20 May 04
Martin City
Yesterday we went to the monthly meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society where there was a talk about purple martin colonies in Sacramento. It’s a fascinating story of adaptation of wildlife to the human landscape. The population of purple martins in the Central Valley of California crashed in the 1960s concomitant with the invasion of the European starling into the state. (Starlings were first introduced into the United States in 1890 by the most misguided Shakespeare fan ever: out of desire to see all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays this person released 100 starlings into Central Park in New York. The rest is ecological history.) Purple martins are cavity-nesters, as are starlings, and the starlings are able to aggressively boot the martins out of nest sites.
The population of purple martins in Sacramento hung on, however. Prior to the starling range expansion, the martins were already nesting in curved roof tiles on the top of various city buildings. What the martins then did was to start nesting in holes on the undersides of elevated highway structures. These weep holes lead to hollow chambers inside these long highway bridges where the martins build their nests. Martins are much better flyers than starlings and have an easier time flying up into these weep holes so the martins have ended up with a refuge where they can raise their chicks.
Sacramento is now the only place in the Central Valley where purple martins breed. The population in the city is increasing very slowly and is now at about 150 pairs. Whether the birds will be able to expand their range outside of Sacramento by nesting under highways isn’t known, though last year a pair did nest here in Davis at a road overpass near the Sudwerks Brew Pub on the east side of town.
19 May 04
Perfection
I’ve always been a bit curious about the term “perfect” when applied to a pitched game—”no hitter” is much more descriptive and, well, gritty sounding. For all you non-baseball fans, a perfect game is when the pitcher allows no hits, no walks, nobody at all to get on base. In any way. A no-hitter can include walks, errors, and all kinds of fumbling.
Randy Johnson was the oldest (40) player to pitch a perfect game in the major leagues last night for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He’s a gangly, 7-ft character whose nickname is the Big Unit, he doesn’t say much, doesn’t smile much. But he was smiling last night. He joins only 14 others who have accomplished this feat in 100 years. Congratulations Randy Johnson. Now will ya go and join your buddy Curt Schilling over at the Red Sox??
——
In non-baseball news, there’s a great new place blog to explore: The Where Project by Boston College graduate student Tim Lindgren. As the Ecotone Wiki approaches its first anniversary as a collaborative exploration of place in the blogosphere, it’s heartening to see the arrival of newcomers such as Tim. Stop on by!
18 May 04
Good Tidings From Massachusetts
We learned today that my stepsister Jennifer and her partner Amy who live near Boston applied for their marriage license and will be having a marriage ceremony in their backyard this upcoming Friday. I’m thrilled to hear this and by the fact that Massachusetts has leapt onwards to legalize same-sex marriage. Jennifer and Amy’s commitment ceremony was 11 years ago this summer, on a narrow spit of sand near Woods Hole, though it doesn’t seem very long ago!
Here’s a link to a Massachusetts wedding album slideshow that a friend just sent to us.
17 May 04
Back From the Desert
DocRoc and I left the Doc’s mother’s house this morning at 5:20 and drove for far too long into a headwind and a traffic jam. I did just catch my plane, running to the gate in my stocking feet (“do I have time to run to the bathroom [my tea was catching up with me]?” “I don’t know how long you need,” as I hopped from foot to foot…). Through some fluke of carelessness on both our parts, I left the Doc’s with no reading material, and some inconsiderate person had finished the crossword in the in-flight magazine, so I had to play scrabble with my PDA (it ALWAYS thrashes me) for an hour as I flew north to Sacramento.
What stays with me: the sound of a pair of ash-throated flycatchers from this blooming smoketree (Psorothamnus spinosus) at 7:45 am; the booming bass of Peter Gomes’ audiofed voice as he announced yesterday morning on Harvard radio, from Harvard Memorial Church, that he’d be performing a wedding today: that of two men, the State of Massachusetts having legalized gay marriage (I burst into tears); the Doc’s irritation with poorly finished hems as she set one of mine to rights; her ministrations to my utterly unreasonable tea needs in the wee hours; the realization that having a girlfriend like this is a blessing many people never get.
Who, for example, could you give a pedicure to and they’d give you one back? (This is not something men often experience, I think.) Or put up with questions like “What exactly did you write your dissertation on?” at six in the morning, after she had answered this same question probably eight times previously?
(Thanks Doc.)
16 May 04
Paper Inconveniences
There was a lengthy Slashdot thread last Friday about metric paper sizes such as the A4 standard, it referring to a text that gives everything one might ever possibly want to know about international paper sizes.
I guess Americans aren’t much into folding things. Once one learns about the essential property of metric paper sizes—that when cut in half on the longer side of the piece of paper, one gets the next paper size down (i.e. an A4 piece of paper cut in half becomes two A5 notepad-sized sheets of paper), thanks to the longer side being the square root of two times the length of the shorter side, one starts finding the U.S. letter-sized 8 1/2×11 inch to be annoyingly inconvenient. According to the above site, this was an arbitrary choice of paper size, apparently “just a commercial compromise at the time [1921] to reduce inventory requirements without requiring significant changes to existing production equipment.”
The U.S. letter size also seems difficult to work with in terms of laying out text aesthetically on a sheet of paper. Alas A4 paper is hard to find in this country. Maybe it’s time to special-order some.
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.