light being reflected back by the leaves, rather than a darker mix of light-and-shadow. Hence the glow. Back on the ground, riding my bike, I also frequently notice a glowing spot opposite the sun on the pavement or from road markings, where tiny reflective beads have been incorporated in the paint. It’s the same effect—the light is shining straight back at me.

Remember to look up at the sky, or down at the ground—you never know what marvels of light you may see.

Signs Of Winter

The rainy season is creeping in on us, and there was partial overcast much of the week. On Monday morning it rained a bit, though we’re not sure how much. We like to keep track of rainfall amounts, but the rain gauge fell over in strong morning winds from its hole in the parched earth. There was more rain today, some this morning and a little bit this evening, 0.25” total for the day. Right now there is the first tule fog of the season, which happens when damp air above chilling ground in the evenings condenses to form a dense fog at ground level. They can be quite thick and dangerous to travel in.

There’s a total lunar eclipse tomorrow evening, but I don’t know if the weather is going to cooperate for us here.

Coffee Houses

Another joint Ecotone entry; this one is on Coffee House as Place.

I remember the first time I entered a Starbucks. It was on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Mass., and what seemed so different about it was how people seemed encouraged to linger: to buy only one overpriced cup of designer coffee but then to sit there all morning. It was almost opposite Harvard Law School and I suspect most of its clientele were law students, choosing a study environment that would never, ever work for me. But I liked it that they weren’t chased out. I ordered tea.

Since those days, Starbucks has covered the globe in much the same way MacDonald’s has, and its cookie-cutter designs render it identical in Cambridge or Davis or London. I avoid it, especially since I stopped drinking coffee many years ago. Yet there are several coffee shops here in Davis: Common Grounds, Mishka’s, Espresso Roma, Cafe Roma, Chamonix—that offer a similar “we won’t chase you out of here even though you’ve only spent $2.65” message. Many of them offer free wireless internet as well (unlike Starbucks, where you have to pay). Cafe Roma features poetry slams and concerts; Common Grounds has book readings and political gatherings.

For a drink that seems to load people up with an energy that leads to the shakes, it’s a civilized antidote, this relaxed notion of how long you can stay. I like it. I can’t give any kind of critique of the quality of the coffee, but each of these havens has its own defining sense of place. Appealing to neo-hippies, Euro-wannabes, or aging grungers, the coffee houses become an extension of the people who sit in them for hours. Even when they’re almost empty, it’s easy to tell if you’d fit in or not.

The Three O’Clock Cookie Run

A note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on Coffee Shop As Place

Not far from the building where I work is the main student center on campus, housing the bookstore and the student-run eatery (supposedly the largest restaurant in Northern California). I always get my lunch from there—the food is cheap and wholesome. Students being students, their newfound coffee habit well nourished by too many all-nighters, naturally there is a place to pick up a mocha during a five-minute run between classes. There is no place to sit down in this little coffeeshop, and people who want to settle into their coffees often sit on the tables and chairs just outside the MemU. Because no one lingers, this coffeeshop doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of place, though I’m sure it does to the student workers there.

Myself, I’m not a coffee drinker, but the coffeeshop is my destination for the usual mid-afternoon baked good run. Most often a cookie, but if I’m lucky they have blueberry muffins. Bakeries as place—now there’s a topic.

Periodic Tables

The cover article in Science News this week (unfortunately not online, but see this writeup in the Guardian) is about a geologist’s redesign of the periodic table of elements, that graphic beloved of chemists. The geologist, Bruce Railsback, set out to redesign the periodic table so that it would be more useful for earth scientists, who deal with elements mostly in their ionic forms. In his table, elements are arranged according to their ions, rather than their neutral atoms, and some elements may have multiple entries in the table if they have several different commonly found ions (e.g. an entry both for ferrous (Fe2+) and ferric (Fe3+) iron).

It’s a pretty amazing graphic (downloadable from here) and I’m tempted to print it out on the large-format plotter at work. It might even lead me to read up on some geochemistry. My chemistry is quite rusty, but there’s something archetypal in studying about elements, their forms, and the earth.

More Critters Of Fall

A few more wildlife observations for today. I heard pipits in our field for the first time this season. Most likely these were American pipits, but Pica tells me to keep an eye out for wayward red-throated pipits, definitely rarities but that’s how you spot them. Second, from the email grapevine I learned that last week a 30” chinook salmon was seen upstream in Putah Creek. Salmon have been coming into Putah Creek in small numbers since 1997, and I’m glad for that update. Finally, riding my bike home past the railroad tracks this afternoon, I saw a crow wheel above the road and drop a walnut which landed on the pavement and opened with a satisfying crack. They’re clever, the crows.

Fox Sparrows and Peregrines

For all you non-baseball people out there, you will probably be relieved to know that it will all be over one way or the other by the end of Sunday, and we’ll be talking about other things on here than World (i.e. American) Series, RBIs, closers, sluggers, injuries (well, maybe there are still a few more injury tales), irate Yankee coaches, and the like.

Instead, there will be more tales such as this:

A fox sparrow was scratching around in the oleander leaves this morning. Fox sparrows in California are much darker brown than their reddish Eastern counterparts. Some rascal is working hard to split the different races of fox sparrow into three or possibly eight different species. I love the splotches on their chests, their shyness, and their song in spring, which we don’t hear much except in the mountains.

We don’t see peregrine falcons much, either, since they are much more rare than the American kestrel, the more common falcon of these parts. Coming out of Medea Benjamin’s talk on Tuesday, though, a peregrine flew southeast over Environmental Horticulture. It now appears that this is a bird that may be hanging around the Arboretum. Which is great: their favorite food is ducks, and there is no shortage of ducks for them in the Arb!

Serpent In Icicles

Last Friday we by chance discovered that Rivers and Tides was playing downtown. We both wanted to see this documentary so we altered our evening plans a bit to watch this film about the English environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. He is a sculptor who works with found organic objects in nature, assembling these in patterns whose beauty derives from their ephemerality. In one sequence along a frozen Canadian seashore, he constructs an upright serpentine figure out of bits of icicles; its destiny being to shine briefly in the sun before melting into collapse.

The images in the film are quite striking: the pool by the stream filled with leaves in fall colors, sorted to range from yellow to deep red; the monolithic cones Goldsworthy builds from wood, ice, or stone; the snake of leaves laced together by single twigs leaving a pool to float downstream; the half-mile long wall weaving its way through the woods of the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York.

His wall will last quite awhile. But even when he works with stone, he is keenly aware of the impermanence of natural beauty, from icicle to stone forming a mere continuum. His is an art that seeks essences in earth, stone, growing things, rivers, and the sea. But doesn’t everyone who ever built a sand castle, or played with mud as a kid, long for such contact with earth once again?

Place Name Blunders

An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on place names.

An ongoing project in many of the world’s natural history museums is to digitize their collections. In this modern era, typewritten herbarium specimen labels, handwritten field notes, and labels dangling from the feet of taxidermied mice are much more useful to people if they’re captured in a database, and, ideally, placed online.

One attribute that is very important to record digitally is the locality of the specimen, needed to make any sort of map of the critter’s distribution. Nowadays we all run around with GPS units which means that it’s easy to record the exact latitude and longitude of a specimen, but the naturalists of yore didn’t have such luck. Usually they would record localities in a telegraphic description such as “Sonoma Mt. Road, 4.2 miles E Adobe Rd., Sonoma Co., Calif.” It is possible, with a large supply of undergraduate laborers and a good map collection, to convert these text localities into lat-long coordinates, and many museums are now diving into this tedious process.

Alas, some of these localities are a bit more cryptic than one would prefer. Lake of Boys???

Californian Place Names

This post is a contribution to the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Place Names.

The European colonization of California was at first northward expansion, from New Spain (Mexico), of Franciscan Missions. The tribes encountered by the friars already had names for the places they lived in, paddled to, the rivers they fished from, the woodlands whose acorns they ate. A lot of these names still survive-near here, for example, Napa, Sonoma, and Petaluma are all indigenous namesbut for the most part California as far north as Sonoma, which is where the northernmost mission is located, is a quilt of Spanishand often Catholic-place names. San Francisco. Santa Maria. [Sagrado] Sacramento. [Nuestra Seora de] Los Angeles, the largest city in the world dedicated to Our Lady.

Above Sonoma there are another 300 miles of California, and along the coast, where there were Russian outpost colonies in the eighteenth century, we have the interesting juxtaposition of Sebastopol next to Santa Rosa.

Then the Gold Rush ushered in the new waves of English, Germans, French, Spanish, and other Europeans, who turned to farming when the gold was gone. The small farming communities around here have mostly English names. Davis, originally Davisville, was named after a prominent farmer here in the late 19th century. (Vacaville, the most absurd place name I can think of in the vicinity-literally, “cow town” in Spanish then French-was named after a Mr. Vaca.) Arranged on a neat, orderly grid, Davis streets were named First, Second, and Third, with the cross streets the logical A, B, and C, and so on, which allow for expansion as needed, at least as far as the twenty-sixth letter.

New housing developments, however, eschew this pleasant logic and instead impose an arbitrary conglomeration of theme names, Disney-fashion. Thus, in Davis, we have the “college” neighborhood (Rutgers, Villanova, Radcliffe); the “painters” neighborhood (Picasso, Gaugin, Manet); the “bird” neighborhood (Mockingbird, Sandpiper, Pintail); and the “golf” neighborhood (Fairway, Country Club, Greenview). You get extra points for figuring out the relative socioeconomic status of the inhabitants.

There is one Davis neighborhood, however, whose street names are on a theme I find quite tickling. Village Homes, where we stayed back in spring for a couple of weeks, has street names straight out of Lord of the Rings. Imagine having an address like “420 Rivendell.” You’d pay a lot for it: two-bedroom houses in this little progressive utopia sell for nearly $450,000 these days.