16 March 04
Spiders Of The Sea
It’s been a while since I’ve studied any marine biology, but this Ecotone wiki topic on spiders and place makes me think of pycnogonids. The Pycnogonida are a group of marine arthropods related to the arachnids such as spiders, scorpions, mites, and ticks. Another name for the group is the Pantopoda, meaning “all legs”, which is pretty much a description of what they look like.
I don’t know whether I’ve seen one live, but they’re to be found on the Pacific coast. One list gives nine species for the San Francisco Bay. Around Bodega Bay (home of the Bodega Marine Laboratory), one species Pycnogonum stearnsi is listed as uncommon under rocks (given the locality, I think this means the rocks of the breakwater). Members of its genus feed on coelenterates, especially sea anemones. To quote from Ricketts et al. book Between Pacific Tides:
A border design of these grotesque yet picturesque animals might surround the pen-and-ink representation of a nightmare. Most sea spiders spend part of their tender youth in close juxtaposition to a coelenterate—the larvae, in fact, usually feed on the juices of their hydroid or anemone host…It is especially common among the caves and crevices of Tomales Bluff, Marin County; sometimes half a dozen occur on a single anemone.
15 March 04
So. The Spiders.
Seamus Heaney’s masterful translation of Beowulf launches the epic thus: So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by… Makes you think you’re around a fire, about to hear a jolly good yarn, and yes, you get one.
So, the spiders. We have spiders here, in Davis, lots of spiders. Spiders that spin webs everywhere, even in places you’d think a spider could never get.
Mostly they’re the long-legged, tiny-bodied “daddy long-legs” which Numenius tells me are harvestmen and technically not spiders, but we’re going to ignore that for now. They are fierce fly hunters and occasionally they eat each other. They are very tolerated by us until I have fit of cleaning up where they are the first casualties.
Garden spiders in the garden or yard, or more like woodpile, where they are fodder for the house wren or wintering rock wren.
The spiders that everyone thinks of when they think of California, though, are the black widows, the shiny black spiders with a red hourglass warning sign on the belly. They can hurt you worse than a rattlesnake.
Black widows are easy to tell even if you can’t see them because their untidy yet contained webs have a single, verticle strand that leads to another untidy, contained web below. They are most active on hot summer evenings.
Lactrodectus species have the stickiest of all spider webs and are surely the inspiration for the sticky cobwebs on funfair ghost trains.
We leave them alone, too, as long as they don’t decide to move inside. By the fire. To listen to the stories.
This is an Ecotone entry for Spiders and Place.
14 March 04
The Grain Of Letters
One of the exciting things in our workshop this weekend was playing with the textural quality of letterforms. Nibs made out of sheets of balsa wood make very interesting and organic marks on paper. And as we discovered, the most unusual things can make for writing implements. In the last series of exercises we did, we experimented with a square of Stim-u-dent toothpicks! They made marks like a music ruling pen, only more so. The textural quality of letters for the most part gets lost using digital type, which is of course most of the letters we encounter these days.
The alphabet at right is one where I was struck by the very reed-like quality of the letterforms of the E and the F, and tried to build upon that for the rest of the letters.
13 March 04
Twenty Alphabets and a Cousin
Numenius and I have spent the day at the San Francisco Center for the Book, studying with Maine calligrapher Nancy Leavitt. The entire day was focusing on variations of Rudolph Koch’s Neuland typeface, a blocky, geometric alphabet we rendered in pieces of balsa veneer. It was such a treat to get covered in ink and eke texture out of these very tactile materials.
I also met my sixth cousin Stephen. He joined us after class and we went to Farley’s on Potrero Hill to exchange genealogy findings. Our common ancestor moved from Duchess County in New York following the Revolutionary War to Canada…
12 March 04
Redbud Days
The western redbud (Cercis occidentalis) is one of the first native trees to come into flower in our local foothills, even before it leafs out. On my ride into campus along the arboretum, the ones planted there are greeting me very happily right now.
11 March 04
Today in Madrid…
Jonathan on the Puerta del Sol Blog has written very movingly about today’s bomb attacks in Madrid. I have been following a few of the Spanish newspapers and online news services. A pulling together, everyone helping everyone else, like in New York: even the politicos putting off their campaigns for the Sunday election.
Three days of mourning have been declared in Spain. My heart is heavy for my friends in Madrid and the people I didn’t know but saw when we were there in December, riding the bus, wandering the crowded Plaza Mayor with Christmas trees, enjoying the winter sun…
[Postscript, March 12: a translation of blogs in Spanish about the 11 March attacks can be found here. The translation’s definitely strange. The original Spanish versions can be found here. Bitcora is the Spanish word for blog.]
10 March 04
Pondering Waypoints
Since I’ve become interested in geocaching, I’m realizing that there is a large set of people who are going around waypointing places with their recreational-level GPSs. Most of these points are geocaches which they are setting up, but there is no reason this energy couldn’t be turned into citizen-produced maps of favorite places and points. There are signs this could be starting to happen: for instance Travel By GPS is a site with a number of sightseeing and outdoor recreation routes and points of interest available for download. Another promising development is the emergence of a standard interchange format for the routes, tracks, and waypoints stored by recreational GPSs.
A culinary application comes to mind. I’d like to see such efforts tied in with restaurant recommendations that people post to websites, their own or others. Compiling such recommendations is a favorite example of how the semantic web might work. Perhaps the day when one can go to a website, read through an aggregated set of comments on Thai restaurants in the East Bay, check off the ones that sound good, and then download these as waypoints for one’s GPS isn’t that far off.
9 March 04
Fox and Geese
We’re having a heat wave. (Sorry, all you east coasters with snow and whatnot to contend with.) Riding home tonight, I was just about to cross the creek and looked up. A perfect V of geese was flying north-northeast. I’m not sure what kind of goose—the moon wasn’t up yet and they weren’t calling. They’re in a hurry, though: it will be hotter tomorrrow.
Other side of the creek, my bike light caught a couple of eyes. I was pretty sure it was a skunk, but it turned out to be a fox. It turned its head and watched me as I rode past. No hint at all of running away.
We’ve been enjoying a CD by a young California-based bluegrass band, Nickel Creek. They’ve arranged a traditional song about a fox that goes off looking for geese…
The Fox went out on a chilly night
He prayed for the moon to give him light
For he’d many a mile to go that night
Before he reached the town-o, town-o, town-o
He’d many a mile to go that night, before he reached the town-o
8 March 04
Treasure Hunting
Spring has arrived here with a vengeance, all the fruit trees are in bloom (such as the row of plums north of my office building, which today harbored a couple of acorn woodpeckers), so it’s time for trying new outdoor hobbies, namely geocaching. Geocaching is a pastime where people hide caches (often plastic kitchen containers, or sometimes 35mm film containers to make it more challenging) with a logbook and a few treasure items inside, and then publish the coordinates of the cache on the web. Others then go out equipped with a GPS and try to find the cache, and if so, sign the logbook and take and leave an item. Geocaching got started in May 2000, just after they stopped degrading the accuracy of GPS for non-military users (my favorite decision that Clinton ever made), and has grown tremendously since then: there are now close to 90,000 caches on all continents.
This evening we found our first cache, after a few unsuccessful tries this weekend. It can be quite a challenge to spot the cache. The GPS unit will usually get you to within 10 or so meters of the cache, but there can be a lot of hiding spots within that circle, especially if there’s thick ground cover.
We’re also interested in letterboxing, another treasure hunting hobby which predates GPSs by a good bit. In letterboxing you are given traditional treasure-hunting clues to find the letterbox. In the letterbox there is a rubber stamp (preferably created by hand) and a notebook, and you arrive with your own stamp and notebook. When you arrive at the letterbox, you stamp your own notebook with the stamp in the letterbox, and stamp the notebook in the box with your own stamp.
7 March 04
Code Pink, Once More With Saucepans
Today’s warm weather brought lots of people in pink into the Central Park of Davis, where we banged saucepans, sang songs, and presented George W. Bush with a pink slip (more like a pink neglige). Organized by Code Pink Davis along with the student chapter of NOW and the newly-reformed Davis chapter of Amnesty International, it had all the makings of the outrageousness that has been a hallmark of Code Pink since its inception last year.
Such silliness masks the fact that there is a far more serious, and urgent, side to this kind of gathering. One student said she was scared Bush was going to blow up the world. She’s not the only one…