We’ve had about 1.5 inches of rain since late Friday night, and it’s certainly welcome!

When you increase the pH of red wine (by brushing your teeth with baking soda after a few glasses, or even directly stirring some into a glass of red wine) it turns bright blue.

The fireball observed over western Canada a week or so ago (thanks Bev!) seems to have exploded over a relatively small area of Saskatchewan. Many fragments have been found. I’d love to have a fragment!

And now there’s this. It’s time to get to work after eight years of incompetence and farting around.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula is fracturing. The Antarctic Peninsula has shown among the highest increases in temperature on the planet in the last five decades, and we’ve now seen ice shelf collapses with annual periodicity. These collapses usually come toward the end of the Antarctic summer, in March, but this one is different. Although it was observed to be uneasy last March, 2008, the fracturing this November comes at the end of the Antarctic *winter*.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center has more about ice shelves here, including the Larsen B disintegration a few years ago, among many others since in the last two decades or so.

Here are the regions of the Antarctic Peninsula affected:



NASA physicist James Hansen (and that will serve to remind you of the censorship attempts in 2005-2006), addressed Congress earlier this year, and the National Press Club, which appears in this pdf, Twenty Years Later. That would be a reminder that Hansen has held a remarkable accuracy in his analyses and predictions of climate change for that period of time.

In that address he ends:

Democracy works, but sometimes churns slowly. Time is short. The 2008 election is critical for the planet. If Americans turn out to pasture the most brontosaurian congressmen, if Washington adapts to address climate change, our children and grandchildren can still hold great expectations.

Part of Hansen’s contention is that the effects of increasing CO₂ lag way behind the actual increase. The presumption has been that the effects would rise essentially concurrently with the increase in long-lived greenhouse gases, but non-equilibrium in the short term plays a very nasty trick on us here. He sees this in the accelerated loss of ice from Greenland, and the alarming sea ice loss in the Arctic, among other things. He notes that the most recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report does not include these phenomena, and so his prediction of a 2-meter rise in sea level by 2100 is greater than the IPCC 0.6-meter prediction.

The above is something of a distillation of a more technical paper ( pdf ) which addresses his reasoning that we must quickly reduce CO₂ levels from the current 385 to 350 ppm. Otherwise we risk encountering “tipping points.” We can reverse from a tipping point, with effort, but they lead to the “point of no return,” if unaddressed or ignored.

The last four pages of text (p10-13, there are a lot of references and supporting material that follow) in that pdf, beginning with “Anthropocene Era,” summarize and indicate policy suggestions. Note that phase-out of coal over the next two decades is a major requirement - excepting that which is used along with CO₂ capture. There are, of course, other considerable environmental problems with coal, including mountaintop removal.

We had a quiet, eventless Thanksgiving Day. Oh there was a fire call early in the morning, but it was outside of our area so we didn’t have to worry about that. Someone starting up their wood stove or fireplace for the first time this year, probably!

We did cooking and baking, with Glenn handling the turkey side of the production with his usual acumen. We were not too gluttonous, and did not agonize too much over the ethical issues involved. We can do that today, as we participate in Buy Nothing Day. Pablo has the details, if you aren’t so squeamish as we are at the throngs of leering greedy people beating down the doors to buy at lower prices substandard crap.

Question: what happens when you drink a few glasses of red wine and then brush your teeth with baking soda? You may wish to try this. We could get into other less salutory, questionably salubrious, definitely outrageous observations of the effects of red wine, but I’ll leave that to others as they partake of their post TNX morning ablutions.

After dinner I took a long walk. We’ve now had quite a few sub-freezing nights, but the days have often been sunny and warm, and yesterday was just so. I noted flocks of robins down at the creek, and saw several syrphid flies of the hoverfly type. But the arthropod community seems to have settled down and out of sight for the winter, now.

The kitties got their share of turkey, following hours of thundering up and down the stairs in excitement, like a herd of elephants. Later, I came upon Max blissing out in the afternoon sun in the midst of a golden population of late autumn bluestem.



It’s pretty much how I felt, as the low sun warmed us on the back deck in the late afternoon.

Too long a list this year, for me, but there is this.

Apparently they took Thanksgiving out for a trial spin in 1776, with two days of fasting and prayer. Imagine dealing with a household full of cranky hypoglycemic family members.

We can be thankful that in 1777, the first *real* national holiday, they replaced fasting with feasting.

Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone’s, and Supervisor Harvey Milk’s murders, by Dan White in 1978. Dan White was given 7 years for manslaughter, for murdering two people, in consideration of the Twinkie Defense, and the White Night Riots ensued. He was released five years later, and killed himself not too long after that.

I had come out at the age of 19, sometime in 1975, but will always remember Harvey Milk’s assertion - tell everyone, be what you are, don’t be ashamed. It’s essential, he said, that everyone know that someone they know, that someone in their family, is gay.

Adolescents are not the most pleasant people in the world. The emergence from adolescence is something that begins to happen at the age of 13 or 15, for straight kids, and it is brought about with much support. Dating, parties, good-natured kidding makes all this a routine thing.

Gay kids, at least then, did not quite fit in, as you can imagine. Any mingling I might have done was not at all approved, and so I put my emergence from adolescence on hold until I was 20, with the obvious problematic results: a 20-year-old adolescent is most difficult, angry, and there are repercussions that follow for many years.

But gradually, particularly with the mellowing that accompanies age, Harvey Milk’s advice, many years ago, proved exactly right. I’ve never regretted following it, or preceding it, actually, for I came to his same conclusion earlier. Nor have I very often been given cause to regret it. Others are not so lucky as I.

I don’t keep much in the way of memorabilia, and unfortunately nothing much survives from the late 70s and 80s. Somehow this wristband has, and indicates how Harvey Milk’s advice still affected me 15 years later then, and now 30 years later as I searched for and then found it. I remember the drive home, passing through Arlington, listening to NPR and hoping that there might be some reporting of that enormous march. What we got, and the only thing we ever heard on NPR, was Bill Kristol, poopooing the whole thing. And that was it. Ecchhh. We still get that effer, 15 years later.



I wonder if Brenda J. Marston has a representative of the above in her memorabilia collection?

ADDED: As it turns out, once I mentioned this post to Glenn, he rummaged around and found his wristband too. Apparently he was 039934 and I was 039926. Oddly, we kept them both in a bathroom drawer, an apparently inviolate sanctum sanctorum. And he found a couple of buttons that he’d acquired, as well. Good times!

Last August 20 2007 I put a fly page together for all the Dipterans observed to that date (and I have to update it now).

This year it’s the Odonates, the Dragonflies. In both cases I’ll have to produce a page with diagnostic photos for each entry. Thanks to all those who have helped me with the identifications!

The Odonata are divided into two suborders, Zygoptera (damsels) and Anisoptera (dragonflies). I’ve followed Bugguide’s taxonomy here.

All of these species have been observed within 1000 feet of the house here. Looks like a total of (roughly) six species of damselflies (now I *know* I’ve missed a lot there), and seventeen species of dragonflies.

Which is (are) my favorite(s)? That’s really hard. I love the brilliant green of the Pondhawk, and the crimson of the Eastern Red Damsel. But then there’s the lovely violet of the Gray Petaltail, and the highlights of the Twin-spotted Spiketail. Who wouldn’t be pleased at the deep black and blue of the Ebony Jewelwing? So, sorry - can’t name any single or small number of clear favorites.

Order Odonata: Dragonflies and Damselflies

Suborder Zygoptera: Damselflies

Family Calopterygidae: Broad-winged Damselflies

Calopteryx maculata Ebony Jewelwing 080505. See also 060512.

Family Lestidae: Spreadwings

Lestes vidua Carolina Spreadwing 070606.

Family Coenagrionidae: Narrow-winged Damselflies

Ischnura hastata Citrine Forktail 080612

Ischnura spp. Possibly I. hastata Citrine Forktail, or I. posita Fragile Forktail 060716

Ischnura spp. Possibly I. posita Fragile Forktail 060530. See also 070508.

Argia tibialis Blue-tipped Dancer 070516

Amphiagrion saucium Eastern Red Damsel 070501. See also 070518 and 070508.


Suborder Anisoptera: Dragonflies

Family Petaluridae: Petaltails

Tachopteryx thoreyi Gray Petaltail 080601

Family Aeshnidae: Darners

Epitheca spp Baskettail 080410

Gomphaeschna furcillata Harlequin Darner 060402

Epiaeschna heros Swamp Darner 060418

Family Gomphidae: Clubtails

Progomphus obscurus Common Sanddragon 070615

Gomphus lividus Ashy Clubtail 080417. Could be G. hybridus, Cocoa Clubtail. See also 080420.

Unknown. Unknown Clubtail 070409

Family Cordulegastridae: Spiketails

Cordulegaster maculata Twin-spotted Spiketail 070427. See also 080414

Family Macromiidae: Cruisers

Didymops transversa Stream Cruiser 080413

Family Libellulidae: Skimmers

Libellula luctuosa Widow Skimmer 080612

Libellula pulchella Twelve-spotted Skimmer 080509

Libellula auripennis Golden-winged Skimmer 080506

Libellula incesta Slaty Skimmer 070615

Libellula vibrans Blue Skimmer 060527

Pachydiplax longipennis Blue Dasher 070615. See also 070627.

Erythemis simplicicollis Eastern Pondhawk 070627. See also 070812, 080611, and 060712.

Plathemis lydia Common Whitetail 060716. See also 070411.

Tramea carolina Carolina Saddlebags 080505

In my idle surfing of the internets the other day, I came across this CNN interview with Malcolm Gladwell. His new book “Outliers” extends his fascination with how unique and “successful” people ("Outliers") or unusual social phenomena arise out of a sea of millions of people informed by near-identical circumstances who themselves are not “successful” ("The Tipping Point"). Snap judgements can also lead to similar phenomena ("Blink"), according to Gladwell.

To balance off the above CNN review there is this largely negative one in the New York Times. And to get an idea of Gladwell’s thesis, there are two New Yorker articles under the rubrics Annals of Innovation (May 12 this year) and Annals of Culture (Oct 20 this year), both written by Gladwell. They are fascinating to read, and if nothing else Gladwell spins a fine tale with many, many examples to support his contentions.

Now I haven’t read any of his three books, so this isn’t a review of any of them. Gladwell pulls together an array of examples to illustrate his point. I have no dog in this fight since (again) I haven’t read his books, but the New York Times' negative review, and my own past recollections, got me going in some other directions. I don’t mean to bring them up in any reference to Gladwell’s work, which I haven’t read, if I didn’t mention that before. I am just using this as a jumping-off point to something else.

Back in the day, we had something called "pop psych". I don’t know what it’s called now, but it stood for “popular psychology.” It led to hundreds if not thousands of self-help books, and help-self books to help yourself explain to others in an annoying fashion the foibles of still more others. I’m reminded particularly of “I’m OK, You’re OK,” which my mother and I referred to as “Eemok Yurok.” We’ve all experienced that irritating person who has read one of these books and is now an expert who can explain exactly why someone behaves the way he does. The aphorism that applies: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, and that’s generally nicer than using the otherwise very convenient word: “charlatan.”

In taxonomy, it’s not at all uncommon to find a key that distinguishes between two closely related species of plants (though it isn’t just plants) that differ, say, only by the presence of a third hair to the left of the uppermost three lateral buds. OK, I made that up, but it’s only because I’m too lazy to find any one of innumerable such examples.

Nothing particularly wrong with that, although you hope that there are other reasons for distinguishing between and splitting the two organisms into two groups. However you then get into evolutionary biology and something else happens. Students (especially but not exclusively) have a tendency and desire to find *reasons* for the presence or absence of that third hair to the left.

In evolutionary biology these are called just so stories, and they are closely related to pop psych:

The phrase “just so story” has acquired the meaning, in evolutionary biology, of an unnecessarily elaborate and speculative evolutionary explanation, which may fit available the facts but lacks any empirical support.

Students are often crushed, after coming up with an elaborate explanation for the presence of that third hair to the left, to find that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

We all love to find patterns in the random chaos that surrounds us. When such things refer to visual (seeing faces in things) or auditory (hearing familiar sounds in white noise) stimuli, this tendency is called pareidolia. The Face on Mars or the manifestation of the Virgin Mary or Jesus in a taco or a birthday cake are examples of this. Linus, Lucy, and Charlie Brown are lying on their backs, staring at clouds. Linus sees Ludwig von Beethoven, Lucy sees St. Thomas More, and Charlie Brown sees a ducky and a horsie. I see evidence of a strong front moving through, and the potential for rain, or at least wind.

Pareidolia is a special case of apophenia, seeing patterns in collections of data, in general. Nothing better could illustrate this than the arguments between two individuals looking at the same climate data - one sees cycles, and the other sees a directional trend. Another example: conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theorist is closely related to that irritating individual at the cocktail party who is able to explain an acquaintance’s behavior through a dominating mother and an absent father.

Conspiracy theorists, in an orgy of apophenia, are much more interesting. Not only do they see patterns in data that no one else can see, they have a tendency to “massage” the data they’re looking at. This is a nice way of saying they cherry pick among it, choosing some and ignoring others, or worse, making it up. So we have that Apollo 11 couldn’t have landed on the moon and it was all staged, because there are no stars in the black sky. We have that 9/11 was actually a government conspiracy. Area 51. And through it all we have to swallow the unlikely premise that hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats can keep a deep dark secret from everyone else. What fun!

Many of the above illustrate one objection to Gladwell’s work that you’ll find in that largely negative New York Times review - sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

But there’s another objection - any hypothesis must be falsifiable. That’s just a fancy way of saying that you have to be able, at least in principle, to do an experiment to test the hypothesis, preferably to show that it’s incorrect. It’s by far the prevailing philosophy by which to evaluate the validity of an explanation.

The alternative is to use your hypothesis to support your theory, and that’s not allowed. That’s called “circular reasoning” or “begging the question.” The New York Times piece doesn’t use these phrases in connection with their review, but the concepts are recognizable.

And speaking of “begging the question,” allow me to end with a personal pique, completely unconnected. The original phrase “begging the question,” reflects something of subtlety and beauty - it means that you have tried to answer a question by using the question itself, or its premise, as evidence for your answer. It is closely related to circular reasoning.

“What is the function of that third hair from the left of the lateral bud?” "Because it is third from the left, it provides a selective advantage." The student has the hopeful key phrase down but has used only the premise of the question to answer it. And has turned down the golden opportunity to say “Sometimes, Dr. Hughes, a cigar is just a cigar.”

I’ve never had so much fun as I do when grading a short answer and have the opportunity to write in the margin: “you’re begging the question.” It is in that way and at that moment when you have essentially said very nicely, “Don’t bullshit me.”

The present day use is to conscript the venerable and elegant “begs the question” to mean, in other words, “makes me really want to ask the question.” Ugh. Don’t we have enough Krispy Kremes and Flavr Savrs already, Kevin?

But first, a message from the past:

A few months ago, the state of dead zones in coastal waters around the world was reported (now forgotten, of course). For example, here:

There are now more than 400 known dead zones in coastal waters worldwide, compared to 305 in the 1990s, according to study author Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science....

Earth’s largest dead zone, in the Baltic Sea, experiences oxygen deprivation year-round, the press release said.

The second largest dead zone surrounds the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite decades of efforts to clean up U.S. rivers and lakes, high nitrogen levels are currently combining with strong water flow to make that dead zone larger than it has ever been.

I’m generally reluctant to recommend books, and in particular, science fiction. So much so, in fact, that I began this review of one of my favorite “comfort books” back in August and then put it aside. For those who enjoy science fiction, Gregory Benford’s Timescape (1980) is a fun read. For those who don’t enjoy science fiction, it may or may not be. It is a time travel story of the most subtle sort, involving only the transfer of information. A perusal of reviews generally nets a so-so reaction. I’d explain this by noting that Benford’s book is a curiosity. It doesn’t have sufficient action for readers looking for that; no one gets in a time machine and kills their grandfather. It teeters on the brink of being able to satisfy those who want “hard” science fiction, filled with ideas firmly rooted in physics; there are no flashy lights. And though Benford is comfortable experimenting in literary style (more so in later work than in this one), those who know about literary style are unlikely to be charmed. The book cover to the left is metaphorical - the Earth does not split open. That makes it sound terrible, but it’s not.

It’s the year 1998, and the world is in deep trouble. Massive diatom blooms off the coasts of heavily populated countries are taking their toll in fish kills, and are behaving very strangely. It appears that a complex pesticide has become self-replicative and is killing off the entire oceanic food chain. Whole populations are starving to death, and the diatom bloom that now harbors the pesticide is taking to the air.

In England, two physicists, Gregory Markham and John Renfrew, and a bureaucrat, Peterson, are about to activate a very special sample of indium antimonide, known to have been used in nuclear magnetic resonance experiments in the early 1960s. Their intent is to direct a tachyon beam toward the point in space occupied by the earth at that time, and thereby excite that very indium antimonide sample during the time it is being observed. Their hope is to send a simple warning in Morse code in an attempt to change the past, and thereby rescue their dying present.

It’s also the year 1963, and our hero in that time is Gordon Bernstein, a young assistant professor at UC La Jolla (sic), broadly optimistic, bright, and shortly up for tenure. His work involves measurements of the nuclear magnetic resonance responses of an indium antimonide sample, yes THE sample, but he’s having a little trouble. Odd noise interrupts the experiments at odd times, and he’s unable to explain this. Until he lines up the charts and realizes it’s Morse code.

ENZYME INHIBTED B

is soon followed by long blocks of message:

REDUCTION OF OXYGEN CONTENT TO BELOW TWO PARTS PER MILLION WITHIN FIFTY KILOMETER RADIUS OF SOURCE AFTER DIATOM BLOOM MANIFESTS AEMRUDYCO PEZQEASKL MINOR POLLUTANTS PRESSENT IN DEITRICH POLYXTROPE 174A ONE SEVEN FOUR A COMBINES IN LATTITINE CHAIN WITH HERBICIDES SPRINGFIELD AD45.....

Bernstein (1963) has another little problem. The full professor who runs the lab isn’t happy that he’s entertaining the notion of finding intelligible signals in noise, and Bernstein’s tenure is in increasing doubt. Yet the “messages” are clear, and more and more desperate. Bernstein follows the instructions, rents a safety deposit box for 40 years, and places a scrap of paper in it.

Peterson (1998 ) :

"Peterson felt his pulse quicken as the catch on the safety deposit box came free with a click. When the lid of the box tilted back he saw only a sheet of yellow paper folded in thirds. He picked it up and carefully flattened out the creases. It crackled with age.

MESSAGE RECEIVED LA JOLLA

That was all. It was quite enough."

One interesting question: did Benford intend his dying world of 1998 to be ours? Clearly, 1963, up to the point of disruption (see spoilers), is ours. Benford describes it lovingly, that maddening, vibrant, and dynamic world. And after the point of disruption Gordon Bernstein’s world is just as clearly not ours anymore - there’s no way it could be.

Writing in the late 70s, Benford could not have known what 1998 was like (unless he was messing around with indium antimonide samples). Yet he describes it with considerable accuracy - complete with global warming, change in rainfall patterns, and things we’re increasingly familiar with. The massive human diebacks and the self-replicative pesticide are not something we know, but we do have the ever-increasing hypoxic conditions in our oceans. The dystopia of Benford’s 1998 is certainly something we could easily be experiencing a few years down the pike. He was just a little premature.

It’s a bittersweet book - optimism at a terrible price.

–

Since all the above takes place in the first quarter of the book, there’s clearly a great deal more to follow. I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll add a few such SPOILERS HERE, in the event that you don’t intend to read the book, but perhaps want to indulge in finding how things turn out.

I should also say that I have a special place in my heart for Benford, who was born and grew up in the area around Fairhope Alabama. That’s where my mother was born and grew up, perhaps a few years earlier than Benford, and where I was born, a few years later.

Benford now lives in California, where he is, yes, a physicist. He has southern Alabama as a setting in several science fiction novels or short stories. This is not a very common setting for science fiction writing.

One such story, a post-apocalyptic one, has a group of survivors hiking through Fairhope, Foley, and into Mobile. All these places are well-known to me.

Wren said the other day that it was colder here in Georgia than up in Michigan. Perhaps not a few days earlier, but it does seem that there is some kind of hyperwarp that is facilitating cold air successfully arriving here. We did in fact break the 23 degF record for Nov 19, and may do so again today. The temperatures, which never got above 45 yesterday, plummetted in the afternoon and right now it’s 17 degF - that’s unusual even for Jan/Feb, much more so for Nov!

Captured at 5:30AM, W marks our particular spot.



And then all I have else to offer is a cautionary observation by Andy Borowitz, but that’s a nice enough Saturday morning treat in keeping with our smug elitism:

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tic, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama’s decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

“Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.”

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, “Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate – we get it, stop showing off.”

The president-elect’s stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

“Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can’t really do there, I think needing to do that isn’t tapping into what Americans are needing also,” she said.

I was amused that Space Command now has a bead on the escaped tool bag of a few days ago. You might recall that Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper, during a spacewalk on Nov 18, was wrestling with an exploded grease gun when the tool bag made its getaway:



Three days have passed, now, and the orbital elements are available at Space-Track. It’s object 33442. Here’s where it will be on Nov 22, at 5:30pm EST, just about to cross the terminator over Athens, GA. Looks like it will be a couple hundred miles ahead of the Space Station in its orbit.



In this screen shot, ISS and the tool bag are moving from southwest to northeast, the “ascending limb” of the orbit. It’s no surprise that the orbits are almost exactly the same, since the bag simply floated off, rather than being forcefully thrown.

The bag actually looks big enough and light-colored enough to be seen in a reflector telescope with a large 12.5-inch mirror. I just happen to have one of those!

I’ve been especially enjoying the process, occurring over a matter of weeks, of leaf drop this autumn. As the leaves drop, the vistas open up. What was enclosed green forest, with a visibility of a few tens of feet, now becomes open forest, with visibilities of hundreds of feet. It’s now, and for the next four or five months, that the shape of the terrain, the long hollow and the slopes upward on either side, become most perceptible.

This is the southwest corner of the property, looking northwards along the ridge that will continue for the next 1000 feet, and then drop down to Goulding Creek. It’s a very fine, relatively open and broad boulevard that follows the property line on the left.

On the right the ridge falls away on a sharp slope (in places, a VERY sharp slope, difficult to negotiate), perhaps 50 feet vertically down to SBS Creek, and the trees here are much more mature, and much larger. They include a lot of white oaks, northern red oaks, tulip poplars, beeches, and hickories (not to mention the understory buckeyes, hornbeams, redbuds, and dogwoods). Along the creek there will additionally be the occasional white ash, black gum, and then the wet-loving wild azaleas.

On the left the trees are relatively young, and pines quickly become dominant as you trespass into Consortium property. That’s because about ten years ago the Consortium harvested a lot of the trees on its 300 acres, leaving behind a motely array of younger, generally trash trees, that have grown somewhat in the intervening time. Of course that has not happened on the right side of the boulevard in many decades.



I’m not quite sure why there should be a relatively open boulevard, free of trees, but suspect the soil is rather thin here. There are a lot of rock outcroppings here and there, and I’d guess trees just don’t gain a purchase along the edge of the ridge.

I’ve spent a lot more time walking this long line this autumn. This is where I put up warning signs in an effort to discourage hunting and shooting on our property to the right. So far it seems to be working, and the signs have not been molested. I’ve twice now seen a flock of wild turkeys patrolling the ridge, striding quickly and comically away, above me as I climb the slope.

It’s 20.3 degF right now, out here at Wolfskin, and if it weren’t five degrees warmer in Athens at the moment, this would be a record breaker for the low of 23 degF set in 1891.

Speaking of cold:

Here’s your gateway to the last eight years of continuous International Space Station occupancy. The ISS has been in existence for exactly ten years now. There has been a lot of thick and a lot of thin, interwoven with forty of the more than 120 space shuttle flights. ISS has now been visited by 167 individuals during its ten year history.

The first construction began with the launch of the Zarya module, Nov 20 1998, which means that this week marks the tenth anniversary of the existence of the International Space Station. It was Endeavor then, with STS-88, and Endeavor today, STS-126, that marks the anniversary.

1998:



2008:



Lest you think that I took these photos, t'ain’t true. Credit to NASA.

I report with pleasure that the sighting event of last night went very well, with the ISS rising exactly on time, brilliantly, into the light polluted sky of Athens, GA, on campus. Everyone was excited, and I guess I could just leave it at that.

But something disturbing: there wasn’t a single individual who knew even approximately what this was all about. One person, a tutor, bless her heart, didn’t appear to be aware that there was such a thing as the International Space Station. No one knew that there were at this moment ten human beings aboard that point of light. I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t realize how bad, and believe you me I’m not naive about the state of knowledge among my otherwise bright and articulate compatriots.

Regardless of how you might feel about the ISS and NASA, this isn’t erudite, arcane knowledge here, worthy only for the geekiest among us. This is a matter of basic awareness. Something isn’t quite right in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Please tell me it’s just Georgia.

Tonight, just before 6:50pm, EST, I’ll take my students outside, and anyone else who wants to come along, and I’ll point to the southwest and tell them to watch. Almost certainly, right on schedule, the International Space Station will appear and grow brighter and brighter as it heads toward the zenith. Tonight will be especially good - the ISS will achieve a -2.4 magnitude, brighter by far than any star in the sky, and then as it nears the top of the sky it will vanish. The reason - it enters the earth’s shadow.

Now my students vaguely know that there’s such a thing as the International Space Station, but it will astonish me if they know that you can see it. I’ve yet to run into the one who knew more than that. So it’s a very satisfactory presentation.

I’ve done this at least a dozen times in a number of venues for the Space Station, and for the fantastic Iridium flares, and it has never failed - folks are amazed. They think you’re some kind of magician, but of course you’re not - the question is, how much do you want to admit? It’s kind of neat, after all, being a magician. Because I hate to fail I actually do download elements and check things out, but this isn’t really necessary.

Heavens Above does it all for you.

Simply go to that link, and then click on the Configuration selection that best suits you. You can just “select from map or from database,” and then pick from the place closest to you - Heavens Above has a huge number of entries in its database now.

I just did that and got presented with a map that I could click on until I zeroed in on my particular location. That turned out to be 33.86058N and 83.24143W, not that those numbers are important in the case of ISS (but they are in terms of Iridium flashes, see below).

In fact, I use a GPS to do the mapping around here, and that’s freaking close to what I see - I have my front porch at 33.86014N and 83.24175W, very close to the map selection.

Once you’ve done that, select your time zone (mine was GMT-5, for Eastern Standard Time). Then you’ll hit “submit”, and be invited to pick a “Satellite,”, and the ISS is the very first one on the list. You do that, and this is what you’ll see, or what I see anyway, for my coordinates:



I’m interested in the 18 Nov row, tonight, where the Space Station will appear at -2.5 mag. The “Starts” section refers to when the Space Station clears the horizon, and in what direction ("Azimuth" = southwest) - that’s where you should be looking, although you won’t be able to see it at that precise time (too low, too obscured by light pollution). It won’t be more than a half-minute though when the ISS will rise above all that mundane stuff, heading towards the “Max Altitude” at 86 deg (90 deg is the top of the sky).

This one is strange because the “Ends” columns shows ISS disappearing at the top of the sky, whereas normally you’d be able to follow it to the northeast. That’s because it’s entering into Earth’s shadow at the top of the sky, and since the only reason you see it because of the Sun, you won’t see it once it enters the Earth’s shadow. I plan to make a lot of points tonight, when it disappears upon prediction!

If you don’t live where I live, that’s not what you’ll see. You’ll have to go through the procedure yourself. And don’t worry if there’s nothing there - sometimes the ISS doesn’t go over you in the time period you’ve specified.

Just to get a little more into it, there are the Iridium Flares, also predicted, just for you, by Heavens Above. It’s even more amazing when you can point to a section of sky and tell people, “just look.” And then this amazing flare, -8 mag, appears, far far brighter than anything in the sky, and everyone goes *wow*. How did you know that, they’ll ask, what is it? It’s time now to be modest, and demur that it’s all done on the internet.

In fact, you can do the iridium flares too. I didn’t realize it before, but Heavens Above actually gets you close enough if you use their maps. I’ve used a GPS in the past to get my home coordinates, but that isn’t necessary now with the map. You really do have to have it close - get ten miles away, and you won’t see it - the Iridium flares are that specific to a small area.

A few weeks ago I did an Iridium flare for the fire department. It wasn’t the most magnificent, but it was fun. A few years ago I did one for our cohort on Jekyll Island and it turned out that one of them had done NASA work on the Iridium satellite constellation.

There’s always someone who can one-up you.

One caveat: Heaven’s Above does a great job of updating satellite elements, but occasionally, and especially when there’s a visiting shuttle or rocket, the Space Station will be boosted higher into orbit, and then the elements will change. Like I say, H-A is on the ball and will quickly change these so you get a good picture but there’s always that possibility.

I know, I wasn’t going to say anything more about the election. And I’m not, not really, but I didn’t expect to be so taken with the current Election Issue of the New Yorker.

There’s nothing not to like about this issue, beginning with the simple, tranquil cover (and we’re going to need a lot of tranquility in the upcoming months). If there’s anything to me that competes, in the American human realm, in sheer beauty with the profound melancholy of the Lincoln Memorial, it’s the exuberant intellectualism of the Jefferson Memorial. Neither, and quite properly, could ever have been invoked as an image for the antic, ignorant Denizen of the last eight years, and either, quite easily, could be used as a metaphor for the next President. There is both power and satisfaction in that dichotomy. There are half a dozen very good articles, beginning with Comment and continuing with the Talk of the Town. James Wood’s Victory Speech tells us why it was A Very Good Night for the English Language. Then there are two major articles piecing together the disjointed announcements, perceptions, and events that came so fast during the campaigns that it was hard to see the forest for the trees. Ryan Lizza fills in the gaps for Obama, and David Grann performs the same service for McCain. As historical pieces, they both explore the years long before the beginning of the campaigns, in 2006-2007. They’re fascinating.

In keeping with The New Yorker’s sometimes too-sober-and-serious tone, nothing here is strident or partisan. It’s sober and serious, of course.

Far as I can tell, it’s all online, beginning with the first link to the Table of Contents. And before you get worried, we’re in a new era, we hope, where it’s no longer a badge of shame to actually read something, including the New Yorker. Throw caution to the wind, and enjoy it.

Yesterday, after our 2.4 inches of rain (2/3 of which fell spectacularly, with visual and auditory effects, in an hour), I took a walk to observe the effects. The small creek that runs through our property had a bit more flow to it, and Goulding Creek which runs along the northwest boundary of our property was a bit higher. But by and large, there seemed to be little effect, which repeats the observations from last month’s deluge. Such rainfall amounts in the past have produced large flows in both creeks.

The explanation is surely that after two years of drought, the thirsty soil is still sucking up moisture and shedding none. The good thing about that, other than the obvious, is that the trees and other plants that grow so profusely are persistently preventing runoff from even large quantities of precipitation over a short period of time. This is a good thing - yesterday there was not even a small sign of surface debris being washed downhill - the sudden influx of water from the sky went right into the soil.

Here is Oglethorpe County’s CoCoRHaS observations logged on Saturday morning, from Friday’s rainfall. My own is that 2.25 inches of rain in the southwest corner. It was not only the highest in the county, but also the second or third-highest in the north half of the state. In contrast, Athens and Clarke County to our west by 15-30 miles got only about 0.70 inches, officially. Interesting that just a few miles north they got only about 60% of our rainfall, but I’m not complaining.



Friday’s Event was a regional thing, impacting Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. To the left is Floyd County, Mark’s stomping grounds. I’m not sure where all the other observers are here - Floyd County has at least seven, I think, but Mark was right - not a lot of rain.

To the right is Mark’s other stomping grounds (when he’s not in LA), Huntsville, in Madison County in northeast Alabama. I was attracted to this by the large amount of RED entries on the national map:



All that rain should surely have blown east and deluged Mark’s nest atop the high mountain, but apparently not.

And because she’s my sister, here for her is Leon County, Tallahassee Florida. All that rain is just par for the course for them.



So what does that do for us? We had a substantial amount of rain in October, which succeeded in turning the downturn in the BLUE line up, after a year or so of declines in actual versus expected rainfall:



However, as you can see, we had such a tease a year ago too, and it didn’t pan out to much.

November, so far, is a hash - if you look at official Athens up to this point in November you see 0.70 inches so far. For Wolfskin, 2.44 inches so far. For the year Athens has a deficit from expected of 11.5 inches; for Wolfskin, 6.6 inches. That’s better either way than at this time in 2007, when we had a deficit of 18 inches.

But overall, since January 2005 we’re down more than two feet, and that includes a surplus in the first half of that year.

So it’s not surprising that the modest but significant deluge Friday didn’t wash away hillsides or flood out creeks. We have a long way to get up to speed.

And according to the Neat NOAA Prognosticator, the next three months will be drier than usual, continuing the severe drought of the last two years, with some improvement, perhaps.

Only a few hours after I told my sister that we don’t get lightning and thunder in the winter, we had a fairly spectacular thunderstorm which dropped 1.67 inches of rain in less than an hour and had all the cats seeking the comfort of a warm lap. Along with the additional rainfall since Thursday, we’ve accumulated 2.2 inches.

During the night, the temperature rose to 65 degF, along with 100% RH. Coupled with the usual 62F indoor temperature I woke up to windows that were all fogged up. But the condensation was on the *outside*, an unusual phenomenon.

We’ve had a respectable autumn color display this year. I haven’t posted any photos but you can always go back to last year’s observations of a very colorful year if you want that.

One plant stands out for its subtlety, though. Climbing hydrangea, or woodvamp ( Decumaria barbara ), featured here any number of times, goes through a very brief pale yellow phase that quickly changes to a near-white display. With the color of the surrounding trees in contrast the large population of these vines suddenly stands out. You’d not have suspected we have so many individuals parked way up in the tops of trees.



This one is climbing a sourwood, whose turned leaves are still a fiery orange-red. I suppose that the near-lack of color is due to an unusually low abundance of accessory pigments, with perhaps a very tiny amount of carotenoid making up the bulk of them.

Jed Lewison put together this fantastic video. You may have already seen it, in which case it will warm your heart again. Watch closely for the FOX News logos - though you probably won’t need them. Even I was able to see the complete foolishness with which FOX handles the news, the first and last time I’ll bother with them.

I hemmed and hawed, but in the end, yeah, it belongs here.

If there’s nothing else that is important, it has been the comparison of the consistent composition of the rallies, between the McCain supporters, and the Obama supporters. That says it all to me.

And it will be the last thing I have to say about this exciting election, like nothing I’ve seen since the first time I was able to vote, in 1976. I have my own skepticisms, and unfortunately Obama will bear the brunt of them far more than President Bush did, believe it or not, because I have many more expectations of this potentially far superior President. I’m already making my list, and checking it twice.

Guess what, Karl?

A few unrelated things here, today.

First up, this caterpillar, which was actually observed Oct 30. Maybe it was just Halloween, but I’m not finding a precise match for this one on Bugguide. The closest I can come to there, or in my field guide, is a Tuliptree Silkmoth, Callosamia angulifera. This caterpillar was found motionless on the side of a likely sweetgum - I’ll have to go back and check on that - and not a tulip poplar. Apparently it’s on its way up to pupate for the winter. If so, it will be dangling in a cocoon all winter from some high branch. I’ve read now that this is something to look for on the bare winter branches - cocooned larvae hanging out during the cold months. A job for binoculars, during the winter months.

However, there are some problems with this tentative identification. The above link shows a caterpillar that is fairly similar in appearance, but mine lacks the several red protruding ornamentations at the front end, and the yellow one at the aft end. And what are those protrusions for, anyway? The ventral red spots on mine are centered in the lighter striping, whereas for the Tuliptree silkmoth cats I find images of the spotting that is even more ventrally offset from the lighter striping. So tuliptree silkmoth may not be right - just how far off right is the question.

You’ll notice that in the first photo above there is a posted sign. That’s mine. When I found, as I mentioned a bit ago, the adjoining Consortium-owned, hunting club-leased signs stapled to trees down a line through the middle of our property, I tore them down. And over the next week or two put up ten commercially obtained brightly colored “no trespassing” signs. That didn’t seem sufficent along the 1000-foot boundary, so I printed up another twenty signs and lightly stapled them in-between the others. It warns hunters that this is the end of the line for them, that ahead of them are private properties who don’t lease, and to not shoot or trespass in that direction.

So far, two weeks later, none of the signage has been molested. I wasn’t rude or confrontational in the message, so hopefully they’ll stay up until they degrade.

This is really dating me, but many, MANY years ago, so many years ago that I actually watched television, there was a science fiction TV show called “The Invaders,” with Roy Thinnes. The Invaders, beings from a dying planet, want, went the intro, *our* world. At that time, in the late 60s, “our world” was problematic - polluted, truly filthy. One could wonder why they’d want it. Perhaps it was because at that time there seemed to be some real political persuasion toward cleaning it up, something that actually happened, however incompletedly and truncatedly. Remember the Cuyahoga River in the late 60s?. Betcha don’t.

I have a feeling that if The Invaders were to arrive now, they’d take a look and say, no, no, not for us - too much of a hot, humid future. Looks too much like our dying planet.

Whatever. Poor Roy spent an hour on a weekly basis for three years trying to convince us humans that there were Invaders, and he always failed at this. Little did he know that he was micromanaging - the message was much broader.

(I love youtube. What a vast library of previously forgotten, recently unearthed guilty pleasures can be found there!)



Although I haven’t been able to find it, one episode involved one of many of the Invaders' attempts to extirpate us humans. They had produced a breed of butterflies that fed off human flesh. Memories degrade but I distinctly recall a hunk o'beef (a human arm?) placed in a chamber with these carnivorous butterflies, and piranha-like, the leps descended and in no time it was reduced to bone. It could well have been that that launched me into an interest in arthropods.

And so we know that arthropods have the most disgusting habits, from the anthropocentric point of view. Spiders, assassin bugs, ladybugs, all sorts - very direct - they are consumers of other animals.

Others - wasps, for instance - are perfectly couth in polite society as adults (despite their murderous penchant, they don’t actually eat their prey - it’s for their kids). But in these groups the kids are the murderous ones.

So I was thinking, especially in view of the last few days of the wild bees at the asters, which arthropods are strictly non-carnivorous at all stages of their life cycle?

Lepidopterans (if you ignore The Invaders) are a large set of families that eschew carnivory at all stages. As such they’re particularly choice victims, the cows of the insect world.

But there are also bees, and in particular the halictids, the sweat bees. These sweeties, as adults, collect pollen and nectar, make a nice little treat, burrow into decaying wood, and deposit their eggs atop the nectar pollen pattie. Nothing gruesome there. Honeybees aren’t specifically carnivorous, although they can sting, of course, otherwise they are entirely primary consumers. It seems to be the case that bees are largely kindly critters, browsing upon flowers and delivering the products to their young.

Until you come to the Sphecodes, the cuckoo bees, and we should immediately be warned by that name. They are kleptoparasites. They deposit their eggs in the vicinity of just the above nurseries, and their larvae then consume both the nectar pollen patties and the other halictid larvae intended for those patties.

Butterflies and moths may produce larvae that cause human-recognized damage of crop plants, but they seem to be entirely primary consumers of plants, not animals. Is this true? Aphids seem to be entirely plant eaters, no? There are flies that at all stages of their life cycle are either consumers of fungi - picture-wing flies, for instance. Have I missed a general group?

I’ve spotted several species of flies wandering the still-productive asters and goldentops over the last few days. This one appears to be Archytas apicifer, Whiteface Fly, although that may not be an “official” common name.



Here’s a particularly wonderful shot of the right profile of the head of this fly. My photo below doesn’t begin to compare.



Most of us get a general idea of the type of plant or animal by some sort of gestalt reasoning. Most of us could probably place most kinds of aster or sunflower-like plants in the proper family, just by encountering it - we don’t have to know what the pappus is, the structure of the florets, we don’t count the number of ray petals, and we don’t even have to know the difference between those and the disk petals.

Even experts do this, but to get a little closer to species and variety, it’s often useful to know some structures. In the case of flies, there are some very helpful ones. Some of these you could only get by coincidence of a photograph revealing them, or by capturing and dissecting the insect.

Here, and below are a few structures that are helpful. The positioning and appearance of the antennae (ant), and whether there or are not aristae (ari), those little hairs on the antennae, seems to be fairly important. This heavily cropped photograph also captured the ocellar triangle atop the head, though you cannot make out the three ocelli (oce), tiny eyes.

Of importance is the presence or absence of a frontal suture (sut), implied above and better seen below. It is a line that defines the face, the region between the antennae and the mouthparts.

There is a whole host of structures in and around the wings that may or may not be present or obvious. Calypters (cal) are knobs of tissue that may be present at the point of attachment of the wings. Flies that have them are calypterate, and those that don’t acalypterate.

Flies have only one pair of wings, but they do have halteres (hal), the remnants of the other pair. And then there’s that translucent protrusion (???) which I have no idea what it is!


And so when I looked at this fly I thought - hmm, houseflylike but larger, more robust, and lots of hairs. Sounds like a tachinid, or something like it. And so it seems to be, and the presence of the above characters confirmed it every bit as much as finding an image on Bugguide that is uncannily like mine.

Two photos, taken in sequence, captured the descending mouthparts. This species is a pollinator as an adult, and it’s attracted to nectar.



Tachinid flies are particularly special. They will be on any list of beneficial insects, as the adults pollinate and the little ones make their early living parasitizing other arthropods, especially lepidopterans. This tachinid species specializes on Noctuid moth larvae, and there are some stinkers there.

The Flytree Phylogeny website has a cladogram for flies on its frontpage that relates the suborders (or superfamilies) of flies, and a five-page very nice discussion of this. Our tachinid would be down at the bottom under Oestroidea, related to houseflies (Muscoidea), which they resemble. Even better for true dipteran enthusiasts is the far more detailed supplemental cladogram that places the individual families of flies (including Tachnidae) in relationship to each other. Note that I have violated the decree: (DO NOT CITE WITHOUT EXPRESSED PERMISSION OF THE AUTHORS). Very unfriendly, and I take some pleasure in violating this.

And I ran across this interesting page addressing a funded program on insectary hedgerows, which are deliberately cultivated coplantings that attract predatory and pollinating insects. Amazing how buckwheat outshines most other plants in attracting a huge variety of wasps, tachinid flies, syrphid flies, bigeyed bugs, assassin bugs, which become either involved in pollinating, predating on pests, or both. Other plants: milkweed, coyotebrush (this is California), elderberry, are nowhere near so productive.

So I had to check out Eriogonum, buckwheat, in Georgia, and despite that there look like the West has thousands of species, we have only one, and that in the coastal plain area south of us. Oh Well!

Occasionally, among the myriad of Halictus presently congregating on the aster bouquets there will be a bright green relation, one of the green sweat bees. We’ve visited these before, 31 July 2006, and I won’t repeat everything said then.

They get nestled right down into the florets, and hide their faces, so it’s hard to photograph them clearly. This one’s left eye is just barely visible, but they really do look like that. Check this beautiful photo out.

And like yesterday’s Elephant Mosquito, they glitter:

As before, the problem in figuring out just which species this one is is that green sweat bees are scattered among the subfamilies of the Halictidae, and the characters used to key them out are obscure to a nonexpert such as I. However I did make a stab at it, using hind leg and tegula observations. Though the photo at left isn’t the greatest, it does show that the tarsal segments amount to a greater length than the tibial segments. In fact, I may have misidentified “tib” in which case the “tar” is of even greater length. This character suggests this bee is in the Tribe Augochlorini, and in one of three genera. Tibia longer than tarsus would indicate Tribe Halictini, in the genus Agapostemon. And there’s the “teg”, the tegula, which is the point to which the wings are attached. A green metallic tegula indicates Augochloropsis metallica.

And so that’s probably what this one is. Regardless it’s a pretty little thing!

More from the menagerie that has been visiting the asters and goldentops in the last week or two:

The nights may be cool, but the mornings have quickly warmed to the lower to mid-70s lately, with lots of warm sun. As it heats up, the flowering masses become the center of attention for a wide variety of bees, wasps, flies, and bugs. I’ve been trying to document these, and have quite a backlog of images to identify now. None is proving to be very easy.

It seems to me that this is a Thread-legged Bug, although I can’t find any photos at Bugguide that match its chunkier shape and coloration. However the enlarged appendages on the head, the forecoxae, strongly suggest it.

UPDATE: Well, I’m absolutely floored. Within two hours Carmen, and then Dale, had it pegged as a mosquito. The comments are worth reading: Carmen of or near Oglethorpe County herself suggests Elephant Mosquito, Toxorhynchites rutilus (see here, where the shiny aspects are emphasized, not to mention the extremely large size, for a mosquito). And Dale outlines the differences between a mosquito and bug that I completely missed, other than the posture.

Thanks to both - I had no idea we had mosquitos this large. This deserves a post of its own.

The stance actually strikes me more as mosquito-like, which surely it isn’t. It was relatively small, a little over a centimeter in size. Its behavior was aggressive - it flew readily but returned to its previous perch quickly. Several times it made threatening moves toward landing bees, but never really connected. Thread-legged bugs are sometimes placed in their own family (Ploiariidae) but Bugguide above, and my field guide, place them in the Emesinae, a subfamily of Assassin Bugs (Reduviidae). Thread-legged bugs do prey upon other arthropods, and have the characteristic feeding apparatus of the assassin bugs. There are four genera listed by Bugguide for the US, but none seems quite right.

These photos show a glittery insect, so glittery that it’s difficult to make out details. I’m not sure why that is, unless the bug was indeed glittery. It was also perched on a difficult location - I was standing on a pile of large rocks and leaning forward quite a bit to be able to image it.

All these photos enlarge.

What’s all this talk about a puppy in the White House? A puppy isn’t going to be able to bust up a filibuster - it’s going to suck up to the likes of John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman, licking them in the face. Why not a real-world cat that can bust kneecaps?

Like Violet.



Still, it’s hard discovering, in the cold morning light, that you’ve been feeding for many years a petulant, angry McCain supporter. But if we can convince her, she’ll be the perfect crossover cat.

Obviously she would have voted for Proposition 8 too, if she didn’t live in Georgia.

Despite my pessimism, the evening was wonderful. I finished my duties, without premonition, and discovered as I got in the car that Pennsylvania had been declared for Obama, Ohio was declared while I listened, and unless any of California, Washington, Oregon, or Hawaii went for McCain, it was over. Barack Obama is our new president.

I hung up the CELLPHONE with my sister, who was as delirious as I, and immediately heard of McCain’s concession speech. And just about as soon Florida and Virginia turned blue.

And then, just after Obama’s victory speech, I got a series of comments on yesterday’s blog that will leave me weeping more than the very fine victory tonight. I had not expected this at all, and thanks very much for including us pore ol' Georgians.

367 electoral votes. That’s what I think!

So today we vote, or at least we do if we didn’t take advantage of, or have the opportunity for, early voting. And hasn’t that been interesting!

I must tell you that the last eight dark years has been my fault. I accepted invitations to election day roundups at friends' homes, and both times that turned out to be a mistake. Not this year. Tonight I work until 9:30 or 10pm, and will have absolutely no idea what is going on until I get in the car to head for home and turn on the radio. At that point it may just be our NPR affiliate’s Night Music, for all I know, or I may encounter delirious jubilation that McCain scored a huge upset. That’s when I find out, unless my students try to spill the beans. And if they do it’s hands over the ears, “la-la-la-la-la, Mary had a little lamb, I don’t hear you!” That’s my penance.

No, I don’t lick doorknobs before going out a doorway, nor do I check the coffeemaker or oven a dozen times before leaving the house, but we can’t be too careful, can we? The weight of the last eight years of the worst Presidency in the history of the United States lies heavily upon me, and if The Onion finds out about this I’ll become some kind of anti-Joe the Plumber.

I respectfully disagree with those who have tired of the election over these past two years - really now, it wasn’t such an imposition that you couldn’t ignore it if you weren’t interested. Fox News was made for you. And as well with those who claim to dislike both candidates, as if neither candidate has integrity or the best of intentions and abilities. The choice has been stark, and I think we desperately want to get it right this time.

This has been an extremely exciting election to me - I can tell that because it has wearied me in the last few months. Being wearied doesn’t mean that I’ve been bored or disinterested.

And for those who don’t live here in the US, and can’t quite grasp how insane we Americans get, I’m sorry. We don’t understand it either.

There’s no one here who doesn’t know who I want to be the next President. But to go any further here would mean that I jinx the results, and we saw what happened in 2000 and 2004 when I did that. My lips remain firmly sealed.

Vote - and enjoy the day, regardless of whom you prefer. Our shadowy overlords beseech you .

The Month of October, Number 33 in a series, where you would ordinarily get a respite from the political scene, but not today.

In Sunday’s All Things Considered, NPR interviewed FSU’s Brad Gomez on the influence of the weather on election day. Had weather been just a little different, Richard Nixon/Henry Cabot Lodge might have won the 1960 elections, catapulting us into an unimaginable future. Consider, for instance, how *he* might have handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, which as a six-year-old I watched in my parents' bedroom as my father was packing, called to duty. I remember this very vividly, the spindly free-standing black and white machine offering its periodic updates on the crisis. There has truly been nothing since then that has been like that, at least nothing that was allowed to us. Nixon would have replaced LBJ’s regime, and who knows what might have happened after 1968. Assuming we ever made it there, which we might not have.

Inclement weather on Election Day 2000, in the Florida Panhandle, my old stomping grounds of Tallahassee, appears to have depressed voting there. A bit nicer weather might have consigned George W. Bush to the ashbin of an alternate history that we are now living.

Here’s the weather forecast for mid-Election Day tomorrow, from Intellicast. It’s not pretty for the Northwest US, but that’s probably balanced out by bad weather in the extreme Southeast US. Otherwise everything looks like a go for a climate-neutral Election Day:



From the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean temperature anomalies for the US. That’s the difference in the average temperature for this October above or below the average for October over many years, plotted in colors. The anomalies are in Fahrenheit.


NOAA is clearly having some problems yesterday and today. They haven’t updated things since Oct 26, as you can see, and everything at the noaa site is downloading extremely slowly.

Except for the pockets of exceptionally warm temperatures in California and Nevada, things were generally pretty mild. A degree or two above normal in the mid-eastern states, a degree or two lower than normal in the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.

From the (click through to the monitoring maps from the left sidebar) National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US over the month of October:


The US midsection continued its eighth month of normal to above average rainfall in October. The western states continued their very dry conditions, especially in southern California and Arizona. Much of the east, excepting our own area, finally, had under-par rainfall. I’ve heard that Kentucky has been particularly hard hit.

For Athens:

Here is my plot of low temperatures for the month of October in Athens. (It seemed appropriate to present low temperatures this time.) As usual, the black dots are for the 17 years 1990-2006 (black dots), 2008 (green line), and 2007 (red line).


We had a few days of warm temperatures at the beginning of October but they were balanced out by cooler than normal weather in the latter half of the month. It gave us an average of 60.5 degF, 2.6 degrees below average. The very odd thing has been the much cooler than normal nighttime temperatures, which soar to much warmer than usual daytime temperatures.

We were more than one standard deviation above the mean high daily temperatures on only 3 days in October, compared to an average 4.6 days per October, and that’s fairly significant. Accentuating this, we had 8 nights with lows more than one standard deviation below the average, dipping to below freezing twice.

Below, the green line shows our actual rainfall, the red shows the average accumulation expected. The black dots are rainfall over the last 19 years, the vast river of peach shows the standard deviation. It’s unusually broad because in this month and surrounding months we either do or do not get rain from tropical storms.

In October we had no contribution from tropical storms, this year, and so it’s particularly amazing that October turned out quite a bit of rain for us, for the first time in three years. We ended up above average for the month, but not quite above a standard deviation above the average (blue).



The US Forest Service provides us with this interesting site, the MODIS Active Fire Mapper. Pick your region and then select from either a jpg or pdf presentation of active and recently active fires.

I’ll continue to link to this neat prognosticator in which you can get variously timed precipitation and temperature outlooks. It currently predicts (for us) that below average temperatures and above average rainfall will continue for the next couple of weeks. That’s helpful in our ongoing drought, but the 3-month view shows little relief in terms of rainfall.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update tells us that sea surface temperatures in the central and east equatorial Pacific have returned to ENSO-neutral regions. ENSO-neutral conditions are expected to prevail through 2008.

Finally, and to reiterate the link way above, NOAA has a neat State of the Climate product. By clicking on the year, such as 2007, you can get to monthly and even weekly reports and zero in on regional descriptions that are much nicer than my own.

The Early Ammonia Servicer, a refrigerator-sized piece of junk, is likely to decay tonight (time range from 3pm Nov 2 to 11AM Nov 3, EST). All times are EST, corrected for the changeover. Translate them to your own times.

The debris potentially makes seven passes over the North American continent during the course of the night. I’ve indicated those below, along with the time for the central dot in the box at the right, and the approximate times the debris passes the continental margins.

The circle indicates the boundaries of where you could see it from the ground. If you’re within the range as it passes, look toward where you imagine the central dot (the red ground track) should be. If the orbital track isn’t directly over you, then it will probably be closer to the horizon than to the zenith.

Travel direction is always eastish to westish, i.e., to the right, in the figures below.

Or go to Heavens Above and select the city nearest you. Click on “select a satellite” under “Satellites.” Enter the number 31928 into the “US Space Command ID box” and select *ALL PASSES* (not just visible ones). This piece of debris, though very bright when illuminated, is invisible during all of these passages, since it’s in the earth’s shadow. Unless, of course, it decays, and then you will be in for a minute or two of treat.

Decaying debris is unmistakeably different from a meteor. When this hits serious upper atmosphere it will slow down quickly and burn very brightly. Unlike a split second grain-sized meteor flash, it will take closer to a minute or more to burn up.

I went out last night and again this morning, but didn’t see anything other than a very fine display of stars. Which wasn’t in itself a bad thing at all!

Glenn has been doing something that’s really beyond me - he’s been canvassing in Oglethorpe County. On Thursday, he attended the downtown Crawford appearance of Jim Martin, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate. Glenn wrote a Daily Kos diary on that, and you can find it here. (FYI, it’s under “wayne” because I registered long ago at dkos, but the writing and effort is all Glenn’s.)

And then yesterday he was out and about very red Oglethorpe County for four hours tootling about with that lady with the Obama earrings. They were knocking on doors and making sure people had voted and that they had rides to the polls on Tuesday if they had not. And so congratulations to Glenn!

You may not be aware of it but the surprising thing about Georgia is that we may just beat out the execrable Saxby Chambliss. Chambliss won his way to the Senate in 2002 by smearing multiple amputee and war veteran Max Cleland. There will probably be a runoff in December, because neither he nor Jim Martin will achieve 50%+1, but in December there may well be a President-Elect who is down here stumping for Martin. Georgia may not itself end up going blue on Tuesday, but it’s real close.


I knew early last week that the changeover from daylight savings time was coming. I knew because at least one website that I visit for climate information changed over last Sunday. They have a server that refuses to update with the ms patch - it happened in the spring this year too.

The problem, especially during the autumn changeover, is the cats. Their servers don’t work either, not at 5AM (EST), and that’s breakfast time to them.

Thanks to tristero for calling my attention to a David Sedaris observation in the New Yorker - I’d missed it. Yesterday morning, NPR had a piece on “undecided voters,” and Glenn and I both looked at each other and said, “Who *are* these people? How can anyone be undecided in *this* election?”

Turns out David Sedaris, the master of the perverse, was wondering the same thing:

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

Since the hunters are in the woods this weekend, or we imagine they are, I kept a close eye on the S. dumosum and E. graminifolia yesterday. The sun hits the flowers and they start pumping out nectar. And so the former was literally crawling with insects, the vast majority of them the Halictus spp. of sweat bee I pointed out yesterday. But there were some others, and here’s a particularly interesting fly that I saw only once:



Sorry about the high contrast photos - the flowers had passed into the shadow of the late day and I still had the camera set for manual short exposure small aperture. Brightening up the extremely dark photos requires increasing the contrast as well, so they’re distinctly odd.



I’d think this was a syrphid of some sort, but I’m not finding anything on Bugguide. It was just under a centimeter in length, and it kept its wings unfolded, held stiffly out, at all times. I’ll have to keep an eye out for it today, because I’d really like to know what it is.

Despite having dipped below freezing on three mornings in the past week, we do still have some hardy plants flowering. One of these is Goldentop, Euthamia graminifolia. I notice in that Nov 6 2006 post that the same little bees were abundant on the flowers in the warm sunshine. That was the year these goldentops appeared, as if by magic, around the back border of the Hyla pond. Their dense masses are welcome this time of year!



I had previously referred to them as little wasps, but Bev suggested bees and indeed I think they’re one of the halictids, sweat bees. This bugguide photo bears a fair resemblance. It’s of Halictus rubicundus, the Polymorphic Sweat Bee, although there are a number of alternative species in this genus and they’re hard to distinguish without looking at microscopic features. Ours don’t have quite the robust femurs and coloration of legs that H. rubicundus does.

Apparently this little bee shows social behavior in warmer climates, and solitary behavior in cold ones, with a mixture in marginal environments. I suppose it is these little wild bees, among many others, that we look to to pollinate plants in the disturbing decline of honeybees.

A few days ago I mentioned the white roadside asters that have been flowering lately. These are probably Symphyotrichum dumosum, Bushy Aster, given the small linear leaves densely covering the inflorescence stems.

The Halictus was also enthusiastic over these flowering masses.

As well, a few days ago, I mentioned the single flower of Late Purple Aster, S. patens. Yesterday it had plumped out a bit into quite a few more flowers.



And the Halictus is just as happy with these. I hadn’t noticed the tiny insect to the bee’s left until I looked at the photos.



I really don’t have much of an idea of what this is, unless it’s another leaf hopper (the way it carries its wings is similar to the one Bev drew my attention to a few weeks ago), but here are some poor crops: