Author: David Gorsline

Lest we forget

Stephen M. Walt reminds us just how much of a trainwreck on toast was George Bush’s presidency. Making waterboard a household word, Walt’s point #6, was perhaps the most reprehensible.

The United States would have been far better off had George W. Bush never decided to enter politics and instead had spent the last two decades running a baseball team. The former president wasn’t particularly good at that job either, but failure there would have had far fewer consequences for America and for the world.

If we still had such legal recourse, we could have sworn out a writ of de idiota inquirendo, but (alas) the only result of that 17th-century proceeding would be that W’s property would go right back to the King.

(Link via The Morning News.)

Baltimore harbor

getting readyOur field trip for Dan Ferandez’s weather and climate class visited the Baltimore harbor by means of the pungy schooner Lady Maryland. Instructors/crew from the Living Classrooms Foundation cast a (educationally-permitted) trawl net, with a little help from us participants.

the fort and the flagready for their closeupThen, as the boat tracked to and fro in sight of Fort McHenry, we examined the fauna that we’d brought up in the net. Some fish (not Rockfish, despite my overeager and uninformed ID, but rather Yellow Perch [Perca flavescens] and Spot Croaker [Leiostomus xanthurus]) that favor the brackish water of the estuary, and a couple of comb jellies (not visible in the image, but in the adjacent bucket).

beautiful swimmeralso found in the bayA wee Blue Crab (Callinectes sapidus), as well as a full-grown one that had joined the choir eternal. And, of course, plastic rubbish, which at least was serving as substrate for some sea anemones.

For me, one takeaway was a reminder from the educators that partially full bottles of drinking water in a landfill isolate that resource from the hydrologic cycle. If you see a bottle of water that’s otherwise going to be trashed (rather than recycled), the least you can do is empty the bottle so that the water can return to the sea.

looking asternbaltimore for scaleAny trip to the Baltimore harbor has to include a shot of the Domino Sugar plant. We see some thin bands of cumulus clouds trying to get themselves better organized. Leta tagged along so that she could loom over the Baltimore city skyline.

Franzen decoded

Richard Katz has just knocked off work on a construction job on White Street, in Tribeca, on page 198 of Freedom:

Darkness had fallen. The snow had dwindled to a flurry, and the nightly nightmare of Holland Tunnel traffic had commenced. All but two of the city’s subway lines, as well as the indispensable PATH train, converged within three hundred yards of where Katz stood.

For suitable values of “three hundred yards.” If Richard is still somewhere on White Street, he can’t be both within 300 yd of the 7th Avenue IRT (under Varick Street) and also within 300 yd of the F (under Essex Street). Even if we smear Richard along all of Canal Street, he is still not that near the stations of PATH trains (which take him home to New Jersey) at World Trade Center (to the south) and Christopher Street (to the north).

But let’s be generous, and place Richard in sufficient proximity to all the lines that run in Manhattan, one way or another, south of Canal Street, leaving the L (14th Street) and the 7 (42nd Street) as the “all but two.” And we still haven’t accounted for the G: it serves New York City, just not Manhattan.

Heads up

My term project for my meteorology class is fairly simple: photograph and identify as many cloud types as possible. And thus the curse of learning to be a naturalist is further heaped upon my head: it’s not enough that I can’t walk down the street or into the woods without asking myself what kind of trees I’m looking at, without stopping to look at an outcrop of bedrock, without craning to get a better view of what’s flying around. Now I have to gawp at the clouds in the sky.

clouds projectI grabbed this image of some rumbly-looking cumulus clouds from the heights of the parking deck at West Falls Church metro. I’m still looking for a good shot of cumulonimbus—unlikely now that the summer thunderstorm season has passed.

Eye/insufficiency

Via kottke.org, next month the University of Kansas will mount a production of A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream in Elizabethan era pronunciation, one of very few full productions ever staged. The English of Shakespeare’s period sounds tingly to me, so I welcome the effort.

I have one quibble with the rehearsal footage that Paul Meier and his students have made available: the team chose Dream because so many of the rhyming couplets don’t any more, neither in RP nor Standard American. But the performances are so focused on rhyme that pauses are introduced (however slight) at the ends of lines that are enjambed.

Upcoming: 27

Via ArtsJournal, Irene Lacher chats with Laurie Anderson about Delusion (the piece she’s bringing to the Smith Center at the end of this week), an exhibition in Brazil, and an imagined project:

…I was in a green room with Yo-Yo Ma, about to give a commencement speech. And it was very hot and very boring, and we were sitting around and talking about different fantasies. And I said, “My fantasy is playing a concert and I look out and it’s all dogs.” And so, he said, “That’s my fantasy too.” And I said, “Whoa, that’s amazing.” We said, “OK, the first one that gets to do it has to invite the other one.”

USA Science & Engineering Festival

just stepped out of the time machineWe had a good, if tiring, time over the last two days talking to the kids visiting the USA Science & Engineering Festival. Actually, I spent a lot of my time talking to the parents, who were happy to prompt their children with “When I was your age, we loved to watch Jacques Cousteau’s TV documentaries.” We spent some time today just inside the entrance to Mellon Auditorium, where many folks were distracted by just having cleared security and the urge to find the flight simulator and the hamster globe. We had more extended conversations out on Wilson Plaza, right at the point where the booths peter out and everyone is wondering where the auditorium entrance is: it was easy to figure out whether people wanted to pause and chat and take pictures and ask awkward questions like “Who was your best friend?” (Hey, this is not a online banking security challenge, lady!) or whether people were looking to motor on to their next destination. Thanks to the family from Lebanon who kindly chose not to continue our conversation completely in French.

my favorite government workerLeta did a great job of boiling Rachel Carson’s explanation of toxin accumulations in upper trophic levels of the food web down to elevator speech length.

Silver Line progress report: 15

Via DCist, Lydia DePillis reviews options for Metro’s rail map redesign in anticipation of Silver Line service. I like Cameron Booth’s proposal, a Vignelli-ish elongation of the design elements that also incorporates connections to commuter rail. DePillis touches my hot button:

…the most infuriating part of the map for graphic designers are the absurdly long station names that have crept into the system over the years, like “U St./African-Amer Civil War Memorial/Cardozo” and “Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan.” They have to be squished in diagonally and even break over route lines—a no-no to transit design purists. … just a brief glance at the now-barely-readable fare charts in stations, after “peak of the peak” pricing debuted, shows how confusing signage gets when it tries to convey too much.

Don’t tell the Hungarians

As reported by Brad Matsen, Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King:

In 1966, Cousteau had just landed a deal with ABC to air twelve episodes of what would become The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. Quickly, a scramble was on to launch the expeditions that would provide the material for the TV series.

It took Cousteau three months to disentangle himself and Calypso from scientific and industrial charters, including one in which his divers were helping to lay a pipeline through which an aluminum plant would discharge red-mud waste into deep water. Better, scientists reasoned, to deposit the mud in deep water, where it settled immediately as sediment, than to allow it to ruin the near-shore shallows. (ch. 15, pp. 175-176)

Providence trip report: 4

Wednesday was pretty much a washout for birding. We did take a quick walk at the education center of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island in between rain showers. (I also visited a Massachusetts Audubon sanctuary on Friday–these independent Audubons in New England have some very impressive facilities.)

Finally, Thursday brought clearing weather and a field trip to Block Island, the intended centerpiece of the conference. The original plan was that we would divide into two groups and bird the island on successive days, without an end-of-day deadline since we had no scheduled dinners Monday through Wednesday. Birding as one large group on Thursday, with a closing dinner scheduled at the end of the day, had conference organizers scrambling. It worked out fairly well, although at times there was a lot of milling about, waiting for a van, and wondering where the trip leaders had gone off to.

it's clearing, reallySeas were still running about 4-6 feet (my guess) on the morning crossing. Those of us on the top deck were appraised of this fact when we were nailed by a big wave breaking over the starboard bow just as the ferry reached the Point Judith breakwater.

on pointWe started near the northern tip of the island, just in sight of the lighthouse. The scrubby woods in this area turned up a few warblers. I saw a yellow-black-and-white Dendroica warbler that otherwise must remain a mystery.

in fruitIn the afternoon we moved on to Nathan Mott Park, also known as “the enchanted forest.” Birding there was fairly slow, the trail was an out-and-back, and our van was waiting for us at 2:15, so we did not linger. Instead, I looked at this nice Arrowwood Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum) in fruit.

from the ferryThe departure and return were sunny and smooth. Most everyone got good looks at Lesser Black-backed Gull (Larus fuscus) (including side-by-side comparisons to L. marinus) on the beach near the ferry landing. The shearwaters did not make an appearance.

My species count for the Rhode Island part of this trip comes in at about 70. I believe the combined group checklists came in somewhere in the 130’s.

This trip reminded me how much I enjoy birding and just generally hanging out oceanside. I still love the mountains, but the sea pulls me, too. Susan and I visited the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1993, and that trip got me hooked on birding for good–and hooked on getting whipped by the wind on a rocky beach, scanning the horizon for gannets.