17 May 06
Slow Road Home
A copy of Fred First’s book arrived today. A Blue Ridge Book of Days. This book has been a long time coming and it’s a thrill to see it finally bound and delivered—a book we’ve been watching happen through Fragments From Floyd.
When you write a blog, daily, you do write in fragments. Yet how well this transition—from screen to page—seems to have gone, especially since there are almost no photographs, a surprise for me. Fred’s writing is always at his best, I think, when he allows humor to punctuate his deep and often quite moving observations about place, his place, his nook in Floyd County where the county seat has only one traffic light (we’ve seen it).
And then there’s this:
“This was a pasture where cattle grazed. Before that, virgin hemlock and oak and white pines tall as ships’ masts grew in dark forests seldom visited. I wish I could have seen it then. I wish I could see it fifty years from now when it will have begun to seem like healthy forest once again. But I only have today—a fixed point in the succession from past to future; and I’ll try to do a better job of living in the land and in the time I have here.”
John Elder couldn’t put it better…
16 May 06
Fishing For Zambia
Pica’s garden has turned into a amenable place to do radio. I’ve strung my 15-foot speaker wire antenna through the almond tree and hooked it up to my little Sony shortwave radio. A favorite shortwave pastime is to try to pull in signals from the far corners of the world. A good time to do this is at dawn or dusk, as the terminator, the border on the face of the earth between day and night, is a good path for radio propagation. Yesterday, at 0320 UTC on 4910 KHz, I was pretty sure I heard Radio Zambia, at least according to my database. The signal was there again this evening—very cool.
14 May 06
Skiving
“Skiving” is a word I learned, like so many others, my first term at boarding school in Derbyshire. It means to goof off but there’s more of an element of deception implicit in the term. Like you’re really getting away with a LOT.
This afternoon I skived off from my class in the most impromptu way to go to a baseball game at the newly renamed and surely to be renamed in the future ATT Park. Class itself was skiving off from chores at home which would otherwise have been skived off from by going to Whole Earth or gardening or going for a bike ride or a swim.
Skiving’s good thing to do. In general. And in specificity.
Tomorrow I’ll post a couple of boards I made at my class. What fun that was… [done, Monday May 15]
13 May 06
Losing The Heart Of Berkeley
We heard the bad news from Ron. Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley is closing as of July 10. This store has been in its present location for as long as I have been alive and has always been the flagship bookstore in Berkeley and the East Bay.
The press release blames a 15-year decline in sales in the Telegraph Avenue location, together with a loss of sales from the Internet. The store has two other locations—one on the highly yuppified 4th Street in Berkeley, and another that just opened in the past year or so on Stockton in San Francisco. I have always found the 4th Street Cody’s to have a fairly paltry selection, and have never been to the San Francisco store.
Probably this decision has been in the works for some time. In my last several visits to the Telegraph store I’ve noticed that the selection of books has been getting poorer. And the recent opening of the San Francisco store worried me.
I grew up near Berkeley, and I have a routine I often follow when I return for a visit. I’ll start off at the Berkeley BART station, walk through campus visiting a few shops along the way, and then head south several blocks for a good browse in Cody’s. It’s very sad that this is no longer to be.
11 May 06
Here Comes Whole Earth
The Whole Earth Festival is back in town tomorrow. Unfortunately I’ll miss most of it since I’ll be spending the weekend at a class in San Francisco, but I’ll get a quick tie-dye fix tomorrow at lunchtime…
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)