1 March 26
Caterpillar In The Park
For today’s urban sketch I drew this much-loved sculpture of a caterpillar in Central Park in Davis.
28 February 26
Introduction to Anbur
I got a postcrossing card today from Russia. The sender includes this information on the back:
On the postcard you can see the ancient alphabet of the Komi people. It’s called Anbur. This alphabet was created by St. Stephen of Perm more than 600 years ago. The first books that were written in these letters were the Psalter and the Gospel.
This beautiful script is written with the nib held on the horizontal, about 5 nib widths high.
27 February 26
The Destruction of the Night Sky
There are two proposals before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission right now that would do horrifying things to the night sky. Both are currently open to public comment through March 6 and 9, and I’m gearing up to submit a couple of comments. The FCC is the federal agency that regulates satellite launches in the United States, and they are now in the practice of rubber stamping an awful lot of these.
The first proposal is from a company called Reflect Solar that wants to put giant mirrors in space for the purpose of turning night into day for selected localities, in particular solar farms. They plan to start with an test satellite in 2026 with an 18 meter mirror, and then by 2030 have 4000 satellites in orbit at an altitude of 625 km. Eventually they imagine orbiting 250,000 satellites. The math for the amount of solar energy one can obtain this way absolutely does not work out, but even the 4000-satellite plan would be catastrophic for both professional and amateur astronomy. Visual astronomy would become an extremely risky activity, since accidentally glimpsing the reflected light in a telescope or binoculars could cause permanent eye damage.
Not to be outdone, everybody’s favorite archvillain Elon Musk is wanting to orbit up to 1,000,000 satellites for spaceborne AI data centers. There are presently 14,000 active satellites in space and low earth orbit is already getting crowded. One risk is Kessler syndrome — that is, collisions from space debris causing the generation of more debris in a chain reaction, rendering the entire orbital zone unusable. Another is impacts on atmospheric chemistry as tens of thousands of satellites burning up when they reenter may contribute to ozone depletion and climate change. Advocates of space data centers also tend to neglect the laws of physics. It is a lot harder to cool down a data center in space than on Earth, since due to the vacuum of space the only mechanism for heat transfer is radiation, not conduction or convection. (This is why vacuum thermoses keep their contents hot or cold.)
Both these proposals are now getting mainstream media coverage, such as in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The organization DarkSky International has a web page on how to comment on the proposals.
26 February 26
Wear your Melt the Ice Red Hats Today
I have recounted my knitting several (by now six) red Melt the Ice Hats. Today commemorates the 1942 banning of red hats in occupied Norway by the Nazis. Seems apt.
My sister had a wretched time of it in the bank this morning. At least she was wearing her red hat!
25 February 26
Tecumseh and the Survival of Native Nations
I just went to a talk at the UC Davis Alumni Center entitled “Tecumseh and the Survival of Native Nations” given by the historian Kathleen DuVal. DuVal’s most recent book is entitled Native Nations: A Millennium in North America and won both the Pulitzer Prize for history and the Bancroft Prize in 2025, as well as a couple of other history prizes. She also got her history PhD at UC Davis in 2000, and her talk today was something of a homecoming — there was a contingent in the audience who knew her from her graduate school days here.
I have not yet read Native Nations, but it was clear from her talk that as a retelling of Native American history it emphasizes the individual identities of sovereign Native nations, a characteristic that continues to be important today. She illustrated this with a photograph from the Standing Rock protests in 2016 showing flags from all the tribes who had assembled together. Her talk today was about the visionary Shawnee leader Tecumseh who along with his brother the religious leader Tenskwatawa (often known as The Prophet) tried to build a unified Native confederacy to resist the incursions of white American settlers into the lands beyond the Appalachians at the beginning of the 19th century. Tecumseh was a great orator and many listened to him and the prophesies of his brother, but overall their call for unification did not win out over sovereignty. Tecumseh ends up dying fighting with the British against the Americans in 1813. Tenskwatawa moved across the Mississippi and dies in Kansas in 1836. But the Native nations persist, and by the late twentieth century Native Americans have three identities in varying degrees: that of their tribe or sovereign nation, that of being a U.S. citizen, and of being a Native American.
24 February 26
Taxes
Everyone I’ve spoken to in the past few days is deep in the mire of sorting out their taxes. These are all people who have an external tax preparer, so the hours they are spending on this grim task are BEFORE a professional actually starts to work on them.
Makes me nostalgic for when I filed taxes in England: they sent me a statement, asked me to review it and let them know if I disagreed, and it was all done. Five minutes. The millions of dollars that are spent every year just so people can get their taxes filed — not counting the thousands, nay millions, of hours of thankless slog just to get them in — are a capitalist absurdity.
The drawings at right are of my siblings as we went through my mother’s tax records for the fourth? fifth? time today. Now to work on ours.
23 February 26
Transcriptions Completed
A week ago Friday, I learned about the Douglass Day transcription project and promptly joined this crowdsourced effort to transcribe printed documents related to the series of Black political organizing conventions in the 19th century. The big push for this project was on Friday the 13th, but volunteers continued on and yesterday finished transcribing the entire collection. There were 1,445 volunteers who transcribed text from 3,416 images of documents. I ended up transcribing 32 documents over 10 days.
I am really happy with the way the effort turned out. This was a way to participate in Black History Month, the volunteers quickly got through the collection, and I discovered that online transcription is a contribution path towards increasing the accessibility of historical archives. It turns out there are plenty of opportunities to do this sort of thing online, through programs at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, and other places I’m sure. I will be looking into these.
22 February 26
On Story Arcs
A lot happened in yesterday’s Comix Coven… the session started out with different story arc possibilities. I added the Heroine’s Journey (I“m reading Mauren Murdock’s classic 1990 book of the same name) with what that arc might look like. It’s particularly appropriate to my own project.
Of course it’s important to understand your family of origin. And, at some point, you just have to take responsibility for your own life. I think this project around my mother’s journey is giving me permission to reconcile with her fully. I just wish she was still around to talk to about it. But that’s the point, isn’t it… If she was, we/I wouldn’t get here.
Update, 23 February: I should point out that Maureen Murdock’s own diagram of the heroine’s journey is a circle, with stops along the way that include a redefinition of self. But this seems to me to be more of an inward spiral than a circle. What I’ve drawn is more like an outward spiral ending in a line, like a snail. However we conceptualize these potential story arcs (and however much fun it is to do so), I’m guessing they look different for every individual, and might even look different for the same individual at different points in time.
21 February 26
The Elusive Bushtit
I’m continuing to try photographing the urban avifauna of Davis, and am learning how bird species differ in their challenges in photographing them. Bushtits are pretty common, but move through shrubbery in a very active flock. It is quite hard to catch one in the viewfinder before it disappears behind a branch. Still, yesterday I walked through the Arboretum and managed to take several good frames of bushtits in a flock at eye level.
Pica and I have a joke that bushtit flocks always come in sizes that are prime numbers.
20 February 26
When Grief Does the Buying
The day Mum died back in September we all sat around, more or less happy that she’d gone how she wanted, more or less numb. We all repaired back to my sister’s after a few hours and I took myself off up the hill to Sherman’s, her local independent bookstore.
There is something so comforting, so open yet enclosed, about a bookstore. Like a mother’s arms. I picked up a copy of Birds of Maine by Michael Deforge and Lynda Barry’s Syllabus from the graphic novel section. Not sure why these books — I just wanted to have something to mark the day, and to thank the bookstore for being there for me.
I’m only now getting to grips with the Deforge, and it is a tour de force. Silly, profound, mundane, bickeringly observed. Daft. I’m going to write a letter to him, it still being International Letter Writing Month, telling him I picked up his tome and thanking him for helping to make sense of a world that doesn’t have a lot of sense in it.