21 May 05
Gremlins
You know you got ‘em when the electrical igniter for the gas stove top starts clicking away every couple of seconds of its own accord with nobody around to have influenced things. Helpless renters that we are (there’s a reason why we should never own a house), we summoned the landlord, who waved his arms over the exposed stove top, whereupon the stove was back to normal. I’ve seen sysadmins do that trick before many a computer, too.
20 May 05
Expanding Vista
There’s been an Airstream trailer outside our back door for the past three months. The landlord’s son who keeps bees has needed a lot of extra help getting new hives built, honey extracted, and bees trucked around the valley (it’s going to be a big year in the bee business, especially for someone who sprayed his bees against mites nobody else believed would be a problem).
The trailer is owned by one Charlie, a laid-back jovial guy who seems curious about everything. He’s not the one who’s been living in it, though: that’s his stepson Taylor, a third-year engineering student who’s been doing the bee work to save up enough money to finish school back in Albuquerque.
Taylor would emerge with a cigarette at roughly the time we were walking the cats on leashes outside. Convention dictates a conversation is required. Nobody really wanted this so early in the morning; normally I still had to get in the shower and eat breakfast.
Charlie picked up the trailer yesterday; Taylor’s gone to Nevada for the next phase of bee work. And our mornings will once again focus exclusively on making sure the cats don’t catch pocket gophers, on the black-crowned night-herons, on the possibly nesting Bullock’s oriole.
19 May 05
Rule Creep
Back in 1982 Douglas Hofstadter in his Scientific American column Metamagical Themas described a game called Nomic which was invented by philosopher Peter Suber. Nomic is a game where play consists of modifying its own rules. Initially rules changes have to be by unanimous consent, but this rule itself can and usually does change. Play continues until one party twists things so that they are the winner, or the game mutates into something completely different. It was a game perhaps ahead of its time, and play of it spread on the ARPANET which then turned into the Internet. Nowadays the home for the game is at nomic.net.
Would that real life were as playful as games of Nomic. The Republicans are about to pull a maneuver which, if this were a game, would lead to shouts of cheating, an argument, and then one party storming out of the house not to return. Changing the parliamentary rules of the Senate takes a two-thirds vote. If the Republicans carry out their threat to eliminate the judicial filibuster through only a majority vote (which they can do in actuality since they are the majority, and nobody is in a position to call them on the rule violation), they will have effectively broken the rule system. Simply put, this deed would be an act of fascism. And as the changes in the rules creep on we find ourselves disintegrating ever more into the soup.
18 May 05
Presence
Sometimes you hear someone and you know after about three sentences you had really better pay attention because what they’re saying is so important and ruthlessly close to what real is for you and for everyone and for the world that it’s almost like being blown over by the simplicity of it and by a wind that heals and cleans and doesn’t say anything new in fact it’s as old as the wind itself but after all the hot air we have to listen to most of the time it practically cuts you in half.
I heard Shirin Ebadi’s talk at the Mondavi Center in Davis last night. Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, the first Iranian ever to do so, for her work in human rights and especially the rights of women and children.
17 May 05
Capricious Deities
I knew better than to gloat here that the Yankees were tied for last place in the AL East, with a winning percentage of about .370. So I didn’t — but the baseball gods didn’t keep their end of the bargain! The Yankees have just won 10 in a row, beating up on the poor A’s, and now Seattle. What petitions did we forget to make?
16 May 05
Caterpillaration
The painted ladies we saw in their thousands a few weeks ago have disappeared, but on Thursday I noticed hundreds of caterpillars on a section of the bike path between here and campus. Same on Friday.
They’re dark gray, spiky with bristles, and have intermittent yellow striping. Yep, painted ladies. They are looking for good sites to pupate, according to Art Shapiro. When the butterflies emerge they’ll continue north.
I saw one today getting nowhere fast on my window at work. I know you’re not supposed to intervene in these things but I helped it over to a spot where there was at least a bit of traction on the wall, unlike the sheer glass.
They are travellers, these creatures…
15 May 05
Heavenly Thistle
Artichokes for dinner. Yum.
14 May 05
Taking Joy in Things of Delight
Today we drove about 45 minutes due west, beyond the hillside where we got married two years ago, and headed into Cold Canyon.
This canyon is part of the UC Reserve System; it’s a creekside hike up a fairly steep trail in places. The rain has made the vegetation very lush; it was warm; I wondered about rattlesnakes a lot but as usual saw nary a one.
You’re encouraged to sign in and are invited to leave an optional comment beyond your name and the number in your party. “Sketching,” said Numenius, below the numerous “hiking” folks that were uphill. (The wags we met on the way out put “trotting” in this category.)
We sketched. We sat by the creek and used pens, pencils, crayons, watercolors, and the new stools I picked up at REI in Boston (okay, Reading) last week.
13 May 05
A Bee’s Course
In the 1960s, biologist Karl von Frisch came up with the hypothesis that honeybees communicate the distance and direction to nectar sources via a waggle dance performed in the hive. His theory was largely accepted, but some scientists argued that the bees who had attended the dance picked up the scent of the food source from the dancing bee and made their way to the nectar site by following the scent. Lacking a way to directly follow these bees en route, some controversy remained.
Technology moves along, and we are now able to attach harmonic radar transponders (weighing between 6 and 20 mg) to insects. In a paper just published in Nature, scientists used radar to obtain flight tracks of honeybees as they went out to find the food source after observing the waggle dance, thus directly confirming von Frisch’s theory. (Image courtesy of the BBRSC and Rothamsted Research).
12 May 05
Feet and Memory
I have small feet. It makes walking hard. I also develop blisters even before I put my shoes/boots/sandals on. It’s genetic.
It’s also ironic, because I love walking.
When I was in Boston last weekend I went to the same usual haunts I somehow always manage to get to when I’m there—Mount Auburn, Harvard Square. It was the first time in probably twelve years I’d been in Central Square, though.
Central Square used to be on the dangerous side of funky. There were gunshots routinely on a Saturday night; walking past the Greek mom and pop greasy spoon would subject you to a cascade of cigarette smoke early in the morning or late at night. I lived down Magazine Street and then down Western Avenue. It didn’t feel very scary, but it should have. It was the kind of place I didn’t give too many details about on the phone to my parents.
Once I got over my stupefaction at seeing the Gap and Starbucks as I made my way from the bus stop to the Cambridge Zen Center last Friday, my feet took over.
They remembered the bricks. The sidewalk on Magazine is mostly brick, with a little cement in front of the Greek Orthodox Church parking lot. All of the eight blocks home were buckled from the roots of sidewalk trees that had grown too big for their housings and eventually been cut down but nobody leveled the sidewalk. I knew all the buckles, or rather my feet did.
I trust my feet. They have memory. Sometimes, as during practice at the Zen Center that evening when they had gone to sleep, they have more memory than sense (try standing up on a leg that is 100% asleep; it doesn’t work). But they took my shivering self through the Dell, down the Harvard Square bus ramp, over the hills and dales of the Magazine Street pavement.
Here’s to feet, and the hard work they do for us…