25 November 07
Calamari And True Love
Two graffiti from the road leading from our place into campus and town. The first is under the freeway right near campus. The text reads “Looks Like Rain”.
The second one at right is from the bridge over Putah Creek. I expect it will last longer than the first one: the campus grounds people usually paint over graffiti under the freeway pretty quickly.
24 November 07
Release
I opened the blue box on the beach.
Just like that.
The female scoter panicked, turned back, turned forward, then bolted out toward the open water. There were already at least ten of her kind out there, in the middle of Tomales Bay.
It’s hard to think how much care, energy, time, and, yes, money has been spent on this one bird, getting it to fly and sit on the water again after the horrors of the past two-and-a-half-weeks. It defies thought. But I can tell you, from here, today, it was worth it. All of it.
23 November 07
Baskets Of Basil
Pica decided to harvest her basil today; it’s now getting cold and the plants are starting to fare poorly. We separated the leaves from the stems, and ended up with enough of them to make pesto for the entire Italian national football team.
22 November 07
Venturing into Starbucks
I’m not a coffee drinker. But even if I were, I don’t think I’d spend half my salary on Starbucks coffee — it’s too strong, yet even their strong espressos don’t taste good like Spanish ones to me. I make my tea, by the gallon (I think I need a samovar), and drink it. No need for Starbucks.
This morning the oiled bird caregivers were giving their orders to Ann, the volunteer coordinator, because Jay had a raft of donated Starbucks gift cards (about $50 worth). I offered despite my better judgment to drive and help carry back twelve sloshing cups, individually marked (under the cup holder). Venti (invariably pronounced Ventey by customers whose second language is Spanish not Italian). Grande. Latte. Frappuccino. It’s such a caricature of itself, Starbucks. Precious. Pompous. Pretentious. It makes me nuts.
It took twelve tries, folks. The cash register can’t do more than about $20 on a gift card (but then won’t do it a second time). The total came to $42 and change. Two baristas and a bunch of spent and re-spent gift cards later (and a host of impatient people behind us, waiting junkie-like for their fix before heading off to face impossible relatives over dinner), we emerged with various concoctions to spill all over the Honda Element.
Connecting people with their coffees was another trick: no food or drinks in the stabilization room, hot chocolate in the trailer, where’s Rebecca, she’s a mocha, no, that was Sandra … I don’t know how anyone ever gets anything done in Starbucks-land.
Added, November 29: Lewis Black’s Starbucks rant.
20 November 07
Bad Ballpark Ad Placement
If you find the humor here, you’ve spent too much time on the Web.
19 November 07
A Triad of Owls
This evening when I was getting ready to come home there was a pair of barn owls flying around my office, clicking away. The great-horned owls have been singing at night too.
The other night I’m almost certain I heard a screech-owl: it could have been an odd horse whinny from across the road, but I don’t think so…
18 November 07
Tertials and Telescopes
Pica finally had a day off oil spill duty (she goes right at it again tomorrow, having to shepherd a national media crew around the Cordelia center at 8 in the morning) just in time for us to attend the Central Valley Bird Symposium down in Stockton. This event has the usual mix of field trips and indoors workshops, but we went down for two reasons — to attend Keith Hansen’s workshop on bird sketching, and for Pica to buy a new spotting scope.
Keith starts his bird sketches with two circles (or ellipses), body and head. In pencil, with eraser. I don’t even generally bring pencils when I go sketching, preferring to be bold in ink. I do see the point though. Keith worked up to an excellent overhead pencil view of a red-tailed hawk, done completely from memory. I decided maybe I should have brought the Derwent Graphitints.
Then to the optics question. It is surprisingly hard to properly compare optics when contemplating a purchase, for in general places that have a wide selection of binoculars and telescopes are few and far between. The best store in Northern California for this task (Out of This World) is way up in Mendocino. This is why one waits for events like the birding symposium because the dealer from Mendocino came down to our neck of the woods with assorted goodies. Pica quickly confirmed that the scope she was investigating was the one she really wanted (the 50mm Nikon ED Fieldscope), but tested out eyepieces before going with the 13-30x zoom instead of the 20x wide angle. She also learned to expect lots of comments saying “oh, what a cute scope!”
Once we got home, I practiced with the Graphitints a bit, but not on a bird, see above.
Baseball note — the new Stockton Sheraton where the symposium was held is right by the ballpark for the Stockton Ports, which is the Single-A minor league team for the Oakland A’s. A nice little stadium — it would be fun to go to a game there next year.
17 November 07
Late Getting the Peas In
I did have good intentions. I had planned to line all my raised beds against the pocket gophers that tunnel their way underneath the entire county. Basic rule of gardening: there’s always at least four times more soil than you think. I got so knackered putting in one of these jerryrigged cages (now happily sprouting mixed lettuces, arugula, tiny Japanese turnips, and parsnips) I lost heart for more.
But today I used the cages I’d had tomatoes and squashes in to at least try and keep the blighters at bay, and planted a full bed of peas. If they germinate, and if they survive our normally trivial frosts, they should give me a good head start in the spring.
If they don’t, so it goes.
16 November 07
Pitch By Pitch
Josh Kalk is a sabermetrics god. This past baseball season marked the widespread deployment of a measurement system (called PITCHf/x) to track location and velocity of every pitch. The motivating reason for this was to provide animations of each pitch for MLB.com’s Enhanced Gameday application, but a few baseball stat geeks discovered they could extract the underlying pitch measurement data and started to do analyses with these.
Enter Josh Kalk, who has built up a database of about 300,000 pitches from this season and has presented these graphically on the web. At left is an example of one of his plots. This graph shows the location of all the changeups thrown by Tim Lincecum of the Giants that were captured by the system. The view is from the catcher’s direction; the box in the middle is the strike zone.
Another view of these data is provided by his player cards, such as this one for Tim Lincecum. Kalk has developed an algorithm to separate different types of pitches (i.e. sliders from changeups from fastballs etc.) and these are shown plotted in different symbols on these graphs. In another set of charts he also graphs pitches for each batter, such as this chart for Red Sox slugger David Ortiz.
15 November 07
Bird-Proofing Windows
Dave Sibley has conducted an experiment to see what will keep birds from colliding with windows. It’s a simple highlighter, almost invisible on glass to humans, but apparently very visible to birds.
Lots of Swainson’s thrushes hit our windows this spring. I’m definitely going to try it.
Spill news: some grebes (Westerns and Clark’s) will be released at Half Moon Bay tomorrow, out of the way of oil. These birds don’t do well at all in captivity and are best released as soon as possible, but I’m amazed it’s THIS soon.
For the sound of a loon at Cordelia, see this (scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on the audio file).