17 January 04
A Very Lost Bird
I was looking out my office window yesterday morning when a gray bird, about the size of a small thrush, flew into the large valley oak to the north. It looked like a northern mockingbird.
But: no white flashes. None.
The bird was a scissor-tailed flycatcher. They nest in Oklahoma and Texas; usually they spend the winter in Central America. This one apparently is happy to be in Davis. Sylvia Wright first spotted it on December 12, when it was seen only by her and one other person, though she did manage to get a good photo.
I called a few birding friends, and within twenty minutes about twelve people were there. The provost came down to look for it. We had all kinds of people asking whether we were conducting a psychology experiment!
Postscript, Monday, January 19, 2004: We saw the flycatcher well for over an hour this morning. Numenius took lots of photos, one of which can be seen at left.
16 January 04
Waves Coming and Going
An entry for the Ecotone topic on Coming and Going
It’s been a week of playing with sound. On the laptop that is, where it’s easy to take a recording from a CD (the sound sampled at 44,100 times per second) and open the file in a sound editor and look at the waveforms. If you zoom down far enough, to ever shorter and shorter periods of time, you see the individual sample points, approximating the continuous sound wave. (Dogs must find CD recordings dreadfully lo-fi, being unable to render the upper octaves of their hearing.) That we perceive these pressure waves coming and going as sounds of different frequencies is a marvel.
Outside, a Pacific tree frog, by far the commonly encountered frog around here, is going ‘crickle, crickle’. This is their time in the cycle of the year—plenty of water around to keep them happy and able to wander about freely. At left there is a plot of the sound spectrogram of their call (time is on the x-axis, frequency is the y-axis). Their call pattern is strikingly periodic: a two-part ‘crickle’ every second or so.
It’s cloudy, and I don’t know what the phase of the moon is. But I do know that 29.5306 days from now, it will be at the same phase. Such is the periodicity of this universe.
15 January 04
Coming and Going
There is a Hebrew blessing for everything, just about, and there is certainly one for entering and leaving your house. I’ve seen several translations of this but the one I like best is “blessed are you in your comings and goings.” For a culture that has spent much of its history on the move, at least mythologically, it’s a good blessing, focusing on the present and the inevitable but bringing “home” into it. It’s packed with resonance yet wholesome. Blessed are you in your comings and goings.
I come and go all the time; I’ve lived in four countries. USA-Spain-UK-France-UK-USA. The years I spent in Boston I moved seven or eight times in as many years. You keep your pack light; you get restless; you move on. (Sometimes you are made to move on because of circumstances outside your control, but part of me believes there’s more control available here than I’d like to think.)
I’d like a blessing, instead, for staying put, something I seem to find almost impossible. Blessed are you in your sitting down. Blessed are you in your emptying your head of shopping lists. Blessed are you in your quiet time, in the quiet time you seem to shove aside as though you feared it.
Blessed are you in the fog and the moonlight and the breath you take to enfold them. Blessed are you in your breathing. Blessed are you—in your place.
(Ecotone Wiki joint post on Coming and Going)
14 January 04
In Search Of Early Music
While stumbling around the radio waves Saturday looking to practice recording music digitally straight to the laptop with our new iMic, I came across the radio show Harmonia, a weekly hour-long program from Indiana University on early music. This week’s program was on early American music, and I managed to record some shapenote tunes and a jig or two. I’m glad I finally found this show, which should become a staple on Saturdays for me.
13 January 04
Is Religion Inherently Violent?
This is a question being asked in a class I’m taking here at UC Davis—a class that is going to involve a lot more work than I had bargained for when I signed up. Lisa’s post on William Stafford over at field notes has prompted me to jot down a few things from what we’ve learned so far.
Given that most world religions have their origins in sacrifice, animal or even human (or divine), it’s interesting to speculate. Religion pushes humans to an ultimate commitment, for which they’d be willing to undertake violence (and do, to an alarming degree: many wars and genocides in history, recent and less recent contain religious elements). When this religious commitment gets paired up with a national one, it becomes very dangerous, and much more likely to engender violence.
The language of religion is often suffused with violence (“the wrath of God”); its symbolism, no less so (the Christian cross, for example, is a symbol of extreme violence perpetrated on its founder). Rn Girard believes that religion is inherently violent, because of the notion of sacrifice that is at its core. Its function is to limit violence through violence (so that religion becomes a kind of legal system through animal sacrifice).
The kind of religious violence that seems to be on the increase worldwide can be linked to fundamentalism, that is, a re-renewal of the foundations of a specific religion. The fundamentalist Christian sects that seek to blow up government buildings in the United States share this with Al-Qaeda: they perceive the world as heading down the slippery slope to evil and corruption, and it is the duty of the religious practitioner to “correct” this tendency. At whatever cost, apparently.
With all this it will be interesting to explore how a religion of NON-violence can emerge; how a Jesus, or a Buddha, or a Gandhi can come about in the first place.
A final note: I have learned a great deal about the life of undergraduates in the last few days, in particular how much time they spend standing in line, waiting to buy books, getting treated rudely by staff, and adapting to the whims of different professorial styles. They are condescended to routinely. It sucks, basically. (I’m learning the lingo.)
Ecotone wiki joint post on “Coming and Going” is due on January 15…
12 January 04
Prayer And Printer Cartridges
For those who are in a titanic struggle with their recalcitrant printer, or at least need some more ink or toner, there is a group of Cistercian monks in Wisconsin, who are raising money for their abbey by selling printer cartridges. Their business, entitled LaserMonks, is two years old and growing rapidly, and their prices are excellent. (From Slashdot).
11 January 04
The Serendipity of Soups
Making soup is an activity we do a lot of in the winter; it usually involves making stock from the vegetables from last week’s soup (peelings, etc. thrown in from the freezer). I rarely follow a recipe, but soup almost always involves sauteing some alium or other, followed by root vegetables, followed sometimes by tomatoes, followed by the stock, followed by soaked beans, followed by leafy greens and seasoning. All the items above alter depending on what looks good to buy at the local food Coop, so no soup is ever really replicated. Getting really fancy involves springing for tarragon and a little wine in the soup.
Today, though, it turned out particularly well. I’m not quite sure why, but I suspect the presence of large quantities of garlic in the stock along with flageolet beans. These green, elegant beans are the “freshest” tasting of all dried beans and also have a wonderful texture. They are also harder to find than the pinto, black, white, or kidney beans we usually use, and cost more when found. I also used red chard and a leafy variegated thing which may have been related to mustard or dandelion but which was neither.
Bread, cheese, and soup: dinner for winter nights.
10 January 04
Discovering Digital Audio
Our installation of Panther, the new version of the Mac operating system, has prompted me to start playing with the Apple music jukebox program, iTunes. And in so doing I’ve finally become clued into the digital music scene. The world of internet music is quite in flux, but some trends are getting clearer. Business models are emerging for selling music over the net. The iTunes music store is doing quite well, seems to hit the sweet spot: reasonable prices for downloading (99 cents a track), an ever-growing selection of music, and fair licensing terms. And shareware music, where you can download before paying for the album, is now a viable alternative, examples being the Berkeley record label Magnatune, and the independent CD distributor CD Baby. There’s plenty to explore, and I’m learning that a laptop with a minimum of hardware and software can make for an all-in-one music box, allowing for recording, editing, and playback with great ease.
9 January 04
Macked(Mac’d?)-out
I went to Mac World today with a colleague, our systems administrator, who is fated to run an office full of PCs but loves the great design and good ideas put out by Apple. It was raining and we took the train and bus, arriving fairly late—around noon. We went into the conference hall and gasped, a couple of gals in a thoroughly guy world.
I’m so tired I can hardly type, but the image of two grown men wearing mini-Pods (the new, colorful miniPod, not yet for sale but part of the Apple employees’ uniform for this week) and wondering why we could imagine that an Apple version of the Tablet PC might be worth making (so very coy, they were) will stay with me for some time.
8 January 04
More California Election Fun
It’s 2004, and presidential primary season is upon us. This is the process by which the political parties choose which candidates to run for the U.S. presidency in a series of state-by-state elections.
I am registered as an independent voter, but according to current California law, I can vote for the candidates of a particular party in a primary election if I so declare (and if the party authorizes non-partisan voters to cast ballots for their slate). The California primary is on March 2nd (known as “Super Tuesday”, since many states are having their primaries that day), and I’ll be choosing to vote for one of the Democratic candidates, though I don’t know who yet.
Today I got a memo from our county registrar of voters today, enclosing a form to fill out to choose which political party to vote for March 2 California primary election. (Since we live out in the boonies, we must vote absentee by mail.) But the form is due back on January 16th, so I had better remember to send it in, lest I miss the fun on Super Tuesday!