15 May 04
As Time Goes By
I’m visiting DocRoc at the famous Tin Chateau this weekend. On the way down here I mapped out our friendship: meeting at MLA in San Francisco one year, where she read a book I had made about a trip to Venice; her moving to Cambridge, Mass, where I lived at the time; her supporting my move to Santa Barbara; her own move to Idyllwild nearby and then Los Angeles; our move north to Davis; her move out here to the Lower Sonora Desert.
Timing is everything, they say. Maybe it isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. And it gets locked into place. Venice, or Cambridge, or Davis. And in the TC.
For the Ecotone Wiki’s Time and Place entry
14 May 04
Timing Planetary Light Shows
A post for the Ecotone Wiki topic on time and place.
When you think about it, we don’t need to know the exact time for the vast majority of events. If you have a 10 AM meeting, it’s okay if you enter at 10 o’clock and 47 seconds. Baseball games never begin exactly at 7:05 PM in the evening (make it 7:06 or even 7:11), and movies always have trailers when they begin. Oddly, the class of events that I’ve encountered in the course of my life that requires the most precise time lies not in human affairs, but in nature.
Celestial mechanics is one of those amazing triumphs of science, and the ability to precisely predict where solar system bodies will be when is what makes solar system observational astronomy a lot of fun. Is tonight the night when three of Jupiter’s moons will be eclipsing the giant planet? Time to set up the telescope then. And solar eclipse chasers know exactly when to book their special cruise ship on the other side of the world. But there is a solar system observational game that though a bit more obscure, is quite entertaining in its own right.
I refer to occultations. An occultation occurs when a solar system body moves through the line directly between an observer on Earth and another solar system body or a star. The easiest of these to observe is a lunar occultation. As the moon orbits, it changes its position with respect to the fixed stars. Sometimes it even moves directly in front of a fairly bright star.
It’s an amazing event to watch through a telescope, especially if the side of the moon that eclipses the star is not illuminated at the time. The moon slowly, but as steady as anything, creeps up on the star. The moon gets closer and closer to the star, then all of a sudden, within a tenth of a second or so, the star just winks out.
Not all occultations are as quite as dramatic, and these call for more effort on the part of the observer. Sometimes an asteroid invisible in a small telescope will occult a faint star. What happens then is that the star will dim measurably for a bit, and then return to full brightness.
It turns there’s good amateur science to be done here, because with precise measurements of exactly when these occultations take place, we can improve our knowledge of the orbits of these solar system bodies. The International Occultation Timing Association coordinates the activities of the relatively small band of amateurs interested in this activity. By precise I mean on the order of 0.1 to 0.01 seconds, but this is achievable with a camcorder and a precise time signal.
And where does one get this precise time signal? The easiest way is via shortwave radio. In the U.S., the station WWV broadcasts time signals on frequencies of 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 Mhz 24 hours a day.
13 May 04
The Footnote’s Triumph
Tony Grafton is one of those great ferreting historians who should be declared international treasures. Like astronomers who look a little to the side when viewing something like the Pleiades in order to see them better, in peripheral vision, he rumages through discarded and often ignored bits from the past and removes, from the detritus, a mirror. His Footnote: A Curious History is one such.
I picked up a book in the library the other day: Ibid: A Life, a novel in footnotes by Mark Dunn. The premise is that a manuscript gets destroyed by a careless editor and all that remains are the footnotes. I haven’t gotten very far, but this promises to be a great read. I’ll let you know.
Terry Pratchett, whom I’ve also been reading voraciously as I predicted, is a master of the device: a simple phrase such as “everything happened at once*” is turned into a chuckle or more by a simple asterisk. Gentle mockery of pedantic erudition doesn’t debase erudition itself. Where, for heaven’s sake, would we be without the philosophers?
Here’s my plea for the continuation of the footnote, which I will lay at the feet of the sages of the marketing departments of university and other presses, who maintain doggedly that footnotes frighten people off with their terrifying “ibids,” their ghoulish “see alsos,” their scary “this practice is not unknown in the culture of X”s. If a note’s worth putting in at all, put it at the foot of the page. Don’t bury it in the back where we have no way of knowing whether it’s just an ibid or something really juicy. We can decide for ourselves whether to ignore it or not, rather than get paper cuts scratching through the “notes to chapter 6,” spilling our tea and fumbling with crumpets and losing our original places in the process.**
Look at us, people. We write our blogs every day, splashing links to this and links to that throughout like insects to toil and moil on our behalf to say look! and see this! and that too!—the link in the blog has not only brought the footnote into its own, but is practically its raison d’etre. We’re now grown up enough, I think, to be able to deal with footnotes. What say you?***
——*“This is not precisely true. It is generally agreed by philosophers that the shortest time in which everything can happen is one thousand billion years” (from Mort).
**Though having just divulged the fact that I’ve borrowed a book from the LIBRARY, not paid $22 for it, will no doubt render my opinion worthless to said sages.
- A bit of gratuitous pseudo-Elizabethan English designed to raise the level of diction in an otherwise prosaic paragraph, repeated TWICE by the Lord Aragorn (Pippa and Fran, you must have been really tired that night) to the King of the Dead and his mates in the film version of Return of the King, but too Falstaffian for anyone including the King of the Dead to respond any way at all other than by guffawing. Speshly when you say it THREE TIMES. (This is of course why Peter Jackson cut away from the scene without letting you see it.)
12 May 04
Earth Snapshot Of The Day
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) sensor, aboard two satellites orbiting our planet at an altitude of 700 km, has been taking images of the Earth at 250 meter resolution since the end of 1999. The MODIS Image of the Day page is a gallery of interesting events in the past week observable from moderate Earth orbit. The current set of views includes an erupting volcano in Kamchatka, fires in Southern California, a dust storm in the Chinese desert, as well as a view of Japan.
For those who hearken for vast quantities of satellite imagery, and have bandwidth to match, the Global Land Cover Facility at the University of Maryland has the largest collection anywhere of Landsat satellite imagery available for free download. Their collection consists of 8,727 scenes at 30 meter resolution covering every land surface on Earth except the Arctic and Antarctic. But after a few downloads, one might end up needing one of these.
11 May 04
More On Ground Squirrels
Some of the California ground squirrels I see outside my window at work are now wounded. Only the males can be seen above ground; the females are all in their burrows, presumably with young.
The male nearest my window has some pretty serious injuries. They seem sequential, and also seem to have been the result of fighting, I’m imagining with other males. I have now seen quite serious lacerations to his neck, thigh, face, and now, today, a new one to the left hip.
There is quite a lot of research on ground squirrel communication, but from what I can tell it’s mostly on their calls. It’s an altruistic system: whoever’s on guard tells everyone else if there’s an aerial predator (a single, high call) or a ground one like a cat (a lower, multiple syllable one). Everyone wins in this system: if I save you today, you might save me tomorrow.
I wonder, though, whether there’s been much study of ground squirrel tail movement as communication. There’s clearly a significance in courtship-a waving tail means come hither by a female, essentially-but I’ve also noticed the males use their tails when threatening, and then abruptly turn to GROOMING their tails when they somehow both decide that this fight’s not worth it. (Owings does have a picture at the above link of side-to-side tail movement of squirrels approaching a rattlenesnake, and says this movement is restricted to this particular situation; we went to a fascinating talk where he explained how ground squirrels had developed an immunity to rattlesnake venom.)
Whatever the game might be, the male nearest my window is clearly losing; I think he might soon become food for Swainson’s hawk babies. One of the Wildlife Health Center vets took a look at his face through my binoculars yesterday (her diagnosis: “ooh, that’s gross”) and said she didn’t normally interfere when it seemed like natural behavior. She did say the wound was probably infected.
I watch him scratch the earth and rub the wound in it, worry it with his paws.
Migration’s almost over; I saw a warbling vireo yesterday, but no migrants today.
10 May 04
NEAT Thing In Sky
I just had my first look at Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) which is now visible in the southwestern evening sky in north temperate latitudes. It’s a good little comet: in our 4.5 magnitude skies here, it is barely visible naked-eye but it has a nice tail in 10×50 binoculars. It is currently a few degrees southeast of Procyon, and will be climbing higher in the sky daily as well as growing dimmer. Like many comets these days, Comet NEAT was discovered by an automated sky survey, in this case the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program, hence the acronym.
9 May 04
Looking Within
When I posted my piece last week about Ron the Deranged and the American military, I didn’t yet know that some of the photographs of torture in prisons in Iraq that have now been spread around the world featured women. Women doing shocking things—things that are shocking for any human to do but especially shocking because they’re women.
DocRoc at WriteOutLoud has wondered about this in an open letter to Tim O’Brian. Of the many people I’ve spoken with and written to this week, nobody has been able to come up with any kind of explanation at all. We’re all dumbstruck.
Not one normally to find myself without an opinion, I am going to dare to do something challenged by Burningbird (thanks Alembic): I’m going to express UNCERTAINTY.
Here’s the most frightening thing I think I’ve ever said.
I’m not sure-I’m not sure that, given the same circumstances, the same boredom, the same bitterness, the same mix of factors-I would categorically not have been that woman with that leash in her hand.
Which is, I’ve decided, the most compelling reason we shouldn’t go to war. People don’t want to go to war because they don’t want to get killed; others don’t want to kill. But what I think we should be most afraid of is becoming Lynndie England.
As Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, puts it: “the line that divides us, who would like to see ourselves as civilized and compassionate, from such communal barbarity is razor-thin.”
8 May 04
Davis On The Air
David Neiwert of Orcinus has written a long and excellent post confronting the demeaning of the national discourse by the mass media (the inevitable outcome of the past two decades of media conglomeration) to arrive at a ten-point manifesto for reclaiming the media.
Well enough, but I’m not a journalist, how do I help with this revolt against mass media? A possible answer occurred while we wandered around the Whole Earth Festival today. The town of Davis is getting its own little 100-watt radio station which is going on the air in September. This is a new community radio station that has been licensed under the FCC’s Low Power FM radio rules. They had a table set up at Whole Earth and are recruiting volunteers for all aspects of their operations, from programming to fundraising. This is definitely something I’m interested in becoming involved with, being a bit of a radio geek after all, and community radio is a fine avenue for reclaiming the local. And if I ever want to become a DJ, there’s my chance.
7 May 04
A Pink Evening
The Whole Earth Festival is back: 20,000 hippies are now in Davis and will be here all weekend. The quad on campus is looking (and smelling) like a different place.
Medea Benjamin, founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink, was in town to talk to the crowd. Washington Code Pink activists seriously disrupted Rumsfeld’s testimony before the House this morning. Her talk focused a lot on this, on the need to get people engaged with the political process (a huge number of non-voters in this country include unmarried women, who also tend to be more progressive: what’s going on?), and on making a personal commitment to change.
How this woman keeps her energy up in the face of all that she knows-she’s been to Iraq several times since winter 2001, and what’s she’s been seeing is a lot worse than we know from the press-is beyond me, but I’ll take it. In pink.
6 May 04
Tangled Banks
There’s a new collaborative blogging exercise in town, similar in concept to the weekly Carnival of the Vanities. This is The Tangled Bank, and it is a compendium of weblog entries on biology, medicine, or natural history. (The name “Tangled Bank” comes from a famous metaphor by Darwin.) The second Tangled Bank collection just came out; I submitted my entry about the barred owl to it. From this collection I learned that this will be a 17-year cicada year for folks in the Eastern U.S!