The odds of us winning a zillion dollar lottery are already zero but even if we bought lottery tickets it would be essentially zero. However we’re probably the ones who would win this lottery:

As a service to our customers, we are notifying you that Nikon has issued a
> voluntary recall for the Nikon EN-EL3 rechargeable lithium battery packs.
> The Nikon EN-EL3 battery pack was provided as a supplied accessory with
> Nikon�s D100, D70 and D50 digital SLRs and also sold separately as an
> accessory. Nikon says the battery pack can experience a short circuit
> causing it to overheat and possibly melt, posing a potential hazard to
> consumers.

> > The notice states, �There have only been four confirmed reports of incidents
> of the problem worldwide, and while no injuries have taken place, Nikon Inc.
> has initiated this recall of the affected lot numbers as a reflection of its
> commitment to safety and product quality.

And so on. Of course our battery is one of these, a 48AG made in China. The lengthy list of battery lot numbers and the instructions for returning and receiving a replacement within “7-10 days” is found at
this Nikon site .

So now the question is, of course, do we finally play the lottery? Or do we go camera-less for what will be surely two or three weeks?

UPDATE: Actually the Nikon site above does include an option for getting the replacement before sending the old one, so you don’t have to go without.

These long (up to a foot long!) pods are fruits of Honeylocust, Gleditsia triacanthos. We have several of these trees on the property, two of them quite large. The specific epithet triacanthos is well-chosen.


These pods are dried out now, but when fresh they’re edible and sweet - where the tree gets its name. Don’t know about the seeds. You shouldn’t confuse the plant with its distant relative Black Locust, which is toxic (however there’s not much chance of that). Glenn claims the shape and twist of the pods makes it aerodynamic and able to drop farther from the tree. I threw one off the deck and I’m not so sure about that.


You can probably tell from the pods and seeds that this is a pea family member, a legume, in the Fabaceae.


However, to get the pods, you’d have to climb the tree. The thorns are incredibly hard and sharp. They’ve been used as nails in the past.


Apparently there are thornless honeylocusts for those who like the plants but don’t want their children skewered. Or something - I think it’s like decaffeinated coffee - why bother?

A couple of days ago I posted the pic of the fairy ring and noted that most of the trees there were black walnut (Juglans nigra). The walnuts have been amazingly reproductive this year.


Their productivity seems to go in two year cycles, and by and large all the walnuts in the area are synchronized. Last year there were virtually no walnuts; next year I predict there won’t be any.

The trees in the fairy ring, although not young trees, are generally less than 8" in diameter. Up on the knoll though, 300 feet north of the house in the opposite direction from the fairy ring is what must be the granddaddy of them all:


This tree is probably (spreads arms to emulate thingfish - “this big!”) 4 feet in diameter. As you can see I had to put two images together to make this composite, and didn’t quite match up the blue sky correctly. But I can always say that’s a line of clouds off in the distance.

Not too remarkably, this is the first tree we noticed particularly when we bought the property twenty years ago. It sits on the highest point on the property, and it’s certainly dramatic. Until last year it was festooned with thousands of smilax vines, and had several very close-growing junipers. I spent a week removing all the vines and crowding trees last year. You can make out the circle of hackberries surrounding the walnut - notice that they’re all bending away from it.

Walnuts, here at least, are the first to lose their leaves in the fall and the last to regain them in the spring. And I already mentioned the nasty juglans chemical they secrete - I’ve lost a number of tomato plants by putting them too close to a walnut!

Pablo asked about the old well a couple hundred feet south of the house. It’s out in the “fairy ring” that I pictured yesterday and is adjacent to an old house site. We occasionally find old brick half buried in the immediate area and there’s several places where large pieces of tin roof have settled into the ground. This is also the area where several clumps of narcissus and daffodils poke up every spring.

The predominate tree species is black walnut (Juglans nigra), which is known for secreting the inhibitory chemical juglans into the soil to reduce competition. But there are plenty of things that grow under them.

Redbuds (Cercis canadensis) seem to have little problem, neither do beautyberries (Callicarpa americana). The six-weeks fescue I mentioned yesterday does well. The climbing milkvines (Matelea) use the walnuts as a prop, and the small geraniums (Geranium pusillum) also mentioned yesterday grow well. There are a lot of hackberries (Celtis occidentalis) in the immediate area.

The well itself is about 4' across and has now filled into about 6' below the ground. The inevitable sweetgum is growing out of it.

We have at least two native winter grasses that have populated areas previously indundated with the Microstegium.

The fairy ring right now is a lovely green, covered largely in Six-weeks Fescue, a native annual grass, Vulpia octoflora.


I mentioned this grass earlier this year in the midsummer, along with quite a few other interesting plants growing up at that time. It grows on a somewhat shady plateau we call the Fairy Ring, which drops off in the background steeply to the creek. This grass will stay lush and green throughout winter and spring, and then it will flower and die back, but as it does it will turn a red-bronze color.

It grows rather sparsely, not as a thick turf, so it’s not useful for lawn grass, probably. However since it grows sparsely it allows many other plants to grow within its space. Right now I’m seeing a lot of Geranium pusillum, Small Geranium, unfortunately not a native but a fairly attractive ground cover.

This brings to mind the idea of “winter annuals”. Many people are probably aware that one way to germinate seeds is to give them a cold treatment, or stratification. This simulates winter, and the stratification requirement is to prevent the seeds from germinating before the warm spring; if they germinated earlier they’d freeze.

But not all plants are like this, and winter annuals aren’t. They grow during the fall and winter and flower in the spring and early summer. There seeds must be able to germinate in the late summer or early fall. So they don’t have this particular kind of stratification or cold treatment requirement - if they did they wouldn’t germinate until spring and couldn’t survive increasing heat.

So they presumably have a different requirement, a period of hot temperatures before they can germinate.

There are quite a few winter annuals - many mustard species are like this, as is Arabidopsis thaliana, that plant molecular biology model which is incorrectly viewed by many scientists as requiring a cold treatment before germination can proceed. On the contrary, if they’re incubated at elevated temperatures for a week or so, they germinate quite well.

Glenn has identified the other native cool season grass as Bromus kalmii, Arctic Brome. It grows on what we call the knoll, north of the house, and forms an attractive expanse in the spring and early summer. It has an odd distribution - despite its name it grows well from the north into the middle eastern states, and then nothing in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, but it is found in Georgia and Alabama. Curious!

I can think of three explanations - a trivial one, that it just hasn’t been documented in the above middle states; and another trivial one, that it was planted farther south but not in-between. Both of these strike me as unlikely. The third explanation may be that it was left behind during the last ice age. There are well-documented examples of plants normally found in cold climates that just manage to hang on far south of where they should be, because of that.

Of course a fourth explanation is that we’ve misidentified it!

It’s called that, here in the United States, because small businesses hope to see their accounts move into the black, but I see the phrase in a dual light. With all due respect to the small entrepreneurs who hope to make sales today (and all undue respect to the big boxes that CNN features):

Several times yesterday, on Thanksgiving, I started writing a post on what I was thankful for and I just couldn’t manage it.

Don’t misunderstand - I’m thankful for a great many things. I’m thankful for Glenn. I’m thankful for all that surrounds me and makes my life happy, and that includes my cats who on a daily basis give me a lot of joy. I’m thankful that my life is what it is; that I have plenty to eat, that I’m comfortable, that I have a job. I’m thankful that my extended family are all healthy and happy. I’m endlessly thankful for both my online and offline friends. I’m especially thankful for the memories of those who have surrounded my life for 50 years, many of whom are no longer here. But what I came to realize is that those things I was thankful for were all personal; they didn’t extend outward. And I couldn’t finish that post, at least not on Thanksgiving Day.

But Black Friday, the Day of Intense Greed, seems a good day to write the rest of it. If our culture demands to place an approved recognition of greed right after a day of thanksgiving, why shouldn’t I enumerate those things I’m not thankful for, today?

Yes, I’m thankful for all I have but I can’t pretend it was due entirely to hard work. Yes, I’ve worked hard, and Glenn works hard, but we’ve had opportunity that three quarters of our fellow human beings who live in places like Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, don’t have, and they work hard too, often just to stay alive. And at least part of the reason we have those opportunities is at the expense of those who don’t. I can’t be thankful for that.

Yes, I’m thankful for the availability of those things I really need, but I watch today’s CNN page and am horrified at the greed of those who are camping out in front of WalMart and BigK and Target hoping to suck up as much as they can buy and more, all too often by overspending on their credit cards, whose home companies really really really WANT them to overspend. I can’t be thankful for that.

I’m thankful that I live in a safe environment where I don’t have to worry about a car bomb or suicide bomber threatening my life or the lives of those close to me. But that’s not the case in an awful lot of other places, and how can I be thankful for that?

I’m thankful that I live on 40 acres of forested land, and it’s true that Glenn and I prepared and worked for that for twelve years. But we had the opportunity that so many don’t have, and soon will not have even here, and that bothers me.

Part of the reason I’m thankful to live where I do is that the horror of environmental degradation, and the lack of concern in this country, isn’t so apparent here. But it’s happening, and oh, so much more in other places, and for more than most other things I find it impossible to be thankful for that.

And in keeping with that thought, I’m thankful that everytime I turn on a light or a computer or the heat that it comes on, and that power interruptions are random and meaningless. But this can’t continue, and there’s no evidence of our leaders showing any constructive efforts toward understanding and working toward a prevention of that permanent interruption. I’m definitely not thankful for that.

We live in this country, in a democracy, and I am surely thankful that I was born into that. But it’s a democracy increasingly perverted by special interests and the graspings of politicians who place party and power over the interests of those they govern; how can I be thankful for that?

I’m thankful for our soldiers, but there are so many of those who have lost their lives, and their families who have to question if it was worth it. How can I be thankful for that? And how can I ignore the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have lost their lives for no better reason than that they lived in the wrong place at the wrong time? How can anyone be thankful for that?

Perhaps, in a very large sense, I can at least be thankful that our President and his Administration are now having to answer some very hard questions, and that they have little to fall back on. Maybe a lot of the problems I see might be addressed now, just a bit, as this President becomes more and more emasculated and ineffectual. True, it doesn’t solve everything; we have a lot of repairs to do, and a huge number of problems to address, but perhaps he can’t do any more damage with his “mandated agendas”.

Maybe that’s something larger than my little personal world that we can be thankful for.

I hope everyone had a good thanksgiving, with food, drink, and memories to the expected degree of supersaturation. I enjoyed a quiet stay-at-home with Glenn and the cats, and everyone had a good feast yesterday.

You may recall that we got DSL a couple of weeks ago, but as well and unbeknownst to me Glenn had found a good deal on a 3Ghz 220GB Gateway pc AND with a very nice flatscreen, and so we spent the first couple of days of the holiday installing it and then setting up networking for all three computers. That operation did not go without problem( * ) but it was finally completed yesterday and all three computers are talking to each other now.

The Little Office Under the Stairs existed before there was ever a Harry Potter. But it’s gotten better in the last few days. Some might think it a little crowded, others might more unkindly refer to it as cluttered, but with two computers and screens and all my reference materials I call it *cozy*. I suppose you could say that if there’s a single point at which Niches emanates, it’s here.


* For those who are interested in the technical details, our problem was that two of the computers ran Windows XP, and they could talk to each other, but neither apparently wanted anything to do with my old Gateway running Windows 2000. We finally realized that XP no longer sets up the NETBEUI protocol when it’s installed. You have to get the two files out of the setup disk and put them in the right XP directories and then add the protocol that’s now available. At that point both XPs saw the 2000 and it was a good thanksgiving indeed.

I’m not sure that there was ever a “silver bullet” point; we did a lot of tweaking before adding those two files and I still have no idea what all we did or what other things might have also been necessary, but it works even if I don’t understand it perfectly.

For the last few weeks we’ve been puzzling over areas in the beds and walkways that have been dug up down to a few inches.

Last night I was out on the front porch and heard an awful lot of rustling around in the leaves a few feet away. It wasn’t a cat, and it wasn’t a possum.


Although I’ve seen armadillo roadkill when I lived in Florida, I’ve never seen one alive and up close. An acquaintance whose husband works in Greene County 30 miles south of here had told me that he sees armadillo roadkill, but I’d never encountered them here until now.

I imagine we’ll be sorry they’re now this far north, but my goodness isn’t he cute? And fast! I wasn’t able to make him jump up in the air; he really wasn’t very disturbed by my presence at all.

The high pressure area that has been guarding our part of the country, warding off rain and cooler temperatures for the last two months, finally went away. Moist air blew up from the southwest and cold air from the northwest. Since Sunday night we’ve had 2.6" of rain, the first in almost two months. With highs for the next few days in the 40s and 50s, it looks like we’ve officially entered our normal winter cycle. And that means a few days of dry cold, followed by warming and humidity, and then rain as cold fronts from the northwest move through. Rinse and repeat. Once or twice it may coincide that humid air and extremely cold temperatures will result in snow or an ice storm. The only drawback is that we won’t have much in the way of thunderstorms until spring. I love thunderstorms. The Matelea carolinensis, Carolina Milkvine, has finally turned color, just in time for a quiet Thanksgiving at home. And for those in the US, how are you celebrating it?

I have this vision of mountains flying through the sky.


Yes, I photoshopped this. The foreground landscape is Eros, from the NEAR project, and the flying mountain is Comet Wild 2, from Stardust’s flyby. Only in my imagination do they actually come close to each other.

There’s one place this could happen - the asteroid belt. Imagine standing on an asteroid and watching a mile-wide mountain cruising above your head at a few miles an hour. Surely there will be tours one day for the filthy rich to watch such a thing. Can it happen? How often? To answer this I wrote a little program that takes the 100,000 major asteroids and determines their distances from each other on each successive day. I was hoping to find asteroids that zoom past each other within a few miles, but I was cruelly disappointed. The closest pair I found from Nov 2005 through Feb 2006 was 16,000 miles from each other on Feb 16 2006 at 4:30am EST.

You’ve seen this before. It’s the inner system asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter, and we see it as it will look on Feb 16 2006 with 100,000 asteroids plotted. It looks so crowded! But within that torus there’s 8.3x10 to the 23rd cubic miles of space, and that’s enough so that any given asteroid is on average 10 million miles from another.


The two green lines show the positions of two asteroids that will be as close to each other as I’ve been able to find so far. One asteroid is named Gotz (after the astronomer Paul Gotz ) and the other has not yet been named by the International Astronomical Union and simply has the unromantic name of 2000 WC122, as do most.

The naming conventions, since mythological names gave out, are very democratic. There’s Zappafrank, Annefrank, Cheshirecat, Jamesbond, Misterrogers, and tons more.

Here’s what this close encounter looks like on that date in February, stripped of all the others. My, they look close, but they aren’t.


And here’s what they look like as Gotz (the yellow line) passes close to WC122, the blue dot. Despite the appearance they’re still 16,000 miles apart.


So how would a 1 kilometer diameter asteroid look if it was 16,000 miles away? We’re disappointed to find that it would just be a point of light, if that, moving slowly across the sky. You’d get a bigger thrill standing out in your backyard in the early evening or dawn and watch satellites passing overhead.

For us to be truly thrilled, and get our money’s worth, it would have to be the size of a full moon and would have to pass within 70 miles. Dang. And in order to fulfill my vision of a mountain filling half the sky it would have to pass within 2 miles. Surely it happens now and then but the asteroids have had a few billion years to do their collisions and sort out their orbits and and events like the one *I* want must be quite rare.

The geek in me approves of the geek in you. Unfortunately there seems to be no geek in CNN, NYTimes, or other “purveyors of important information” so we don’t know quite what happened with Hayabusa. The Japanese Space Institute tell us they’re accumulating data to determine the outcome of yesterday’s landing.

Fortunately for us geeks there is a Space Calendar, provided to us by Ron Baalke of JPL (who actually had an asteroid named for him a couple of years ago, now Asteroid 6524 Baalke!). Baalke’s Space Calendar gives you tons of info on comet apparitions, asteroid approaches, anniversary dates, meteor showers, and a lot of other stuff.

In just about an hour, Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft will land on Asteroid 25143 Itokawa, one of those near-earth orbit asteroids that pose potential collision dangers. The event is being live-blogged at Japan’s ISAS, the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.

Here’s a pic of Itokawa taken a couple of hours ago as the spacecraft began its descent. The asteroid is just under a kilometer long.


The spacecraft was launched in May 2003. It was originally planned for Hayabusa to land, collect samples, and take off for another location three times. But earlier this month the tiny 4" Minerva robot that would have hopped all over the surface instead drifted into space, so those plans may change. In December Hayabusa will leave Itokawa and head back to Earth. It will drop its samples over Australia in June, 2007.

From the Near Earth Object Program, here’s Itokawa’s position today, and here’s a neat article on the mission.

So this morning I said to Glenn, I said, do you want to have the fun of doing it or do you want me to? And he said, you do it.

It took five minutes - I’ll give AOL that. Perhaps it was my mild hostility to a single intrusive question that put me on a fast track, I don’t know. But it seems my 8-year association is now over. I sure hope DSL doesn’t mess up now!

There have been several situations in my life that have afforded me a euphoric measure of relief - getting my PhD, when the FBI agents didn’t call me anymore, and a few others. How strange, given how trivial it is, that I feel the same measure of contentment now! I must be easy to please.

Quick UPDATE: One other source of euphoria I hadn’t considered - removing AOL from my computer! What fun! And a side benefit - I use Zonealarm as a firewall. Connected to AOL I used to get an intrusion, from high to medium level, every few minutes. Since I’ve been using DSL exclusively the last few days there hasn’t been a single intrusion logged. Let it be a lesson: AOL could do something about high frequency probes from their less ethical members if they wanted to, but they don’t.

This is a tussock moth, Orgyia spp., and probably O. definita according to Bugguide, the definite-marked or yellowheaded tussock moth.


It’s not the worst critter in the woods; according to Auburn Ag, it’s not numerous enough to do much damage as it proceeds in its search of foliage of various deciduous trees. And as you can tell, it’s not stinging Glenn. This is in contrast to its cousin the white-marked tussock moth, O. leucostigma, which is numerous and damaging, and it does sting.

Very attractive caterpillar, with its broomlike clumps of hair and overall bright yellow color. The adult moth is rather drab but does have magnificent comblike antennae and long forelegs.

CNN Money is not my usual stomping grounds, but let me introduce you to Lee Raymond, CEO of Exxon. He makes more money in one minute than you or I will ever make over the course of our lifetime, and he said to Frank Lautenberg at a Senate hearing last week that neither he nor his company were involved in Dick Cheney’s Secret Energy Task Force discussions in 2001. So did a lot of CEOs of energy companies now reaping huge profits.

“However, The Washington Post reported Wednesday that a White House document showed some companies did in fact meet with the task force. It said the document showed officials from Exxon Mobil Corp. (Research), Conoco (Research), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc., whose executives testified at last week’s Senate hearing, met with Cheney aides.”

My intent here is not to get into this little revelation, although it affords us quite a potential for future fun.

Rather, it tickled my memory of a piece of satire aired by NPR in 2002. It’s by Bruce Kluger and David Slavin, and when we heard it then we liked to have died laughing. This morning I dug it up, found it prescient, and now you too can enjoy it, by clicking here. (Apparently you can only listen to this through RealPlayer; it doesn’t appear to be very big.)

The latest update in my ongoing documentation of this autumn’s high temperatures. Data were obtained from the National Weather Service Forecast Office webpage for Athens. The blue line is the record high for that day since records were kept, and the red line is 2005. The other lines are daily highs for the years 1990-2005.


With the exception of a few days at the beginning and end of October, we’ve been consistently at the high end of the temperatures of the last 16 years from Sep 1 to the current date. On Nov 7 and 8 we set the historical high for those days. Combine that with our exceptionally dry fall and you have some very confused plants. I should point out that my choice of the last 16 years is itself misleading: at least the last decade has generally been extremely warm here.

And btw, about 2/3 of the highs were set in the 1920s and 1930s, during the Dust Bowl period. It’s generally thought that the Dust Bowl was the result of a period of high sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). For the last few years the AMO has also been in a period of extraordinary high temperature, which is additionally one possible reason for the historically superactive hurricane season this year. In the 20s and 30s the high Northern Hemisphere temperatures were offset by low Southern Hemisphere temperatures, so the global average temperatures weren’t affected. That of course is not now the case.

For your amusement, here’s the AMO plot since 1900. The blue areas indicate cooler than average North Atlantic Temperatures; the yellow and red warmer than average.


You can certainly see a cycle here, but it also seems to be superimposed on a definite upward trend (the heavy black line). A note about this year’s hurricanes - they occurred during a weak to neutral El Nino phase, and El Nino suppresses hurricanes. Just wait until we get a La Nina, which enhances, and you’ll see some real fireworks. A perfect storm sort of thing.

Yesterday, the AOL connection went down. Damn, again, I thought. Five minutes later the little green DSL light on the modem lit up and suddenly we were flying through the internets, without reconnecting to AOL. I haven’t reconnected since.

Wow. It’s heady.

The last few days have been warmish and full of moisture in the air. In a few hours, the cold front that moved through the midwest yesterday will reach us, and for the first time in a month we’ll have some rain and thunderstorms - if we’re lucky and hit that 70% chance!


All in all, two very good days!

An old New Yorker cartoon, which I can’t find, shows two cowboys on their horses standing on a tall plateau looking out over a vast valley - in the distance are a group of circling dots.


The punchline: “Could be buzzards, could be grief counselors. Can’t tell from here.”

OK, it’s not a very nice joke, and I’m not usually fond of cruel jokes, but it’s not terribly cruel and besides I like scientist jokes and cartoons too. Ever since, Glenn and I have referred to the turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) that we see frequently here as grief counselors. We are endlessly amused by this. The vultures above were circling and landing in a group of trees where a hunter had left the innards of a deer after evisceration. Last week, after Gene had been gone for three days, I started looking for buzzards circling above our area. I even investigated one area where a coupla dozen were circling one day, but found nothing.

Turkey vultures detect the mercaptans given off by dead, but preferably fresh, animals. Whether they detect carrion by sight or smell has been a matter of debate for over a hundred years (pdf). Vultures have been known to circle over gas leaks (natural gas, naturally odorless, is spiked with a little mercaptan, the smell of skunk, to make it detectable to those humans who use it). In fact, the position of buzzards in the air has been used to locate gas leaks in gas lines. Their olfactory bulb is very large and refined, however observation of responses to various concentrations of mercaptans in the air suggests they don’t detect extremely low levels of it. So their acute vision probably has a great deal to do with locating a food source.

One late afternoon some years back, on a clear, cool, blue-sky day much like today, I was sitting outside and looked up to see at least a hundred of them circling above me, not a thousand feet up as in the above pic, but less than a hundred feet up, completely discernible in all details. It was an extraordinary and surreal sight and I ran in to get the phone to call Glenn (no camera, unfortunately).

When I got back they were gone, just like that. Puzzled I wandered around and into the nearest group of pines, and suddenly the trees were all in motion as the hundred giant birds took off from where I’d just disturbed them from their impending roost.

The Turkey Vulture Society of America offers us some interesting factoids. A group of vultures is called a “Venue”. Vultures circling in the air are a “Kettle”.

It’s a wonder, given their long hours of gliding thousands of feet above the ground, that they don’t suffer from skin cancer; at least I have been able to find no indication of it if they do. They must have incredible DNA repair systems; it’s hard to see how their naked heads and necks could escape the blazing radiation they encounter almost continuously.

They’re also one of those animals that just about all of us encounter at a close, though brief, range. Besides their presence in the sky, our niches overlap as those of us who do drive along busy highways. Roadkills attract vultures, and that’s where we see them, often waiting until a car is just upon them before staggering back into the sky. Without them, our highways would be ever so less pleasant.

OK, this is entirely frivolous, but it’s a slow day, sometimes frivolity is warranted, and since I mentioned Leona Helmsley yesterday I thought I’d give you an idea of why her images and advertisements and icons fill my bathroom shrine. There’s only one real competitor, the far more recent Mrs. Betty Bowers, and she doesn’t own a bunch of hotels.

I should also tell you that every year I take the piled-up New Yorkers and cut out and save all the cartoons and snippets that amused me that year. I’ve got them back to 1978. Could I have really imagined, 20 years ago, that I’d be sticking them on a scanner I had no idea would exist now and offering them to you? That’s foresight!

Isn’t she wonderful? Wouldn’t you love to share a jail cell with her? And remember “Only the little people pay taxes!” Viva Capitalism! Viva Tax Cuts!

As I mentioned earlier, DSL has come to Wolfskin and Sparkleberry Springs. Or has it? Our provider, Alltel, sent the DSL kit that includes the software on CD and lots of little cables and filters and a neat little modem:


Notice how the DSL light is dark .

I spent an hour or so yesterday enthusiastically doing all the things the kit told me to do, and it all went swimmingly until the last step when after a little flickering the DSL light would turn bright green, and Presto! Our lives change for the better.

Anyway, it didn’t. We’re still in the Stone Age but Glenn’s call to Alltel tells us that it is in the mail, the hookup will be on Tuesday, we’ll officially be DSL Hittites then. The adventures in wireless will have to wait until then.

You can see how Leona and I spend our early mornings, reading Roundrock Journal. Of course we don’t allow just any cat up on the monitor, but Leona’s a lady. She’d never pee in the computer; indeed I’m pretty sure she doesn’t pee or crap at all - none of us has ever seen her taking care of business.


Obcatnames: Leona and her brother Harry are named after the Helmsleys. My bathroom is festooned with Leona ("only little people pay taxes") Helmsley, the Queen of Mean, photos, New Yorker adverts, and trivia - one friend stayed in a Helmsley Hotel and actually brought me back a toothbrush, a prized icon in this shrine, appropriately located in the bathroom, to the worst of America. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons from the 80’s is an old Miller one that shows a withered, well-off couple in easy chairs, the wife saying “Why can’t you buy some hotels and make *me* your queen?”

Finally, one of my favorite fascists is Mrs. Betty Bowers. She’s everything you want in a truly repulsive neanderthal. Through The Biomes Blog, here’s a wonderful collection of buttons from Betty Bowers.

And I would guess a male, judging by his red eyes. He was having a good day until I came by.


Turtles are in the order Testudinata which includes 12 families and about 300 species. Eastern box turtles (Terrapens carolina) are in the family Emydidae, which includes pond and water turtles. Other families include the snapping turtle family, the mud and musk turtle family, the tortoise family (including gopher tortoises and Galapagos tortoises), the sea turtle family, the softshell turtle family, and the leatherback family.

Not only do many species of turtles live a long time (one of Darwin’s giant tortoises is believed to still be alive), but they’ve been around as turtles for a long time, at least 210 million years. They survived the giant meteor impact that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It’s not clear what the stem ancestor of all turtles today might have been, but it might have looked like this, the pareiasaurs.

Periodically throughout the summer we see a pair of box turtles, with one in mad pursuit of the other, in the process of mating. It’s amazing how fast they can move when they’re sufficiently motivated!

At this time of the year I have to check an old well, mostly filled in but still about 7 feet deep, into which a lot of turtles seem to fall and can’t get back out.

To me yesterday’s results from Tuesday’s elections and decisions were wonderful news. I’m cautious about overinterpreting but hope that the displeasure reflected in the polls will begin to put the brakes on the extreme agenda demanded by the extreme right-wingers, and pandered to by the Republican right-wingers in power. I hope, because it’s time for this to stop.

That of course was nothing compared to the second bit of good news. When I got home from work, put my things up, and sat down at the computer next to the stairs, I heard a cat come down the stairs and looked around and it was Gene. Glenn had found him sleeping just beyond the house in the early morning after I’d left and put him inside for me to find. We’ll draw the curtain on the embarrassing spectacle that immediately ensued.

He won’t tell us where he was since he disappeared Thursday morning. He’s fine, eating a lot but doesn’t seem to have lost much weight. I’m so glad to have him back. Thanks to everyone and to my neighbors for keeping their eyes peeled.

Dry as it is, this “shelf fungus” has been moist and growing ever since I first saw it on this hackberry in the floodplain four days ago.




I’m afraid I don’t know my fungi of this group well enough to say exactly what it is. It could be in the families of coral fungus (Clavariaceae), crest fungus (Corticiaceae), or tooth fungus (Hydnaceae). It seems to be toothed, but they are very very short teeth. Perhaps someone else knows. Very dramatic, anyway.

In September we had 0.9" of rain. On Oct 5 and 6 we had 4.35" rain, all from Tropical Depression Tammy, the one that blew up to everyone’s surprise off the coast of Northeast Florida and then came ashore almost immediately. Since Oct 6, we’ve had no rain.

This has been the unusual nature of the last four months - no periods of several days of rain, in fact, no rain at all unless delivered by tropical storm remnants.

And yet, it doesn’t *seem* dry, and the Georgia Forestry Commission’s Fire Hazard Map seems to agree with me, at least for Athens (note though that there are parts of central and northwest Georgia (hi Mark!) that are extremely dry.

I wake up in the mornings to the sound of occasional dripping from the trees. This is in the nature of the cool nights of fall, no matter how dry it’s seemed during the warm days of October and November. The sun goes down, things cool off, the dewpoint is reached, moisture appears in the air and by midnight is coating everything. By dawn anything under the trees is wetted pretty thoroughly. But only under the trees - generally it’s pretty dry on open ground.

Of course by noon it’s all dried off again leaving crackly noisy leaves on the ground.

By the way, is it just our local population of possums, or are everyone’s this stupid?

I feel like we’ve been blogging cats to death, but this is entirely coincidental. Thursday night at the Wolfskin VFD business meeting, Frankie (our VFD’s extremely capable mechanic) and Mary come up and say, “Hey, wanna nother cat?” After listening to all her virtues, I pointed to Glenn a few seats down and indicated that they’d have to ask him. “Well”, Mary said, and I could see how it was happening, we were getting suckered - again - “he said to ask you!” And that’s how it happened.

(This adoption happened on the evening of the morning Gene disappeared, so it’s unrelated to that - we were only then becoming anxious about it.)

So - introducing the new girl:


Her current name is, approximately, “Memiao”, pronounced, approximately “MEEM-yow”. I’m not sure if that’s going to stick. I’m not sure about waiting at the vet surrounding by rottweilers and pitbulls and german shepards named Jock and Brute and Rocky and Chopper ("sic balls, Chopper!") and having the receptionist inquire, “Is Memiao ready for her appointment?” So the question is, what to name her?

“Memiao” is a little over a year old, and she’s a Katrina refugee. I’m not sure of the whys and wherefores but early on Frankie went down to New Orleans, to an area he was familiar with a little north of the city, and spent some time rescuing abandoned animals. This particular cat had been closed up in a house, left behind with food, but which had run out, and the family situation was dire - the husband of the couple was murdered at a refugee center and the wife was in rehabilitation. At any rate, “Memiao” made it back to Athens, and thence to us.

We’ve considered “Katrina”, but that’s a little too obvious for us, and smacks a bit too much of naming kids after soap opera characters. I myself favor “Nola”, or perhaps since she was a little north, maybe “Nonola”.

As I consider myself something of a geneticist, I’m also partial to “Sector”, and thats because she’s a tortoiseshell. Just look at those vivid magnificent orange markings! And by the way, a while back I wrote a little genetics tutorial on the remarkable sex-linked genes that produce a female calico or tortoiseshell, and why males are extremely rare.


“Memiao” has not quite found her comfort level. She’s very sweet and affectionate with us, but she’s still got a bit of adjustment to do with the other cats. The hisses and growls are frequent, and her private space is enormous. It’s entirely one-sided. The other cats really don’t care one way or the other about her; they and we’ve done this many many times and we all say that it just takes time.

So. How is it that we get into this kind of situation? We do have our upper limit of course, and with the addition of “Memiao”, we’re closely approaching it. It seems that we’ve somewhat involuntarily assumed the role of indigent cat saviors. It’s a relaxed role - we don’t actively seek out cats to take on and we don’t find homes for them after they’re here. They show up, or are otherwise accepted, and that’s it - they’re permanent members of the family, don’t need food stamps, and have full medical benefits.

You might be amused by my tendency to slum, but I was struck by this years ago, and ever since. In Stephen King’s “The Shining”, Dick Halloran’s extremely severe and stern female airplane seatmate comments on his obvious mission: “Something that will improve the general situation in some small way, I hope”.

There’s a dark curtain that threatens to close over us all. Frankie went and rescued animals. We take in abandoned cats. My parents help their neighbors. As miniscule as they are, and as vast as our adversaries' resources are, maybe these little efforts, when compounded over millions of well-intentioned individuals, contribute to an overall improvement, a reduction in entropy, and a net gain for humanity.

Yesterday was rough. I spent 8 hours tromping through 40 acres, calling, and then re-walked 20 acres again. No luck.

As Mark said, he’s probably not gone far, assuming he’s alive. He might’ve gotten surprised by coyotes or a bobcat. The usually nocturnal rattlers like to come out during these warm November days and he might have run across one of those. These are the worst-case scenarios. Best case is that he got treed by something and is taking his sweet time getting down.

Anyway, many thanks for the good wishes. Glenn called and alerted the neighbors. We’ve done all we can to find him in the earliest time. If he shows up in one form or another I’ll let you know, but for now back to business.

Gene has gone missing since yesterday morning (Nov 3). I know some of our neighbors read this blog so I’m putting his pic up just in case you find him. He’s a small neutered male, about 1.5 years old, fairly friendly. You can call us (Wayne or Glenn) at 742-2296, if you do find him. He’s not likely to have wandered much beyond the Timberland Trail area, or the area between that and Blacksnake Road.

It was pretty clear that after a couple of years, enough dust had collected on the scope mirror that it was going to have to be cleaned. A bit of dust doesn’t hurt performance, but as you can see below left (before) this was enough to scare the bejeezus out of Vera Donovan.


The rest of the pics are after cleaning. Look how thick that glass is! The black piece of tape in the center is for collimation purposes - you’ll find that in the geometric center of most reflector mirrors. The final pic on the right is an “art pic”, a reflection of the above ceiling fan taken with just a blur to it (and yes, the paddles are a burgundy color).


Now all I have to do is remount the 30-lb thing back into the scope tube and re-collimate.

It happens now and then.

A lot of you know I’m especially distracted by space stuff and enjoy programming with regard to that and other things. Large numbers of things with large numbers of numbers attached to them make me happy.

This morning I thought, hmmmm, I wonder which asteroids (of the 103,395 I have on file) are close to one another? Like, within a hundred miles. So I spent a few hours after I got up at 2am writing a very inefficient program to determine this. Sorry, no results yet, the program which is so inefficient that it has to make 10 billion calculations is still running, and I don’t have the heart to stop it even though I have a better idea that speeds it up at least a hundred fold.

I’m working with asteroids, because that’s what I’ve got as a database, but earth satellites are just as interesting. There’s tons of satellites and pieces of junk in low earth orbit, all the way from operating satellites to gloves and bolts, moving at 18,000 miles an hour, catalogued and updated, and quite a few of them are potentially in collision with others. Take the International Space Station, for instance.

In Dec 2001 the ISS had to be boosted by Discovery a bit to avoid the possibility of collision with a Russian booster.

Toward the end of Nov 2003 a piece of junk collided with the ISS, causing no damage but some degree of excitement.

An interesting article about space junk is found here. As they make the point, there’s probably 5-10x the number of catalogued objects that are uncatalogues, and there’s nothing we can do about that.

Of course, nothing I do is going to contribute to the effort, this is just for fun.

Most people have had fast connections for years now, even wireless environments. We’ve felt a little like stepchildren. Our phone number is listed in Winterville, our address in Arnoldsville, and the nearest town, six miles away, is Crawford. Crawford is best known for having the only traffic light in huge Ogelthorpe County. So there hasn’t exactly been a huge rush to provide fast connections to our area.

It looks like we’re going to finally have DSL access here. AllTel established a hub about 2 miles away and Glenn signed up yesterday after asking a lot of questions about upload/download speeds at our house and so forth. It’s not cable, but that’s ok.

Fourteen years ago when we moved out here we were dialing up at 4800 baud through the University, which didn’t take long at all to remove that service. We then got on AOL, and have used that ISP for the last decade with considerable reservation but few options, and a gradually increasing dialup now occasionally reach 48000 baud if we’re lucky. Now we get DSL, liberation of the home phone, and finally the freedom to remove from AOL, and that will sever our last connection to obnoxious mainstream American culture. Yeah!

Now all I have to do is figure out how to network our two computers.

It’s easy to see the end of summer and the advent of frost as a kind of an end to life, but at least in northeast Georgia, 'tain’t so. There’s plenty of living animal and plant life if you look, and it continues on into winter and beyond.

Dogwood berries. I’ve never seen so many - every tree is filled with red berries; usually there are a few on a few trees. This is Cornus florida, in the Cornaceae.


Orb weavers. I’ve posted earlier on one of these, but now we have these bright black and yellow jobs hanging around everywhere. Even with three frosts they’re still going strong. I’m assuming this is some kind of Araneus but haven’t been able to find the exact species - it’s very common here.

Whoop! Bugguide has it. Probably Araneus marmoreus, Marbled Orb-Weaver. They’re supposedly shy, “dropping to the ground if approached”, but ours certainly aren’t.


Last but definitely not least, one of the very nicest asters, Aster prenanthoides (aka Symphyotrichum prenanthoides) - Crookedstem Aster. Deep blue ray petals and large flowers make this a dramatic plant late in the season. The name comes from the zigzag growth of the stems.