Bald-faced?
Sunday, 10 September 2006
When I saw this, I thought bald-faced hornet on a boletus. Boletus I’m sure. The hornet species still seems right, too.
I walked quietly on….
Musings
Preserved artifact
Saturday, 9 September 2006
Cruising through Google’s downloadable books, I found some miscellaneous publications, including volume 1 of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of New-York (yes, with hyphen), published in 1871–1872. This canoe is from p. 67, a brief article called “Canoe in Savannah-River Swamp” (hyphens must have been cheap in those days) by Charles C. Jones, Jr. Actually, quite a few canoes, considering how unlikely it is that they would survive, have been found over the years in the Coastal Plain of Georgia and the Carolinas, sunken in the muck. Undoubtedly many are prehistoric.
Revisiting Coltrane
Friday, 8 September 2006
No real theme to today’s musings….
Photos are of a grave in a rural Georgia cemetery, quite a distance from the sea that yielded the shells that decorate its top. Exposure to the weather exposes their lack of durability…. Still, it’s a pretty sentiment….
Outside reading: click here to read a lovely story by Ben Ratliff about how satisfying John Coltrane’s music still is. He notes:
In his time Coltrane had no peer as a player of romantic ballads; he learned from Johnny Hodges, the master of that form. For his first wife, he wrote “Naima�?…. Perhaps it’s the insistent pedal tone, grounding everything, or the wide intervals, or the rich harmony; but “Naima�? almost reinvented this type of tune in jazz, building on Hodges saxophone showcases like Duke Ellington’s “Warm Valley�? yet intimating something deeper, a kind of contemplative, I’ll-see-you-in-the-next-world feeling.
Me, I’m headed for iTunes Music Store to improve our Coltrane playlist….
Forest green
Thursday, 7 September 2006
Yucatán Peninsula: cenote at Chichén Itzá.
When I first started this blahg I should have mentioned Antipixel, the blog of a terrific photographer who’s Australian and living in Japan while working as a web coordinator. His images are amazing and his words are thoughtful and lovely, and Antipixel has to be added to the list of blahgs that inspired me originally, and continues to do so. Take a look at this photo of trees and moss and green-ness on the island of Yakushima (never heard of it; looks gorgeous!), at, get this, a kilometer above sea level! You can even download a higher-res version for your desktop—I did!
Life’s succession
Wednesday, 6 September 2006
I can’t believe that when The Puppeteers put together The Puppet’s administration (aka The Plan), with gray-beards and yes-people in all the key positions, they didn’t spend considerable time and energy on issues of succession. By putting the current version of Tricky Dick in the Veep role, they did the opposite of anointing that office-holder as the heir-apparent. The rest of the core administration officials are team players (obviously deliberately chosen for this tendency), and so unlikely to want to be Puppet-leader themselves. This means that the focus and spotlight stays on the Puppet-shrub—while he’s in office, which had to have been important to The Puppeteers, at minimum as a distraction from policies such as the erosion of civil rights, etc. enacted by the Players across the administration. So, what was the Rove-ster thinking about succession when they selected The Shrub, or was he overruled by the gray-beards?
Or did The Puppeteers think that to make the dramatic changes they have wrought, they’d sacrifice the advantage in the next election, since the administration and conventional leadership would be so tainted by the changes they so carefully and often secretly would craft?—so that the next Leader would have to come from outside, and that was up to him and not to them to plan for?
No, I keep thinking, there was too much at stake to not consider the succession issue extensively, and to not consider playing the legitimacy card by anointing from within…so, are all those thought to have been high-probability Successors when The Plan was put in place too tainted for them to continue in that role?
And, how much does what The Puppet’s been doing over the last few days have to do with succession?
Ellipsoid representation
Tuesday, 5 September 2006
Maps fascinate me. After all, they take a planetary sphere and reduce (usually a piece of) it to a flat version that is instructive and compelling (at least the good ones do). Essentially, a map is a kind of propaganda, the product of a suite of choices that prioritize certain things and disguise or eliminate others.
Cartographers control multiple mapping elements, especially projection, orientation, scale, and symbols. Scale, orientation, and symbols are straightforward concepts. Scale is the simplest—a map may have a single scale, or the scale may vary in certain directions; the accuracy of that scale is also variable. We often think of orientation as “which way is up?�?, but myriad choices may be made; AAA strip maps would prioritize the route in the layout. Symbols allow distilling of complex ideas and information constituting the pictorial language of the map.
Projections are trickier. Here’s the fifty-cent definition of cartographic projection: the representation, on the plane, of all or part of the terrestrial ellipsoid. Projections are grid systems (where’s the datum?) that in effect generate geographic addresses, and introduce systematic distortions. Map projections affect area, shape, direction, distance, and scale, such that not all can be accurate simultaneously.
When building, drawing, or constructing a map, you have to first select your projection—in effect, you first choose what to prioritize, then orientation and scale.
Of course, with new programs like Google Earth (with interactive projections), hand-held GPSs for the masses, and even augmented reality, cartography and projections are increasingly complex and in flux.
All of this is by way of the fact that I came across this Boston Public Library interface that lets you look close-up at a 2nd century map by Ptolemy, published in 1482, and other maps. Click on “Open in Map Viewer�? for the closeup and then zoom in!
Efficiency?
Monday, 4 September 2006
Note that first on this list of how to have a quieter computer is, tada!, buy a Mac! Major points to author Daniel Greenberg. Unfortunately, mostly such articles skip the Mac, which often flat out does not have the problems discussed in the piece, e.g., viruses, horrendous software install times, extreme frustration with [fill in the blank]…. The real sad part is that people who actually take their advisement from such articles just aren’t aware that having a Mac would solve their PC time and frustration problems….
BTW, I wonder how successful the latest Mac ads on TV are, the ones with the two guys representing the Mac (cool guy once on the series “Ed�?) and the PC (the greazy—yes, with that spelling—geek)….
History brick
Sunday, 3 September 2006
You can find history under your feet, and you don’t have to dig for it!
Against all odds in this hustle-bustle city, there’s a street over by Piedmont Park that is still surfaced with brick pavers. Most are plain, but a few were made by Copeland-Inglis, of Birmingham, over in ’bama.
Only a tiny bit of rudimentary googling, and I found this 1910 photo of John R. Copeland’s house in the Norwood neighborhood, and the note that Mr. Copeland was President of Copeland-Inglis Shale Brick Company. Elsewhere I found a note about the house’s owner, and a tidbit about the building’s history:
Birmingham city directories indicate that the Copeland family moved out in the late 1920s, and the house was then divided into six apartments. It remained an apartment house for decades.
Speaking of molded items with their maker’s names incorporated, I think I’d drink more beer if the bottles still had the manufacturer’s name and city molded into the bottles. Several times when I was doing archaeological surveys in the Upper Peninsula, I found old bottles with this info, from breweries in Manistique, Marquette, and Munising.
Of course, earlier today I was flipping channels and saw someone showing off a “DeSoto Beer�? can, probably found by metal-detecting (I hope they had the land-owner’s permission). Apparently the company lasted only a year or so, down in Tampa.
Anyway, back to the present…. But check what’s under your feet once in a while, okay?
Go USA!
Saturday, 2 September 2006
Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses.
—from Diana Jean Schemo in the NY Times.
Translation: how can you teach freshman classes in, for example, anthropology, if the incoming students can’t read, write, do simple syntheses of what they’ve been assigned?
Answer: you can’t and you don’t. You compensate by not requiring college-level performance (e.g., no writing assignments). Why anyone would chose to pay college prices to learn high-school level material mystifies me.
Sad truth: nearly half the incoming students will not graduate.
The real question: when those that do graduate receive their diplomas, are they still behind? Or are they truly competent? Heh—guess we know the answer to that!
Phony tax
Friday, 1 September 2006
Individual taxpayers will be able to claim a refund of up to $60 on their 2006 federal returns as the government attempts to give back $8 billion in long-distance telephone taxes that courts have ruled should not have been collected.
—from Kathleen Day and the Washington Post….
In short, apparently everyone with a long-distance bill has been overcharged a 3% tax over a 41-month period ending the end of July of this year! The solution to this bureaucratic nightmare—
For the 2006 return, a person filing a return with one exemption can claim $30; two exemptions, $40; three exemptions, $50; and four or more exemptions, $60.
You don’t have to submit any proof of paying the fees, just request the refund…. Don’t spend it all in one place!
Off to make Dracula Chicken—I’ll post the recipe soon!