Musings
Today’s headline activity: a visit to Mogollón Ghost Town. By UP standards, however, it wasn’t really a ghost town—eight or nine people live there year-round, and several businesses persist, although maybe not year-round.
As Mogollon, it was a booming mining town for several decades, longer than Seney, I think. We found the drive in (from the west) jaw-dropping, just spectacular. After our visit, we went around through Glenwood, and up to the Catwalk, another artifact of mining activities (pipeline up the creek). The overcast sky made photo-taking difficult, and the elevation has kept us from running around much. We do more plodding!
It’s raining now, rather unexpectedly for us, and the rain felt cold on our faces as we, with overabundant determination, took a planned dip in the hot tub, cutting it short due to the inclement circumstances. (Yesterday, we stayed in almost an hour, much of it with the jets and lights off to better see the sky.)
Posted at 11:34 PM |
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Life is a puzzle. Or, a series of puzzles. Certainly, marriage is! Perhaps it is that any complex system is a puzzle, therefore our ecosystem is a puzzle. Anyway, puzzles abound!
Take a look at changes in the sediment load of the Mississippi River from this NYT article. Of course, you notice first that the overall sediment load has dropped by more than half—yet, the dredges are still busy day and night keeping shipping channels open. Then you notice that the relative sizes of the upstream contributor-rivers has changed dramatically—the upper Miss itself has shifted from being a little stub to a multibranched load-carrier. Maybe next: still the largest single contributor-river is the Missouri. And: what’s the deal with that Atchafalaya drainage fork?
The question I’m left with: exactly which Mississippi River (and which Amazon Basin, which Yellowstone Park, etc.) are we talking about “returning�? to (also, see upper graphic)?
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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This lovely ’shroom really was this delicate, pale lemon color.
One way to look at it is the gods were watching us this afternoon, and the dark gods removed our DSL connection for a few hours, while the gods of light prodded Apple to agree that they were taking just too darned long to fix the dysfunctional DVD player on our well-loved 12�? laptop—indeed, they said they didn’t know when they’d receive the replacement part, so…John’s magic kicked in, and they offered us a NEW, Intel core DUO, MacBook, black, with built-in iSight and all the other goodies (and including remote control!), whenever jcb showed up at the store.
Of course, he immediately braved rush hour traffic to scoot up to Lenox and nab it—took all of two minutes in the store, he said. That is customer service!
I confess to a few minutes of nostalgia for the old laptop, but I suspect that this one will become a boon companion (of the techno-sort) quite soon….
If you’re expecting me to mention the new date for the latest Neandertals, okay, here’s my take: could be a small relict population in southern Iberia, with the European mainland already cleared of the species and replaced by Early Moderns—that is, if the date is good, just as the good Dr. Finlayson (!) and his team report.
Posted at 5:45 PM |
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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.
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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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….
Posted at 6:13 PM |
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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!
Posted at 1:56 PM |
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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?
Posted at 4:41 PM |
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For the last few months, huge machines have been touring our neighborhood at a snail’s pace, replacing first sewage and now fresh water pipes. This massive and noisy monster worked its way down our street the other day, shaking the house, and emitting vibrations I could feel in my bones. Either that, or historian David Christian’s 2004 Maps of Time, about what he calls Big History, is more monumental than I thought!
For several excellent reasons, I recommend this volume over anything by that Diamond guy. Christian says his book is a modern creation myth (pg. 2), and I’d say it’s more, more scientific and fairly comprehensive, and lacking in the huge contradictions that often stud creation myths, although the Big History tag seems more commercial and like a marketing gimmick than I prefer….
Posted at 6:33 PM |
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Here’s another Michigan park, Fayette.
Here’re US home values, adjusted for inflation over time, in a graph from the NY Times meant to to indicate that since the late ’90s, they’ve risen precipitously. But, in Tufte-eque terms, this is misleading. While strictly speaking, the plot is probably correct, what it’s meant to convey—that we’re in a huge real estate bubble—would be attenuated if these data were plotted against household income or something similar. In other words, the cost of a home is one thing, but the dent it makes in the household income is something different. Also, if you took out one or a very few markets (e.g., NY itself), I suspect the average home cost over the last few years, and even previously in the century, might not have increased so dramatically….
BTW, can we consider these kinds of statistics just a window in time, for better or worse?
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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One thing I’m grappling with these days is how to graphically portray scale and time. It’s a gnarly problem. Here, Alain Pavé shows overlapping scales of interactions for entities ranging from teeny things smaller than genomes to ecosystems and biospheres, all wrapped up in a single package, that at least on first blush, looks accurate. (Just how small are the smallest organisms anyway?)
Obviously, using two axes is an obvious solution (time on y and scale on x). I’m pondering adding a z axis, with a third variable (e.g., another kind of scale, for example size in extent—hectares—vs population). Hurts my head to try and actually generate that figure, however.
Fortunately, my bright, wise hubby, the Genius Wizard, has just purchased the latest Edward Tufte, so a guide is at hand….
* Pavé, Alain. 2006. “Biological and Ecological Systems Hierarchical Organization,” in Hierarchy in Natural and Social Sciences. Edited by Denise Pumain, pp. 39–70. Dordrecht: Springer. Figure 2, page 48.
Posted at 6:20 PM |
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