Author: David Gorsline

Dehyphenate

Aaron Morrissey visits WMATA HQ and finds an omnibus sign with all of the known and planned Metro stations. I have an old D.C. map from about 1980 that shows the planned station at Chillum (which decamped to West Hyattsville) and maybe I’ve seen a reference to Federal City College (which became UDC). The unpaired Franconia station name tells me that the sign was made before the split tail of the Blue/Yellow lines was conjoined into the single terminus of Franconia-Springfield. But the planned then deleted Oklahoma Avenue station does not appear.

For Lydia Davis

13 June 2002

This evening on the subway I saw a man reading a comb-bound book with a green cover. From the side I could see diagrams, small circles arranged in orderly polygons. I reasoned that I was seeing diagrams of aromatic molecules. Perhaps this man was a medical student on his way to a class at GWU.

The I read the phrases “four couples…,” “partner…,” “in a circle or a square…” The book was a manual of square dance patterns, hundreds of them.

In the man’s hand I could see a walkman and a bandanna, folded, printed with stars and stripes.

The rich have their own photographers

Via wood s lot comes news of the passing last week of Milton Rogovin, social documentary photographer based in Buffalo, N.Y. Claire O’Neill has assembled a slideshow of some of Rogovin’s images of “the forgotten ones,” and links to a 2003 interview with Scott Simon. Once blacklisted as the “top Communist in Buffalo,” Rogovin’s archives are now with the Library of Congress.

Hemlock Overlook Regional Park

hanging onThe Eastern Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) are hanging on, just barely, in Hemlock Overlook Regional Park. I took a quick loop around this park, which lies on the Fairfax County side of Bull Run.

at the fordA fairly quiet walk, save for the unsettling sound of gunfire somewhere to the south and (we hope) outside the park boundary. The ground is frozen hard, which turned out to be helpful for a couple of gullied-out stream crossings. A Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) looped over the county line from the other side of the stream, then flew back. I was a little surprised by the several Belted Kingfishers (Ceryle alcyon) that are making a winter of it along the watercourse. At midday, as I returned to the car, some tangled brush next to the parking area proved to be rather birdy, turning up a wren and a junco or two.

I followed, more or less, the loop described as hike #14 in PATC’s Hikes in the Washington Region, part B. My edition (third) is dated 1993, and a few of the trails have been relocated since then. There’s a section that’s rather built up, as it’s set aside for youth camps: there are ropes courses and such.

tastefulThe street name signs in the nearby Town of Clifton, the municipality of quadrangular border, are simple and effective.

Some lists: 8

Via Bookslut, Simone de Beavoir, Pearl Buck, Nelson Algren (A Walk on the Wild Side), and Françoise Sagan were on the Times fiction best-seller list the week I was born. Not too shabby. The nonfiction list is not too bad, either: John Kennedy, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Nancy Mitford, H. L. Mencken (posthumously), C. S. Forester (crossing over from the fiction list with The Age of Fighting Sail), and Winston Churchill.

More cork

Audubon Naturalist Society eNews reports:

As we gather with families and friends over the next few weeks to celebrate holidays and other special occasions, chances are there will be bottles to open. And when you open that champagne, wine, or cider why not save the cork for recycling? All natural corks can be dropped off at any of three Cork & Fork stores — in Bethesda, MD; Gainesville, VA; or downtown Washington — or at any Whole Foods Market. The Cork & Fork stores have partnered with ReCORK, and Whole Foods is working with Cork ReHarvest. The effort aims to help sustain cork forests and turn used cork into useful products, such as shoes, flooring tiles, building insulation, and sports equipment. So, cheers and recycle on!

Strange liberators

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at Riverside Church, New York, 4 April 1967:

A few years ago there was a shining moment… a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

* * *

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Stop, look, and listen

A recent column by David Alan Grier gives a mixed review to citizen science and related activities. He speaks well of the CubeSat, at standardized design for experiment packages to be designed by students and launches into space; he also likes the BOINC framework for harnessing household computers to solve computationally intense problems. But his praise for generalized crowdsourcing of research is tempered:

Citizen science may not be able to make major changes to scientific institutions, but it should be able to occupy some niche in scientific practice. As we have seen in other activities that attempt to coordinate the contributions of the general public with the Internet, these efforts have a way of disciplining work and overcoming gross inefficiencies associated with mass labor.

Mass labor, especially when it is a volunteer effort, can prove to be remarkably resistant to discipline. Volunteers are prone to follow their own inclinations no matter how much guidance a professional scientist might offer. One of the major citizen projects devoted to recording biodiversity claims to offer a global perspective on flora and fauna, but its volunteers have shown a remarkable propensity for collecting images from the world’s wealthy shopping districts and resorts. Pictures of Yellowstone can be of great interest, but they are of little use when you hoped to see images of plants found in Yaoundé.

I’m inclined to agree. Doing science is not the same thing as snapping a photo with a smartphone or checking in at foursquare. Perhaps the sweet spot for this approach is the application of what we might call semi-skilled knowledge work: trained observation and transcription. As examples, consider eBird and the related projects from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Distributed Proofreaders component of Project Gutenberg, or my own new volunteer project, the North American Bird Phenology Program.

Sk8r boi

Rachel Carson explains something that I often see on my infrequent visits to the ocean beaches:

The tidal flotsam abounds, too, in many little empty egg cases in which various sea creatures passed their first days of life…. The black “mermaid’s purses” belong to one of the skates. They are flat, horny rectangles, with two long, curling prongs or tendrils extending from each end. With these the parent skate attaches the packet containing a fertilized egg to seaweeds on some offshore bottom. After the young skate matures and hatches, its discarded cradle is often washed up on the beach.

—The Edge of the Sea, ch. III