21 February 07
Riding South
The Tour of California is turning into a very good race. Today’s stage featured the toughest climb of the whole tour, up Sierra Road east of San Jose. The route went from Stockton to San Jose. There was a breakaway early on of about 16 riders that threatened the overall leader Levi Leipheimer, who was getting little support from the peloton to try to close the breakaway. Finally on the big climb he made his move and caught the remaining riders in the breakaway, though he was edged out at the finish by one of the breakaway riders, the veteran Jens Voight.
Tomorrow is the longest stage in the race, going from near Monterey to San Luis Obispo along the spectacular coast road Highway 1. It is also predicted to be quite wet with winds coming from the southeast at 15 to 30 miles per hour. I think the riders will all hunker in the peloton and not try anything outlandish — look for a sprint finish in San Luis Obispo.
20 February 07
Tour of California Comes to Davis
We got back from a quick trip to Monterey to see birding friends from Massachusetts in time to catch the don’t-blink-you’ll-miss-it third stage of the Amgen Tour of California, running from Santa Rosa to Sacramento via Davis.
My optometrist’s shop is on 2nd street and I needed to get my glasses adjusted, so we opted to camp out at the finish of the 2nd Street intermediate sprint, which conveniently was right outside Mishka’s (ran into my co-trainee for Cold Canyon docenting, Iraj, and we had a good yak about how to cut a reed pen for calligraphy; Numenius’ boss and five of his labmates were across the street).
There’s a lot of waiting about for a race like this. The pink-dreadlocked lass in front of us has taken these days off as vacation and was following the tour as it sped through parts of California she’d never seen before: she coaxed me to the edge of the street as long as I didn’t get in the way of her digital camera. On Thursday, the race heads down Highway 1 past Big Sur, where we were yesterday, looking for condors. (Unsuccessfully.) That’s a long stretch of road to tie up with a bike race, but a thrilling race trajectory (too bad a storm’s coming in that day). My pink-haired friend was wondering whether she should get down there really early and wait for them along the cliffs, or see them off at the start…
The Davis sprint was exciting: a three-man breakaway had one guy clearly in the lead and about to take it when his green-clad rival snuck up behind him and took the sprint by about 12 feet.
We rode our bikes home, into the strong south wind, only to find that our landlord had plonked himself outside Baker’s Square to watch the race (about 300 yards up the road). He said all the waitresses came out to watch too, since there was nobody in the restaurant.
A great turnout for a workday: well done, Davis. After four days off, it’s back to the grind for me tomorrow…
18 February 07
Ethical Shopping In Your Back Pocket
Pica ran into a pal at the coop today who was raving about a book entitled The Better World Shopping Guide, by Ellis Jones, who is here in Davis. So she picked up a copy of it. There are plenty of books about socially and environmentally responsible shopping but this is a very practical guidebook. It’s small, so it easily fits in one’s pocket, purse, or pack. It gives A to F grades to many of the prominent companies in about 75 categories of consumer goods ranging from airlines to wine. Some of these ratings are expected (under ice cream, Ben and Jerry’s is an A, Nestle is an F); others are not, and may cause us to rethink our shopping choices. The author has a website for his book here.
16 February 07
Snow Day
Dedicated to all my friends and family in chilly, snowy climes: hang in there, spring’s on its way!
Also check out the launch of the new Madrid wiki, Madripedia. (via Puerta del Sol Blog )
14 February 07
Reclaiming Your Inner Autist
We heard Dr. Temple Grandin today give two talks on campus sponsored by the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute (Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders). The two talks overlapped much in content, the first entitled Exploring the mind of a visual thinker, and the second entitled My experience with autism. My favorite work of hers is her book Animals In Translation in which she uses her experience of being autistic to better understand what animal consciousness is all about. She is a photorealistic visual thinker, and believes that many animals function the same way. Thought without language happens. It’s not a mode common in humans, but such a pattern gets developed under certain circumstances.
She identified three specializations of autistic thought — visual thinkers, music and math dominance, and verbal thinkers. The first, the photorealists like her, are those who function like having a movie projector in the brain, or in a contemporary analogy, a Google Images-like search engine. The second type are those who are good at patterns — much more abstract than the visual thinkers. She illustrated this with a slide of a praying mantis made in origami overlaid on top of the quite complex folding pattern of its square of paper. Some very pattern-oriented mind came up with that folding sequence. Finally, the verbally-oriented folks are those who are good at facts — the history buffs, the sports trivia buffs.
It seems autism isn’t one single thing or syndrome, rather it’s a manifestation of how different brains can specialize. Obviously it is important to work on making autistic individuals functioning members of society, but as Temple Grandin puts it, we don’t want to cure Einstein (non-verbal at age three). What we see in extreme in autistic individuals are unusual combinations of the intellectual potentials we all have.
13 February 07
Imped
Yesterday for work I was present at a surgical procedure on a bird. A black-crowned night-heron had gotten snagged in some fishing line and was found in December, dangling from a tree, with its left wing flight feathers severely damaged.
Feathers grow back, but you have to wait for a new moult, which can take months, always to be avoided with wildlife. So the vets decided to undertake an “imping” on the bird, a transplant where donor feathers are grafted onto the trimmed existing shafts using bamboo skewers and five-minute epoxy glue. No blood involved: this is all dead tissue.
This night-heron had nine feathers imped yesterday.
Wondering where the term came from (the vet who did the surgery didn’t know, but he knew it was a very old falconry technique), I asked Language Hat. Right person:
“You’ve come to the right place! The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s from a (rare) Old English verb impian, which is related to various other Germanic verbs (like German impfen) but its earlier history is obscure, though it’s presumably ultimately derived from Greek emphuteuein ‘to implant, engraft.’ Its earliest meaning was ‘to (en)graft,’ which goes back to around the year 1000; what you want is definition 4:
4. Falconry. To engraft feathers in the wing of a bird, so as to make good losses or deficiencies, and thus restore or improve the powers of flight; hence, allusively, with reference to ‘taking higher flights’, enlarging one’s powers, and the like. In various constructions: a. To imp feathers into or in a wing, etc. Obs. 1477 Paston Lett. III. No. 794. 185 Like as the fawcon Which is alofte, tellith scorne to loke a down On hym that wont was her feders to pyke and ympe. 1580 LYLY Euphues (Arb.) 249 Ymping a fether to make me flye, when thou oughtest rather to cut my wing for feare f soaring. 1589 NASHE Pasquil & Marf. 11 Such an Eccho, as ultiplies euery word..and ympes so many feathers vnto euery tale, that it flyes with all speede into euery corner of the Realme. 1641 ROME Joviall Crew II. Wks. 1873 III. 374 To see a swallow..with a hite feather imp’d in her tail. 1706 PHILLIPS, To Imp a Feather in a awk’s Wing (among Falconers), to add a new piece from an old roken stump.”
etc.
The bird was expected to stay in an aviary for a week or two while it strengthened its flight muscles. By nightfall yesterday, though, it was was flying around and generally freaking out. It was released this morning after a band had been put on its leg; flew up into a tree where it stayed for 20 minutes, and then headed off into the Suisun Marsh.
12 February 07
Evening Pile-up
Tune around the ham bands and sometimes you will hear dozens of chirpings slightly out-of-tune from one another, some loud, some barely audible, sounding all the world like a large flock of colonial seabirds trying to attract a mate. In fact, they are trying to get the attention of a ham operator who has gone to some forlorn corner of the world and is transmitting from there. (Like birders, many ham operators are listers — what they list are the geographic entities they have made contact with.)
I heard such a colonial din this evening low on the 80 meter band. I looked up online what was attracting their attention. Appropriately enough, they were trying to contact an expedition in the Caribbean to Aves Island.
11 February 07
Clones
When I worked for an architectural firm in Cambridge, Mass, in the late 1980s, a lot of the young architects had studied at Harvard. They had survived the gruelling critiques by the then prima donna, an eccentric Argentine called Jorge Silvetti (“Jess: but it is veddy veddy oggly”) and were coming to terms with churning out HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) systems rather than designing the masterpieces they were probably all capable of but would never have the chance to do, because architecture is highly political and without an in to where the money was, their work was doomed to oblivion. They were affable and seemed resigned to the huge student loans they’d struggle to repay for decades.
They taught me a lot, though, these talented designers, apart from the late 20th century Boston vernacular and how to play softball. (And, incidentally, how to love the Red Sox.) They taught me that you could tell that someone had studied graphic design at RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design, simply by looking at their portfolio. (You can use any typeface as long as it’s Helvetica.) I later came to learn that you could tell any calligrapher who had been active in Portland in the 1980s: styles coalesce regionally around one or two top practitioners.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this: it’s been going on a long time. The eyes of figures in Giotto’s paintings are what they are because of where he was and who he sipped wine with, as much as who taught him how to paint and his own genius. Early Renaissance Sienna brings to mind a certain look. There were the masters and the students, but there’s an identity inherent in the school.
How this is different from a disturbing trend I’m seeing now in book arts is hard to pinpoint. But the way, now, the de rigueur way to make an artist’s book, is this: you take all your pages, you smother them with acrylics (leave no white space visible, on pain of being labelled facile); you then take vintage photographs, which you cut up in “disturbing” ways (hands; feet; eyes) and paste onto your acrylic ratatouille, and then you paste arbitrary newspaper clippings on top of that and other clip art and maybe some rubber stamping and slather some more muddy acrylics on and there you go, you’ve made some art.
Except for this: all of these pieces are identical. They will be found 100 years from now and someone will say “Scrapbooking School, ca. 2006, artist unknown.”
Will someone please explain to me a) how this happened and b) how it’s just a fad that’ll over by next Tuesday, please?
10 February 07
Now Indexing The Universe
No longer content to gulp all this world’s textual materials into its maw, Google is turning its eyes heavenward and partnering with 16 universities to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The 8.4 meter aperture LSST features a 3 gigapixel camera and will make a complete scan of the sky over Cerro Pachón, Chile, every three nights. Soon we’ll be able to read blogs from Epsilon Eridani b.
9 February 07
January Drought Over
Our ditch is full of water. Today’s supposed to be rainy and very windy. I’m heading into Sacramento with some friends to go to the Crocker Art Museum. We’ll be sharing the road with about 2 million other people who, deprived of snow during the month of January, need to make up for lost time. Many dollars will be transferred to orthopedic surgeons this weekend…
A trip to the library last night: Danny Gregory’s Creative License was in the new book section! If you’ve never drawn anything past the age of five, or if you have but got discouraged by comments from teachers or peers or parents or siblings, pick up this book and pick up a pencil (or, even better, a pen, the easier to free yourself from the tyranny of the eraser). I promise you, you won’t regret it.
When I sit and sketch or draw — on a curbside, as on Sunday next to a spectacular flowering quince while most of Davis was watching the Superbowl — I get so absorbed I go into a sort of trance. About five people I knew walked or cycled by while I sat there, and each time I looked up at them with a glazed expression, not helped by the fact they were mostly backlit by the sun, apparitions, almost. There is no better therapy for me. The overwhelm of the sumptuous color, the figuring out its complement in order to render shadows (for this coral, turquoise); the sexual pumping of the bees, never sated, plunging themselves again and again into the heart of every blossom; the audible yet still invisible arrival of an Anna’s hummingbird, displacing the bees momentarily from their copulations with flowers, finally peeking at me through twenty spikey stems: bliss. Whether or not the drawing or sketch is any good is almost irrelevant: the act of sitting, slowing down, really looking — it’s probably the closest I get to meditation.
I’ve been finding lots of good sketching and drawing blogs lately. Making a Mark is eye candy for devotees of the colored pencil, and the current collaborative online Van Gogh project Katherine’s involved with is definitely worth a look; Lori over at Chatoyance sketches freely, passionately, capturing wonderful expressions (which, of course, is all of them: when you’re working with people, every piece of them becomes an object of wonder, worthy of attention); I receive Julian’s Postcard from Provence daily; Aussie calligrapher Graham McArthur has a spectacular blog, Eidolon. Trumpetvine Sketchblog features Martha’s incredible instructions on how to eviscerate a Moleskine planner and turn it into exactly the kind of sketchbook you want. (We ran into Martha at the December San Francisco Sketchcrawl and got to see this beautiful creation in action.) Illustration Friday grows each week with more and more participants.
Grab a sketchbook: everything’s fair game. Next worldwide Sketchcrawl: Saturday, March 17. I’ll see you out there. (Or inside: today’s not such a good day for outdoor sketching here in Northern California.)
PS: At right is an almond blossom I drew for Jennifer, whose birthday is today (February 10) and who is dealing with freezing temperatures in Sweden: Happy Birthday, dear Jennifer! The original’s on its way…