Happy 50th anniversary to the Urban Mass Transportation Act, in short, the legislation that made Metro (and transit projects across the country) happen. Martin Di Caro interviews Therese McMillan of the Federal Transit Administration.
Author: David Gorsline
That radar array is really a cooking grill
Leta responds to misdirected customer complaints and requests for service.
Dear Ms. Hall,
Is the meat in tsc’s tsatziki steak flatbread conventionally raised or organic?
Rant
DAPHNA: Yeah. Jewish law prohibits tattoos of any kind but even if it didn’t that wouldn’t be a problem for me because just for like me personally, when I like step back and reflect on all the things that had to occur in the universe over billions of years so that I could be alive, in my body, right now, like, we’re made of the same things as stardust, that’s how connected we are, to everything, so to be like, who cares about the natural, larger-than-life mysterious universal reasons why my body was designed the way it is, like, screw that, I’m just gonna permanently etch this doodle onto my body which is composed of the same things that are in stars?!?!
—Joshua Harmon, Bad Jews
Shoes
Rather than an unboxing post about new hiking equipment, this is a goodbye to my old New Balance boots. They finally blew out on me, catastrophically, on a naturalist’s hike on the Appalachian Trail in May.
I bought these boots somewhere in the early 1990s—I know, nothing is built to last any more. Light and comfy, they took me up to Clingman’s Dome in Tennessee in 1993: that’s when I figured out that the nicely ventilating nylon uppers weren’t waterproof. Together, my footgear and I climbed in the Cascades of Washington, the Adirondacks, Yosemite, and many times up, down, and over the Blue Ridge.
Stitched and glued back together several times, they’d finally had enough. So long, old boots.
Hey, the laces are new and in good shape. I can use them again for something.
Clean sweep
I remember taking this personal development readiness assessment several years ago (via Caterina Fake), but apparently I never bookmarked it. So now I think I have left a sufficient trail that I might find it again. There’s not really anything about the questionnaire that’s particularly zen, I just think of it that way.
Manassas National Battlefield Park
To break in a new pair of boots, I took an easy loop hike on the blue blazes around the battlefield of First Bull Run. The breezes were strong, and it was midday, but there were a few butterflies flying. I turned up something I didn’t remember from last year—Common Wood Nymph (Cercyonis pegala)—as well as something that turned out to be, upon checking my photos later, an animal I’ve never put on my list before, Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor). I think I’ve probably seen this guy before, but I’ve been put off by one of the photos of the dorsal side in Glassberg’s book. The ID key, it seems, is actually the single row of orange spots on the ventral side of the hindwing.
The bridge over Bull Run was once a prized strategic objective. Now, not even the nesting swallows are interested in it; they prefer the U.S. 29 bridge just downstream.
The trail gets a lot of noise from the roads and a winery just across the run, but it crosses through a lot of woods and can be quite pleasant.
The Carter family cemetery is completely enclosed by a stone wall built from the ruins of Pittsylvania, the manor house. The graves within are not individually marked. The last interment was done in 1903.
Liberal memories
Adam Gopnik considers the making of memorials (paywalled article):
Those who lack faith in fixed order and stable places have a harder time building monuments that must, in their nature, be monolithically stable and certain. Happiness writes write, and pluralism builds poorly. An obelisk can never be an irony. A pyramid can never symbolize a parenthetical aside. An eighty-foot-tall monument to fair procedure would not be a fair sight.
Out with the goldeneye, in with the Canvasback
My 2014-2015 Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamps (Duck Stamps) arrived in the mail today. Have you bought yours?
Sham
An editorial from Scientific American points out that executions by lethal injection are putting innocent patients at risk. The supply of tranquillizers like propofol (used in routine procedures like colonoscopies), all or in part, comes from Europe, and the E.U. prohibits export of drugs that are to be used to kill people.
Perhaps the root problem is here:
…executions are not medical procedures. Indeed, the idea of testing how to most effectively kill a healthy person runs contrary to the spirit and practice of medicine. Doctors and nurses are taught to first “do no harm”; physicians are banned by professional ethics codes from participating in executions. Scientific protocols for executions cannot be established, because killing animal subjects for no reason other than to see what kills them best would clearly be unethical. Although lethal injections appear to be medical procedures, the similarities are just so much theater.
At the park: 69
We wrapped up the nesting season two weekends ago. The Wood Ducks bounced back after a couple of slower years. I’ve noticed a pattern recently: not only do the Hooded Mergansers get started earlier, but overall they tend to fledge a greater percentage of the eggs they lay—85% or better, seven of the last nine years. The Wood Ducks, on the other hand, are subject to dump/drop nests that don’t fledge anything. (One such nest a year is typical for us, out of 15 to 20 boxes being monitored.) In six of the same past nine years, our fledging rate for woodies has been 67% or lower.
The sanity-checker script at NestWatch is skeptical that we have mergs laying 14 eggs in a clutch, and laying as early as the last days of February. I invite the Lab scientists to come check the boxes for themselves.
I took a new camera with me to the park: it’s still a happy snap, but the optical zoom is better suited for quick shots of butterflies. The spangles on the underside of the hindwing of a Speyeria cybele are not usually the first thing you see, but they are diagnostic for ID.
Silver Line progress report: 37
Metro announces that the first day of passenger service for phase 1 of the Silver Line will be Saturday, 26 July.
(Alas, there was no groundbreaking ceremony to attend when construction started, and it looks like I will miss opening day, too.)
Beautiful little gravestones
Tony Award-winning sound designer Robert Kaplowitz has a few things to say about awards, for theater, winning the bowling league, whatever. The nut of the piece, for me, is his eloquent rationale for recognizing good work:
Theater awards matter because theater vanishes. Paintings, sculptures, novels, and poems can last for centuries, or millennia. And, while scripts live on, productions themselves last only as long as that magical assemblage of actors, stagehands, musicians, stage managers, craftspeople and front-of-house staff are together. They enact the staging of one particular director, the movement of one specific choreographer, those particular words said or sung in that exact environment created by those exact designers, and (in musicals) conducted by that specific conductor. It exists only as long as that group gives it life.
What’s special about Kaplowitz’s post is how inclusive it is, recognizing almost everyone who contributes to the theatrical experience. And again,
…[my Tony award] was an honor that resonated throughout my team, and reflected back on the entire company of Fela!
Lifehacking 10.0
…he was as highly evolved as any successful young Charter could be, the elements of his existence rigorously tuned, as were those of all his peers, with “best practices” in mind, those ever-optimizing metrics that we in B-Mor know as well as anybody, though ours are, of course, designed ultimately to smooth our unitary workings. Charters, on the contrary, are always striving to be exquisite microcosms, testing and honing and curating every texture and thread of their lives, from what they eat and watch and wear to whom they befriend and make love to, being lifelong and thus expert Connoisseurs of Me.
—Chang-Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (2014), p. 256
Experimental Lakes Area
I submitted my class report on the Experimental Lakes Area of western Ontario for grading. This was the last paper that I needed to write for my certificate!
Back to nature
Joshua J. Tewksbury et al. make the case for restoring natural history’s importance to answering questions of public health, food security, and biology as a whole. They see citizen science projects as an important means of working with big data that can’t be developed in the lab or in silico.
As evidence of natural history’s contribution to public health, they relate the anecdote of a simple means of blunting cholera epidemics: filtering drinking water through the cloth of human garments.
The discovery that Vibrio cholerae has free-living populations associated with copepods and other zooplankton (Colwell and Huq 1994) forms the foundation of model predictions of temporal and spatial changes in human cholera outbreaks, because these models are based on the dynamics of the zooplankton and phytoplankton on which they feed. With this natural history in hand, public health experts now use satellite sensors to monitor phytoplankton chlorophyll as an early-warning system for cholera outbreaks. The same discovery also explains why filtering polluted water through cloth is surprisingly effective in reducing exposure to cholera: although the cloth does not capture V. cholerae individually, it filters out the zooplankton to which most V. cholerae are attached (Huq et al. 1996).
And, in the area of natural history and recreation and conservation, the Federal Duck Stamp program gets a shout-out:
It is often the collective focus on natural history by hunters, fishers, wildlife watchers, and conservationists that allows consensus-based management of fish and game species. The waterfowl conservation movement in the United States serves as an example. This partnership was set in motion in the early twentieth century by observations of large-scale duck mortality caused by botulism brought on by invertebrate die-offs in wetlands and by lead poisoning in high-intensity hunting locations. In both cases, observations by hunters and bird watchers alerted managers to the issue. The initial focus on disease was fortunate, because it provided a common enemy, and, at least for botulism, the most effective management centered on the designation of federal and state bird refuge areas in wetlands (Bolen 2000). More generally, the many groups that came together to change state and federal policies around these issues led to the creation of powerful hunting and conservation groups. These collaborations also led to a hunting license fee structure that supports the more-than-500-unit federal wildlife refuge system in the United States. The success of waterfowl conservation efforts, and the hundreds of other species that they support, comes in large part from the diverse interest groups that recognized the importance of basic natural history in setting management and policy objectives and that created a stable funding stream to support the collection of that information.