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Friday, November 13, 2009
Heard moments ago on New Mexico public radio: "It's a whole box full of Pandoras."Almost as good as an Aubreyism. Labels: quotes Landscapes of Mars Since 2006, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real.Bit slow to load, but well worth the wait! Labels: astronomy, Mars, Photography And in Herodotus-related news: The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology's biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.Also via Megan McArdle. Labels: archaeology, history Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Origins of the Japanese people and language by Jared Diamond. Interesting, and a nice summary. I didn't realize that linguists were classifying Japanese and Korean as far outliers of Altaic. Via Megan McArdle. Labels: archaeology, Japan, linguistics, Turkic Thursday, November 05, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Last weekend: helping to peel 1,500 pounds of green chile for our friend's New Mexican restaurant in Alaska. Nice way to spend a weekend:
Today: Larissa's visiting! Took her out to be intrepid in Bandelier during a break in the snowstorm:
This weekend: Magdalena. Labels: New Mexico Friday, October 23, 2009
If I win the lottery*, I now know what to get Steve for a present: parahawking! Perhaps a trifle silly, but damn! it looks fun. Hat tip: Terrierman. *Seriously unlikely, unless I start playing. Labels: birds, Bloody Good Thursday, October 22, 2009
Tamarisk removal 101 "If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough." (See previous post for context) The manual technique: Find the taproot. Begins with clipping and sawing, generally ends in a hole ten feet over and seven feet down from where you thought the tree was. This is not feasible on a large scale. At the end of the day, your volunteers will require quantities of beer hard to provide in a wilderness setting, even with raft support.
Cut stump treatment is another possibility, which involves sawing off the limbs and painting an herbicidal glue onto the stumps. A lot easier than digging them out, but it leaves a lot of pointy sticks around and is still not feasible on the scale of canyon country. The Bosque del Apache refuge in New Mexico bulldozed, burned and poisoned cyclically for years before they finally got the bastards under control, and they had road access. You see why beetles start to look more appealing. A spawning bed for native fish, mercifully pristine. But Tamara and her volunteers cleaned out the lower end of it this June. And the tamarisk are lurking not far away.
Tamarisk Beetles Found in Grand Canyon: Researchers previously thought that this species of the tamarisk leaf beetle would restrict its range to above the 38th parallel, which is near the upper end of Lake Powell. The beetles were not approved for release within 200 miles of southwestern willow flycatcher habitat, an endangered species which is known to nest in tamarisk - a dominant species in the Colorado River corridor. Tamarisk leaf beetles are now causing defoliation of tamarisk trees further south than originally anticipated. According to Dr. Dan Bean of the Colorado Department of Agriculture, the small population of beetles recently documented in Grand Canyon National Park is unlikely to overwinter successfully. However, it appears likely that as beetle numbers increase a viable reproducing population will be established in Grand Canyon within the next several years.Good news or bad? I'd come down tentatively on the side of good. After all, the whole point of the beetle program is to get them out there eating tammies, and if they're able to do it down south it could be very good for a lot of places I love. But it was somewhat comforting to think that they had geographic limitations. Reporting on the beetle program is generally rather confused; I never seem to read the same details twice. Tamara Naumann, the park botanist for Dinosaur National Monument and a major driving force behind the beetles, told me this summer that there are actually two species in the mix: the northern-adapted one that was released in Dinosaur, and a more southerly version released (if I remember correctly, which I may not) by the state of Colorado. She also said that there are apparently beetle poachers who are collecting some from release sites and taking them elsewhere. It's been nice during the last couple seasons in Dinosaur to see some decidedly ratty tamarisk stands. It apparently takes three or four good defoliations to kill the damn trees, so with any luck we'll start seeing real death in the next year or two. Of course, being a biologic control, the beetles are not expected to eliminate tamarisk completely, and then go rampaging about for other things to devour. The best case scenario is that the tammy populations will crash, followed by a beetle crash, followed by a tamarisk rebound, etc. The hope is not that the trees will be eliminated, but that the beetles will bring them under sufficient control that native plants can start competing again and other removal methods will become feasible at select sites. Virtually the only Achilles heel of tamarisk is that it doesn't like shade; there's a hope that if box elders and other natives can get saplings establishes, they may be able to shade out the tammies in places. If you've just tuned in to this story, I should mention that the decision to use biologic controls was not made lightly. The people behind it, believe it or not, are aware of the risks, disastrous historical precedents, and probably even the relevant Simpsons episode. The decision to release follows over twenty years of lab study, the most intensive study on a biologic control ever. The beetles are very tamarisk specific. Tamarisk has no North American relatives at the genus level, and its only relative in the same family lives in very different (i.e. non-riparian) habitat. The risk is there, but it's low, as low risk as a biologic control can ever be. Ms. Naumann is humble regarding the introduction, and aware that "future generations may curse my name." She has also worked against other biological control projects where the outlook was more dubious. But she likes to point out that doing nothing was a choice as well, a choice whose consequences were predictable and disastrous, given the high value of the riparian habitat that tammies invade. Of particular concern in Dinosaur are the tammies moving up the Yampa canyon to invade some of the very last cobble bars where the highly-endangered native fish spawn. Introducing the beetles was a calculated risk ; leaving things be was guaranteed to be lousy. Click here for dystopian tamarisk sci-fi, by a Paonia, CO author. Labels: biology, Colorado, Grand Canyon, invertebrates, rivers, the West, Utah Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Greetings from Istanbul! It's a wonderful, if draining place; very easy to get around, though. But it's a horrible place to try and practice Turkish, as every time you try, you get a sympathetic chuckle followed by pretty fluent English. We're catching our flight to Erzurum today. Aya Sofya and all that sort of thing are wonderful, but we're already glad to be getting off the tourist track, hoping perhaps to interact with some Turks who aren't selling something. Labels: Turkey Saturday, September 26, 2009
A roundtable discussion of Xenophon's Anabasis. As long as we're shouting, "Thalassa!" (ht) Labels: greek, history, Xenophon Friday, September 25, 2009
Can't really blog now: leaving for Istanbul in the morning. Mrs. Peculiar and I are bound ultimately for northeastern Turkey, Erzurum and historic Georgia. One major destination is likely to be Gümüşhane: as Odious will appreciate, this is near where, after a grueling march across Anatolia to the crest of the Black Sea Range, Xenophon's exhausted troops exclaimed, "Thalassa! Thalassa!" If anyone wondered what (besides sloth) was consuming my blogging output lately, here's your answer: researching Turkey, making the agonizing decision as to just where to go: the place is just crawling with worthy destinations. It's as big as Texas, but oh! so much more fascinating. And I've been studying Turkish,a very laudable tongue, barbaric and yet refined in its intricacy. I really enjoy non-Indo_European languages. The lack of grammatical gender alone makes them greatly superior, and what bliss is Turkish or Finnish regularity, where rules apply consistently enough to be worth remembering. With any luck, I'll be much more interesting in a couple weeks. Here's a shot from the Selway this summer to tide you over:
Labels: Idaho, Photography, rivers, Turkey Thursday, September 24, 2009
A newly-unearthed hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold: discoveries don't get better than this. Via Cronaca, who has lots of good stuff right now. Labels: archaeology, history Thursday, September 17, 2009
"Unfortunately, along with all its good effects, the web brings together people who should be isolated, and gives a voice to those who really should remain voiceless."S.M. Stirling, interviewed by Glenn Reynolds. Looking forward to his forthcoming depiction of contemporary Santa Fe. Labels: science fiction The Lovecraft Collection. Scents inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. Iä! Iä! My favourite (I leave identification of this scent's name as an exercise for the reader): A small, furry, sharp-toothed scent that will nuzzle you curiously in the black hours before dawn: dusty white sandalwood and orris root, dry coconut husk, creeping musk, and the residue of ceremonial incense.Courtesy of Derb, who I hadn't realized was a Lovecraftian. Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Music composed by birds. Sort of. I once heard a lecturer* on modern classical music describe an analogous experiment in which a stripper cast her garments onto wires and musicians interpreted the results. I imagine the birds have done better. *A really oddly stilted fellow, the lecturer: he would cast octogenarian-style aspersions on the "Grateful Stones" then go right on to describe a piano concerto performed with the composer inside the piano, scraping a piece of chalk on anything that would make a noise. Labels: birds, music, oddities Friday, September 11, 2009
Also an opera. MACCUSThere... there don't seem to be any recordings of it. Labels: edna st. vincent millay, opera Thursday, September 10, 2009
Just discovered that when Edna St. V. M. was a young thing in New York, it was fashionable to write poems using her name as the final line, e.g. Laurel is green for a season and love is sweet for a day Labels: edna st. vincent millay, poetry |
