19 November 03
SUV Taphonomy
Yesterday Pica’s family nearly witnessed the fossilization of an SUV. Pica’s sister and family have been visiting Pica’s mother in Bodega Bay, and yesterday they went on an outing to Goat Rock at the mouth of the Russian River to look for sea glass. On the beach there was a film crew making an ad for the latest model of the Lincoln Navigator. But that metal carnosaur of a vehicle had gotten stuck in the sand! There was a huge hullabaloo under way to free the trapped SUV, so alas its fate wasn’t to end up being buried by sediment from the next Russian River flood (a pretty much annual winter event). For some reason I don’t think the final released version of the ad will feature the rescue operation.
18 November 03
State Visit
Why Tony Blair isn’t fearing for his life, I have no idea. Why Queen Elizabeth is according more pomp and circumstance to this American “President” than any during her reign, I have no idea. Why these people combined don’t understand that the scene in “Love, Actually” where the newly-installed Prime Minister delivers a witty, biting dig at the fatuous, vain, self-involved American President isn’t, actually, the projected fantasy of Great Britain, I’m none the wiser.
Coup de Vent will be demonstrating against this nonsense. Good for her. If I were there, I’d join her in the streets.
This is so much like a bad novel I want to go and get back to my good one, The DaVinci Code. But the plot is no less sinister.
17 November 03
UC Davis Scientists Learn How To Hit Home Runs
Engineers at UC Davis have just learned how to hit the long ball. In a study just published in the American Journal of Physics, these scientists developed “improved models for the pitch, batting, and post-impact flight phases of a baseball [for use in] an optimal control context to find bat swing parameters that produce maximum range.” There is lots of scary math and physics in this paper, but their most surprising conclusion is that an optimally hit curve ball will travel farther than a fastball, due to the initial topspin from the pitch. And hitting coaches can now tell their clientele that the optimal way to hit a fastball is to undercut it by 2.65 cm and swing upwards at an angle of 0.1594 radians. I’m sure that will help.
16 November 03
Visitors and Eggheads
This entry is another collaborative post on the Ecotone Wiki: “How Visitors Affect Your View of Place.” See other posts on this topic here.
Coming back from a trip to the coast this evening to see family we were discussing how visiting a foreign country is a great way to learn to see afresh, since everything is so different. It makes you look at where you live in a different way.
Davis, California is not a tourist destination. There are no Roman ruins, there is no spa, no beach; the the most ancient buildings are just over 100 years old; there isn’t even any wine made here other than for the purposes of study. But there is a large, world-class university, and in fact it is this that accounts for the trips made by most visitors, either directly or indirectly. (The recent runaway success of the University Retirement Community, providing different levels of care for seniors, is almost certainly attributable to its proximity to the campus. These people didn’t move here for the climate.)
Pica’s window at work looks out onto one of the egghead sculptures by Robert Arneson. It is actually the most photographed one in the series; entitled “Eye on Mrak: Fatal Laff,” it is a Janus-faced piece where the second face, pictured at left, is upside-down and laughing. At least three different people pose next to this head every day; sometimes the number is far higher. (Mrak Hall is the main administration building on campus.)
The egghead is not a sight we bother to show our visitors. Rather, we make sure our visitors see the significant landmarks in our daily round: the Davis Food Co-op, the Davis Farmers Market if they’re here on the right day of the week, and of course the cows right next to the main road loop through campus. Architecturally inclined visitors get to see the 1970s era ecotopian Village Homes, the contemporary McMansion wasteland known as Mace Ranch, and the monolithic edifice the Mondavi Center. Those who stay a little longer with some interest in birds get to see the California Raptor Center.
If Numenius were a visitor, not a resident, there is one place not mentioned above that he’d be sure to head to—Shields Library. If the university is at the heart of this town, the main campus library is surely the heart of any university. How better to get a sense of what the town has to offer?
14 November 03
Where I’m From
Both Fred and DocRock have inspired me to try a “Where I’m from” exercise… Others have responded to Fred’s initial call. It was a lot of fun.
I come from the fog, from the fog round the bridge. I could see from the sink that the bridge peeped out, orange.
From the place where the dog caught the snake, a bright garter.
From the lounge of a ship, singing into a mike.
From grandma’s sickbed that we reached in a bus, where a Lancashire gray steady rain plinked on down.
From the car driving south, French appendicitis.
From my polio calligraphy-scratch in Madrid by the doctor. He spoke in a language we couldn’t make out.
From my first day at Numont, alone and afraid. From the tree in the garden, on my branch, hidden well.
Up the street in bare feet, a cement-diamoned sidewalk. For popsicles we learned to call “polos”; for comics.
From the market that smelled, called “The Smelly Market.” Where Mum went to buy “escabeche” and lemons: we sat in the Valiant, our noses assailed.
From paintings on white paper bordered in black. Entitled “Dibujo,” there was lots of white space.
From Jennifer’s pool, holding swirled Pepsi bottles. Grownups smoked and drank beer and drank gin and drank scotch.
From the playhouse we made, from our dreams of true love; from the secrets we shared, like the hamsters that mated.
From the cartoons in Spanish. A kindly bus driver. Past the guards wearing three-cornered hats, bearing guns.
From the restaurants we ate at, where I ordered, in charge. Where we kids had our food on our table, apart. Where the children around us were well-dressed, cologned; where we ran—tolerated—rambunctiously foreign.
From the black market goodies, American food. St. George’s on Sunday, and chocolate cake.
From the red bike Dad brought on his trip back from London.
From our first trip alone on the metro downtown. I don’t think we told them we’d gone. Well, we did.
13 November 03
Assembling California
I quite enjoyed yesterday’s lunchtime reunion between writer John McPhee and UC Davis geologist Eldridge Moores, who is the main protagonist in McPhee’s account of California geologic history, Assembling California. We have a long plane ride ahead of us soon and, needing a long book to read, I may choose McPhee’s Annals of the Former World which is really five books in one, three of which I’ve read. But that was a long time ago, and I certainly could fancy rereading Assembling California. It’s a brillliant narrative that made me wish I could take my own journey across the length and breadth of California with a professional geologist near at hand to interpret the terrain outside.
Alas, professionally-led geologic field trips are not in my near future, but it would be fun to learn more about local geology. My formal geologic training is limited to one course in geology and another in geomorphology way back in college, so I have a lot to catch up on. Alt and Hyndman’s Roadside Geology of Northern and Central California is a good lay guidebook to the vicinity, but when one inevitably seeks more local detail, for the most part one has to jump the gulf into the professional literature. At least there’s a long tradition in geology of field trip guidebooks with milepost-by-milepost annotations.
There are certainly easier places to study geology than coastal California. It’s not without reason that many rock units around here are termed mlanges.
12 November 03
John McPhee at UC Davis
John McPhee has been in Davis for the last few days. I caught his panel discussion this afternoon with two other writers of place, Gary Snyder and Robert Haas. Although none of these writers thinks of himself as primarily an “environmental” or “nature” writer, they all allow place to suffuse their work. And, as Gary Snyder put it, part of his project in writing is to confront the failure of our culture to realize that we live in a physical world.
I haven’t read John McPhee’s Assembling California, but Numenius went to a lunchtime talk where McPhee revisited some of the geological discussions he had with Eldridge Moores, a geology professor here at UC Davis and a long-time friend of McPhee’s.
It was an interesting day of pondering why it’s important to continue thinking hard about landscape and what lives in it, including us. Robert Haas explained about the River of Words project where children are encouraged to write poems about their local watersheds, in the United States and across the world. As he says, if these children can’t think imaginatively about the world they’ll inherit, nobody will.
11 November 03
Gossamer Afternoon
We both had the day off today, so after running an errand in town, and an excursion over to Sacramento to the Crocker Art Museum, we returned home for lunch and then sat outside on a very pleasant warm afternoon where we heard pipits in the field and a red-shouldered hawk calling from the trees by Putah Creek. And floating across the field we’d see occasional strands of gossamer. The spiders are dispersing.
I don’t know anything about what spiders make gossamer strands and googling wasn’t a whole lot of help, though this page from the nearby Stebbins Cold Canyon Natural Reserve suggests that these were orb-weaving spiders, of the family Araneidae. Time for a trip to the library for some arachnid research. At any rate, as Fred reminded us last year, it’s a pleasure to be conversant with the gossamer ways of spiders.
10 November 03
Cocoa Weather
It’s quite chilly here, at least in comparison to a couple of weeks ago. An article on the antioxidant benefits of cocoa prompted us to get out the Droste and have a cup. It will become a winter ritual, I think.
Droste-Dutch cocoa-is quite different than English, American, Spanish, or Mexican hot chocolate, all of which I’ve made. The Spanish version contains rice flour and is very, very thick (and rich); it’s sipped in demitasses and is good for dipping churros (fried dough) into. We may pick some up when we go to Spain in early December. It will certainly be the right time of year!
Numenius reminds me of the Droste effect—the package design which features a picture of the package inside a picture of the package inside a picture of the package. Unfortunately the package sold in the United States has a different design.
9 November 03
The Heiligenschein
Today was a good day for looking up at the sky, with dramatic cumulonimbus clouds and a midday thundershower (which caused us to hurry home from our morning outing to the gym to rescue the laundry on the line). And I’ve been reading a sky-oriented book, Out of the blue: a 24-hour skywatcher’s guide, by John Naylor, which discusses all manner of optical phenomena in the sky: rainbows, crepuscular rays, eclipses, and so forth. In this book I finally learned the explanation for a phenomenon I’ve viewed from an airplane window many times, and in a different guise, from the ground as well.
What I notice from the airplane window, usually on descent, is a glowing bright halo on the ground and moving with the plane. The glow is at the antisolar spot —the sun on the opposite side of the plane, and once the plane gets low enough its shadow can be seen at the center of the glow. This phenomenon is a heiligenschein, which means ‘holy glow’, and is caused by a self-shadowing effect. The shadows cast by objects, such as trees seen from the plane, in the antisolar spot are directly underneath the objects themselves, and what one sees is just the light being reflected back by the leaves, rather than a darker mix of light-and-shadow. Hence the glow. Back on the ground, riding my bike, I also frequently notice a glowing spot opposite the sun on the pavement or from road markings, where tiny reflective beads have been incorporated in the paint. It’s the same effect—the light is shining straight back at me.
Remember to look up at the sky, or down at the ground—you never know what marvels of light you may see.