...more recent posts
Bird News, Good and Bad
The confirmation of Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas is pretty amazing. I remember the “probably extinct” designation from childhood field guides, and dutifully skeptical ornithologists have been discounting supposed sightings for decades. Most of those probably were phantoms, and now it turns out that much of the searching was in the wrong place, but it’s still hard to believe that such a large bird could go undetected for 60 years. Of course if you’ve ever tried to find a purportedly “conspicuous” bird, even in a relatively small area like Central Park, you’d know how inconspicuous they can be when they want. The reappearance of the Ivory-billed is an index of the success of conservation and consciousness-change over the past century, as the once vast bottomland forests of the south recover from the wholesale logging of old.
If the Ivory-billed is a tragedy in reverse, our local Red-tailed Hawk saga has taken a turn for the worse, though their prospects are probably still better than the woodpeckers’. It now seems clear that the 5th Ave. nest has failed, as the female has been sitting on it for over 45 days with no sign of hatchlings. This is sad, but not totally unexpected. There were failures in 1993 and 94, both years when the nest was newly constructed. It’s probable that a second year’s accumulation of twigs is necessary to properly cushion the eggs in this location, and it’s likely that the birds will try again next year, with a better chance for success.
Partial list of Arianna Huffington's "celebrity bloggers" (here's the NYT background story if you don't know what this is about.)
fake or foto
unrelated quote of the day --
"I wonder if identifying Tom Arnold as an "actor" wasn't another subtle insertion of LA Times deadpan humor. Arnold does something on screen in The Stupids, McHale's Navy, and Soul Plane, but I'm not sure it could be characterized by even the most charitable as "acting."" - james wolcott
arianna's kvetching post v. tpmcafe
Major League Baseball signs deal with Six Apart to produce MLBlogs.
[....]
Maybe in a hundred years, assuming there's anybody left around, people will be amused at their great-grandparents' failure to grasp the self-evident idea that what was called literature was a niche-marketed intellectual property, and that the war between the outlaws and the canonicals was another dispute between Big-Endians and Small-Endians. (Half a dozen people with a taste for the recherché will even get the allusion.) You can already see the borders getting porous. Final quiz: where do you put A) Mary Gaitskill, B) Nicholson Baker, C) Neal Stephenson, D) Jonathan Lethem? Canonicals or alt.canonicals? Or should we call them, along with Foer, Wallace and so on, postcanonicals? (Just plain ''writers'' would put the taxonomists out of business.) ''Don't join too many gangs,'' Robert Frost advised us back in 1936, but for the past 50 years or so, writers haven't had much choice: who you hang out with, and who watches your back, defines what you are. ''The Outlaw Bible'' still posits a literary East L.A., with palefaces and redskins tagging and throwing up signs. With a little luck, we won't have to live here much longer.
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.
Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
alex mentioned thats hes got like 200 or so unread comments on the tree. sounds like he got some pretty screwed up priorities. too much working and hanging out in the park. so if youd like to say something to alex that hell never read, comment here.
laine Scarry
For the past year, we have spoken unceasingly about the events of September 11, 2001 . But one aspect of that day has not yet been the topic of open discussion: the difficulty we had as a country defending ourselves; as it happened, the only successful defense was carried out not by our professional defense apparatus but by the passengers on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania . The purpose of this essay is to examine that difficulty, and the one success, and ask if they suggest that something in our defense arrangements needs to be changed. Whatever the ultimate answer to that question, we at least need to ask it since defending the country is an obligation we all share.
continue...
"saint phil"
Benjamen Walker talks with authors Jonathan Lethem and Josh Glenn about the Science Fiction genius Philip K Dick. He also gets the cover of the book UBIK tattooed on his arm. LISTEN
from a book thread
mello kitty
toys in the attic
this scruffy guy has been coming around for food lately. he (i suppose he could very well be a she, but i've taken to calling him claude) climbs up the tree in the back of the house and comes onto the deck. mike started feeding him, so he's only got himself to blame if we soon have two cats again. i haven't been able to get near him yet, he's very skittish, but i'd like to somehow get him to a vet. anyone need a mouser?
Spent last weekend in Seattle, the Public Library was one of the hightlights. Amazing, worth the trip from Portland. Roaming the deep red undulations of the Meeting Floor reminded me of hours spend as a kid walking through the giant heart exhibitat the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
Darwin, The expression of the emotions in man and animals, London, John Murray, 1872
if google maps (now with satellite photos) is accurate, then its possible that if i left my apartment and went perfectly northward for 20 miles, i might nearly pass directly through the house i grew up in. definitely within a half-mile.
The "architectural eyesore of the month" guy has a blog .
This is a debka link, so salt to taste, but I found this article very interesting
The most signal achievement of Brzezhinski’s career was predetermined a year before he took office by one of his last experiences as an academic. In 1976, a Polish Archbishop, Karol Wojtyla, came to Harvard to deliver a lecture. So impressed was Professor Brzezinski, a churchgoer, that he invited the visitor for tea, during which they found much in common. The regular correspondence they embarked on, in Polish, continued for years after Wojtyla’s investiture as Pope John Paul II on October 22, 1978.
i wish people would quit dying for a little while.
Silent rave with wireless headphones. I remember Steve had this idea at least 5 years ago.
(Also, since that link is to boing-boing: someone - I can't remember who - was complaining recently that boing-boing now has so many ads they have become the NASCAR of blogs. LOL. So true.)
Krugman readers have probably seen it but here's his latest.
teaser for the upcoming edition of Scientific American:
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.