Martin Austermuhle reports that D.C. Councilman Michael A. Brown will roll out a new campaign for statehood for the District, to be launched 8 November.
“Is this an innovative approach?”
Virginia Gewin provides some pointers for rookie reviewers of papers submitted to technical journals. With career-hungry postdocs doing much of the refereeing, there’s little room for the purported conspiracies that cover up inconvenient research results.
Astronomy journals are generally comfortable with papers being revised several times, says Chris Sneden, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and editor of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s rare, but a paper can go through five or six review rounds if it starts out as a disaster,” he says. “But the sociology of the field is happy with a lot of back and forth with the author during the process.”
A Bright New Boise
The opening image of A Bright New Boise is a powerful one: Michael Russotto’s Will stands under a highway overpass, shouting for the end of the world. Will, like all of us, is a seeker of truth, a man trying to find meaning in his life; however, the particulars of his journey are out of the theatrical ordinary, for Will has recently parted company with a millenarian congregation in northern Idaho, and perhaps has left his religious faith behind as well.
When the apocalypse comes, who’s to say it won’t come to the break room of a chain store specializing in arts and crafts?—a chain whose labor practices (enforced by Pauline, the excellent Emily Townley) would make many an HR professional’s hair stand on end. For it is there that Will tries to put his economic house in order, and maybe build some bridges to the past. A standout among his misfit coworkers is the limp-haired Anna (Kimberly Gilbert), a woman with an unmodulated voice and limited social skills.
In the end, Will remains a curiosity for us, despite an honest performance by Russotto. The barriers he has raised against the emotional and financial shocks of the world leave him isolated, and it’s difficult for his to feel empathy for him.
- A Bright New Boise, by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Silver Line progress report: 21
Prefab walls are being dropped into place at the Wiehle Avenue work site—I saw the first one going in last weekend. The terra cotta with gray accent course will be an attractive change from the classic concrete look.
Who’s a fraud?
Stephen Marche mounts a spirited attack on a bit of Hollywood folderol, and digs out a more uncomfortable truth:
… antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” … Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.
Philosophical spaces
Alva Noë looks at Richard Serra.
Seeing, or any other kind of conscious experience, happens not in the private caverns of our minds, but out there, with others, in environments that we make, and that then in turn surround us and compel.
New camera
A new camera, and I’d always wanted to take some snaps from the 7th floor roof deck. Looking north, two domed houses of worship are visible, the golden United House of Prayer for All People, and on the distant heights, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The long horizontal roofline is Galbraith A.M.E. Zion Church.
Looking down into K Street, N.W., the vacant pavement, once a parking lot, has been fenced off for several weeks. Perhaps some new construction is afoot. Looking beyond to New York Avenue, N.W., the green awning marks the location of the old A. V. Ristorante; its aggressive street-level awning used to span the wide sidewalk. Also notice the backside of the billboard, inflected toward Maryland-bound commuters.
Looking to the southeast down Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., the white dome will be familiar to some. The sloping red brick roofline is the Pension Building, home to the National Building Museum.
On the radio: 7
Stacey tapped me for a bit of a challenge: voiceovers for five audio clips (at NPR we call them “actualities”) from Zhou Youguang, to be part of Louisa Lim’s profile of him for today’s All Things Considered. Zhou headed up the committee that devised the pinyin system, thereby reforming the Roman transcription of Chinese characters. Stacey asked for an older man’s voice, seeing as how Zhou is 50 years older than me (his spelling system was published when I was two years old). Older, but spry and mirthful. I hope I gave her what she was looking for; in any event, the completed piece sounds like magic.
I think this is the only time that I will voiceover someone who has his own Wikipedia article. I am deeply honored to have worked on the story.
At the park: 45
Some late-season nesting activity led to some late-season recordkeeping, so here we are in October with final results for the spring nesting season of Hooded Merganser and Wood Duck at Huntley Meadows Park.
We took five boxes down that had not seen nesting activity for five years or more.
This was another year that was not kind to the Wood Ducks, with a 5-year-low 37 ducklings fledged. We saw five mixed-clutch nests this year, out of a total thirteen clutches. Perhaps we are getting better at distinguishing the two species’ eggs.
Summary numbers: 51 hatched/76 laid Hooded Merganser, 37 hatched/82 laid Wood Duck. This year’s raw data worksheet and the 30-year historical summary are available.
Advice to the players
Via A Blog Supreme, two pages from Thelonious Monk’s notebook from 1960:
Don’t play everything (or everytime); let some things go by.
Own closest relative
Via Leta, Carl Zimmer reviews a lot of recent research on slime molds (myxomycetes). Eye-popping photographs by Steven L. Stephenson, especially the shiny black knobby bundles of Metatrichia vesparia.
Silver Line progress report: 20
It looks like the running title for these posts won’t have to change: a (rough) draft Metro system map colors the line to Dulles Silver and uses the abbreviation SV.
Titular
So I was writing an online squib that referred to the 1959 horror film by Georges Franju, known as Eyes without a Face in English. And I was surprised that the National Gallery capitalizes visage in the French version of the title, Les Yeux sans Visage. Now I thought I knew the rules for title capitalization in French, but it turns out that (a) I had never learned them properly (see what comes of getting your information from kids on street corners) and (b) there are three different conventions that various authorities follow. Laura K. Lawless explains.
The convention I taught myself was rule III, sentence capitalization: Les yeux sans visage. It’s the most egalitarian. Rule I, first noun and its adjectives, accounts for many of the titles that I see that confuse me: Les Yeux sans visage. Looks unbalanced. Rule II, all important nouns, strikes me as quintessentially French, since it calls for a judgment of which nouns are important: Les Yeux sans Visage. Sort if like the way taxes are assessed in France.
(By the way, some people capitalize the English title as Eyes Without a Face. I say that without is a preposition and I say the hell with it.)
Rose River loop
Feeling the need to walk along fast-moving mountain water, I plotted a coathanger circuit hike using the Dark Hollow Falls and Rose River Trails in Shenandoah National Park, following only blue and yellow blazes—no white. The trails in this area offer quick access to a couple of fine water features.
A nice wash of fall color was on display, the reds provided primarily by maples. The Dark Hollow Falls Trail is built for lots of traffic, and it’s very popular. It’s a little less popular with the Bambi-peepers who are making the 600-foot return climb from the falls back to the parking lot.
Walkers become more scarce below the falls, where the descending trail follows Hogcamp Branch to its junction with the Rose River. Some muddy downslopes made me glad that I am carrying my stick with me on a more regular basis. I didn’t spend a lot of time botanizing, but I did find a little patch of Partridgeberry with some fruits still remaining. A couple of Downy Woodpeckers, a Common Raven to break up the quiet. On the return climb, a mixed flock with Dark-eyed Juncos.
For a return leg, I like the fire road, rather than the recommended horse trail on the other side of Skyline Drive. This way, I can stop at the Cave family cemetery to pay my respects.
Elevation change 1200 feet, distance 5+ miles, a fairly easy 3:20.
Zombie tree
It’s not quite as tall as it was in June, but the Paulownia tomentosa that I cut down to a one-inch stump has sprouted up again. Looks like I’ll have to dig up the roots to get rid of the damn thing.
And I need to take Leta somewhere other than the side yard for photo ops.