10 May 06
Middle Earth Pixel-By-Pixel
In geospatial parlance, a DEM, or digital elevation model, is a gridded map showing the elevation in each grid cell across a region. Some enterprising souls, not content with mapping areas close to home, have started making a DEM of Middle Earth. I’ll start worrying when they succeed in finding matching satellite imagery! (From The Map Room).
8 May 06
Digging by Moonlight
So I hurt all over, folks. Hamstrings, glutes, quads. Arms. This evening I went for a swim and I couldn’t straighten my arms out for backstroke…
Reason # 456 to garden: it’s terrific exercise.
It’s hot when the sun’s out now now and digging—double digging one of my raised beds—beyond dusk has the added advantage of a front-row seat (okay, stand) while the egrets take off and go home to be replaced by the night-herons in the flooded alfalfa field next door. It’s a very bad time to be a burrowing rodent around here these days.
I’m hoping to pick up a huge load of used horse bedding from across the street tomorrow and finish preparing the soil of at least one of the beds. I’m also hoping that all this work up front will save me loads later on when I come to put in my winter garden in August.
7 May 06
Yolo Loam
Pica rented the rototiller and had it overnight. It’s nice soil, Yolo loam I remembered from perusing the soil survey for Solano County. Or to be more specific, assuming the map is accurate, Yolo loam with a clay substratum at a depth of 40-60 inches.
My colleagues over in soil science across the road from my office have put together a very nice web mapping application describing the soils of California, Arizona, and Nevada. So if you’re curious about the soil type where you’re trying to garden, zoom on in and have a look.
6 May 06
Torture "Lite"?
Last night we went to hear Amy Goodman of Democracy Now host a panel on Guantánamo. Her guests were Michael Ratner, a human rights lawyer and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights; James Yee, a muslim former army chaplain who was arrested for espionage after serving at Guantanamo and later released; and Alfred McCoy, a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
From McCoy we learned that far from being an aberration, the Abu Ghraib photos show that the methods of torture that have been perfected by the United States since 1951 are still being routinely used in the interrogation of prisoners. They consist of three kinds: sensory deprivation (hence the hooding scenes); self-inflicted pain (such as a prisoner being forced to hold his or her arms out for days at a time, crucifixion-style); and exploiting cultural or personal phobias (in the case of muslim prisoners, using dogs, using women for sexual humiliation, and desecrating the Koran would all fall into this category).
Psychological torture has been shown to be by far the hardest to treat. John McCain has said repeatedly he would much rather have been beaten than have to face the mock executions that characterized his time as a POW in Vietnam. It’s also the hardest to prove because it leaves no physical traces.
There have been no new prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2004. Where, then, are they being taken? To secret CIA “black sites” around the world, outside the jurisdiction of any U.S. court, away from cameras and journalists and protesters and politicians.
This isn’t just a Bush-Cheney thing. A treaty signed by Clinton essentially excludes mental torture from the activities the U.S. commits itself to avoiding when questioning prisoners. Howard Dean, president of the Democratic National Congress, admitted there was no “position” by the Democratic Party on Guantánamo or on torture.
I felt so sick about this I couldn’t write about it last night. I still feel sick about it. I knew we had been lied to, of course. But I had no idea that this had been such a routine part of U.S. policy for over 50 years.
I feel sick.
5 May 06
Freeing The Isle of Wight
About the only way I think of that the United States is more socialistic than the rest of the world is that information collected by the federal government generally gets placed into the public domain. This policy has had a happy consequence that there are a lot of map products and map data available free to the public. These include digital versions of the topographic map series produced by the USGS, as well as the street mapping used by the Census Bureau in the course of their work.
Most countries are not so fortunate, and map data collected by the government survey agency at public expense gets sold back to users, often at a considerable price. This situation has led to a movement to make publically collected data freely available. A workaround until this practice is changed is to start making one’s own maps, and a number of mapping enthusiasts are taking this route.
One such project is the OpenStreetMap. To contribute to this map, people go out with recreational GPS units and trace out streets, paths, and trails and submit their coordinates to the online map. This weekend the OpenStreetMap folks are going to free the Isle of Wight. Some 30 volunteers from all around Europe are converging on the 381 square kilometer island to travel all its roads and footpaths and will make the resulting map freely available to the public.
(Via The Map Room)
3 May 06
Rototilling
The saga of the garden continues. Now we’re going to do the plot behind the almond tree which is out of the way of everything including the currently swarming bees, their accumulated detritus, tires, and whatnot. This is getting to be almost comical. It does seem that you can save a lot of money (if not a lot of time) by getting good advice before you start breaking your back with pickaxes.
A friend called me at six this morning from North Carolina (I was already at work) to ask how to address a vice-chancellor in an email. By their first name, said I. Oh, not chancellor so-and-so? Oh no, I don’t think so. But by the way how should I rototill packed-in Davis clay?
Oh, says she, there’s a man who will come with a tractor and do it for you. Look under rototilling in the yellow pages. And, sure enough, there it was. Greg in Dixon. I left him a message.
Either that or spend a lot to rent one which I have to lug over here. Not sure. But I did also go to Project Compost today to find out how to get yards and cubic yards of compost.
I am so, so in danger of becoming a gardening bore…
2 May 06
Dog Days Arriving
When we were at the Little League game Sunday, this spaniel had had a long day and was content to lie on the lap of the girl sitting in front of us in the bleachers.
1 May 06
Blog Against Disablism Day
Thanks to Diary of a Goldfish for hosting this.
I had a lot of ideas for what to say for this post… to talk about what it was like suddenly to have an injury that required me to navigate the world on crutches, the instant appreciation for the path that is taken not just for two or three months but a lifetime of a lot of people. About how with this same injury, if I had been born in the sixteenth century, it would have become my own lot for a lifetime.
I wanted to talk about my friend Donna who insists that disabled students, if supported, face the same likelihood of success or failure as other students based on their socioeconomic backgrounds. Their disability is not their limiting factor: it’s our ignorance and stupidity.
I wanted to talk about the first time I ever saw a man ski with only one arm. It was in Spain. He was obviously not Spanish. It was a strong contrast to the message of the signs on the metro reserving seats “para mutilados de guerra.” (Not for anyone with a disability, just one acquired on the winning or losing side of a civil war.)
I wanted to enter into a conversation with Jenny and my own relatives who have worked so hard on this issue.
I’m at the end of a day that began yesterday for Jenny and other antipodeans; most bloggers have already said their bit on this. What can I add?
This, I think: owning up to our own disablism is even more unlikely than owning up to our racism, because it’s so plausibly in all our futures. So I’m thankful for everyone who works on this: to stop discriminatory policies, to advocate for equal access to buildings and public transport services, to design better and more ingenious gadgets that seem trivial until you realize that for someone, it can make the difference between browsing the web—this blog, for instance—or having to ask someone to do it for you.
30 April 06
Little League, Davis Style
We went to our first little league game ever today. Our friends Rick and Donna invited us to come watch; Rick is the coach of one of the Davis teams, the Rangers. He is unusual in that he is involved with little league without being a parent. Alas, the Rangers were having a hard time today—when we arrived it was 4-0 White Sox; two hours and three innings later, the score was 23-8 White Sox. Rick attributed this to it being the first hot-weather game. Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun. Fly balls are always an adventure; the pitchers are alternately getting shelled or missing the plate; and the spry kid who hit a home run had the biggest grin on his face when he leapt on home plate. At left is a sketch of the Rangers’ catcher during the much-needed pitching change.
29 April 06
Birdathon
Today Numenius and I did a birdathon by bicycle to raise funds for Yolo Audubon Society. We went in different directions: he headed south to do the breeding bird atlas survey I birded along Putah Creek with a friend and colleague on the Audubon Board, headed into west Davis, down to the Arboretum, east to the Yolo Bypass, south to the Yolo Grasslands and Tremont Street Cemetery, and finally home.
We tallied 80 species between us by bicycle, great considering the day started out gray and a bit cold and ended up hot and windy and the flooding is still extensive. Not quite the total someone like Richard might have put together on a day like this, but respectable.
If you’d like to make a contribution of any size—a total amount or an amount per bird—you can mail it to
Yolo Audubon Society (Birdathon)
P.O. Box 886
Davis, CA 95617