1 July 08
Hands Free?
Today the hand-held cellphone while driving ban takes effect in California. The law was poorly worded — text messaging, for instance, which is obviously much more dangerous than merely talking, is not mentioned — but this is a welcome start. (I’m of the opinion that talking on the phone, hands free or not, should be forbidden while driving, because the lapse of concentration is analogous to having had between one and two drinks regardless, but nobody asked me.)
While cycling to work this morning I saw a cyclist pedalling in the other direction, holding her cellphone and talking into it. I guess the ban doesn’t affect bikes, then.
30 June 08
One-Nil
Lots of sports action these past couple of days decided by the score of one to zero. In Oakland last night, the San Francisco Giants beat the Oakland A’s 1-0 behind the stellar pitching of Tim Lincecum who struck out 11, giving up 5 hits. The Giants only produced two hits, but that was enough to win. Lincecum’s record is now 9-1 with an ERA of 2.38.
Also last night, the L.A. Angels lost to the Dodgers 1-0. The Dodgers however never got a hit in the game. The only run came on a fielding error by the Angels’ pitcher. This is only the fifth time since 1900 that a major league team has won a game without getting a hit. The Angels however made up for it this afternoon and beat the Dodgers 1-0. Both teams got hits.
Best of all, Spain beat Germany today 1-0 in the finals of Euro 2008. We watched the match over at Mariachi’s. About 25 others were paying attention to the match in our favorite taqueria, most of them rooting for Spain. The decisive moment of course was striker Fernando Torres getting by defender Phillipe Lahm and getting his foot on the ball just before the arrival of goalie Jens Lehmann. Torres is 24, Lehmann is 38, playing in his last European championship — we thought that the age difference might have been a key factor, Torres having just more speed than the goalie. Pica has been thrilled the whole rest of the day by the result; the Spanish team just achieved something which hasn’t happened since she was growing up in Spain. And the team is young and talented — what’s next?
29 June 08
Big Day
My birding buddies threw a party for me yesterday morning to celebrate my 700th ABA bird. We met at 7 to wander around Lake Solano, enjoying multiple and gorgeous views of pileated woodpeckers (and multiple views of peacock chicks, which was cause for a bit less joy, that place is going to be overrun in no time). A few later risers joined us for a potluck breakfast at 9…. the sketch at left was done by Sue, who was with us on the Sierra Valley trip two weeks ago, which she presented to me. Other Sue brought flowers. Shucks, guys.
This was followed by a wedding in the evening. A former coworker and her sweetie got married out at Phillips Winery (food by the fabulous Magpie Caterers ). The funnest part was running into the flower girl at the hairdresser; she was having multiple curls applied to her head and fell asleep in the process. (I begged a pen and paper from the gals and sketched her; I had to beg another pen from the wedding bus driver, having forgotten mine at home.)
Sunday’s big dayness involves the Spain/Germany final. We’ll be at Mariachi at 11:45 if anyone wants to join us…
27 June 08
Smoke
I just got a copy from the library of Richard Hamblyn’s new The Cloud Book, a well-illustrated cloud identification guide published by the UK Met Office. What we’ve been seeing these past few days isn’t described there. Smoke, persistent smoke, filling the Central Valley and then some. The visibility this afternoon was about 2 miles. According to the CAL FIRE site, as of this evening there were 28 active fire complexes burning throughout Northern California covering 165,000 acres. This set of fire complexes originated when a dry lightning storm moved through the northern half of the state on Saturday. That it has been a very dry spring didn’t help matters.
According to the weather service, some relief from the smoke may happen on Saturday, when the upper-level flow turns southerly with the northward migration of a low off the coast. But with so many fires everywhere, and with the possibility of more mountain thunderstorms, I don’t think it’s going to get very clear for quite some time.
25 June 08
Hardy and Hillary
I’ll admit it, in public, and in fact have on one of those “books you hated but everyone else loved” websites: I can’t stand Thomas Hardy. Labored, ponderous, not quite getting it right with his female heroines, and they such drips. Tess should have clocked a bunch of people around the face before setting to them with a knife.
But he straddled, didn’t he, Victorianism and Modernity. Someone had to do it. Woolf went to visit him, it is said, not too soon before he died in 1928. She straddled that same divide, more on this side than that. He paved her way.
How could he stand it? How could he stand those bloody complacent Edwardians? Well, he couldn’t, so he kept WRITING.
Hillary has straddled a similar divide. Before her, woman-as-president was laughable. She has facilitated, like Hardy, a cultural transition. Not for herself, perhaps, but for all who come after. It still pains me to recall her speech two weeks ago, when she was passionately, and vocally, and authentically Hillary (as opposed to whatever the guys managed out of her). If she had been that in, say, Iowa, Obama would have had no chance.
I’ve been as much of a fan of Hillary’s as I have of Hardy’s. It had a lot to do with how she voted on the war, and how she refused to acknowledge she’d been duped. But she’s made a lot possible for little girls (and big girls) to dream, and I salute her for that.
25 June 08
California Burning
Crews are exhausted. Every municipality has lent firefighters to adjacent, or further, counties. The sky was brown all day — a breeze has kicked up tonight; maybe it will be better tomorrow.
Maybe it will be worse.
They get a blaze out then it rekindles somewhere else.
It’s still, folks, only June…
24 June 08
Baseball Movie All-Stars
What would be the best lineup one could come up out of the fictional players in baseball movies? Here is one view on the topic.
Hmm, one of these years we’re going to have to see Major League.
22 June 08
Green Almonds
For Beth, and M and J.
22 June 08
Davis Open Mapping Party
Yesterday I got an email announcement about a Davis OpenStreetMap mapping party to be held today. The OpenStreetMap project is one of these collaborative open data projects that I’ve known about for some time, but haven’t really dived into it, so I was glad to have the introduction to it today. The impetus behind this project is that there is very little street map data in this world that is free in the sense of being legally unencumbered, allowing one to make full creative use of it. The online mapping services provided by Google Maps and Mapquest are good examples of not free-as-in-speech data, but so is map data from most government mapping agencies, e.g. the Ordnance Survey. (The United States is an exception here, since federally-produced mapping data is in the public domain.)
Since everybody and their dog now has a GPS unit, some enterprising geeks came up with the idea to start mapping the world’s streets with their GPSs and make all the collected map data freely available for any use. Thus was born the OpenStreetMap project, which has really taken off in the almost four years it has been underway. As of June 2008 there are over 22 million kilometers of highways and byways mapped in the system, and over 32,000 registered users who are able to add to and update the map, which is essentially a cartographic wiki.
For some reason the project’s founder, Steve Coast, was in town today so a few of us gathered together at the café Delta of Venus at 10 AM to plan our mapping session. Thanks to the public domain TIGER data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, there is good street mapping for most places in the United States, including Davis, already uploaded into the OpenStreetMap, but there are always details to fill in — no maps are ever finished. We decided to work on bike paths and other paths. I opted to head up to the North Davis Greenbelt and collect GPS tracks for every bit of the bike paths there, including the connectors to all the side streets. There is already some mapping of these bike paths in the OpenStreetMap, but there are definitely bits to add.
It was a very hot day today (up to 102° F) and I was glad to return to Delta of Venus for lunch at 1:30 PM. There I got some exposure to the map editing tools but have yet to download the track data off my GPS, let alone start the process of editing the map online.
It’s a great project. There are lots of technical details to learn, much of which are of substantial cartographic interest (e.g. how do you classify the features you’re trying to map), and all completely fascinating from a geographer’s point of view.
21 June 08
You Say Aluminium...
One of the hardest things I find to say, even though I’ve lived here for nearly 20 years, is “alOOminum.” Skedule and prohject don’t seem to pose the same problems, but aloominum’s just something I can’t get to come out of my mouth (a bit like stOOpid unless I’m being arch or or FRITillary unless I’m trying to illustrate how it’s possible to merge four syllables into one). I got chastised again the other day for saying aluminium “wrong” and retorted that we (we in this case meaning Brits, though this like so much else in my identity shifts according to the winds, the wicket or diamond, or the company) had the word first, so how could it be wrong?
But since I’m given to sounding authoritative without the slightest reason to, and having resolved to have more reason to, I decided to look it up.
Seems like there’s no clear cut answer either way, which doesn’t resolve anything but is certainly interesting. In fact it could form the basis for a sociolinguist’s PhD (or at least a paper). Pronunciation of scientific elements: hypercorrection for the latinate, or hypercorrection against it?