Great photographs by Domingo Milella of a grove of Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) in California’s White Mountains.
Author: David Gorsline
Gone
Demented is different to drunk. I think people get demented the same way they get annoying. The thing you don’t like about them just gets worse, until one day you find that’s all there is left of them — the fuss and the show of it — the actual person has snuck out the back and gone home.
—Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz, “Save the Last Dance for Me,” p. 194
Birding haiku
From one of the Vardaman chapters, a wonderful evocation of kettling vultures, rising on a thermal:
Now there are seven of them, in little tall black circles.
“Look, Darl,” I say; “see?”
He looks up. We watch them in little tall black circles of not-moving.
—William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Sooner or later, we all go through it
The Dalecarlia Tunnel carries the Capital Crescent Trail under MacArthur Boulevard in southwest Montgomery County, close to the District line. Built in 1910, the 341-foot long tunnel originally carried a spur of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
Stand and deliver
Michael Grabell, reporting for ProPublica, recaps the shameful railroading process that has placed hundreds of X-ray machines of doubtful safety in U.S. airports, in a misguided attempt to improve security. The depleted Food and Drug Administration chose not to regulate these nasty boxes.
The government used to have 500 people examining the safety of electronic products emitting radiation. It now has about 20 people. In fact, the FDA has not set a mandatory safety standard for an electronic product since 1985.
The Transportation Security Administration has no peer-reviewed research to back up its claims that the X-ray-based body scanners are safe, Grabell reports. On the contrary,
Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines. Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as “safe,” glossing over the accepted scientific view that even low doses of ionizing radiation — the kind beamed directly at the body by the X-ray scanners — increase the risk of cancer.
Mind you, the TSA and its contractors have rolled out two different body-scanning technologies, one using potentially harmful ionizing radiation, the other employing (perhaps relatively harmless) millimeter-length electromagnetic waves. But how is the flustered traveler to understand which machine the bored functionary is directing him to, and the concomitant health risks?
Capital-W Writer
Dan Kois visits the awesome Lynda Barry at one of her creativity workshops.
Two sets
Two treasuries of Washington photography: 700-plus images made in the mid-1960s by Alexander Lmanian (1925-1996), shared by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; and Darrow Montgomery’s smaller collection of 25 photos he has made for Washington City Paper over the past quarter-century. Most notably, the Lmanian pictures document the destruction of the 1968 riots.
Little Bennett Regional Park: botany foray
Yesterday’s unexpected snow and ice caused trip leader Carole Bergman to simplify this morning’s field trip to Little Bennett Regional Park, lest we go slip-sliding away. We ended up following the track of the old Hyattstown Mill Road, from Clarksburg Road along Little Bennett Creek as far as the creek ford. I have visited the park a couple times last year, but this is the first time I’ve spent an appreciable amount of daylight time north of the creek.
Bird activity was surprisingly lively. We found a few Eastern Bluebirds at the woodcock clearing, and a Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Regulus calendula) farther down the trail.
But the main objective of this trip was fall/winter trees. As the sky cleared and the snow melted, the canopy dropped slush bombs on the group, but we soldiered on. Carole pointed out generous examples of Post Oak (Quercus stellata), some huge old Black Willows (Salix nigra) in a creek bottom, Carpinus caroliniana in fruit (nuts protected by involucral bracts), Witch-hazel in flower.
Special trees for the trip: Fringetree (Chionanthus virginicus), in the image at left, with Carole in the foreground, and a solitary shrub of Bear Oak (Q. ilicifolia), in the image at right. Harlow writes, “Seton [The Forester’s Manual, 1912] says it was called bear oak because this animal was about the only one that would eat its intensely bitter acorns.”
On the way back to the rendezvous point, we took a side trip to the Burnt Hill parking area in the extreme northeast edge of the park to find a small patch of American Chestnut (Castanea dentata). The trees are protected with exclosures, lest hungry deer munch every last bit of green sprout from these desperately regenerating trees. One of the three we looked at had a limb bearing leaves (now yellow) and a few fruits. But the real value of these trees is in their genetics. American Chestnut Foundation breeders have collected pollen from these individuals, in their attempts to raise strains that are resistant to blight.
Where can I get a sticker?
Martin Austermuhle reports that D.C. Councilman Michael A. Brown will roll out a new campaign for statehood for the District, to be launched 8 November.
“Is this an innovative approach?”
Virginia Gewin provides some pointers for rookie reviewers of papers submitted to technical journals. With career-hungry postdocs doing much of the refereeing, there’s little room for the purported conspiracies that cover up inconvenient research results.
Astronomy journals are generally comfortable with papers being revised several times, says Chris Sneden, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s rare, but a paper can go through five or six review rounds if it starts out as a disaster,” he says. “But the sociology of the field is happy with a lot of back and forth with the author during the process.”
A Bright New Boise
The opening image of A Bright New Boise is a powerful one: Michael Russotto’s Will stands under a highway overpass, shouting for the end of the world. Will, like all of us, is a seeker of truth, a man trying to find meaning in his life; however, the particulars of his journey are out of the theatrical ordinary, for Will has recently parted company with a millenarian congregation in northern Idaho, and perhaps has left his religious faith behind as well.
When the apocalypse comes, who’s to say it won’t come to the break room of a chain store specializing in arts and crafts?—a chain whose labor practices (enforced by Pauline, the excellent Emily Townley) would make many an HR professional’s hair stand on end. For it is there that Will tries to put his economic house in order, and maybe build some bridges to the past. A standout among his misfit coworkers is the limp-haired Anna (Kimberly Gilbert), a woman with an unmodulated voice and limited social skills.
In the end, Will remains a curiosity for us, despite an honest performance by Russotto. The barriers he has raised against the emotional and financial shocks of the world leave him isolated, and it’s difficult for his to feel empathy for him.
- A Bright New Boise, by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Silver Line progress report: 21
Prefab walls are being dropped into place at the Wiehle Avenue work site—I saw the first one going in last weekend. The terra cotta with gray accent course will be an attractive change from the classic concrete look.
Who’s a fraud?
Stephen Marche mounts a spirited attack on a bit of Hollywood folderol, and digs out a more uncomfortable truth:
… antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” … Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.
Philosophical spaces
Alva Noë looks at Richard Serra.
Seeing, or any other kind of conscious experience, happens not in the private caverns of our minds, but out there, with others, in environments that we make, and that then in turn surround us and compel.
New camera
A new camera, and I’d always wanted to take some snaps from the 7th floor roof deck. Looking north, two domed houses of worship are visible, the golden United House of Prayer for All People, and on the distant heights, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The long horizontal roofline is Galbraith A.M.E. Zion Church.
Looking down into K Street, N.W., the vacant pavement, once a parking lot, has been fenced off for several weeks. Perhaps some new construction is afoot. Looking beyond to New York Avenue, N.W., the green awning marks the location of the old A. V. Ristorante; its aggressive street-level awning used to span the wide sidewalk. Also notice the backside of the billboard, inflected toward Maryland-bound commuters.
Looking to the southeast down Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., the white dome will be familiar to some. The sloping red brick roofline is the Pension Building, home to the National Building Museum.