23 September 07
YouTube At Two Inches
I am now in Victoria, BC attending a conference this week on open source GIS. Pica has this amazing gizmo that is perfect for such trips. This is a Nokia N800 internet tablet. It’s a little bigger than a file card and does wireless: web browsing, email, and anything else you might want to do on the net. I’m blogging this lying on my back.in bed, holding it in my left hand. And I can catch up on movie trailers too:nothing like watching tte one for “Sleuth” on a two-inch wide window!
21 September 07
Democrats Want My Opinion? Not Really.
A survey arrived in the mail yesterday from the Department of Processing and Tabulation, Democratic Party Headquarters. It’s the stuff of nightmares: the way the questions are framed makes me wonder whether they aren’t just dying to hand the whole baby along with the bathwater back to the Republicans in 2008.
Consider, for example:
Which of the following would strengthen our nation’s economy?
_ More big tax breaks for wealthiest Americans (clearly, we’re not supposed to check THAT one)
_ Targeted middle-class tax relief (tipping our hand a bit, here, aren’t we?)
_ Both (not likely to be answered by anyone except by mistake but hey, that’s statistically as significant as “neither,” below)
_ Neither (hmmm… almost rhymes with “spoiler”)
If you check “neither,” there’s no way to say what you think might be appropriate in terms of “strengthening” the economy (always an assumed “good” thing, like “growth”). Like maybe weaning ourselves off this disastrous institutional perceived link between “consumer confidence” (read rampant spending on shit we don’t need based on lies and paper, debt and borrowing, all of it unhealthy and unsustainable) and “economic strength.” Like maybe taxing gasoline at appropriate levels to modify behavior because we’re going to need to modify it at some point, control of Iraqi oilfields or no, Arctic drilling or no, whether the democrats or the republicans or the half the country that votes or the other half that doesn’t like it or not, and they won’t like it, so they certainly won’t be “encouraged” to (one of the survey questions) by mere political cant.
If I had to make a decision today, I was asked, which of the following would I like to see running in the general election? Looking the names before me on the paper, Biden Clinton Dodd Edwards Kucinich Obama Richardson, I had to swallow hard. I looked at Kucinich, dismissed the notion as romantic fantasy. I nearly checked Obama. Romantic fantasy again. I removed my hand.
In the end, whatever they say about grass roots and listening to the “base,” it’s going to be the one with the war chest, with the big democratic machine behind her, that wins the nomination. (Just below the names was a place to check just how much money I was willing to contribute to the cause, in case we were in any doubt about this.) The lip-service paid to wanting my opinion is lip-service only; they don’t care about the progressive agenda. Our questions aren’t even on the survey form. (Like just f’rinstance the connection between poverty and race and how to address that, or the connection between justice and race and how to address THAT. If I were black and had been made homeless by Hurricane Katrina, say, or if I were black and lived in Jena, Louisiana, and had been sent this survey, I’d have assumed, completely correctly, that it was being misdelivered. It doesn’t apply. N/A.)
I believe Hillary Clinton is unelectable. Her supporters still seem to have no idea quite how much she is hated and despised by the very constituency she’s trying so hard to court (who, exactly? NASCAR fathers’ wives? because it certainly ain’t me), tip-toeing around the hard questions, fudging, fudging, because you have to be so careful, don’t take any risks, but make sure you look and sound tough. (Those of us who endured Thatcher’s “be a woman but sound and act and as far as possible look like you have cojones and then go ahead and tear apart the national infrastructure to prove it” masquerade are weeping in disbelief.) I predict, however, that Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.
In consequence, I think the Republicans will win the 2008 general election. Despite the lies, the dead and maimed and irreparably damaged American military personnel (not to mention because we never do mention it, do we, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis they’ve killed maimed and irreparably damaged), the billions we’ve wasted on this interminable fiasco and are now so far in the hole that rebuilding any kind of human services will take years and probably be abandoned as impossible or unpopular or both. Despite the scandals. Despite the much more serious systematic disregard for the constitution. Despite the continued rape of the planet. Despite the rictus on the face of the demon-clown and the grotesque cackles of those who pull his strings. Despite the continued almost comical reappearance of the demon-clown’s nemesis, exhorting the faithful to commit this or that atrocity when he was supposed to have been smoked out of his hole how long? six years? ago by the demon-clown’s Action Men, by the most powerful military machine in the world. I’m angry, people. And I’m feeling patronized by questions such as “Should the Medicare prescription drug benefit plan be reformed to make it less confusing to seniors?” I mean, come on, are they kidding? Is this a joke question?
I’ll send in my survey, though, because in spite of everything I still believe in democracy, and because I do actually have an opinion, in case that’s not apparent. The survey will be heavily annotated, even though I expect the annotations will be ignored, because along with a bonkers irrational aversion to taxes Americans have an irrational aversion to the complexity of the “essay question,” favoring instead multiple-choice answers that can be easily tabulated by Diebold and their ilk, from kindergarten quizzes to IQ tests to customer service at Jiffy Lube and Burger King to tertiary-level examination questions to deciding an “official presidential strategy.”
Yes No Maybe Not Applicable? Check.
20 September 07
White-crowns Return
Odd weather yesterday and today, the first rains of the season, with a thunderstorm late yesterday afternoon and a shower early in the morning here. The kitties were looking at something through the screen door to the back, and I heard a ‘slihp’ call note — it was the first white-crowned sparrow to return for the fall and winter here.
19 September 07
Tracking Wildlife
Walter “el jefe” wandered into my office this afternoon and alerted me to Tracking of Pacific Predators which is a very sophisticated effort to bring tracking data to the public.
18 September 07
Pastel Pencils
Our trip Sunday to Berkeley featured a visit to the art store, located conveniently three blocks from where we had lunch. My cousin Susan is a colored pencil artist, so there we gathered around that appropriate aisle in the store. Pica spotted these Stabilo CarbOthello pastel pencils, and started playing. With no shortage of encouragement from the rest of us, who all had their own temptations, she ended up walking out with a set of 48 of these.
Basically these are pastel chalks bound inside a wooden pencil. I have not done much of anything in pastels and these are very fun to try out. The concept of adding white to a drawing to raise the value is hitherto new to me.
Above is a drawing of one of the white eggplants that Pica has been growing in the garden out front.
17 September 07
Avian Anatomy
My recent forays into bird sketching have required the study of some elementary avian anatomy. Where to find such a tome? I looked at online sources and pretty quickly realized I had a very respectable book on our shelves already, Proctor and Lynch’s Manual of Ornithology, a book I imagine the entering Avian Sciences class at Davis will be purchasing. (I got my copy back when I worked for an east-coast university press and knew the sales rep for a different east-coast university press.)
It’s been years since I did any anatomy at all, but it’s good to see some familiar names (humerus, ulna, radius) and some less familiar ones (retrices, hallux, crissum). I do already know about supercilia and malar patches.
My protracted encounter with turkey vultures today made me realize how much an anatomical background might help as I try to sort out feather groups, structure, shape…
16 September 07
Turning Ecoblogging Into Data
Today was a good day for fall migrants. In the walnut tree north of the house we saw a couple of Wilson’s warblers and two Pacific-slope flycatchers.
This is the sort of natural history observation that is common for us ecobloggers to post about. My Spire project colleagues have just released a Firefox plugin called Spotter to help turn the observation into formally-described data. The plugin lets one quickly open up an observation form in Firefox. If you fill the form out, the data gets submitted to the Spire server and in return you get a link to the marked-up data together with a fun little spotted owl icon which you can put into your blog post (see below).
For more information about Spotter see this announcement, and the plugin may be downloaded from here.
Spotter is still a research prototype, and we would love to get feedback about how usable the tool is and how it may be improved. So if you are so inclined, give it a whirl!
15 September 07
A Trip to Berkeley
We took a trip to meet a cousin of Numenius visiting from Cleveland. It was a delightful surprise to find she’s an artist. We spent lunchtime talking about pencils, brushes, pastels, and finally decided to drag everyone else off to Dick Blick on University Ave (far enough down that Cal football traffic wasn’t an issue). I bought some pastel pencils I think will work well for bird portraits, though there wasn’t any Ampersand Pastelbord at that shop — I’ll have to order it.
I did a sketch of Numenius’s father. He’s a great gentleman and a great person and I’m always happier and richer to have seen him.
14 September 07
Announcing The Semantic Naturalist
Pica is not the only one to start a new blog here. I have just launched a technical blog together with my colleagues at work on the Spire project entitled The Semantic Naturalist. It is subtitled “Musings on natural history, geography, and the semantic web”, and the idea is to explore developments in computer science that may lead to a more integrated Web for natural history information. (The introductory post is here.) Though the content is technical, I hope some of it will be of interest to Feathers of Hope readers as well.
13 September 07
The Use of a Monocular
Not many birders use monoculars, for good reason. The three-dimensionality of binoculars gives a much better look at a bird and a telescope gives much better looks from afar.
But as I mentioned in Bird by Bird, a monocular is a great sketching tool, one I’ve used already quite a bit in my daily bird sketches.
I wondered who, though, mostly buys monoculars. Oh, said the extraordinarily attentive salesperson at that fantasy palace of consumerism, B&H, on Friday. Antiques people and truckers.
?
Antiques people so they can look through the cordons on the cordoned-off Chippendales; truckers, so they can read road signs without taking their eyes off the road.
I’ll be interested to see if I ever notice monocular around birders in the next few years. I may be alone.