theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Antique technology roundup:
Two pics of neon signs in Greater New York that I’ve happened to catch in pixels over the years.
Small accomplishments during the year, not otherwise accounted for. Not major milestones, but bigger than inchstones.
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.
Chris Staecker explains the dingus I saw in southwest Virginia last year. It’s more properly called a sector.
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
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:
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
This could only happen to me / Who has been through anything like this?
Shame on any legislator who would vote to advance this proposal on such incompetent evidence.
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.
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.
Another not-fully-explained artifact in the Southwest Virginia Historical Museum is this surveyor’s ruler. The graduations along the outer edges are clearly inch marks, but what is the function of the inner scales on a slant? The innermost scales could be logarithmic, so perhaps this is a folding nomogram for performing multiplication.
In their native habitat, marine lampreys are “keystone species” supporting vast aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems….
Environmental consultant Stephen Gephard, formerly Connecticut’s anadromous-fish chief, calls lampreys “environmental engineers” as important to native ecosystems as beavers.