1 August 05
Refuge By The Sea
I’ve been down at a conference at Asilomar near Monterey the past couple of days. It’s been blessedly foggy here, following the days of 100 degree heat in Davis. Asilomar is a famous lovely conference site, started almost a hundred years ago amidst a native Monterey pine forest just upslope from sand dunes, a white sandy beach, and the Pacific Ocean. In terms of wildlife, I’ve seen a fawn outside my room window, a young deer with antlers just outside the dining hall, Heermann’s gulls on the beach, acorn woodpeckers, and raccoons. They say a there’s a local mountain lion with Asilomar on his beat as well. The big meeting room in which I’m writing this was built in 1915, designed by Bay Area architect Julia Morgan and is an exemplar of Arts and Crafts style, complete with lettering in versals on the horizontal beams halfway up to the ceiling.
Very nice. Let’s not forget my favorite sound here—the bell rung from the top of the social hall announcing meal times!
31 July 05
30 July 05
Calligraphy Into Font
Perhaps it’s a midsummer thing but once again I’m interested in the project of turning our calligraphy hands into fonts. Regardless of how these work as typefaces, having a digital representation of a calligraphy hand will be extremely useful in solving calligraphic layout and design problems. Luckily, there’s a good freeware font design program to get started with this task—namely FontForge.
29 July 05
Clicker Training Squirrels
The new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory features forty trained squirrels, all opening walnuts with their teeth, sitting in a pristine room. Tim Burton was adamant about using live squirrels rather than computer graphics (fur looks cheesy in CG).
According to this article, many of the squirrels were bottle fed from babies and then trained using the standard operand conditioning.
I’m trying to teach our cats to come when called. This is difficult because they come anyway if they think there’s a treat in it for them, but it does seem to be working. I can get them to come from another room now.
A woman on the cat clicker list is training a bobcat kitten that has suffered head trauma and is not releasable. Within one minute, this biting, unhappy feline was putting nose to target. Within three minutes, it was jumping over a log.
For animals that are confined, this is not a circus trick. It gets them to exercise their minds and their bodies and to communicate with humans. Wilbur the bobcat can do a tremendous amount of good in captivity if he can be used for education purposes—which he can, once he stops biting.
28 July 05
Long Road Out of the Cabinets
There is a huge amount of information in the world’s natural history museums that is languishing in drawers and cabinets which are rarely seen. Slowly some of this material is being made accessible via the Web, but it’s a long haul, especially with current funding priorities. Here is a story about the hopes of the Florida Museum of Natural History to create a national butterfly database out of their immense collection of some 3.5 million specimens.
27 July 05
26 July 05
Aggie In Space
With today’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery, UC Davis has its very own astronaut orbiting the Earth. This would be Stephen Robinson, who got his bachelor’s degree from UC Davis in mechanical and aeronautical engineering in 1978. This is his third flight in space, and will be one of the two space walkers in this mission. He has made his way back to Davis in recent years. A few years ago, he was the grand marshal at the Picnic Day parade, and the year after that I heard him speak about being in space at the Davis Star Party.
25 July 05
Pseudogenes? I don't think so...
A paper published today in the Public Library of Science Genetics suggests that cats don’t have a taste receptor for sweet, unlike most if not all other mammals.
Charlie, at left here, comes running when he hears me crunch down on an apple, a pear, or even a peach. Not sure how this ultimately shakes down, but if it’s true, Charlie’s going on a sugar-free diet.
25 July 05
End Of An Era
As most know, Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France today, his seventh in a row, and has just retired from professional cycling. As much as one has to admire his accomplishments, it will be nice to have the Tour de France be a wide-open contest again. Meanwhile, there are rumors that Lance might someday run for governor of his home state. Or as Jay Leno puts it, “Well, finally Texas would have a governor who knew how to ride a bicycle.”
23 July 05
Blood, Gore, and Fegato
My class in uncial is winding down. It almost didn’t finish at all, but some quick footwork on the part of the teachers found us an alternative site for our class when the old one blew up (or rather was disconnected by a disgruntled computer person).
Uncial has many connotations. It’s invariably the script used around witchcraft, good or bad, on television or in shop windows. Given that the Irish variant was used for centuries (and still is) in Ireland, it often gives a Celtic flavor to whatever you’re writing. I’m not Irish though my accent sometimes leads people to think I might be—and I do have a kind of horror of piggy-backing on someone else’s culture.
I was going to do a quote from Beowulf, but I’d want to do it in the Old English as well as the translation, and that seemed cumbersome. Plus it’s translated by Famous Seamus, see horror in paragraph #2 above.
So instead I have been immersing myself in a piece written by Elck of the late lamented Vernacular Body. It concerns the liver, which seems an admirable subject for a hand as old and venerable and earthy and be-wormed as uncial. Here’s an excerpt:
4. Livered.
A bloody formless mass sitting in the inner dark. Brooding, suppurating, sweating like an injured animal. Prometheus on the Caucasus, delivered. Fava beans, Chianti.
(We have not eaten fava beans tonight but we did have lentils cooked in the solar cooker with tomatoes and capers, and cracked open a bottle of Fat Llama Chilean Cab, which is a lot chewier than Chianti. A la tienne, Elck.)