Everyone has their own soil problems. Sometimes it’s the soil in general and sometimes it’s because of the way the soil around a house site was treated during construction. In our own case the soil problem was worsened because our construction crew removed the topsoil and quietly sold most of it off, leaving us with a largely clay subsoil to work with.

Good soil has three components in roughly equal proportion. It has large particles like sand for drainage, tiny particles like silt or clay for water retention and mineral nutrients, and lots of organic matter for aeration and support of a microbial population and invertebrate population so essential to aerating and mixing the soil. Too much of any one of these three and too little of the others and you have a poor soil. Too much sand, for instance, and the water drains too quickly and leaches what few nutrients there are out, leaving a sterile, dry soil.

With a soil high in clay like we have you at least have two good things going for you - the clay does contain minerals and it is at a good useful slightly acidic pH. When we had the soil tested it lacked only one mineral component: boron, and we just watered with a dilute solution of borax to add that back. And it does hold water, sometimes too much. Clay particles are very tiny and stick to each other - besides retaining too much water, clay is nonporous and there’s no air to support microbial and invertebrate populations. What it lacks is organic material: that which was in the topsoil layer that was carted off.

Our solution has been to add peat moss, and we’ve puchased dozens and dozens of big 4-cubic foot bags over the last fourteen years. It actually doesn’t take too much, mixes in pretty easily, and earthworms love it. After a winter of rotting the soil is pliable, easy to work with, and drains well. After that it’s a simple matter of mulching and the earthworm population does a great job of dragging the mulch ever deeper into the now-friendly soil.

We can see how good the topsoil around the house was by taking a look at the decidous woods area just beyond the construction site. There the topsoil goes down as much as a foot before encountering a clay subsoil, and even that’s not bad, riddled by invertebrates as it is. Fallen deciduous leaves are an excellent additive to clay soil.

In contrast, the piney woods area has only the thinnest layer of topsoil, even after decades of accumulation, usually only an inch or so. Apparently pine needles are a very poor organic additive - they disappear through decomposition much too quickly and the soil invertebrate population is very low.

Adding dry organic matter like leaves or peat moss brings its own problem - low levels of nitrogen. Trees suck the nitrogen back before they drop their leaves, and peat moss is pretty low in that essential nutrient. For native plants it’s not much of a problem; they grow slowly and bacterial populations needed for nitrogen fixation can keep up. But for a vegetable garden which needs nitrogen RIGHT NOW nitrogen needs to be added, most easily in the form of chemical fertilizers.

Other ecosystems have completely different problems and I’m curious as to how people in other places have handled theirs.

Pablo, and we have his goading to thank for this, suggested sticking the camera up to the eyepiece of the telescope and taking pictures. I had done this on a regular basis with the dissecting scope and the Nikon 990 Coolpix (requiescat in pace); with its little 28mm lens it mated perfectly. I was dubious about the ability of the much wider Nikon 28-135 SLR lens to view the image in an eyepiece but went ahead and tried it anyway.

Earlier in the afternoon I’d played around with pointing the telescope at a hillside probably 800 feet away. Using the 32mm eyepiece (about 50x, as I recall) I obtained these images. As you can see it works after a fashion; there are certainly a lot of problems with the imaging lighting and contrast and teensy camera angles make a big difference in the image that gets captured. Understand that throughout this I was being extremely sloppy - this is a first-time experiment.


I stuck in the 6mm eyepiece (about 240x) and obtained these images of sweetgum balls 800 feet away. The problems get even worse, especially trying to catch the tiny image and focus it in the camera. And this in the daylight!


Nonetheless it seemed promising, so I took lots of pictures through the 32mm eyepiece earlier this evening. Forget the 6mm - it’s hard enough seeing it with your eye when it’s that tiny a field of view - the camera was not able to pick it up. Here’s what one of the full images looks like; Mars could have been anywhere in the field depending on the teensiest changes in the angle of the camera; in this case it’s where the white arrow indicates. Was I disappointed? I should say.


Now that’s not at all what Mars looks like to the eye in the 32mm eyepiece - it’s a definite bright round object; much of the above pic is extraneous. I expanded the areas around Mars and brightened it up a bit and obtained these six “enhancements” (each is from a separate picture, so you can see that the “features” are indeed reproducible from image to image). Was I ecstatic? I should say. And notice how nicely Mars blends with Niche’s new fall color scheme.




For what it’s worth, the first image on the upper left looked the best so I expanded that a bit more:


So are the features real or noise? Real,I think. To the eye in the eyepiece, they’re somewhat visible but not nearly as nice as in these crude photographs. And I do mean “nice”. Fuzzy as they are, I should never have expected to have been able to visualize this kind of detail with this sort of telescope.

The problem is that Mars is so damn *bright* in the scope that the glare washes out most of the features when you view directly through the scope. I don’t see any evidence of polar caps, and that makes me a bit suspicious, but maybe the winter caps are on the wrong side of the planet at the time of these photos. Also - you’ll have noticed how the telescope turns the image upside down, so Mars' Southern Hemisphere, currently in the Martian summer with a shrunken polar cap, would be at the top, and the Northern Hemisphere at the bottom. From the comparisons I’ve made, the dark region should probably be Syrtis Major. And the white region at 11 o'clock on this image (southeast of Syrtis Major) could be the Hellas Impact Basin, where the dust storm Pablo mentioned is arising.

What I shoulda done was to go out right now at 5am (now EST),after a quarter rotation, and do another set to prove it but thank you no, it’s cold as hell and I’m not gonna do it. I’m going to bed.

Why the differences in quality of images? Focusing, I think, and jitter at such long exposure times with a hand-held camera. It’s really hard to focus on a dot, especially when you’re shivering in the 32 degree cold.

All in all, not too bad. I’m surprised. The moon, Jupiter (at its closest in April and May 2006) and Saturn (January and February) ought to look fantastic.

Just to increase the geek factor, I used the lens at 28mm focal length and the camera’s manual mode at f/20 and 1/15-1/60 second for these images. Mars too bright to the eye was just bright enough to actual expose under these conditions. A reflector such as mine is not the thing to use for most planet viewing; it brings in too much light, ironically, and has too little resolving power. A good refractor telescope is more suitable; much more resolving and that it brings in less light is actually an advantage.

Here’s a great website on Mars and Hubble Space Telescope will be posting images of this close approach as they come in. And here’s HST’s pics of Mars' close approach 2 years ago, for comparison purposes.

So to wind things up properly, thanks Pablo, for the suggestion!

Tonight’s the night Mars will be at its closest, at 11:19pm EDT, about 42 million miles away. Of course it’s been dazzling for weeks and it won’t look any dimmer tomorrow night than tonight.

And apparently it’s the weekend for daylight saving time to end in most of North America and Europe.

So many interesting events this week!

It’s not often we can get half the cats together without the artifice of food, but with morning temps in the mid to low 30’s the last few days, they congregate on Nano’s Warm Afghan in the mornings.


From left to right we have Violet, Leona, Squit, Munch, and Beaumont. Apparently seeking other warm places are Urchin, Gene, Bart, Harry Pewter, and Maxwell, he of the silver hammer. There are those who call Sparkleberry Springs “Kittie Heaven”, and they’re right - these are our willing companions and obligations.

Violet and Beaumont (sometimes referred to as Bobo, Bopeep, or Bowshit) are brother and sister, the only survivors of a litter dumped at the Wolfskin firehouse. Leona and her brother, Harry Pewter (not pictured, but detailed previously), were rescued from a household that preferred not to neuter its cats and therefore had way too many. Munch arrived one day, probably three years old, and has lost his hearing and developed chronic kidney failure in the last year or two. Leona and Munch are tuxedo cats; Bobo is just a very weird black long-hair.

Squit, the tabby-siamese hybrid, has also been profiled previously. He’s disgruntled because *he* likes to sleep next to Violet.

It was clear to just about everyone that Harriet Miers was out of her league when it came to a Supreme Court nomination that now, in this age, requires a good bit more intellect, training, and breadth than she had. I had not been able to come up with any particular view one way or the other (although it was becoming clear that her political leanings were not mine), and that was because of Bush’s deliberate choice of someone who could not be evaluated in any sensible way.

It’s probably the most naive folly to evaluate Harriet Miers' withdrawal from nomination in personal terms and yet it strikes me that those personal terms might be the most illuminating of this Administration. After several weeks of enduring the most totally irrelevant and adolescent catty comments from the left and right about her homely features and her bad makeup (which actually endeared me to her in some respects), she could easily right now be reading how this makes the President look weak, how the radical right succeeded in imposing its agenda on the President, and, well, she can read all these things anywhere, but nowhere will she read about the betrayal Miers must be feeling.

Whether true or not, it strikes me that Miers is a victim. Yes, she may have been unqualified, but it’s clear that Bush, perhaps flush from his success in getting a Supreme Court nominee confirmed as Chief Justice despite a relative lack of paper trail and time at judgeship, pursued an even more extreme stealth course in nominating this individual who had even less a paper trail. Worse for her was that Bush as President steadfastly refused to illuminate her qualifications citing executing privilige. In the manner in which we have become accustomed, he left her flailing in the wind as what was to everyone yet another crony appointment.

It’s completely out of fashion, I know, but it strikes me, in attempting to empathize, that Miers is a victim because she entered into the fray in good faith, euphoric and imagining perhaps that she was truly qualified, and it’s now clear that all she was was a pawn. There’s something that tugs at my heartstrings, irrespective of her actual sentiments, in watching how she was used. And yet, that’s what we’ve come to expect of President Bush and his Administration - using and abusing people for their own ends, regardless of the loyalties his own people have to Bush. Miers is a case in point; someone who’s given years of her life to this pathetic excuse of a human being just to be shat on.

Am I glad she’s withdrawn? Yes, because she wasn’t qualified, neither in terms of breadth of knowledge nor in terms of bias, and she was an obvious crony. But if this is the way Bush treats his most loyal people, don’t be too surprised at how he treats the rest of us.

How does a kid get to be 50 years old (almost) before making a solar cooker? This was one of several designs by Teong H. Tan at The Solar Cooking Archive, and looked to be the easiest to play around with first. All it is really is twelve narrow cardboard trangles, cleverly measured out and folded in a couple of places and then taped together in a ring after gluing aluminum foil on one side. Sort of origami - it then draws up into the funnel you see below:


I finished it at 3pm and checked it out without further refining it. In 30 minutes a black cup of water placed roughly at the focus had reached 130 deg F, 70 deg F above ambient, too hot to touch. Not too bad, considering I haven’t fully tweaked it into shape, put a reflective piece in the bottom hole, placed the cup at the real focus, or had the sun at its highest during the day.

I see now how to make a really good one. This one is only 0.3 square meters opening, which means about 300 watts of sun is being concentrated. And of course just about all the heat escapes out the open funnel.

This one only approximates a parabolic reflector. A real one, which has a continuous bowl-like surface, is rather hard to make. The approximation here is to use 12 flat and bent sides to mimic the parabolic curves. Just for fun, here’s how the parabolic reflector works. The one I’ve constructed here is the “close version” where the pot sits well inside the reflector. The shallower the bowl, the farther the focus is from the reflector.


The Death Ray Version was inspired by an intense memory when I was about six years old. My parents, who owned an Airstream, one of those silver-bullet pull-behind trailers that you can only hate or love (our number was 3068, I think, so it was one of the first ones), had taken us on a two-week camping trip “out west”. We were in Colorado, at a campground, sitting around in front of the trailer in the mid afternoon when I noticed a woodchip on the ground smoking furiously. I distinctly recall figuring out that the side of the trailer, which looked flat, but wasn’t, had briefly focused a powerful beam of light onto the ground and ignited the chip. It was my first Death Ray, and I was suitably impressed.

We’ve found a number of evidences that Sparkleberry Springs was once occupied - I’ve written about some of these before, including the 1920’s bottle found in the creek below a housesite in the area we call the Fairy Ring.

There’s also barbed wire ("bobwire") here and there:


Although there’s evidence of ancient posts, most of the wire seems to have been tacked to trees. The trees of course kept growing (lateral meristems!) and gradually covered over the wire with cork and xylem, sometimes in very pretty patterns. I haven’t tried to cut down one of these snagged trees to see exactly when, by tree rings, the wire infiltrated the tree but that’s certainly possible.

The fence seems to run from Goulding Creek, 1000 feet northwest of the house, southward up a roadcut that we imagine to be a logging road, and then takes an eastward turn and runs another 1000 or more feet. It only exists aboveground in fragments, usually stuck in trees, or with small lengths poking out of the ground.

The little creek runs northwest toward Goulding Creek and undercuts a lot of banks. Trees occasionally die and then hollow out. Here’s a pretty corpse:

As our nation dives deeper into the cold of winter and the ever-increasingly murky depths of corruption, I’m doing my part. The cool blues of Niches, so appropriate for the hot summer months, and which have saved the energy industry an estimated 7.7 billion dollars in air conditioning costs over the last six months, have been exchanged for the warm light salmon and pumpkin in recognition of the cold winter months.

I didn’t make this decision lightly, and I expect no recompense despite my estimate that this will net the petroleum industry 5.6 billion dollars pure profit over the next six months as the butts of Niches fans, warmed by our new soft colors, forego the urgency of turning their thermostats up even as their energy costs double. I do this even though I *could have* kept the cold blue shades thus costing the economy, in my estimate 10.3 billion dollars as my readers keep turning up the heat in unconscious response to their compulsive viewing of this website.

I’d like to point out that I’ve eschewed the usual browser-safe hex background, FFFFCC, in favor of a lighter, non-safe, more mellow hex, FFFFDD, and hell, let’s throw caution to the wind: I might even go to FFFFEE. Despite that this might cause some browsers to sputter and blow up their host computers, I’m willing, and in the best spirit of the times, to make this sacrifice for you.

I’ll brook no complaints about the advantages of off-white and neutral light grays, those are cold colors and we have Halliburton to think about. We have a nation to save. I’m doing my part; what about you?

Saturday night we had some friends over for hamburgers and couscous salad and other delicious treats, and I took the opportunity to drag out the telescope, hopefully for some Mars viewing, among others. Unfortunately we were all too stuffed to drag ourselves to the back deck where I’d set the scope up so it didn’t happen until a couple of hours later after everyone had left.

Mars is *tiny*. Even with my highest power objective, which would shown Jupiter at four times the distance with its bands and moons, Mars was just a little pink disk with only the slightest hint of topography to it. The evening was, however clear and cool and the Pleiades, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Double Cluster between Casseiopeia and Perseus, all favorite haunts, showed very nicely.

Here’s the monster.


It’s a reflector telescope, this one made by Discovery Telescopes, as opposed to a refractor telescope. More specifically it’s a Dobsonian reflector, a relatively crude construction - in this case the tube, six feet long and 12.5" across, is made of thick tough cardboard and is originally used to cast concrete piping. You just grab the side handles and pick up the big tube, which weighs about 40 lbs, out of its cradle and lug it around to where you want it. The silly straw hat is to keep out dust and cats and bird droppings; it was the cheapest accessory.

A refractor telescope, which this is not, is generally a much smaller tube that uses a lens for focusing and you view it from the end; with a refractor, which is more highly resolving, I could have probably seen more detail on Mars. With a reflector, however, you can see objects that are much more dim. The optics on this one are quite decent though - I’ve been able to split double stars that are extremely close together.

A reflector is a “light funnel”. It uses mirrors instead of lenses and it’s possible to make much bigger mirrors, therefore possible to have a much wider tube to catch a great deal more light. The mirror at the bottom of this one is 12" in diameter. It’s not your ordinary shaving type mirror though; it’s a monster hunk of glass 8" thick and 12" across that weighs about 30 pounds, most of the weight of the scope itself. It’s a parabolic mirror and focuses the light back to the top of the tube to the secondary mirror you see hanging from those crossbars:


The secondary mirror bounces the light 90 degrees to the objective lens which hangs in the focuser you see mounted on the side of the tube, and that’s what you look through.

Like cameras, the body is only half or less of the total expense - there are also lenses and filters and all sorts of other stuff to buy! I have a modest collection but my favorite lens is the low power one that gives you a full degree of field of view - looking at a globular or open cluster is quite a lovely experience, and the full moon fits nicely into the field of view.

And like cameras there’s a focal length, for the big mirror here, it’s 5 feet, and a scope is usually described as “fast” or “slow”. “Fast” means the light is focused quickly along a short distance; the optics have to be aligned perfectly which means you have to have a (another!) special tube to insert into the focuser so you can match everyone up - “collimation”, they call it, and it has to be done just about every time the scope is used, or if there’s been temperature changes. A “slow” scope would be much longer and have much less need to be collimated, but to be a good slow scope this one would have had to be 20 or 30 feet long, very unwieldy!

With its 12" mirror, this scope could be used as a death ray. Just point it at the sun ("Never point your scope at the sun!" ) and a concentrated beam of sunlight would focus out, until the secondary mirror melted, anyway. Just like having a magnifying glass a foot across.


We bought the scope in 2001, and two months after 9/11 I put the passenger seat down in the car, heaved the tube in, buckled it up, and took it down to Fairhope for thanksgiving with my parents and impressionable young nieces and nephews. It looked like a big cannon (or death ray), and I was slightly anxious at the possibility of being reported as a potential terrorist.

You know, our boy, the Bug Boy.

As Wilma appears to be angling (just a little wordplay that our bug and fishboy Thingfish23 would enjoy) with screaming velocity toward Naples, FL, I wonder if anyone has heard from him and his?

I wrote him early Sunday but haven’t had a reply and there’s no update on his website. He’d indicated they’d be sticking, but there’s been considerable noise in the news about mandatory evacuations from the soutwest Florida coast. Anyone know?

The color of the season is now orange, and for you urbanites who think “orange means wait and green means go”, orange here means you’d better wear it if you don’t want to get shot.

Since it’s not a color in fashion (and you all know how much I love and follow fashion ) I collect orange sweatshirts and jackets whenever I find them, which is seldom. My eyes are blue and my complexion is fair and as the Lady Chablis might well have said, but did not, in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, honey, orange is NOT your color.

Yesterday marked the first day of deer-hunting season here, which will go on until the end of the year. For the time being it’s “any deer”, male or female, which goes against the innate feelings of many long-time hunters who have been cortically programmed since childhood to ignore does but which is much more ecologically sensible in our part of northeast Georgia where deer are much too numerous for their own good. Without predators, hunters are essential. There will be those who will say, “oh how awful”, but I respectfully beg to differ.

We’ve given permission to one friend to hunt on our property, but have known for a long time that there’s a number of poachers who trespass unpredictably. The dangers to us of this hit home several years ago when I was outside and two shots passed audibly through the trees a few feet above my head. You can imagine the vile imprecations screamed out toward their source.

Our neighbor that we’ve given permission to is a responsible hunter who is meticulous about notifying us when he’ll be out there. When he’s there, you hear one shot and that’s it. When poachers are out there you hear multiple shots, sometimes seconds apart, for minutes at a time; clearly a non-hunting behavior as anything moving fled the area at the sound of the first shot.

It may be disturbing to some to read this but I suspect that some don’t live in a rural environment where deer hunting provides a major portion of food for the rest of the year. And anyone, rural or urban, can learn that a too-large deer population results not only in the decimation of native plants and the selection for inedible invasives such as Microstegium, but also in the distressing sight of pathetically thin, wasted deer later in the winter and early spring.

Yesterday I was talking to my sister online and she and her husband were very amused when I said, in response to her suggestion that I join GreenPeace, “I hate environmentalists”. "Wayne", she said, “you always say the unexpected”. OK, what I said was hyperbole to some extent- I do love the value of shock, and I don’t really hate them, and environmentalists certainly have their place in a political arena, but in my experience they know virtually nothing about ecology, and therein lies the danger of their ignorance. So I find it really hard to hate them all THAT much, since there’s very little effective between that ignorant extreme and the equally ignorant slash and burn and develop philosophy at the other extreme. What to do?

What to do. In my humble opinion, if you’re to be a bona fide environmentalist, you need to know something not only about ecology but also about biology, taxonomy, climatology, and even astronomy, and there’s surely a whole lot more. Sounds like a lot, but my goodness, there’s so much material on the web, easily digestible to any person of average intelligence that it’s almost a crime not to be able to pick it up. And yes, I do mean average intelligence which in almost every respect is all I myself have: understanding these things have nothing to do with savvy, they have everything to do with willingness. We’re not talking about being a genius, we’re talking about being a human being. So, and I guess here I bury it so deep within that very few will ever pick it up, is the ultimate reason why I write this blog. (And if you got to this point, say “yowzir!” so I know it.)

I’d rather have wolves and large predators, but I’m afraid it ain’t gonna happen around here.

While it’s not expected to produce a full-fledged hurricane or pose danger to the US mainland, a tropical depression has formed in the Caribbean south of Haiti/Dominican Republic. When it reaches tropical storm status, it will become TS Alpha. A new record.

Well, I’m still puzzling over yesterday’s orchid. That it’s an orchid is pretty much beyond doubt, but I’m afraid it’s already flowered. I snipped off an ovary and dissected it and it’s full of hundreds of tiny tiny developing seeds. Hopefully Don is right about the Autumn Coralroot possibility.

UPDATE: Yes, I do think Don is right - Corallorrhiza odontorhiza - Autumn Coralroot. I’m ecstatic. As I said in the comments to the previous post, 15 shoots within a 20' diameter and none outside that. A coralroot colony!

This one I do know - it’s Rattlesnake Plantain, Goodyera pubescens, in the Orchidaceae family. One of our extremely attractive little ground orchids, it’s usually hard to find one with an inflorescence because the deer come along and snip it off.


And a nice little bonus - one of our numerous insect predators this year. I’m not up on my mantises but this one blends in well with the pine cone!

Yesterday, walking through the moderately dry piney woods, I came across this little dude poking up from the ground. No leaves, stem emerges from a sheath, those ovaries look pretty swollen, but maybe the flowers haven’t opened yet. There were two others emerging nearby. (Yes, there was a little spider living on it.)


Glenn suggested an orchid. It could be Cranefly Orchid, Tipularia discolor; we certainly have lots of that, but it just doesn’t look like it. It might be a coralroot, which would make me ecstatic. Coralroots are parasitic orchids.

It’s certainly not news to most people now that Wilma strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane from a Category 2 last night in the space of a few hours. It has achieved the lowest measured pressure ever, 982 mb, which along with the 175 knot winds make it the most intense North Atlantic storm ever. These pics from NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Program tell the remarkable story:

Left, Wilma yesterday at 4pm EDT. Right, Wilma today at noon.


Wilma isn’t expected to remain a Category 5 as it hits the shearing force of the prevailing westerlies and begins to move east toward South Florida. But even so, if so, its life as a Category 5 has swollen it with vast amounts of water, and even a Category 2 or 3 carrying that much water is fearsome. Be thinking about our friends in Florida.

Chrysanthemums:


These are pretty good citizens. I got them for Glenn for Valentine’s or his birthday, or something like that and we planted them along with some brick red and yellow ones. The latter have gradually disappeared but these have done well and stay in their assigned location, so I have no real complaints except no Chrysanthemum species are natives.

It’s probably worth mentioning that there is a particularly noxious chrysanthemum, Leucanthemum vulgare, that most people know as Oxeye Daisy. It flowers in the early to mid-summer and takes over pastures and fields and roadsides. It’s very pretty of course, and is one of those components of fast germinating invasive flowering annuals that’s put into the “Wildflower in a Can” obscenities. It’s found in every state of the US, so probably everyone has seen it - it actually looks pretty much like the above Chrysanthemum.

Tomorrow night the nearly full moon will pass within a few diameters of Mars. Not quite an occultation, but spectacular juxtaposition.

Yesterday morning the pre-dawn temperature was 42 degrees and this morning 44 degrees. I think we must conclude that autumn is finally arriving. The days have been absolutely fantastic - clear, deep blue sky, warm but not hot even in the direct sun. The kind of day I just couldn’t imagine existing back in the dead heat of summer when to exert myself beyond simply walking to the car meant breaking out in a dripping sweat. The red-tailed hawks also enjoy these days - they spend a lot of time and energy just flying and calling.

Brian and Floridacracker - looks like a major hurricane Wilma may be headed your way in the next four or five days!

The comments to the previous post have been quite valuable to me, even the poor little wordplays ; thanks to everyone. I’m going to summarize them here, but basically, no matter how you slice it, the initial $2000 estimate has now doubled and puts this idea out of our range for the time being.

First, I think Don has once again placed the appropriate financial damper with a calculation of cost and return, and has convinced me that we can expect no recoup on system cost (in fact, we can expect periodic maintenance costs). That leaves us with the issue of whether or not to spend the money and take on the maintenance solely for the purpose of being independent of external electricity for obtaining water. (Remember that we don’t have publically supplied water here; it comes out of a very deep drilled well.)

Had the estimates of cost remained the same, I’d be tempted to go for it anyway, but DPR made some relevant comments that I have been looking at for the last couple of days. Glenn found pump and controller specs for the current AC well pump: 1 HP (746 watts), 230v is the pertinant info. This requires a somewhat larger battery than I’d chosen, and probably a larger panel. Maybe more important is the power surge that DPR mentioned: for this pump the power surge could be more than 100 amps for a few seconds on startup. All this together means a MUCH higher power inverter, 2500 watts, than I’d chosen, at MUCH higher cost - at least $1000 higher. Replacing the perfectly good AC pump with the necessary DC pump, would cut out the inverter requirement, but itself runs about the same cost.

Interestingly in all this, the cost of the solar panel is not so much at issue as the 5-10x additional costs of all the supporting components. In any event, the cost considerations seem to outweigh benefit obtainable by other means (e.g., a fossil fuel powered generator for short term emergencies - shudder).

Looks like margaritas and nachos on the back deck instead, Don, with plenty of aspirin for those headaches!

First, the bats appear to be returning to their usual roost. They’ve been gone now for at least eight weeks. The roost up to that time was (presumably, assuming these are little brown bats) all female and infant. The babies would, I imagine, just be starting to fly on their own. I wonder if this two-month departure has to do with socialization and introduction to the male component of the colony. Presumably mating is going on during this time (although the females won’t permit fertilization for some time to come).

Second, Mars is now just two weeks away from its brightest and it’s becoming distinctly brighter in an almost geometrical progression with each passing day. The earth is now rapidly catching up to it, and the quality of its appearance is now different from any other point of light in the sky. Whereas even a week ago it was at the zenith just before dawn, it’s now way down in the western sky, which makes sense - more and more opposite the sun as it rises. I find it interesting that the quality of its red light is most dramatic against the background of the dark blue dawn, rather than in the darkest of night. Get out there and look at it!

I know this is going to be a boring post to most, but I’m adding it for my own reference and I’d like comments from folks who know more than I do about such things (you don’t have to know a lot to know more than I do about this, yet!).

The intent here is to have a modest PV system charging a battery. It must be able to run a current AC-powered submersible well pump, which I figure draws about 4 amp-hours per day; at 115vac would demand 460 watt-hours per day. Leftover battery energy used for other applications, either 12 or 24 volt dc, or even house voltage drawing from the inverter. (There’s no doubt that a cost-effectiveness would be reached at some point, but the primary thing is that our water supply not be a slave to outside power.)

So I figure that a 160 watt panel, on a good 8-hour sunny day, would store 1280 watt-hours of energy. Since I’ve estimated (probably over-estimated) my pump requirement to be 460 watt-hours per day, I figure the additional charge would get us through at least 2 days without charging the battery.

So here’s what I’ve come up with, primarily using Solar-Electric.com. Does it look like the components match? Are the prices I’ve found outrageous and can I do significantly better? Have I forgotten anything important?

160 watt 24v solar panel $740 (a 12v panel would be more compatible with most components)

600 watt 12v or 24v inverter $562 (to supply AC to the submersible well pump)

12v 56 amp-h battery $117 (I realize I’ll need a voltage converter for this, or find a 12v panel)

12v 15amp charger $124 (to keep from overcharging the battery)

12v 10amp charge controller $60

monitor with shunt $208

total $1811

It’s been about 3 months since the 36th (!) anniversary of the first moon landing July 20, 1969, but we were prompted at this late date by reading some observations in a book review in the New Yorker.

Those Americans with living memories of the moon landing - fewer than half of us - have a hard time summoning any recollection of Armstrong’s face.

So writes Thomas Mallon in the October 3 2005 issue of the New Yorker in his review of the new biography of Neil Armstrong entitled First Man by James R. Hansen.

Others will have their own memories of the event; for myself I recall at the age of 13 those amazing days of watching Apollo 11 lift off on its mighty Saturn V rocket, go into “translunar insertion”, successfully orbit the moon, and then the Eagle landing. Then the moon walks, and the marvelous video of the lunar module lifting off, taken by a camera left behind. The anxious period of waiting to see if the command module would successfully enter the wedge of re-entry. My father, an excellent photographer, had his own camera set up in front of the television set and we took lots of pictures of the events. It was all a wonderful culmination of keeping close track of the space program and building endless models throughout the years of Mercury and Gemini and the earlier successes and tragedy of Apollo.

As for remembering Neil Armstrong’s face, well, we don’t have a great deal of art around the house, a few original prints and lots of posters, but we do have this wonderful print that Glenn purchased a quarter century ago:


It hangs in the upstairs bathroom, so we, and our guests, have plenty of time to memorize his face. About the print:

Paul Calle was one of many artists who were invited by NASA to record the space program.

The original pencil sketch was done while the Apollo 11 crew were suiting up prior to leaving for the moon. Michael Collins mentions this in Carrying the Fire. The prints were signed by Neil Armstrong and Paul Calle at the National Air and Space Museum on December 23, 1976 and were sold there to raise money for the Charles Lindbergh Memorial Fund. Our last, highly coveted, long since sold-out limited edition (#876/1000) of Neil Armstrong in his “Snoopy Cap” prior to boarding the historic flight of Apollo 11. Drawn on 7/16/69. Autographed by Armstrong, and signed by the artist.

Ours, by the way, is #383/1000.

Mallon concludes his piece in the New Yorker:

The original L.M., detached from the command module that returned Apollo 11’s crew to Earth, drifted around the moon for some years in a decaying orbit before smashing into the surface. Viola Armstrong, the astronaut’s mother, died in May, 1990, having just told her daughter, “I am not sure there really is a God. But I am very happy that I believed.”

Anyone who long ago displaced a portion of his spirtual yearning into Armstrong’s voyage knows today that the journey came to nothing, or at least to nowhere. Even so, even now, one remains grateful to have lived through the false dawn.

That last part is rather sad, I think, but something I’ve long since recognized to be true. Nonetheless the years up until 1980 or so were pretty exciting, and Neil will always hang in our bathroom.

Glenn wrote a good bit of this entry.

Since I know everyone’s wondering how this turned out, here it is - the chi squares for the first 200 million digits of pi, evaluated in blocks of 1000. The highest chi square was 44; I figure to be really really REALLY significant, there should have been a chi square of at least 1000. Nope.

There are 200,000 points plotted here. Rather than make a plot twenty times wider, I just superimposed 20 runs over each other.

Makes a pretty picture, anyway.

I’ve had email from a reader in Kansas who is having some trouble with development encroaching on her property, who asked for some suggestions on how to deal with it. This has been an ongoing problem for some time and has reached a critical stage where she needs suggestions and information. She gave me permission to post relevant parts of the email but I’ll let her identify herself or pass on her email address if she wants to.

The basic issue, as I understand it, is the “improvement” and lengthening of a bridge across a creek that runs past her property. The plans call for removal of a bend in the creek by rerouting the creek, which will destroy a significant part of her property. It’s the reason the bridge has to be lengthened.

The county has a “plan” to replace a bridge that is adjacent to my property. The “plan” calls for straightening out the road. Oops! the creek is in the way. OK, move the creek, fill in the old (current) channel, dig a new channel, build road on top of new filled in (old) channel. Oops! Need to build man-made riffles and pools to more accurately reflect current stream velocity. Plan to put in 4 of those man-made riffles, which will need to be man-maintained forever. . .on and on ad nauseum. New channel is 1/3 as wide and comes off the current channel pointing straight at my house, coming in my lower driveway, as a matter of fact. Hm. . .could there possibly be any long-term consequences of that? Taking out lots and lots of trees of all sizes. Some very large, all very treasured.

Last time this issue came up I was told that the county had to follow federal guidelines in order to receive federal money, and that the feds do not recognize any difference between a one lane township road and an interstate highway. Thus, the curve next to bridge has to go, "cuzz the feds say so. When I repeated that to an engineer this time round, he looked at me like I was out of my mind. (Could be, but now is not the time to debate that - now is the time for me to become armed with verifiable FACTS, which have evidently been sadly unavailable in most former interaction with the county folks.)

The county has apparently not been dealing in good faith with her in the past regarding this development, but now the issue has resurfaced.

I dug out my old files and found one letter written by the county to my folks is postmarked 1984. (I moved back to the farm in 1986.) Then there was lots of activity and a very ugly plan around 1989-1991. I tthought that the county backed off at that point because the appraisal of the trees on my property came in around $27,000,.00 versus the $58.00 dollars that the county offered me. But an engineer/old neighbor who got involved at the time thought they backed down because of an EPA study that showed that the springs at creek level would have to be tubed out and somehow dealt with. I knew nothing about that impact study. The county took me to court to condemn my land and have their way, but when the judge asked for names of appraisers, the county stood up and gave him 3 names. I had read the book that was mailed to me, and kept my mouth shut. I knew that the judge had erred, as the county was to name one, I was to name one, and the judge was to name the 3rd. I figured if nothing else, I could come back with an appeal on improper procedure. But, the county messed themselves up, as all 3 appointees had functioning braincells intact, and they were appalled at what the county wanted to do. So. . . the county backed down that time.

I asked her to clarify some of the details of the bridge development.

I don’t really know why the county wants a straight road, but the new bridge being 3X longer than the old is because of the straight shot down the hill makes it a longer span over where they want to cross the creek. The additional problem for me is that they want to do away with my current driveways, and give me one at a steeper pitch that will meet the new road 10 feet higher than my current lower drive. I use the lower drive most of the time, but maintain the upper drive so that I can get out during flood situations. However, the upper drive is too steep to get out during ice situations, and if the “new” (read: take out even more trees that currently line both sides of both drives with a natural rim rock running between the two) road is even more steep, I’ll never be able to get out during snow and ice situations.

That she’s left without the ability to get out in the winter certainly seems like a bad situation for her, and perhaps one to bring up as an issue. Since she lives in Kansas the winters can be harsh.

I’ve suggested a couple of things - having an archaeological inspection to determine if the site is of historical interest (Indian burials, artifacts, etc.) and to have someone familiar with plants of the area to see if there are any endangered species on the site.

However I’ve never worked in a government bureaucracy or had to deal with a nightmare like this, and am not familiar with Kansas law in matters like this. I’d love to hear some suggestions and am sure she would too.

Many thanks.

Has anyone tried the pump flashlights? THey’re advertised as having a squeezable grip - you get about 10 seconds of light per squeeze. The only indication that they might not be so great is the caveat that “light intensity doesn’t remain constant”.

The hummingbirds are gone now. I suspected it on Saturday and it appears to be the case. I’ve been told that occasionally some, including wayward species other than our ruby-throats, such as blackchins, will stay behind during the winter and you should keep a feeder going all year around. I figured the sucrose solution will freeze at about -2 deg C, so have to bring it in on cold nights. Anyway, nothing happened last year except the feeder froze and busted.

I hate going to Wal Mart. I go in with a list and before it’s half done I’m thinking “I’ve got to get outta here”. So, Wayne, why not patronize other places? One reason is the usual one - to save a gallon of gas and a couple of hours of time, and the other maybe a little odd - I hate shopping in generally only secondarily to hating shopping at Wal Mart.

You can find a lot of interesting things under 8 months worth of stacked books, magazines, papers, and index cards. Yesterday as I was doing my semi-annual (or near to it) cleanup, it was two dried, pressed scorpions. Would’ve made nice herbarium specimens.

Periodically I also have to go through my plant books and clean out the accumulated leaves, flowers, and sometimes whole branches that have been stuck there for later identification.

Yesterday I stalked a pileated woodpecker with the camera for about an hour. He appeared just north of the house in a large loblolly pine, and then led me on a merry chase from tree to tree. He *could have* just flown away, but I think he was enjoying the tease. No good pics!

You may praise him or curse him, and undoubtedly I’ll be taken off the list of child-safe websites, but Glenn did alert me to this little orgy of vicious predators going on on the screen door outside the loft, and I did take the picture.

Let us not even begin to try to figure out who’s doing what to whom here, but - my! - this is the very picture of an effluvium of segmentation and jointed appendages!


This is a trio of wheel bugs, Arilus cristatus, in the family of assassin bugs, Reduviidae. Wheel bugs, and they are true bugs, are predatory and use their proboscis to impale and suck out the innards of their victims. They’re relatives of conenoses and can inflict painful stab wounds if you bug them too much.

This particular trio may be in trouble though - the middle one looks to have a case of fungus, if that’s what the downy white outgrowth on its back is. If so, and if it’s entomopathogenic, then it’s already growing well inside and probably sporulating outside. In which case the partners are probably going to come down with it too.

There are quite a few entomopathogens - fungi that specialize on insects. Probably the most famous is Entomophthora muscae, a zygomycete fungus that invades the innards of houseflies, and then pushes aside the thorax plates to thrust its spore-bearing hyphae out into the air. It has peculiar effects on the behavior of houseflies - it starts out by taking over a housefly’s nervous system, and drives it to fly upwards toward the light, an advantage in dispersing the spores to new hosts. Sometimes you find a housefly dead on a window surrounded by a white halo, and now you know what’s happened to it.

A little etymological tidbit - pathogenic fungi often don’t have common names, but if they have a specific host, their genus name (e.g., Entomophthora, destroyer of insects) is followed by a specific epithet that is the genus name of the host (E. muscae, from Musca domestica, the House Fly). This is also true of naming of fungi that attack plants.

And by the way, Tom Volk’s Fungi Webpage is a great site, as is his Fungus of the Month Page.

Some entomopathogenic fungi are being used as biological controls on insects, e.g., Beauveria bassiana, a soil fungus that causes a white fungal growth on a wide range of insects, and perhaps that’s what this is. If so, and Beauveria does have a wide host range, I think I’d rather have the wheel bugs!

One final speculative note: fungi are well-placed to parasitize insects. Each of these groups of organisms, diverged for hundreds of millions of years, has independently evolved the use of chitin, a structural polysaccharide. Insects (and crustaceans, and arthropods in general) use it to build their exoskeletons. Fungi use it to structure their cell walls. Chitinases are enzymes that chew up chitin, and fungi probably produce them in large quantities, allowing them to colonize their distant relatives easily.

UPDATE: One of the folks at Bugguide suggested spidersilk, clinging there from a previous blundering. I relocated the three bugs, and pretty sure that’s exactly what it is. Still, entomopathogens are neat!

Pitcher plants are of course all carnivorous plants of the passive trap type. They produce a tube-shaped leaf with the upper inner surface waxy so insects slip, and the lower inner surfaces covered with downward pointing hairs so the insects can’t get back out. Digestive enzymes are secreted into water that has accumulated in the bottom of the pitcher, and all those nitrogenous goodies that don’t exist in the pitiful soil these guys live in are soaked up through the inner tube tissues.

I neglected to post pictures of the flowering Sarracenia in our bog this spring - several others had done a great job of it - but despite our heat and drought earlier a number of them are still doing quite well.

This one is our great success story. Sarracenia leucophylla, Whitetop, or occasionally Crimson Pitcher Plant for reasons I don’t understand, had a very difficult three or four years. But this year it produced perfect pitchers that stayed upright, didn’t fall, and seems to have habituated well, finally. You can see why it’s called whitetop, and of course the specific epithet “leucophylla” promises a white leaf.


S. leucophylla and many of the remaining nine species around here (and we have most of them) are erect, with open hoods. But there are some species that are decumbant, lying back, and have cobra-like hoods. Here’s two of them, Parrot Pitcher (S. psittacina), and Hooded Pitcher (S. minor).


These Sarracenia pitchers are in the family Sarraceniaceae, which has one other genus, Darlingtonia, which lives in California, Oregon, and Washington. Sarracenia is quite widespread - Yellow pitchers, S. flava, and Purple Pitchers, S. purpurea, are found throughout low boggy areas in the eastern half of the US, way into the north and way into the south. It’s a very adaptable plant as far as temperatures are concerned but it isn’t competitive outside of nitrogen poor bog areas.

There’s a diverse family of pitchers that is entirely tropical, Nephenthaceae, which includes a lot of viny climbing pitchers, very colorful.

Species of Sarracenia hybridize freely. Since they hybridize well, and since even the individual species show a lot of variation in color, venation, patterning, and shape, there’s a huge number of varieties. Here’s a great website showing all the variety in the various species.

And here’s a little chart that shows how they hybridize, and the names of the hybrids. I placed the hybrid names in blue next to what I thought was the female parent (sometimes that makes a difference) but as I worked I realized the order was probably just alphabetical order (flava x leucophylla, for instance), and not the conventional arrangement of female x male.


You might wonder why we’d put them into different species if they cross hybridize so easily. No one ever said this was simple. Species definitions aren’t just based on whether they can cross, but also how different they look from each other.

If you haven’t read Phila at Bouphonia’s Friday Hope Blogging for this week, get thee there. And while you’re at it, read Thingfish’s Fishing with Donny as an interesting take on interacting with and influencing people who are different from you.

One of the most frustrating aspects of addressing problems of economy, environment, energy independence, and global warming in the US is the tiresome contention that changes must necessarily be accompanied by economic hardship. Have we heard enough of this? We’re told that placing higher standards of fuel efficiency on automobiles will “harm the economy”. The US didn’t sign Kyoto because it would “harm the economy”. We must drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, because despite that that oil won’t make a dent anyway and even so not for a decade, it would “harm the economy” if we didn’t. The US isn’t the only country in the world and there are certainly others who seem to be making a good faith effort to deal with the problems of the day without sacrificing the rest of the world.

These rationalizations are bogus. Alternative solutions won’t “harm the economy”, although they certainly do seem to threaten large corporations. Phila makes an excellent point that innovations and solutions can do a great deal to boost the economy in a great many ways. It’s essentially the “if you’re handed lemons, make lemonade” approach. Our “leaders” appear to want us to ignore the lemons, or to throw them in the landfill.

The problem appears more to be that the boost wouldn’t target those who maintain the status quo. Consequently solutions are only implemented from a very narrow range of options, without considering other possibilities.

Here’s an example that encapsulates the dilemma for the status quo. It seems to me that the general thrust of approaches to solve these problems leads to more power to individuals, and less to the centralized suppliers who have made such a killing in profits in energy, gasoline, and other petroleum-based technologies. Give someone a solar panel, and that’s that much less energy he or she needs from the big electrical supplier. Find ways of increasing the efficiency of transducing solar radiation to electricity and that reduces the cost of providing an alternative energy source to the individual. But these innovations are hobbled, as Phila says. And as a result, large energy companies are protected, refuse on their own to innovate, and consumers continue to consume a dwindling resource and to pay an often arbitrarily high price, as we are in fact doing right now.

Or take environmental preservation and stewardship - look no further than the effects of Hurricane Katrina and wonder how much less destruction might have been endured had the wetlands surrounding New Orleans been taken care of. Yes, NOW it would take a great deal of money to restore the wetlands. But caring for them all along might have considerably reduced the cost of repairing the damage recently incurred. We can imagine that the federal government, or Halliburton, heaven help us, might have taken care of the wetlands, but far better for the communities and residents to have done it themselves.

How’s about another example, public transportation? We are wedded to our cars, slaves to our cars. But bicycling to and from work is a perfectly workable alternative, simply fraught with all kinds of benefits. What’s stopping it? People love to bicycle, it’s fun, it’s cheap, it has obvious health benefits, it augments community interactions, people take note of the environment they’re cycling through, it reduces the load of carbon dioxide, sox and nox generation, and reduces landuse requirements for parking. But it’s terribly unsafe because bicyclists are forced to “share the road” with cars that can impact them with a thousand times the bicyclist’s kinetic energy. Why on earth aren’t we placing bicycle paths on every single non-interstate road? How much more money would this cost than, say, to put in metro-wide subway systems that simply add to energy cost, or for that matter, to invade another country for contrived reasons? My guess is in part that the automotive and large-scale transportation, and yes, power industries don’t like this idea at all.

My sad feeling is that large companies depend on the supposition that individuals are not willing to do the things necessary to cure their addiction to being cared for, at the cost of their disappearing income and their individual freedoms. But more and more, and in no small way, the future depends on the willingness of individuals and communities to not only take control of their resources, but to learn how to do things themselves, and as Brian points out, to *teach* each other.

Things like recognizing and correcting local environmental problems, and riding herd on resident industries. Things like abandoning their cars on most nice days and riding a bike to work. Things like learning how to use alternative energy sources, and disseminating that information to others in the community. Things like interacting with each other to produce solutions at the community level, rather than accepting a federal solution which might not always apply, or even be there in a murky future. Even simple things like growing a vegetable garden. Things like accepting that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, or mow a lawn. Perhaps most importantly, things like eschewing the fashionable and mainstream and changing their individual minds as to what’s really important.

Of course, these approaches that target individuals necessarily leave out the mega-companies that have become absentee landlord dinosaurs, and through large political contributions, effectively our government itself. Yes, they could adapt, but only at the cost of high profits and governmental influence. In the short term, and in ignorance of the long term, it’s cheaper for them to obstruct.

I’m not sure what species this fruit belongs to but it’s definitely a mallow in the family Malvaceae, probably a Sida or Sidalcea.


Prowling about was this colorfully patterned little bug, doubtless an evil waster of some sort. Wouldn’t you just kill for a pair of legs like that? I myself would like all six. I know exactly how to hem my jeans and where to put holes in my t-shirts to take full advantage. I’m also covetous of the antennae, although I’ve seen better. Throw in a coupla orange pompoms at the tips and it’s a deal.

I imagine it to be a true bug of the Hemiptera based on the scutellum, that enlarged triangular plate just back of the head, but haven’t found any clues yet as to what he might be. Maybe Mr. Thingfish knows.


By the way, monocot plants like corn, wheat, and other grasses, also have a scutellum. It’s the single cotyledon, the shield-like single cotyledon that is not a true leaf, but rather an absorbing organ, and does photosynthesis for the first time for the seedling.

UPDATE: Well, I just finished going through 56 pages of true bugs at Bugguide, and at 40kbaud that is a couple of hours of review. I endured the dozen or so pages each of assassin bugs, leaf-footed bugs, and stinkbugs (I knew it wasn’t any of them), and then when I got to plant bugs (Miridae) I thought ahaha! surely here! But no. No matches. I don’t have the heart at the moment to brave the undoubtedly several hundred pages of beetles, just in case I was off on the broad recognition. Later. Maybe it’s a cockroach.

....comes Tammy. Just two more named tropical storms and we’ll be going through the alphabet again, starting with Alpha. Nah, no such thing as global warming.

Tammy won’t likely attain hurricane status. It’s disorganized and won’t be over water long. How odd where it formed though. What it is doing is producing tornados, heavy rain, and wind as it’s moving over the southeast Georgia coast.


Here’s its projected path; the red arrow (well, it used to be red, now it looks brown), as above, shows our location. The consensus is close to the yellow line.


Life is interesting. We do need the rain. I see no likely problems.

While other blogs get 50x my total in one day, and others talk about their hits every other day, I turned over to 10,000 today. In 14 months.



So. Whodunnit?


Who informs me at the time I’m 9999 that he’s 10026. Sure. But how many *comments* does he have???

See you at 99,999. In 11 years.

Happy 48th Anniversary of the beginning of the Space Age. It was Oct 4, 1957, that Sputnik was launched.

I was not yet two years old; did anyone see Sputnik spying down on us in the days after its successful launch?

There are two movies that annoy me no end for their subversion of the main themes in the books from which they were derived. Now of course this is a tiny annoyance amongst a collection of huge annoyances, but still.

In Harry Harrison’s book “Make Room! Make Room!”, the main theme is overpopulation. Hollywood’s take on this book was the 1973 “Soylent Green”, remembered only for the overwrought revelation by an over-the-top Charleton Heston of what Soylent Green is actually made from. The idea of overpopulation was only hinted at in one scene. Indeed, despite the large number of books that treat the subject, I cannot think of a single movie that treats overpopulation at all, can you?

In Carl Sagan’s book “Contact”, two sorts of faith are dissected - personal faith without evidence, and faith in observed result. Now I actually thoroughly enjoyed the movie: for its rich visuals, for Jodie Foster, who I love, and for John Hurt, who was perfect as her eccentric, reclusive billionaire patron, SR Hadden ("Wanna take a ride?").

“Contact”, the movie, was a fun ride, taken in isolation; I will not detract from that aspect. But it didn’t just subvert Sagan’s “Contact”, the book, and its treatment of this often contradictory duality of faith that fascinated him so, it added preachiness about the first sort of religious faith and completely threw out the second. It also deleted the entire final section of the book in which the protagonist Ellie Arroway does a little experiment with a fascinating result. Since the result is a spoiler, I won’t get into it. Ironically the movie was dedicated “For Carl”, who had by that time died and must have been spinning in his grave. Jeez, this drives me nuts!

Did you know you can actually download billions of digits of pi from the internets? (Trust me, there IS a connection.) Just for fun, I did a chi-square analysis of the first 10 million digits of pi, just to see if there were significant deviations from what you’d expect if it were all totally random. (I’ll admit I’ve downloaded another 90 million digits to analyze .)

You might remember that chi-squares tell you whether the distribution of actual results are significantly different from the expected distribution. In this case I scanned the first 10 million digits in blocks of 1000 digits. In one block you’d expect to find 100 0s, 100 1s, 100 2s, and so forth up to 100 9s. Here’s the results for the first 10,000 blocks of 1000 digits. A high chi-square is an indication of a block that is way different from the expected distribution.



Now most of the chi-squares, as indicated by the unlabelled small dots, form a cloud at low chi-square values. Meaning that they’re in the range that’s insignificant - they are as expected. Boring. Interestingly (to me at least!) there are two very high chi-square values, one at 40 and one at 44. Whoa! I have no idea what the associated probability of finding chi-sqares at this level is; tables usually only go up to 0.1% at values of 30 or so. At THAT level you’d expect to find 10 such occurrences in a group of 10,000 observations such as I did. Maybe someone else knows what the chi-square values are at 0.01% and lower.

Here’s the actual numbers of digits in that block of digits from 9,109,001-9,110,000; listed from 0 to 9. Remember that we’d expect 100 of each:

155 80 113 82 98 106 97 92 96 81

Now why would anyone care to do this? You’ll have to read Carl Sagan’s “Contact” to find out!

Congratulations to Australians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren for their award of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Their work began in the 1980s, and their tenacity and ultimate proof provided me with a great story to tell students when I was teaching. Students loved the great story of how Barry Marshall swallowed a culture of Helicobacter pylori to demonstrate that it was the primary cause of stomach ulcers. Bad lab technique, but great drama!

(Actually I don’t know if Marshall and Warren could be classified as “Little Science”. I do recall over the last ten or fifteen years reading about their work periodically, and thinking, hmm, they strike me as pretty eclectic and dogged in their work.)

As the Committee pointed out, their discovery has led to the realization that quite a few conditions and diseases thought to be stress or mechanically caused are actually caused by inflammation, treatable easily by antibiotics.

A few days ago I wrote of Barbara McClintock, whose prize was awarded in the same category and was the first woman who did not have to share her prize with a guy. There have been more than a few other cases of Nobel Prizes given to scientists for work that was not “Big Science”, funded by millions of dollars, motivated by hordes of grad students. This is most satisfactory.

In 1995 the Nobel Committee recognized three atmospheric chemists for their work in demonstrating that chlorofluorocarbons degraded the ozone layer, and surely little need be said about the significance of that! Those folks worked for many years to provide an explanation that was not happily received by industry. I still remember a New Yorker article from years ago, before the Award, that showcased F. Sherwood Rowland, one of the awardees. Tenacious and hard-working; again, most satisfactory.

The rather colorful Cary Mullis won the Nobel in 1993 for the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a way to amplify selected segments of DNA. His was the result of an inspiration that has achieved the level of legend. Again, an example of an award given for relatively Small Science that has percolated into every aspect of DNA analysis. And if you google for Mullis, you won’t find much - he’s not a “helicopter scientist” (he is, however, very colorful ). Very satisfactory.

Lest you see my enthusiasm as some indication of unalloyed worshipfulness: some see the individuals honored by the receipt of a Nobel Prize as an indication of broad intellect and great understanding. On the contrary, Nobel Prizes are given for an extraordinarily narrow although significant success. They are not exactly “genius awards” in the sense as are those given by The MacArthur Foundation. We probably all have recollections of Nobel Prize winners who can’t resist the temptation to market their recognition as an invitation for dabbling in other, unrelated arenas.

Goldenrods and Asters!

We have at least three kinds of asters promoting their reproductive prowess late September through October. Below is a branch of what used to be called Aster lateriflorus, Calico Aster, I think (believe me, asters are confusing). You may have gotten the message already that North American asters are only distantly related to Old World asters. Old World asters are now placed into the genus Aster; with one exception of an arctic aster, North American asters are no longer placed into this genus. They are called by the most tongue-twisting names imaginable. So calico aster is now Symphyotrichum lateriflorum. Sorry. At least there are tons of Symphyotrichum, so once you’ve got it, it’s useful.


I love the subtle blue of this fellow, which is really fantastic in the full, shrubby plant which is literally covered with the tiny flowers (below left). The flowers start out with yellow centers which quickly turn a reddish brown when the anthers open.


Above right is a chance encounter with what Bugguide identifies as a Red-Banded Hairstreak, Calycropis cecrops, and what I call hyperactive. Hairstreaks have these thin hair-like projections trailing the hindwings, vaguely visible in the photo above. Hairstreaks are gossamer-winged butterflies, in the family Lycaenidae. The Butterflies of Georgia tells us the caterpillars of this species like the leaves of sumacs, some oaks, and wax myrtle.

The goldenrod is Solidago erecta, Erect Goldenrod. It has a wand-like inflorescence with the individual flower heads attached to the stem by very short pedicels. I like it!

The Fruits of Fall, the Seeds of Spring

How do we know autumn is coming? Why, autumn is a big time for collecting seeds, and that’s what we’ve been doing. Here’s a group photo; most I harvested yesterday. Notice how seeds are so distinctive:


I love seeds. I love their diversity and the aspect of their nature that has no parallel in the animal world. If it did, we’d dry up for an indefinite period about 8 weeks into pregnancy. Just add water! I love their adaptations that get them from one place to another - little barbs, parachutes, tiny size, the temptation of a delicious repast, followed probably by a huge blowout. A grad student in the botany department here, Reed Crook, I believe, once described a seed as “a baby plant wearing a jacket and carrying a sack lunch,” and that’s what they are.

And here’s the little darlings closeup. Click on the image to see a larger, more detailed version in a new window. Beware though: 200-600 kb images.

First, seven examples of the sunflower family, the Asteraceae. Rejoice in their diversity.


I particularly like ironweed seeds (first above); their bristles are a lovely purple early on. I can’t imagine that the huge crown-beard seeds (second below) wouldn’t be a nutritious treat for some bird. Sunflower seeds can be very pretty, with festive markings.


A couple of grasses. Shorthusk has nice long pointy awns that get stuck in your socks, but they’re not nearly the most dramatic sorts of awns.


A few miscellaneous species: allegheny vine has tiny lustrous black seeds; I like the patterned indentations of passionflower.


Another miscellaneous set. Cardinalflower seeds, like all lobelia seeds, are extremely tiny. There are some *cells* that are so large! Some call the first image below moonseed; I think they look like snails, myself.


Another miscellaneous set. Florida anisetree seeds are large and shiny-brown; virginia creeper seeds (out of the berry, of course) look oily, and they are.


Last but not least, two legumes. I like the polygonal shape, color, and texture of partridge pea. Very good for quail!


Finally, I’m still learning how to use this camera, and I know about f-stop and depth of field, and ISO, so if you know something more subtle than that I’d love to hear it. If you have helpful criticisms that don’t elevate above the less-than-sophistocated, chill. I know.

The October 3 issue of the New Yorker has a very interesting Letter from Louisiana this week. David Remnick entitles it “High Water: How Presidents and citizens react to disaster.”

For the first two pages, Remnick describes Lyndon Johnson’s response to Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Urged by Russell Long, Senator from Louisiana, Johnson visited the region and initiated a series of measures to cope with the disaster.

For the next eight pages, Remnick describes the pre- and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

What’s interesting is that, unless I missed another one, there’s only a single mention of President Bush: “Unlike Lyndon Johnson, President Bush was slow to respond to the emergency - so slow, in fact, that his staff felt compelled to prepare a DVD of network newscasts to impress upon him the scale of the floods, the chaos, and the suffering.”

I was intrigued. It’s demonstrably possible to rail against this President for his lack of concern for a rapidly degrading environment, to bitterly criticize him for his reactionary social policies, to despise him for running the economy into the ground while taking no rational steps to make us energy independent. It’s easy to feel scorn for his lack of curiosity and ridicule his policy of surrounding himself with yes-men who will never, never try to illuminate his ignorance. It’s almost impossible to keep from tearing your hair out in frustration over the increasingly bleak future he’s steering us into. It’s hard not to turn away in embarrassment from the sight of this strutting, smirking, self-righteous little popkin, and that’s a good start:

I realize this little fantasy hasn’t a snowball’s chance, but just imagine: how much more satisfactory it would be, as a united body, for the next 3 years and 4 months, and in every venue, simply to ignore and shun this president!