27 January 05
Cousin Hippopotamus
A post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, Jean-Renaud Boisserie, and two French colleagues have just published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences clarifying the evolutionary relationships of the hippopotamus. This morphological study derives the hippopotamus from an extinct group of artiodactyls (the even-toed ungulates, such as cows, pigs and sheep) called the anthracotheres.
Their study indicates that the closest living relatives of the hippos are not pigs as has been commonly thought, but rather whales, as molecular evidence has also suggested. According to the study, cetaceans and hippos appear to have had a common ancestor 50 or 60 million years ago, and phylogenetically whales can be considered members of the artiodactyls.
26 January 05
Walking to Work on a Wednesday
It’s raining and I’m
walking to work
because it’s raining
and my helmet won’t fit over
the rose barrette Nicole made me
which goes with this turtleneck
(but not so much else)
and it’s not raining after all
and I see
my shadow—the merest hint—for the first time in days
and I notice the creek’s flow
is somehow reversed
but I can’t stop to see why
because as usual
I’m late for work
late, but not so late
as not to notice the red-wing’s concoree
or the kew of the flicker
or that the fat western gray squirrel
(not the kind the Brits accuse us
of having introduced there to wipe out
their red squirrels, I observe as I
see a starling overhead,
bane of bluebirds and purple martins
and just one of hundreds
of eurocontaminants here)
is getting ready to mate
but will probably
statistically get run over first
and I kick a lone
black walnut
to the left
and it leaves a trail
of walnut ink
which I’ve been writing in
all morning
and as I cross the road
my heart is singing
because how many people
get to walk to work
in the rain?
25 January 05
Forty-fifth Out of 146
This is the ranking of the United States in the newly released 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index, a joint product of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, the Center for Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, and the World Economic Forum. The top five countries in this index are Finland, Norway, Uruguay, Sweden, and Iceland respectively.
In the main report there is a figure (Figure 3) that illuminates the position of the United States well. This is a scatterplot and regression of the environmental sustainability index agains the per capita gross domestic product. Despite having the highest per capita GDP, the United States falls well below the regression line. In other words, the United States is performing poorly when you take into account its wealth level.
24 January 05
Apocalyptic Assignment
My calligraphy course in Roman Majuscules continues to throw challenges my way. The latest one is a rendition of Revelation 6:8, the one where the four horsemen of the apocalypse are named along with wild beasts of the earth (which apparently didn’t merit their own horses). Roman majuscules lend themselves to ponderous, serious things, and would be quite unsuitable for, say, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” unless you were trying to pull a Monty Python. (Which Terry Pratchett does, in fact: he has the horsemen scratching their heads over how to play bridge in a bar while Cohen the Barbarian comes along and makes off with their horses. I forget which novel.)
We were to write out this verse in a mixture of 7mm and 15 mm-high letters with the attribution at 3mm; we could choose a left, centered, right, or asymmetric alignment. In these days of desktop publishing programs this is very easy to do in type but when you do it with a pen, it involves a lot of scissors, lettering, re-lettering, and so on; I can’t swear I didn’t futz with the right alignment a little in Photoshop before turning it in.
I chose a right-aligned text, much harder than I suspected, and spent hours working out the inter-line spacing, where the words should be larger, and so on. In the end the lonely word “earth” at the bottom is a reminder that things look pretty bleak out there. But this class is a lot of fun and it’s certainly a lot of work…
23 January 05
Dogblog
A photo essay on San Francisco’s patient canines.
22 January 05
Hill Walk in the Fog
We went for a short walk today up Mix Canyon, which is easily the closest very steep hill for all the hard-core cyclists. (We saw two on their way down.)
It’s also the best place near Davis to see California newts. We did see some, but alas none were alive—they cross the road in the rain in the dark and many get run over. It’s late to be looking for them, but I was hoping. Numenius says he’ll take me to Briones to see them there. Maybe we could have a Bay Area blogger meetup at Briones.
The buckeye seeds that dropped last fall were all germinating. At left is a sketch. We saw the blue sky briefly but mostly walked in the gloom with the scent of California bay piercing the cold, damp air.
21 January 05
The Chlorophyll Mandala
Our friend Karen recently gave Pica a copy of the new book The Earth Path, by Starhawk. Starhawk wrote this book in part because she’s seen that many members of Pagan communities, though professing to a nature-based spiritual practice, actually have had little contact with nature. Much of this book consists of exercises to help ground each of us in nature and place. I love this stuff, and there are many practices described therein that it would do me well to start carrying out. Such as finding a home base, a little nearby natural spot to return to time and time again to hang out and observe. I used to have several such spots, and with the creek nearby, I certainly should have one now.
I like Starhawk’s imagination. One of her ideas is take twenty-five or more friends, and make a mandala of the chlorophyll molecule, with people forming the atoms. As she says:
If we had a Gaian Goddess temple, the chlorophyll molecule would make a lovely stained-glass window or floor mosaic. But, in the spirit of not taking ourselves too seriously, here’s a story and directions for making a chlorophyll molecule—an enterprise that can be done with a minimum of twenty-five children or childlike adults.
I also think it’s also time for me to start observing the seasonal holidays of the Celtic year, on the solstices, equinoxes, and midpoints between. Why, Brigid, or Imbolc, is coming right up on 1 February. Along these lines, I’ll point interested listeners to a wonderful Paganish CD entitled The Almanac: Time and the Turning Wheel, featuring the fiddler Shira Kammen. The very Wiccan song “The Wheel of the Year” on the album is quite apropos. (It may be legally downloaded from the not-evil record distributor Magnatune on this page, as well as other tracks from the album.)
20 January 05
Farewell to a Friend
Bsag over at but she’s a girl was recently wondering how to improve her handwriting. While I was leaving a comment I looked up a reference to Tom Gourdie’s book on this very subject and learned from a Scotsman obituary that he had died on January 6th of this year at the age of 91.
I’m a calligraphy buff. I own probably more calligraphy books than novels. There are the greats and the Very Greats, Edward Johnston and Irene Wellington and Alfred Fairbanks and Donald Jackson, Gainor Goffe and Denis Brown and Thomas Ingmire, Sheila Waters and Julian Waters, Ludovico degli Arrighi and Hermann Zapf. These are the stratosphere people, true artists whose work is inspiring and somewhat terrifying. They are generally a gentle bunch, well the ones who are still alive anyway, but their gentleness doesn’t prevent an aura of solemnity from emanating from their midst and their work.
Tom Gourdie was never like this. You just KNEW. His great project was to improve handwriting in Scottish schools and for decades he devoted himself to introducing the italic hand to children, when he could so easily have been one of the stratosphere people. I never heard him speak but the copies of letters he so generously included in his many, many books show a sensitive yet sensible person, a born teacher, someone you’d love to have over for dinner and then clear the table and get out the ink and the pens.
Clarity for Gourdie was key—in fact I’m sure he’d say it was synonymous with beauty. Any handwriting that deteriorates at speed is useless. In a time when people find it hard to pick up a pen at all any more, this message should be sung from the rooftops. I’d be up there only I have a history of mishaps involving my lower extremities…
19 January 05
Under The Fog
I’ve been having fun with weather applets of late, having installed Meteorologist for Mac OS X on this laptop and KWeather on my computer at work. So I ought not complain about the weather here, since they tell me that in Norway, Maine (home of Pica’s sister) it is now 12 degrees F, and expected to drop to a low of -12 degrees F on Friday. Still, we’re into a chilly pattern here, in the low forties with 100% humidity. There’s a fog layer that’s sitting several hundred feet above the ground surface. Get above the fog, and it’s sunny and warm: in Placerville today, at 1800 feet elevation in the Sierra foothills, it was 69 degrees today. Here under the fog, it’s gloves and furry hat time for cycling.
18 January 05
Dunkin’ Donuts girls
One of the added bonuses of spending so much of last weekend travelling by car was that I learned, via my math teacher birding friend, what is considered cool among teenagers in Massachusetts these days.
There are the obvious things—iPods, for instance, the newer and snazzier the better. He’s given up trying to regulate cellphone use in last period (it’s illegal to use your cellphone in class) and instead starts off telling everyone to check their messages now before the end of school so they can get the scoop on what’s happening afterwards—which siblings to pick up, where their parents are going to be. (They all have cars and they all drive them to work, which makes for interesting town hall meetings when a new $300,000 parking lot for the high school is being discussed; riding the bus is, you guessed, not cool.)
And then: there’s the distinction between Starbucks girls and Dunkin’ Donuts girls.
Teenage girls apparently all show up to school looking like their mothers these days, which is to say they’re holding the obligatory cup of coffee complete with handprotector and plastic lid. Coffee at Dunkin Donuts makes sense: it’s good, it’s cheap, it’s easy to park, and there’s no line.
But of course it’s not cool.
So the girls aspiring to coolness at Andover High have to get up earlier in order to park, stand in line for ages, and get their exorbitant latte, so that when the question gets asked “is she a Starbucks girl or a Dunkin Donuts girl?”, they will come out on the right side of a divide whose significance is known only to their peers and that will one day, soon if they’re lucky and way longer if they’re not, come to seem as absurd as it does to old farts like me who don’t like coffee, least of all the overpriced gunk that pours forth from Starbucks.