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…
6 March 04
A Bridge Of Clay
Today we went to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento where we saw the stoneware sculpture The Bridge by the Taiwanese artist Ah Leon. This is an amazing twenty-meter long sculpture of a wooden bridge that has fallen into disrepair. Every bit of the bridge—the wooden planks, even the nails—is made out of fired ceramics, five tons of clay in all. The details are extremely realistic, down to the finest grain of the wood, and if you didn’t know it was made out of clay, you would be easily fooled. The installation of the bridge took three days.
Also in the exhibit were a number of smaller ceramic works, including teapots with a tiny vent in the handle to allow fine control of the pouring, and simulated platters of newly made tofu in a wooden tofu press.
5 March 04
Returns
On my way to work this morning, I noticed two wood ducks flying out of a box in a eucalyptus tree above the still-flooded creek. I didn’t know that was a wood duck box. I’m thrilled.
At around three this afternoon I saw my first Swainson’s hawk of the year. They’ll be arriving in some numbers in the next few days, working on getting their nests in order. Spring will be accelerating now. These birds need to get working on their broods: it’s far too hot to raise young in summer here, which starts in mid- to late- May.
On our way home this evening from dinner, a barn owl clicked its way around the temporary buildings next to my new office.
4 March 04
Doubleplusgood Activism
For several weeks now there have been flyers on bulletin boards in buildings on campus reading things like “AMERICAN VALUES. Invading Iraq: $185,000,000,000. Funeral Costs for 543 American Soldiers: $581,000. Capturing Saddam: priceless. Some things money can’t buy. That’s why we use bombs.” This is the work of some students who are setting a sterling example of paying heed to Big Brother by forming the UC Davis chapter of the Students for an Orwellian Society. The motto of this society is “Because 2004 is twenty years too late.”
Along these lines, a few people are encouraging public readings of 1984 on April 4, 2004, which is the 20th anniversary of the opening date of the novel. When asked Why read 1984? they answer Because we still can.
3 March 04
Photoshopped Out
I’m back from my urban foray. Photoshop is hugely complex (like we didn’t know this already) and I’m worried that if I don’t put into practice all these things I just learned, they’ll fade away.
At left is a photo of San Francisco from Judy’s house in Berkeley where I was staying (thanks Judy). This is the house Numenius grew up in, so it was sort of fun to poke about the nooks and crannies of this Arts & Crafts vertical dwelling.
New in Photoshop CS, though we don’t have the ability to do it with our cameras, is Raw editing; lens blur and average filters have uses that aren’t altogether obvious, and the file browser is much slicker. I won’t be upgrading just yet—there are other priorities.
It’s amazing to be around 2,500 people who are as excited about all this as I am; there were obvious cliques of Designers versus Photographers, but everyone got along. Watching our teachers duke it out in the afternoon today during Photoshop Wars was quite entertaining.
2 March 04
Secrets Of The Deep
A note for the Ecotone Wiki’s entry on Ocean and Sea.
There’s an excellent gallery of fishes and other creatures from the deep sea here. Do not view if you’re prone to nightmares. (From Metafilter).
Closer to the littoral zone, giant crabs are invading Norwegian coastal waters. These crabs were originally from the Bering sea and Kamchatka and were introduced in the 1930s into the Barents Sea for food production. Following a population explosion in the 1990s, these crabs rapidly moving down the Norwegian coast, eating every fish in sight.
1 March 04
Ocean Water
“Water is good for taking away your troubles. The ocean is best because it’s big enough for all of them.”
—My Cousin Susan“On any given morning, the caffeine levels in the Puget Sound spike at around nine.”
—Oceanographer DaveTwo random thoughts for the Ecotone Wiki’s March 1 entry on Ocean and Sea.
29 February 04
The Unknown Worms
I just read The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, a new book by Amy Stewart. The author is a gardener who got entranced by earthworms and wrote this account of their natural history. Oligochaetology, as the study of earthworms is known, starts off with Darwin’s last book, written in 1881,The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits. The field, however, remains tiny, making ornithology look like the path to riches. I am amazed, but at some level am not surprised, by how little we know about the systematics and biogeography of earthworms. The field is reminiscent of 19th-century natural history: of the several earthworm systematists in North America, most don’t make their living as biologists. One is a computer tech, and another is a truck driver manager. There are probably a half-dozen new species to be discovered in California alone, but who will ever do the needed surveys?
But we like worms anyway. Pica regularly rescues them in rainy weather, and the author, who has been tending several thousand worms for the past seven years, feels there isn’t a finer pet anywhere. Or to quote Darwin: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”
28 February 04
Photoshop-ho
Photoshop World starts on Monday in San Francisco. It’s a huge three-day serious teaching forum/conference where there is usually more than one session you want to attend concurrently, so they prepare an 800-page “booklet” for you to lug around that gives you all the information about all the other sessions you couldn’t get to.
I’m going to attend, even though I just started a new job. I consider myself an intermediate Photoshop user; I can tweak images enough for publication. By Wednesday evening I hope to be an Advanced Photoshop User, able to do this tweaking far more effectively and above all EFFICIENTLY.
My former job had me doing four or five publications a year (writing and/or editing and design, prepress). Now I’m going to be doing four or five a quarter, and there are lots of images coming my way, images I’m going to have to get a handle on pretty quickly.
I’ll be taking the train down through the Suisun marsh; it will be interesting to see what it looks like with all this water we’ve had in the past week. And yes, I’ll have a digital camera with me…
27 February 04
The Doom Of Digital Data
These past couple of days I’ve been at a meeting for this research project I’m involved with that is trying to make the nascent Semantic Web useful to ecologists and environmental managers. So far it has been an exercise in attempting to get the biologists and the computer scientists to speak a common language. We scruffy ecologists and biogeographers hail from Northern California, and the computer scientists are mostly in Maryland. Oddly, both groups have a high fraction of vegetarians.
In an effort to expose the computer scientists to a bit of field science, today we went on a trip to the PRBO bird observatory out on Point Reyes. There we learned about mist netting and field forms, got a good look at a merlin before he flew from the top of a dead pine tree to chase a flock of dunlin on Bolinas Lagoon, and saw a group of harbor seals hauled out on a mudflat a little over a hundred meters off, many of them about to have pups next month.
At the field station we looked at their library of field notes from some thirty years worth of monitoring projects. The computer science students were soaking it all in, but the government agency tech folks, grizzled from a career spent wrestling databases, were aghast at all the paper records. What if there’s a fire? they thought, and started conjuring up ways to directly collect these notes in digital format. Tablet PCs, perhaps?
Our guide explained that such a transition would be a long time in coming. After all, paper is a great technology for notetaking. It doesn’t run out of batteries, you can drop your notebook in the creek without losing all your data, and it’s easy to put side comments and sketches in the margins.
The calligrapher and librarian in me is wary of directly capturing field data digitally for another reason. Bearing in mind that these are long-term ecological records which will be immensely valuable if they survive a century or two, digital records seem much more ephemeral than paper and pencil or ink. Between the certainty over time of data corruption (those pesky cosmic rays), change in hardware technologies for storage, and obsolescence of file formats, I’ll place my bets on acid-free paper and Higgins Eternal ink.