Tree Swallows

The tree swallows have been active at the Howard County Conservancy this past month. I haven’t succeeded in photographing them on the wing over the grassy areas but they like to perch on the fence around the community garden and they are nesting in several boxes.

One particular box was along the loop hike for the third grade hikes I was leading; it seemed like there was a bird in the box or on top of the box almost every time I walked by! The bird would fly away if there was too much noise but it would not take long for it to return.

Swallows are fun birds to watch because they are so acrobatic and they seem to make patterns of loops in the air. They evoke the joy of flying with their motions. Do they feel it too --- or are we just translating their movement into our own emotions? 

Gleanings of the Week Ending May 17, 2014

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Two museums doing 3D scanning of artifacts (one of the technologies introduced in the archaeology course I took on Coursera recently:

Paleontologists unveil online showcase of 3-D fossil remains - An introduction to the University of Michigan’s Online Repository of Fossils.

Look at These Ancient Egyptian Artifacts from Every Amazing Angle This article points to a project at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology to make objects available on the web in a format that allows complete rotation of the object. The project’s beta site also allows zooming in to get a closer look at the objects.

Categorizing Invasive Plants - I’ve recently done some volunteering to help control invasive plants in my community. This was a nice summary of approaches used by land managers.

Newsmap - A visual display of news (based on the Google news aggregator). There is color coding for broad categories of news and it is possible to select a ‘country’ from a list at the top of the display; looking at the news perspective for a country different than your own is always a broadening experience. The visualization has been around for a few years; I only found it recently and am trying it for a few weeks to decide if it is better than looking at the same info in a Newsfeed format.

Bee biodiversity boosts crop yields - Good to know. Hopefully we have not already reduced the diversity of bees on the planet.

8 CIO moms share tales and tips from the IT trenches - These tips make sense for more than just CIO/IT moms!

40 maps that explain the Middle East - I just finished a Coursera course about the modern Middle East….so this series of maps was particularly well timed!

The Most Common Language in Each US State—Besides English and Spanish - Language as a window into differences across the US.

Cold War Spy-Satellite Images Unveil Lost Cities - Tripling the number of known archaeology sites via technology…another story that linked well with the archeology course from Coursera. 

Never Say Die - Recent research results re longevity.

Magnificent 19th-Century Library Shelves 350,000 Books - Architecture of the late 1800s and books….in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It looks like a magical place.

Zooming - May 2014

Spring is full of blooms.  The zoomed images from the past month include plum blossoms, dandelion flowers, a very wet tulip, and some hydrangea to add some blue…..

Maple samaras in the grass (detached before their time by browsing deer), cowslips, and jagged edge tulip….

A mushroom, a jack-in-the-pulpit, and a foraging chipmunk….

A foraging bumble bee, spores on the back of a fern frond, and the cone of a cycad….

Fiddleheads and a Venus fly trap….

The center of a dogwood flower, a peppermint color azalea, and new growth of pines.

I find that photographing makes me more observant while I am out and about….and then again when I am looking at the pictures on a larger screen once I get home. I often don’t realize the whole of what I am capturing in the field. Every zooming blog post I compile is a celebration of the technology available in modern cameras!

Robins’ Nests

Almost every year a robin nests on the cross beam that supports our deck. Our two cats look down through the deck boards from the half of the deck that is covered - with keen interest but unable to disturb the nest at all.

This year we have 5 nests! Maybe the second and fourth one look a little scruffy - might be left over from last year. But that still leaves 3 that look freshly constructed. The fifth one is the one is on the corner of the deck nearest the garden…so the robin frequently leaves in a hurry and noisy complaint whenever I am gardening.

We are quite a few robins in our neighborhood. The trees in the yards are now 20+ years old and the trees in the forest that extended down to the river behind the neighborhood has trees that are older still. The robins seem to increase in number every year but this is the first time I’ve seen the increase so tangibly: more nests means more robins in the next generation!

Gleanings of the Week Ending May 10, 2014

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Dynamic Paintings of Birds Capture the Essence of Flight - Appealing work.  I usually like photographs of birds in flight better than paintings….but these are an exception.

The Coming Antibiotic Crisis, Revealed in Maps - Will we eventually revert to infections that kill like in pre-antibiotic days?

Inside Turkey’s Top Archaeological Sites - From the Dialogue of Civilizations: Gobekli Tepe (oldest human-constructed ceremonial site in the world) and Zeugma (mosaics). Links are included to photos, galleries and virtual tours of the sites. There is also a link at the bottom of the article to other posts about the Dialogue of Civilizations.

10 Spring Cleaning to Dos for Your Digital Abode: Part II - I posted the Part I of this list a few weeks ago I my cleanings list.

Basic science finds corporate refuge - With funding from the US government declining, corporations are picking up some of the funding shortfall.

A History of Garbage in Space - In just over half a century, we’ve created 17000 objects in earth orbit. The majority of them are ‘fragmentation debris.’

What's Your Major? 4 Decades of College Degrees, In 1 Graph - This is a graphic to looks at - move the cursor over it to get numbers that correspond to the colors. Click on the one and a graph with just that major will appear. Physics is almost non-existent in the graph (higher in 1970 than now).

Watch Stunning First Simulation of Universe’s 13-Billion-Year Evolution - In a little over 4 minutes, a simulation of the universe from the beginning to now.

Ocean acidity is dissolving shells of tiny snails off U.S. West Coast - Scientists has previously thought it would be decades before this result of ocean acidification would be observed. It appears that this is one consequence of climate change that is happening faster than anticipated.

Neuroaesthetics - A relatively new field that studies the way humans process beauty and art.

Goslings at Brookside

We had just parked at Brookside Nature Center when my daughter commented that there were goslings in the woods near the stream. Sure enough, by the time we got to the boardwalk and bridge to walk toward Brookside Gardens, the Canadian goose and the goslings were in the stream!

They went under the bridge and kept going. Well - the mom kept going. The goslings were challenged by a riffle in the stream. In the slide show below you can see the mom coming back to give them some encouragement (image 6). They responded with much flapping of stubby wings and managed to get over the barrier!

They swam up stream for a short distance before the mom led them to a small beach.

The goslings paused in the shallow water - probably a bit tired from their adventure.

And then they followed the goose back into the forest. There is one gosling that appears to be a bit more adventuresome…not exactly following the mom.

Gleanings of the Week Ending May 03, 2014

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

A Ranking of the Deadliest Animals in the World - The mosquito is the only one more deadly than humans!

Rainbow Slime Recipe for Play - I couldn’t resist…it’s pretty and fun looking…a great activity for the child in us all!

Two items about bees: 5 Facts about Bumblebees—and how to help them (the bumblebees were very active on a redbud blooming in our area) and The Waggle Dance of the Honeybee (this is not a new video…but timely as the bees become more active this year).

10 Spring Cleaning To Dos for Your Digital Abode: Part I - This is a list written for teachers but it makes sense for others as well! Part I is the first 5 of the 10.

Some of the Strangest and Most Artistic Rooftops in the World - The ones that are green with vegetation are my favorites.

Exquisite Macro Photos Reveal the Miniature World of Insects - My favorite is the dragonfly catching a ride on the seed puff.

Mount Baldy at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore to Remain Off-Limits Indefinitely - Sand behaving in unexplained way….the world is not always easily understood.

Ethereal Silk Scarves Feature NASA's Photographs of Space - I want one of these for Christmas!

Elegant Animal Illustrations Created Using a Morié Pattern - The owl captured my attention…..and then the bats.

Optimizing sweet potato production - Sweet potatoes are one of my favorite foods. I’m glad they are becoming more appreciated. I’ve always had good luck growing them too.

Coursera Experience - May 2014

I finished up two courses in April:

• Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets (Brown University)
• Roman Architecture (Yale University)

They were both thoroughly enjoyable and the Discussion Forums held a rich assortment of pictures that is used as a ‘last hurrah’ for the course material. There are two courses that continue into May and one that starts just at the end of the month:

• The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Tel Aviv University). I have read one of the reference books I found on Paperbackswap and still have another one to go. I also browsed The Architecture of Cairo course material from MIT which seemed to integrate some of what I was learning at the end of the Roman Architecture course and this one.
• Introduction to Systems Biology (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai). At first, I thought this course was going to take me way back to the biology courses I took as an undergraduate….but then I realized that it was going to do much more than that. This one is integrated biology with all the modeling and statistical analysis I did in my computer science based career!
• The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Nubia (Emory University).  I could resist starting another archaeology related course!

And there are 2 more that start up at the end of May

• The Diversity of Exoplants (University of Geneva). I want to take this one since it is such a hot topic in my daughter’s field.
• Preventing Chronic Pain: A Human Systems Approach (University of Minnesota). There are several people in family that deal with chronic pain; I’m always interested in learning about the current state-of-the-art on topics like this.

Dallas Arboretum - March 2014

Late March is probably one of the most beautiful times of year to walk around the Dallas Arboretum. We went on a week day so it was overly crowded. It was sunny and cool - comfortable with a light jacket. I took so many pictures it has taken be a month to pick my favorites to include in the slide show below. The Dallas spring was almost a month ahead of our spring in Maryland this year!  Enjoy this celebration of springtime!

Crane Fly Images

The crane flies were so numerous when I was in Dallas in late March that one somehow got inside the house where I found it on the carpet in the den - motionless. I got out my loupes to take a closer look at the insect.

The whole insect fit in the cup of the 8x loupe. The spindly legs and clear wings looked fragile. They were not quite the same as the insect would have been flying low over the grass alongside many more of its kind.

The 22x loupe showed more detail. Next time I’ll try with a brighter light. The flatter the specimen - the easier it is to focus. That is why the wing is better than the upper body.

Narcissus

Narcissus and spring ---- they go together. The flowers in this post were in my parents’ garden in Dallas but the flowers are frequent sights in Maryland this time of year as well. As I write this (back home in Maryland) I see a patch of daffodils that a neighbor planted at the edge of the forest; they started out in a smaller area 20 years ago and have multiplied - and seem to be in sync with the red blooms of the maples.

I used my 8x loupe to capture images of the central flowers from different perspectives.

And there was a tiny spider that was very still on his flower while I captured his portrait.

Gleanings of the Week Ending April 5, 2014

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Bridging Two Worlds - Lynne Quarmby is a cell biologist….that paints. See some of her art work here.

Several interesting paper sculpture posts: From Zim and Zou (my favorite is the bird in the first image), Massive Paper Installation Feels like You’re Walking Inside a 3D Painting and Bird Sculptures

Wish you could fertilize crops with pee? Urine luck - Article from Grist. It caused me to wonder about 1) how sustainable thinking looks for solutions that are better for the planet….but may be less expensive too, 2) how often sustainable also means ‘closed loop’ (i.e. there are no bad bi-products that build up as ‘waste’) and 3) infrastructure changes that will enable sustainability (in this case -bathrooms and sewer systems could be enablers, but different than they are today).

Noninvasive colorectal cancer screening tool shows unprecedented detection rates - Hooray! It would be great if this or some other non-invasive test became the diagnostic of choice rather than colonoscopy! No one likes the colonoscopy or the prep it requires. Surely the non-invasive test will be less expensive too.

Loblolly pine genome is largest ever sequenced: Seven times bigger than the human genome - This article includes a good explanation of the computational challenges of genomics.

Enormous Climbable Structure - Intriguing design. The sight for the developer is here. There are quite a few of them installed in children’s museums in the US and they all look like lots of fun.

Helpful Infographic Illustrates Polite Dining Around the World - Learn about the cultural nuances of dining in other countries.

Americans using more energy - Not a good trend….Are we using more as the economy improves?

Fair bosses pay the price of burnout - Procedural fairness (structured and rule bound) is beneficial to the organization and employees….but it is hard to sustain without feeling the strain. Should leadership/management training be updated to at least acknowledge that strain and suggest ways to cope with it? Maybe sabbaticals (The Working Vacation) should become more common in non-university organizations.

Daylight saving impacts timing of heart attacks - Should people with heart conditions ‘spring forward’ more gradually?

Noisy Wood Frogs in Spring

Last month I happened to walk by a pond where the Wood Frogs were having their annual orgy. It was one of the first sunny days of spring…still chilly but the sun was warming the water. The hoarse clacking sound drew my attention first; it reverberated through the vegetation around the shallow pool. As I got closer I saw that there were a lot of frogs - in the water, on the rocks.

Then I noticed the masses of frogs surrounding a female. The frogs were celebrating the warmth of the day with in a frenzy to start the next generation.

There was a couple near the orgy that seemed oblivious to the ruckus!

Second Group of Spring Coursera Courses - April 2014

April is going to be Abusy month for classes with 4 concurrent Coursera courses for most of the month:

• Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets (Brown University)
• Roman Architecture (Yale University)
• The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Tel Aviv University)
• Introduction to Systems Biology (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai)

Then by the third week of the month, Archeology course ends….followed by the Architecture course. I was thrilled to find one of the reference books for the Modern Middle East course available via paperbackswap. Readng all the references recoomended by the courses will probably extend into May!

One of the recent serendipity discoveries was in the Archeaology course -- a segment onf creating 3D images of artifacts with opensource software. I did some initial experimenting with Autodesk 123D Catch and that experimentationwill continue in April with different kinds of objects. I'll do a blog post with 3D images as the project evolves.

Being a student is probably one of my favorite activities. Hooray for Coursera!

Ten Days of Little Celebrations - March 2014

Over a year ago I posted about finding something to celebrate each day. It’s an easy thing for me to do and the habit of writing it down reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. This month has been full of ‘little celebrations;’ here are my top 10 for March 2014.

STEM Fair - These spring events used to be called ‘Science Fair’ but the fair has enlarged to include Science - Technology - Engineering - and Math so they have changed the name. I have volunteered as a judge for our county fair for the past 10 years or so. It seems like every year is an improvement over previous years and this year there was a bigger improvement than usual! This year the middle school students were much more articulate about the statistics they were using (standard deviation in particular).

Great snowflake pictures - Some years we get snow in March and sometimes we don’t. This year not only did we get a good snow, the situation was ideal of snowflake photography. Of course, I celebrated with snow ice cream!

Raisins soaked in apricot brandy - I plumped some dried out raisins with apricot brandy for an apple - raisin - celery salad. Yummy! I may do this every time I make the salad from now on. Little culinary successes are always worth celebrating.

Volunteer naturalist classes - Last fall had did most of my prep for becoming a volunteer naturalist by shadowing people that had done it before; this spring I am taking the classes and enjoying them tremendously. I even won the drawing for the book give away - Bringing Nature Home by Douglas W. Tallamy. Wahoo!

Philadelphia buildings - I had a hard time choosing between the Philadelphia Flower Show itself and discovering the interesting buildings of downtown Philadelphia which will probably be the focus for my next foray into the city. Either way - the March day trip to Philadelphia was a daylong celebration.

The last two volcano lectures - I worked my way through a series of online lectures on material science related to volcanoes that stretched my memory of chemistry (from classes about 40 years ago) and was thrilled to get to the last two lectures that focused on how lab work is done with silicate glass and how all the research and field work gets translated onto geologic maps.

A clean car - With all the snow, my car became thoroughly encrusted with salt. Its shiny clean look coming out of the car wash was worth celebrating.

Lots of feathers - It was a little disconcerting to find a pile of feathers beside our house but then I realized that the presence of a predator was an indicator of a working ecosystem in our neighborhood….and  I enjoyed having the feathers for a photography project.

Pot luck lunch - I have always liked pot luck events. Sometimes there is a skew to desserts but this one had great variety. If anything, it was skewed toward fancy salads.

Work experiences to pass along - One day I was able to pass along two potential solutions to my daughter from my career: 1) Hotel too expensive for a conference? Room with someone. 2) Logo shirt required for an outreach event way too big to tuck into slacks? Wear it tucked into a skirt or belted like a short dress over leggings or skinny slacks. It’s worth celebrating any time lessons learned long ago are still relevant!

Robins!

Robins on the lawn or in the garden are another sign of spring. The ones I’ve seen recently appear to be tolerating the last blast of winter quite well. Even without their feathers fluffed they look well fed! The robins pictured in this post seemed almos tame....alowing me to walk relatively close (and then use the camera's zooom) to get their pictures.

We always seem to have the most robins in the spring. They seem to move around in small flocks and then we see them one at a time or in pairs later in the season. Perhaps some of them head further north and a few stick around to nest in our area. Almost every summer we have a nest under our deck.

Gleanings of the Week Ending March 22, 2014

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Education boosts brain function long after school, study shows - The benefits of education extend way beyond career preparation/enablement. This study did not look at the impact of continuing education. Will a study 20 years from now document the cognitive impact of the increased availability of low cost (or free) online courses such as Coursera?

Mongol Empire rode wave of mild climate, but warming now may be tipping region into unparalleled drought - Tree ring research from the steppes has been used to characterize climate of the region back to 650 BC!

Land cover change over five years across North America revealed - Changes from 2005 to 2010 are depicted with satellite images. The article describes the North American Environmental Atlas which is online here.

“Passive House Revolution” Shows the Rise of Extremely Efficient Houses - Hopefully more new houses and renovations will use these ideas!

To Keep Teenagers Alert, Schools Let Them Sleep In - In many school districts the high schools start the earliest and then the buses are reused for middle school and elementary. Is it better for elementary school students to start earlier and let the high school students sleep in?

Distorted Landscapes Create Surreal Perspectives of the World - Randy Scott Slavin’s spherical panoramas

Water-rich gem points to vast 'oceans' beneath Earth's surface, study suggests - Ringwoodite sample found in Brazil…inside brown diamond. It’s quite a story of almost accidental discovery and international collaboration.

Three Adorable, Endangered Tiger Cubs Born at the London Zoo - 2.5 minutes of clips from the Cubcam

The Many Origins of the English Language - A graphic that updates for period selected (showing either the period or cumulative from Pre-1150 to present. Even from 1950-present, Latin was the biggest contributor with French coming next.

Why Do Flamingos Eat Upside Down? Your Weird Animal Questions Answered - From National Geographic’s Weird & Wild

3 Free eBooks - March 2014

It’s time again for the monthly post about eBooks that are freely available on the Internet. The three below are my favorites for March 2014: birds, insects and flowers. I am anticipating spring!

Gould, John. The Birds of Europe. London: R. and J.E. Taylor. 1837. Five volumes are available on the Internet Archive: volume 1, volume 2, volume 3, volume 4, and volume 5. A few years ago I saw an exhibit of John Gould’s bird prints (large books) in a museum in Tennessee….and made a note to check the Internet Archive for any scanned versions of his work since the exhibit only displayed a small portion of the volumes. It was such a pleasure to finally browsing through these books online.

Fabre, Jean-Henri; Stawell, Rodolph, Mrs; Teixeira de Mattos, Alexander; Detmold, Edward Julius. Fabre's Book of Insects. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. 1926. Available on the Internet Archive here. The illustrations by Detmold are the draw for this book.

Galeotti, Henri); Funck, Nicolas; Morren, Edouard. L'Horticulteur practicien; revue de l'horticulture franaise et trangre. Paris: A. Goin. 1858. Two volumes are available on the Internet Archive: 1857 and 1858. The illustrations of rich with color and detail of flowers….it’s like touring a conservatory online. I picked the forsythia illustration because it reminded me of how disappointed I that our neighbor’s forsythia is likely to have a hard time this year since the deer have eaten all the tender parts. It might not manage any blooms at all!

Macro Feathers

The pile of feathers beside the house last week prompted a little photography project with the 8x and 22x loupes. I found myself concentrating on the ends of the feathers….and how different the wing feathers were from the fluffy down.

Gleanings of the Week Ending March 15, 2014

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

10,000 years on the Bering Land Bridge: Ancestors of Native Americans paused en route from Asia - I’d always assumed that the ‘land bridge’ was narrower - just across the narrowest part of the Bering Strait.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #63 - I haven’t included one of these in my gleanings recently….doesn’t mean that I don’t continue to enjoy them. My favorite in this batch is the kingfisher with the little crab in its bill.

Is Daylight Savings Energy Efficient? No, Says Expert - Every spring and fall I hate the time change. Does anyone like it? Sometimes I think governments like the idea simply because it confirms that they have the influence to cause the population to do something in synchrony!

Nutrition Facts Label: Proposed Changes Aim to Better Inform Food Choices - The new labels are in a 90 day comment period from the FDA. What do you think? I like them. The revised labels include new info (added sugars, Vitamin D, and potassium) that I have missed in the past. I like the larger calorie count and the attempt to make the serving size the size of a real serving.

The Weight of Mountains - A short film (11.5 minutes) about how mountains are made….live…and die.

Mothers leave work because they don't want to behave like working men, study suggests - ‘Presenteeism’ (the notion that being at your desk until late is required, even if there is nothing to do) should not be a requirement for men or women….but it has the effect of driving women out of the workforce more often than men. What a waste of skills and education! Will the workplace change over time?

Deer proliferation disrupts a forest's natural growth - This study was done in Ithaca NY but Maryland has very similar problems. The deer are so prolific that they are eating all their preferred foods down to the ground.

NASA's Breathtaking Images of Space - The view from space….always awesome.

Women's jobs are poorer paid, less flexible, more stressful - My career was in a male-dominated field and was well paid. About 20 years in, I realized that while I did work longer hours overall than women in many other fields, the stress was generally positive and not brutal in duration….and the flexibility increased over the course of my career too! So - this research result meshes quite well with my experience from the mid-70s onward.

Honeybees reveal that evolution is stranger than you ever realized - Just how do sterile bees contribute to the fitness of their species? Kin selection. That’s why honey bees in Yemen have adapted to be excellent at air conditioning their hives in the hot desert air and Japanese have adapted to combat deadly wasps in a unique way.