19 March 08
Speech For The Ages
Barack Obama gave an amazing speech today on race and politics. Don’t just read the commentaries on it — it’s well worth the time to watch or listen to the video of the speech, or at least read the complete text of it, all of which can be found here.
15 March 08
Procrastination
I have dozens of things that need to get done. I seem unable to finish any of them. It’s a spiral that’s not good to go down…
12 March 08
Nova In The Morning
Having daylight savings time begin while it is still winter is simply ludicrous. But yesterday I got up earlier, rather than later, at 5 AM PDT because I wanted to have a look at a newly-discovered nova in Cygnus — N Cyg 08. Such a star is not at all impressive to view — it just looks like any other faint 8th magnitude star — but the interesting thing is to follow the time course of their brightness over days and weeks. First you have to find it. This took me a long time — I haven’t seen that bit of the sky in a while and I can use more star-hopping practice (step 1 — orient your chart before you do anything else). I then marvel at how someone managed to recognize among all the hundreds of stars in the eyepiece that this one was new.
It puts one in a nice frame of mind, early morning astronomy.
8 March 08
Carrots Love Tomatoes
Okay, so I’ve been gardening. I now have a pair of Rosie’s Coveralls since I’m sick to death of getting my nightie covered in mud every day (though now it’s more likely to be dust; we’ve moved from winter to almost summer in record time).
I have tomato seedlings going at work, and I’ve planted a bunch of coriander, butternut squash, eggplant, and pepper/chile seeds in my newspaper pots. It seems late. Everything catches up, though, here.
Today at the Coop I picked up a copy of Louise Riotte’s Carrots Love Tomatoes, a book I’ve seen referred to all over the place. It’s been updated since its first publication in 1975. It’s a bit like having your Aunt Nancy for tea. Consider: “By now I’m sure everybody knows that rue doesn’t like basil. But an authority as ancient as Pliny tells us that ‘rue and the fig tree are in great league and amitie together’.”
SO: No fennel near anything, basil, carrots and onions near most things, parsley near everything, radishes near squashes, okra near peppers and eggplant, avoid curcubits with potatoes (no problem there), be sure to double plant marigolds against nematodes.
This is a gardening entry and Illustration Friday’s topic of the week is garden. Have at it, gang.
6 March 08
Doritos For Aliens
The UK astronomy and physics communities are undergoing a severe funding crisis, to the amount of a 80 million pound budget shortfall. So some astronomers have come up with a novel means to raise money — advertising to aliens. The first such ad targeted towards the alien market will be promoting Doritos and will be aimed at the star 47 Ursae Majoris which is some 42 light-years off and is known to have at least two planets. The message will be beamed using a 500 MHz radar system located in Svalbard which is normally used to study ionospheric disturbances and auroras. Bridge to the stars, anyone?
5 March 08
Reason #431 Why I Love the Coop
We’re standing in line at the checkout waiting to pay having seen Jim and talked about canning tomatoes and having seen Ann and talked about Kilimanjaro and the lad with the strawberry blond hair and beard greets us and takes the yoghurt container full of prunes and mutters numbers and then I tell him I have ten gallons of water and he says okay then I hand him the card and he says Agh brain overload then quickly apologizes and says I just got handed a note by a pretty girl.
Discretely, he says.
He goes bright red almost like his hair, smiles from ear to hear, pulls the note out of his pocket and reads it again.
(I feel oddly honored that he should have divulged this to me. Tickled.)
Oh, and Brian finally started a blog. About time, monsieur le philosophe.
4 March 08
Wolverine Sighted In California
The first confirmed sighting of a wolverine in California in 30 years took place last Thursday. This was recorded by a remote camera array in the Tahoe National Forest; a link to the photo is here.
2 March 08
No Al B. Tross, But...
With a friend visiting from Massachusetts and another one eager to see more California birds, we took a trip out to Point Arena and Bodega Bay yesterday. It’s a long drive: it took four hours just to get to Point Arena from Davis. We left at five.
The Laysan albatross that has been wintering in Point Arena for the past 14 years wasn’t there. We knew it was a long shot, since this is right around the time it has historically departed for (presumably) Hawaii, but we decided to spend a good time there, look for it, see what else we saw, and head down the coast.
Point Arena yielded a flotilla of horned grebes; black oystercatchers, and Hutton’s vireo plus unhoped-for Allen’s hummingbirds; Willow Creek Road, just south of Jenner, turned up wrentit and more Allen’s; Bodega Bay was an orgy of gulls (we had all four cycle Western gulls on adjacent picnic tables for comparisons) plus my first black scoters for many years, Pacific loon, the huge and impressive array of shorebirds, more photographable oystercatchers, pelagic cormorants, pigeon guillemots, and a fierce northwest wind by mid-afternoon.
These long birding days, in the company of enthusiastic and skilled people, are delightful, even if you pay for the early mornings and long drives later. Christopher, I hope you got home safely. We loved having you here. Fernando, cuando quieras, salimos otra vez…
27 February 08
Encyclopedia of Life Opens Its Pages
Today I went to a presentation about the Encyclopedia of Life, a project to provide a set of web pages for every one of the 1.8 million species on Earth. As it turns out, the first incarnation of the site went live yesterday, and proved to be too popular for the site’s own good, their computers quickly crashing under the load — they got about 19 million hits yesterday!
The site has initially been populated with about 30,000 entries, with 25 of these being selected to serve as exemplars showing what the fully fleshed-out content will look like. They hope to have entries for all the named species within a decade.
On the way down to this presentation in San Francisco, I was able to do some public transport bigbying. From the train I saw a ring-necked pheasant, marbled godwits, willets, and a ruddy turnstone. Best of all was seeing a flock of red-masked parakeets, the birds made famous by the story of the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill.
26 February 08
Signing Up for Saving the World
That will be $13 on Paypal, please.
Why not join in? You can surely fill a small 64-page book by August 1!