20 July 05
Catching Up
Upon a recommendation of PZ Myers, I’ve been reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, by Sean B. Carroll. This is a new book about evolutionary developmental biology, a field which has undergone a revolution in the past couple of decades thanks to advances in molecular biology. Conveniently, it’s been almost that long since I was seriously studying evolutionary biology, and the book is helping me catch up to what we’ve learned since then. In the next two chapters I will learn about how the butterfly got its spots and the zebra its stripes. It’s great stuff.
8 July 05
Morning Balloons
On calm clear mornings here we sometimes see hot air balloons off to the west floating above the Central Valley floor. Usually these are 10 or 20 miles off, but yesterday three were fairly close. The one at left was landing in fields about a mile south of our house. The peak in the distance is Mount Diablo.
6 July 05
Luring Them In With WiFi
I like the following idea for encouraging people to use mass transit: the East Bay bus system, AC Transit, is planning to equip about half their transbay fleet with free wireless. So bring your laptop on the bus to San Francisco starting this fall. This project is being pushed by the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency with funding coming from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
(From Beast Blog.)
4 July 05
Summertime Bales
The wheat in the field outside our house was harvested a week ago Saturday, and a couple of days ago they went through and made straw bales out of the stubble. It’s a very pleasing thing, a field full of straw bales. Makes you want to build a house from them.
1 July 05
Eyes On A Comet
At 5:52:12 GMT on July 4th, plus or minus 10 seconds, the space probe Deep Impact will slam into the comet 9P/Tempel 1, currently at a modest 10th magnitude in brightness. No one knows what we’ll see, but it’s possible a flash from the impact may be visible in a medium-sized telescope. It should be worth getting mine out for the event.
28 June 05
Don Gallo
We’re not getting much of a chance to sleep in these days. The chicken who was present upon our return from North Carolina turns out to be a young rooster who has lately learned how to crow. Nowadays he does this outside our bedroom window, bright and early in the morning.
No one is sure where he came from. Not across the street—though they have had chickens there, there’s never been a rooster. Our landlady thinks somebody just dumped him off here. So far he’s survived the trucks zooming by, and the local coyotes (one of whom we saw from the train Sunday running off with a jackrabbit).
He’s pretty to look at, but I could do without the alarm clock!
22 June 05
Davis Dartboard
The new O’Reilly book Mapping Hacks has arrived in the campus bookstore; it looks excellent. I haven’t picked it up yet since supposedly I’ll be getting an email giving me a 30% discount on it and the related book Web Mapping Illustrated by virtue of going to the conference last week. The former book is by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh, who are quite active in the ‘locative media’ movement. Here’s a game which I may play which is very much in this spirit.
I’ll take a city map of Davis and drop down a couple dozen random points on top of it (all in my GIS, of course). Then I will go to each point and sketch/photograph/write about what I see there. The results of this exercise will end up on this blog, on separate web pages, and/or in a physical book.
Thanks to the Davis Wiki, this town is perhaps one of the most extensively annotated-on-the-web places on the planet. And as it turns out, the city has a comprehensive set of GIS layers that are freely downloadable, not to mention a set of detailed aerial photographs dating from a couple of months ago. But GIS layers and imagery only get you so far. I’m sure I’ll learn things about this town through this exercise, and perhaps catch glimpses of deep culture as well.
21 June 05
Solstice
I’ve been thinking a lot about the solstice for the past few weeks; an Artist Trading Card swap for June has this as its theme and I’ve been wondering how to approach it. It’s a bittersweet time: the languor of the longest day combined with the heading back to winter.
We walked up on the levee to watch the sun set and the moon rise. While we were sketching we heard the sounds of bluegrass from Jim’s house (the former artificial insemination barn). We headed down there to make sure they had seen the moon. (They hadn’t, and immediately headed outside to serenade the moon with a stirring rendition of Blackberry something.)
15 June 05
Knackered; Or, Why I'm Behind on Lots of Things But Especially Reading Blogs
December: Maine/Boston
January: Washington/Oregon/British Columbia
February: Texas, San Francisco, Berkeley
March: Palm Desert, Anza Borrego
April/May: Boston
May/June: San Francisco, North Carolina/Virginia, Bodega Bay, Berkeley
[Of special note: we live less than 20 miles from Sacramento, and I’m not sure I’ve been there once this year… just in case you think putting down Berkeley or San Francisco is trivial for a Davisite.]
Numenius left today for Minneapolis and an open source GIS conference. This is the first time he’s gone somewhere without me for ages; I, on the other hand, have been doing some running around, most of it alone. All of it was fun, though. (I’ve seen seventeen new North American birds this year, which is more than in the last ten years put together. Edging toward 700…) What I think I need to acknowledge, though, is that these short trips take me a long time to bounce back from, in terms of retrieving my focus. I can slip back into work, I can slip back into blogging, but I’m not really here yet. The settling takes longer these days. Eh oui.
So today, especially, I’m happy to stay put, having had a massage this evening to deal with sitting on too many planes and not doing enough exercise and generally pampering myself after a physical exam yesterday, of the routine variety but never, ever pleasant…
12 June 05
View From The Train
Today I took the train down to Berkeley to have brunch with my family. (Pica joined us in Berkeley after staying overnight at her mum’s in Bodega Bay—it was something of a family weekend for both of us.) The train ride offers good views of rural Solano County, and to the south Mt. Diablo (3849 feet high) in Contra Costa County is ever present. At left is a sketch of the peak looking over the Suisun Marsh.