theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Pollution is just a resource in the wrong place: Denver is building a sewer heat-recovery program, as Sam Brasch of Colorado Public Radio reports.
[Shanti] Pless said the biggest barrier isn’t technology — it’s helping developers rethink the size of their heating and cooling systems. Sewer heat recovery often works best as the heart of a district-size energy system, where a central plant provides energy to a whole neighborhood or office complex.
Last full work day of the season:
Three more boxes hatched out! This leaves one more clutch in box #2 to go, plus two eggs in adjacent box #4 that we’re monitoring. Box #4 probably will not be incubated.
Rather than a scheduled work day, K and C will check those boxes in the next week or so as is convenient.
I patched my patch on box #67, and I retacked the screening on box #3 that C and I improvised. That box was super-full of eggs (25), but it seems that all but 1 fledged. I didn’t count that many membranes, however, so the box remains a but of a mystery.
For next year, boxes #7 and #84 have cracked bottoms and are candidates for replacement.
I’ll prepare a full summary report after I collect the last data on our two outstanding boxes.
Thanks all!
It looks like every outlet has picked up this story by now, but ICYMI: a small citizen science study suggests that a house cat will sit in a box, even if it’s only lines on the floor, and even if the box is an optical illusion.
Sunday’s report:
Five boxes hatched out — it’s looking to be a good season for us.
I don’t have a full count of eggs for box #13. K, if you happen to have any other notes, please pass them along.
We patched a knot hole in the roof of box #67. I will come back and make a more permanent fix.
Remaining boxes with eggs: #2 and #4 on the inflow, #6 and #84 on the main pond, and #3 in the new pool by the tower.
Our next work day, the 23rd, may be our last for the season. We just have five boxes to spot check, plus the repair box. That said, box #4 had new eggs on Sunday, so this may be a late clutch that will run into June.
I follow this log when I need to cross Barnyard Run. The water is about thigh-deep on me in the center of the stream, so the log gives me some support.
Of course Ed Yong found a different angle on the arrival of Brood X: “Cicadas Have an Existential Problem.” And a clever analogy to illustrate what’s going on.
A little bit pitch drop experiment, a little bit Michael Apted, a little bit genetic repository: William Beal’s 142-year-old seed viability experiment, reported by Nell Greenfieldboyce.
A microbiologist named Richard Lenski looked on. “The others were digging and trying to figure everything out, and I sort of held the map and held it under my jacket to keep it dry at one point. That was my hard work,” says Lenski. “I was wondering if cops might show up at some point.”
It looks like this guy is back.
Whoever created Eyeglassesdepot, he concluded, simply cloned OpticsFast, perhaps in the interest of saving time and money, and then made a few cosmetic changes. That person isn’t necessarily Vitaly Borker.
“But who else,” Mr. Pierce asked, “would steal the code from a website as notorious as OpticsFast?”
The report for last Sunday:
Box #68 hatched out — Hooded Merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus). This was the box with 10 eggs on 7 March that I suspected was a carryover from last year. But 15 of the 16 eggs hatched, so it would seem the bird just got started very early this spring.
We’re watching 9 boxes with active clutches. I expect that many of them will be hatched by our next work day on 9 May.
We saw an Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) carrying nesting material to the new platform, and several incidents of Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) chasing off crows.
C has reported wet chips in box #67. We’ll take a look to see whether we can improve the waterproofing for that box.
We’ll work again on 9 May and then 23 May. Depending on what we find, that might be all for the season.
The weather looks peachy this weekend! Take an hour and snap some pics for the City Nature Challenge.
I’ve seen a few exit holes, but no cicada adults yet.
Sorry/not sorry, Leta and Andy: An FAQ About Your New Birth Control: The Music of Rush.
… imagine taking the most annoying parts of science fiction and Libertarianism, isolating them, and then somehow blending them up into a cursed musical slurry.
Hannah Kingsley-Ma goes mushrooming in Green-Wood Cemetery with the New York Mycological Society.
[Potter] Palmer and [Sigrid] Jakob think that one of the reasons for this fungal diversity is that some trees in Green-Wood—of which there are thousands, and hundreds of species—date back to the cemetery’s earliest years. (Green-Wood was founded in 1838.)
A report for last Sunday:
As the spring continues to warm, I am tardier with getting reports out.
We had our first hatch, box #7, as park visitors enjoyed the mini mergansers on the wetland. We have seen nesting activity in 11 of our 16 boxes so far. We should be seeing more hatches on the 25th.
We made a quick and dirty mod to new box #3 (the one with the upside down door), but the screening that we tacked in place could be made more secure. Not a moment too soon, because we have 25 eggs incubating in that box. Box #1, also in the new pool, also has an excessive number of eggs.
Robin is scheduled to be joining us next Sunday. The plan was for her to cover an absence, but there will now be five of us, so perhaps we can cover the boxes more quickly. 10-day weather forecast suggests rain, so I will watch the forecasts as Sunday approaches.
Thank you all!
Our textbook is titled Japanese for Busy People, vol. I, and the lessons are organized around situations that a businessperson would want to handle. (A very early unit concerns exchanging business cards.) Each unit has a theme, like “Express gratitude,” or “Make a telephone call,” or “Order food at a restaurant.”
With more than a little nod to James Thurber’s “There’s No Place Like Home,” I remixed some of the unit themes into
Cleaning out a file folder of clippings… I rediscovered this delightful pan of Episode III by Anthony Lane:
… I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves.
A new approach to phishing that I haven’t seen before from the benthic creepy-crawlies:
Failure Delivery Notice.
User: [REDACTED]3 pending sent message couldn’t be delivered
Action Required.
How to Fix It.Click here to view undelivered sent email.
Created Date: 4. 13. 2021