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…
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.