Author: David Gorsline

At the park: 56

Snips from my report on nest box activity for the past two weeks:

Lots of activity! And as usual, not always the boxes one would expect. As of last Sunday, we have at least one egg in eleven of the boxes, although the single egg in #62 looks like it may be a dud.

10 March

Target species observed: Northern Shoveler, American Wigeon, Northern Pintail, Green-winged Teal (30), Gadwall (8)

Water gauge: 0.28

17 March

Target species observed: Northern Shoveler, Green-winged Teal, Gadwall

Water gauge: 0.35

Eastern Phoebes were heard throughout the wetland. I heard Brown-headed Cowbird tinkling in the parking lot. Tiny, tight buds of Spring Beauty could be found.

Here’s the status of each of the boxes:

  • #2: —
  • #4: 3 WD eggs
  • #10: at least 4 HM eggs; hen flushed 3/17
  • #77: —
  • #7: —
  • #6: 1 WD egg
  • #84: 3 HM egs
  • #1: 17 HM eggs: incubating
  • #3: —
  • #13: 6 HM eggs
  • #67: 7 HM eggs
  • #60: 4 WD eggs
  • #62: 1 WD eggs
  • #5: —
  • #61: 1 HM egg
  • #68: 9 WD eggs, 1 HM egg; incubating

I think we should skip checking #1 and #68; it would be good to get a count for box #10, but the hen in there may sit tight.

Yuck

The supply of recycled CRTs and televisions, laden with hazardous lead, is booming. Unfortunately, the demand for this e-waste has crashed. As a result, recycling firms are going out of business and abandoning the waste, leaving toxic dumps for the states and federal government to clean up. The market is upside down.

In 2004, recyclers were paid more than $200 a ton to provide glass from these monitors for use in new cathode ray tubes. The same companies now have to pay more than $200 a ton to get anyone to take the glass off their hands.

Even worse, there seems to be no recycling market at all for LCD screens.

Ian Urbina does the grim reporting.

Opening

Something that you don’t hear top-drawer religious leaders say:

Given that many of you do not belong to the [faith], and others are not believers, I give this blessing from my heart, in silence, to each one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you, but knowing that each one of you is a child of God…. May God bless you.

Well, hardly ever.

And also with you, Holy Father.

[click]

Ian Bogost ends a call:

Hanging up on someone is a physical act, a violent one even, one that produces its own pleasure by discharging acrimony…. Just try to hang up your iPhone or your Samsung Galaxy. I don’t mean just ending a call, but hanging up for real, as if you meant it. For a moment you might consider throwing the handset against a wall before remembering that you shelled out three, four, five hundred dollars or more for the device, a thing you cradle in a cozy as if it were a kitten or a newborn.

Stories I missed: 1

From last summer, Joe Palca’s two-parter (one, two) about Scott O’Neill’s 20-year efforts to find a biological means to control and eventually eliminate dengue fever. I like the focus of Palca’s series: it’s not just about the newest published scientific results, it’s about the process of doing science.

“You know, I was incredibly persistent in not wanting to give this idea up,” O’Neill said. “I thought the idea was a good idea, and I don’t think you get too many ideas in your life, actually. At least I don’t. I’m not smart enough. So I thought this idea was a really good idea.”

Nice work

Malcolm Kenton speaks for the beavers.

Beaver ponds attract and sustain other wetland-dependent creatures—such as turtles, herons, otters, ducks, and many types of birds and fish. They also do a good job of retaining stormwater runoff, allowing pollutants to settle out before the water moves downstream. Beavers have also become a unique cultural asset to cities and towns: they are local celebrities in places like the Bronx River in New York and Chicago’s Lincoln Park.

But perhaps the best-known “downtown beaver” success story comes from Martinez, California, a Bay Area city that rehabilitated part of the creek that runs through the center of town. When a beaver colony established itself there in 2008, the local government threatened to have them removed. But citizens’ organization Worth a Dam rose to the creatures’ defense, and the city has come to celebrate its newfound furry, feathered and finned denizens…

Some links: 65

Snow days are good for cleaning up the inbox of bookmarks.

  • Jeff Kelly shows how to build your own RFID data logger for $40 or less. It’s suitable for tracking birds at feeders, nest boxes, anywhere they hang out. The system works with any animal species large enough to carry an RFID tag; a battery at the logging station provides the power.
  • A new paper by G. Bohrer et al. describes an “exclusion zone” approach to siting wind turbines in an urban environment, as Roberta Kwok explains. The approach manages the tradeoff between maximizing the power produced by an array of turbines and minimizing its adverse effects on wildlife.

At the park: 55

Selected from this week’s report to park staff:

The beavers’ effect on local water levels is quite evident. While lower Barnyard Run used to be the reach of sketchy high water, the knee- and hip-deep stuff is now at the beginning of the boardwalk. Box #2 used to be located at the edge of the channel, and now it’s surrounded by water.

We had some ice to break through in the shallows around #1 and #3.

Box #1 is up to 12 Hooded Merganser eggs, so we would expect incubation to begin this week. Box #13 has a new nest with 3 HM eggs.

Dormant season feeders observed: 14 Green-winged Teal, 4 Northern Shoveler, 2 Gadwall

Water gauge: 0.28

how deep?You can just see in this image that the water has risen so that it is lapping the bottom edge of the side rail of the boardwalk. Another six inches and the trail will be awash.

Perfect

Evgeny Morozov attacks what he calls solutionism:

an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are “solvable” with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.

Morozov makes a strong case, and there’s little I can do but quote from the piece:

Solutionists err by assuming, rather than investigating, the problems they set out to tackle. Given Silicon Valley’s digital hammers, all problems start looking like nails, and all solutions like apps.

* * *

Whenever technology companies complain that our broken world must be fixed, our initial impulse should be to ask: how do we know our world is broken in exactly the same way that Silicon Valley claims it is? What if the engineers are wrong and frustration, inconsistency, forgetting, perhaps even partisanship, are the very features that allow us to morph into the complex social actors that we are?

9 Circles

Julian Elijah Martinez delivers a masterful performance as Daniel Reeves in Bill Cain’s 9 Circles. The play is wrapped around the atrocities that took place in Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq, in 2006.

In Cain’s retelling of the story, Reeves is a young man with little hope and a history of personality disorder who enlists in the Army and is sent to Iraq—perhaps the last person that you’d want to trust with lethal weapons in a high-stress situation. Reeves’s story of the violence he witnesses, his brutal over-response to it, and the slender moment of grace he experiences in the meantime is unpacked by a series of interviews and meetings with various officers, psychiatrists, chaplains, and lawyers. His interlocutors are played by an ensemble of three (Scott McCormick, Jonathan Feuer, and Katy Carkuff), and the doubling serves to emphasize Reeves’s disorientation and isolation; on at least one occasion, he remarks to a new character played by an actor we have already seen, “You look familiar.” Each one tries to put his own spin on Reeves’s tale, and it’s only at the end, in a bravura monologue in which he undergoes death by lethal injection, that Reeves wrests control of the narrative and lets us viscerally feel what it’s really like to be him in this wretched situation.

One of Reeves’s lawyers remarks that his history is a threat to American complacency (and the complacency of all who practice violence) because it opens up a sympathy for the enemy. And as that sympathy knocks down the barrier between foes, how can any war survive? It is Cain’s play that instills sympathy for Reeves, and with that barrier down, how can the scapegoating murder that is capital punishment survive?

Carkuff’s scene as the Army “shrink” is particularly strong, as the career psychiatrist must walk the line between, on the one hand, compassion for her patient and getting him out of harm’s way (his own and others’), and on the other, the need to “recycle” warriors back to a state of fitness for duty and return them to the front lines.

  • 9 Circles, by Bill Cain, directed by Jennifer L. Nelson, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Everywhere a sign

Martin Austermuhle updates us on the District’s gradual replacement of its street name signs with new ones that are set in mixed case. There are, um, some bugs to be worked out. But the new design with rounded corners and a white border, as seen in the signs for Sherman Avenue, N.W. and Columbia Road, N.W., are rather good—indeed an improvement on the current signs. Even if they do use Freeway Gothic instead of Clearview.

Stargrazing

Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring), discovered just this January, is expected to come within 100,000 km of Mars in October 2014, as O.M. reports (as Babbage). Perhaps even closer: the track of a comet is not as predictable as that of an asteroid, as the flying snowball ejects mass on its approach to the sun. Astronomers, professionals and amateurs alike, are looking at the possibility of an even closer approach, and an actual impact is not out of the question at this point.

Update: More reporting on the story, with a fabulous hed and subhed for us Cole Porter fans.