Some small research advances in the effort to reduce bird strikes at wind turbines, by Adam Welz.
Category: Tools and Technology
And now for econ
Some links: 108
- D.C. Circulator buses find new homes far from the city
- Fact-Checking the ‘President Who Follows Science’ on his environmental record
- An Inside Look at the Subway’s Archaic Signal System in NYC
- An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy, by Anaïs Godard
Your version of the future has no room for her. Thankfully, she doesn’t need your permission to belong. She’s already here.
- Leo Mazzone is still rockin’: An Old-School Pitching Coach Says I Told You So
“All anyone in the majors watches now is how damn fast a guy can throw,” he told me, rocking on his heels. “Grunt and heave, grunt and heave. It’s not pitching; it’s asinine.”
- Oh, lovely, first the Colorado and now this: A Crucial River Treaty Is Tangled in Trump’s Feud With Canada
Negotiations over the Columbia River basin could affect the environment in Canada and electrical generation and flood control in the United States.
- Damn, those things are much bigger than I realized: a rubber bullet in the Museum at the Times
Hmm, the Times and the Post have different headline casing styles.
Coming to a museum near you
Antique technology roundup:
- Neon signs in New York City.
- The ubiquitous “Gorton” pantograph font, in Manhattan and world-wide. (longread)
- Blimps over Akron, O.
Two pics of neon signs in Greater New York that I’ve happened to catch in pixels over the years.
Meterstones, 2024
Small accomplishments during the year, not otherwise accounted for. Not major milestones, but bigger than inchstones.
- I took on new responsibilities for Virginia Native Plant Society.
- I resumed working in community theater, stage managing Dance Nation for Silver Spring Stage and Kindertransport (in rehearsal) for Rockville Little Theatre. Much waiting in traffic to cross the Cabin John bridge.
- After trips to three different shops and a returned online order, I found the right replacement halogen bulb for my bedside lamp. After multiple trips to local stores, I bought a $7 (+ shipping) threaded rod from McMaster-Carr and successfully repaired a chair from IKEA (model long discontinued) that I’ve had since I moved into this house.
Postcards from Ohio: October 2024: Addendum
I stopped in Columbus at the Wexner Center for the Arts on my way west, and found numerous six-wheeled robots tootling around the OSU campus. A robot seemed to manage crossing a driveway (into a parking deck, for instance) just fine, but I had the uncanny feeling that it waited for me to start to cross, that being a signal that it was safe to move. The robot’s cargo bay was about the size of a backpack, but shaped more like a little bathtub.
What were these automata delivering? Library books, mayhaps? Nope, it’s food. It’s always food.
A mystery: 29: solved
Chris Staecker explains the dingus I saw in southwest Virginia last year. It’s more properly called a sector.
Some links: 104
- Wheels up! Fleetwood Mac Sound Engineer Sues Stereophonic Playwright. That didn’t take very long. The New Yorker piece. My review of the show.
- Tidy takedown of Ayn Rand, by Gary Saul Morson. “No one could explain to Rand that tautologies can’t be used to prove anything about the real world.” (via Arts & Letters Daily)
- Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App, by Ian Bogost. Looking at you, Walter Kerr Theatre and the Hadestown producers.
New York 2024 bis
I made a second trip to New York this year! The impetus was seeing the Vivian Maier show at Fotografiska before that venue closes its doors. Also on the gallery/museum visit checklist was
- Brooklyn Botanic Garden: the Franklinia trees were looking rather peaky, but I did spot a Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) in one of the flower beds. The Japanese garden was a bit of a disappointment; I don’t understand why the torii was placed in the pond. Some traffic noise, but overall, the BBG is worth a return visit.
- A (for the most part picturesque) ride up the Hudson on Metro North to Dia Beacon, to see some “old friends” (Robert Ryman, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra). I liked the Steve McQueen installation downstairs (Bass): it felt like waiting on a subway platform for the train out of Purgatory.
- International Center of Photography, now on Essex Street.
- MoMA PS1 for James Turrell’s Meeting, seen under perhaps perfect afternoon conditions: some haze in the blue sky, tumbles of clouds sliding by.
I rolled out in the direction of the Rockaways on the A to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge (an NPS property, despite its name). Birding was slow in the late morning, but a Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia) flitted about and a trio of Black-crowned Night Herons (Nycticorax nycticorax) perched up. I found a few new plants that I did not recognize, a couple of non-native invasives (Rosa rugosa and Saponaria officinalis) and a startling mint, Monarda punctata. I watched a Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) steal a cicada from an Eastern Cicada-killer Wasp (Sphecius speciosus): after the wasp lost its meal, it spiraled in angry circles around the scene of the robbery. I killed my first Spotted Lanternfly. And my second. Any my third. Walking the coarse gravel path around the West Pond in my hiking sneakers began to wear out my feet.
The A runs underground until 80th Street, so I had ample time to admire some brilliant innovative tech: as the train approaches a station, doors on the exit side are framed in green light, and the strip map above each door changes to a map of the platform with the train berthed, with your car marked with a “You are here.” Arrows direct you to stairs, elevators, connecting trains and (in the outlying stations) major buses, and street intersections. Wayfinding right when you need it, before you step on to the platform. Let’s hope that this tech makes its way on to the other lines. The gold and cobalt blue accents in the livery are quite handsome.
For all of the New York subway’s crashed message boards,
funky stinks, cramped escalators (looking at you, E and M at Lexington Avenue-53rd Street), squonky noises, confusing service changes for maintenance (for a trip back from Columbus Circle, it would have been faster to walk, even accounting for the fact that I jumped on the wrong 7 train), and random rust stains, once in a while you find a bit that has been restored to glory. Here’s a station marker on the Lexington line that’s just superb.
I visited three jazz clubs new to me:
- Dizzy’s Club: rather posh, bar seating works well.
- Blue Note: very snug, not for claustrophobes.
- Jazz Gallery: no frills, no minimums, just right.
Some views from my jewel box hotel on East 55th Street: an old school shoe repair shop.
From the 7th floor terrace, buildings at the corner of Lexington, and in the distance down at Madison, a partial view of what I still think of as Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building, now just known as 650 Madison.
On my way back to the subway from the Joyce Theater, I was feeling peckish for dessert. Poof! appeared an Oddfellows ice cream shop at the corner of 17th Street. A generous scoop of vegan chocolate-chocolate chunk was very good.
Forte
Linda Holmes nails it in her response to Apple’s crass iPad advertisement.
But these are not practical items to begin with. Nobody owns a piano because it’s practical; it’s about the least practical thing you can own. It can wreck your floor. It goes out of tune. And if you happen to get a new place, you don’t just need movers for it; you may need special movers. You don’t own a piano to get from point A to point B in the most direct way you can. You own a piano for the reason we had one in my house: a person plays it. Someone sits down, as my mother did, and plays the “Maple Leaf Rag,” and you can hear the pedals lightly squeak, and you can watch hands skitter across keys, and of course you are listening to music — but also, those are your mother’s hands.
In my case, the piano’s owner was Leta and the player was Grandmother Madeline.
And in my case, the piano was in the Northern Michigan University dormitory lounge and the player was Audrey from Rockford, Ill., and the song was indeed “Maple Leaf Rag.”
Uphill battle
More developments in New York’s struggle with trash: Emily Badger and Larry Buchanan for the Times focus on the three-tiered containerization plan, and point out that Manhattan streets are stuck with the job of temporary storage because the street grid doesn’t provide alleys. Eric Lach for The New Yorker uses more ink to write about personalities.
Some links: 100
- Walter Shawlee, slipstick reseller, has passed.
Over time, his customers included a weather station in Antarctica, where many electronic gadgets could not take the cold; photo editors responsible for adjusting image sizes (they like slide rules for their clear displays of different values for the same ratio); an archaeologist who found that calculators got too dusty to work properly during digs; the drug company Pfizer, which gave away slide rules as gifts during a trade show; slide rule enthusiasts in Afghanistan and French Polynesia; and “guys from NASA,” Mr. Shawlee told Engineering Times in 2000.
- Sorry, overwintering turtles don’t breathe through their butts.
The notion that cloacal gas exchange helps North American turtles survive long winters trapped under the ice is pervasive in pop science, but to date, there is no solid evidence that hidden-necked turtles use cloacal gas exchange. The skin and mouth lining are where gas exchange happens during winter hibernation.
- The Old English for spider is gange-wæfre (“walker-weaver”).
- From Zack Stanton for McSweeney’s, “Morrissey or Trump?”
This could only happen to me / Who has been through anything like this?
- Guest column for Washington Business Journal by Alan Berube and Tracy Hadden Loh: “Caps and Wizards moving to Virginia isn’t ‘regionalism.’ It’s gaslighting.”
Some links: 99
- Matthew Jordan (perhaps) explains why I love/d Rollerball so much.
- There’s a ha-ha in Fairfax County. Fairfax Master Naturalist Jerry Nissley visits River Farm.
- See Rosslyn’s gas station-church combo before it’s redeveloped.
- We could have used one of these robots when director Lee was attending rehearsals remotely: Lisa Sniderman collaborates with Open Circle Theatre.
- Thomas Wolf wants to see hard numbers on the Potomac Yard arena boondoggle.
Shame on any legislator who would vote to advance this proposal on such incompetent evidence.
- Restoring Joshua trees in designated wilderness with some camelid assistance.
Mid-winter trip reports
I assisted at Elklick Woodlands Natural Area Preserve for a couple of work days. (More days to come? subject to scheduling.) Park Authority staff are actively managing woody vegetation within several deer exclosures in order to re-establish and extend a rare forest community, known as northern hardpan basic oak-hickory forest. Thousands of trees were planted about five years ago, and those that have survived are about knee height now.
The management is fairly aggressive: both native and non-native trees, all of them faster growing than the oaks and hickories, are cut back to the ground, for instance these Virginia Pines (Pinus virginiana) which would soon shade out the white oak at the right of the photo.
Many of the trees that we’re nurturing are still very small, and have dropped all their leaves at this time of the year. So flags make it a lot easier to find them.
I’m also back at The Nature Conservancy’s Fraser Preserve, now equipped with a new tool: an Extractigator Junior, generically known as a weed wrench. For non-native invasive shrubs like Rosa multiflora and Berberis thunbergii, we need to remove as much of the root as possible. A garden fork and some steady pulling will accomplish this, but a weed wrench gives you some mechanical advantage and is easier on the muscles. The genius of these gizmos is that no springs are involved, so it’s unlikely that you’re going to mash a digit.
A composite of a couple of roses that I pulled: Dropping the tool into position.
Closing the jaws around the stems and beginning to pull back on the handle.
The extracted crown of the plant.
I’m still finding my touch with the tool. With smaller plants, I have a tendency to snap off the stem rather than pull it out with the roots. The Junior weighs just under ten pounds, so it’s luggable from Fraser’s parking area to our work sites.
Ohio 2023: 1
The first leg of my Ohio road trip brought me to Cleveland and environs and, after much negotiation of time slots, entailed lunch with Aunt D. and dinner with long-lost girlfriend C. In between meals, I had some downtime so I rode the Red Line out to the airport and back. I was a little surprised that the rolling stock was rather light and that power came from a pantograph, but since the Red Line runs in its own ROW, most people would call it a subway/metro/rapid transit. Non-rush hour trains consisted of only two cars each. The West 25th-Ohio City station is looking rather scruffy; there seems to be some confusion over how to spell “Windermere.”
In the morning, I took a quick loop at Brandywine Falls in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, a surprisingly vigorous water feature. At right, the creek looking back upstream in the direction of the falls.
I found my first clear example of Beech Leaf Disease, which has just been found recently in Virginia. Close by (and perhaps related), an infestation of Beech Blight Aphid (Grylloprociphilus imbricator). You really need a video to fully appreciate these tiny sap slurpers.