This is a topic that I am merely somewhat informed about, as a layman, but since we’re at a critical point, the minimum, in the solar cycle, I thought I’d mention it. I should say that none of these figures is my own, but I believe I’ve referenced them appropriately.

I ran across this 2-page article by Richard A. Kerr in the current issue of Science (Science 324, 1640-1641 (2009), subscription wall) probing our readiness for the next solar maximum. We’re currently at a solar minimum, and the sun is just about ready to start acting up. It’s currently predicted to reach its peak intensity around May, 2013.

The sun goes through 11-year cycles of high and low activity. We’re now beginning Cycle 24. While the actual monthly average irradiance varies only around 0.07% from high to low, periodic ejections of high energy particles do occur during active years.

It’s these ejections that have solar physicists concerned (and excited, of course). As Kerr points out, the ejections seldom point toward earth in its orbit around the sun, but on 28 Aug 1859, a massive billion-ton blast did hit earth. At the time, auroral displays as far south as Mexico were the main perceived effect. The only disruption was to the telegraph system for a day or two, but that was 1859.

By 2009, well, I don’t have to tell you how enormously our civilization depends on a vast array of modern electronics and computers, communication and navigation satellites, cell phones, and even electrical power grids. Just think about how many more people use cell phones, GPS navigation, and wireless internet now than they did at the last maximum in 2000.

So there’s some effort being put to detection and prediction. At the moment it seems to be about on par with hurricane seasonal predictions.

To the right the Yohkoh Solar Observatory, “Sunbeam,” placed into earth orbit in 1991. Until it failed in 2001, it examined the sun. Below is a beautiful photomontage lifted from Wikipedia that shows a soft x-ray image of the sun every few months between Cycle 22 maximum in 1991 (left) and its minimum in 1995. Those were taken by Yohkoh, while it was still alive. Soft x-rays give a good impression of how active the sun is, and you can see how the brilliant sun on the left slides down the descending leg of Cycle 22 to its minimum on the right.

There are a number of ways of measuring solar activity, and one of them is to count sunspots. A little paradoxically, increased sunspot activity is also associated with increased solar activity. As we’re at the minimum right now, there are no sunspots visible. By the time of the maximum in 2013, there may be as many as 90 sunspots at once.

Here’s an example of the count for the descending leg of the last Cycle 23, which peaked in mid-2000. The figure and predictions come from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, where you can get all your solar activity needs taken care of.



Also from the Center, here’s the sunspot count for the last ten cycles since 1900. Note the very large activity in 1958, 50 years ago.



Satellite warnings are pretty much out, as far as solar ejections are concerned. From earth, we’ll see those 8 minutes after they occur, and the mass will arrive not much later than that, they travel so fast. No satellite could do better than that.

Reliance then, is on prediction, by theory and by statistical projection. (Did I mention hurricane prediction?) Currently the prediction as of May by the SWPC is for Cycle 24 to be below average. As they point out, this is a consensus opinion, not a unanimous decision.

So now here is this: this NASA article is over three years old and that’s a long time in terms of research progress.

As far as I know, there’s still no certainty as to what causes sunspots, or the sun to go through cycles of activity. As the article states, some think it may be tidal effects from the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, and I’d guess that has to do with Jupiter’s 12-year orbit, approximating the 11 years of a solar cycle.

But the article does mention a solar conveyer belt that, like the oceanic conveyer belt on earth, sinks into the interior of the sun, recycles old sunspots, regenerates them, and returns them to the surface 30 or 50 years later. How long this takes depends on how fast the conveyer belt is moving. If so, it provides something of a basis for prediction: a massive number of sunspots 40 plus or minus 10 years ago would be predicted to arise again. (That’s an interesting revelation to me - I had not thought of sunspots as discrete entities that could be regenerated. I still don’t know if that’s the case, and I have the feeling that someone is going to tell me.)

In that article, it’s suggested that since we had a very large number of sunspots (and activity) at the peak in 1958 (see the next to last figure above), and since no such unusual peak appeared in 2000, we’re due for the unusual number of reincarnated sunspots this time around. (On the other hand, if you look 30-50 years before the 1958 peak, you don’t see any unusual peak in activity. Did I mention hurricane prediction?)

Now that prediction then, in 2006, is at variance with the one made a couple of months ago. What the reality is, we’ll just have to wait and see. And, to get back to the most recent Science, are we ready? Apparently not. But how could we be? I’d guess the GPS and communications and navigation satellites we depend on for far more than most people know are hardened against radiation as best they can be. To be ready there would be to have backups ready to be launched in case of failure, and that seems like a nonstarter.

Coronal ejections during peak activity can occur anywhere on the surface of the sun, in any direction, but I’d guess they’re more or less along the equator in the plane that the earth orbits. I’m not sure how focused such ejections are, but even if by the time they get to earth’s orbit they’re 10 degrees wide (pretty damned focused!). That gives us a 1/36 chance of being hit with any random ejection, of which there may be many over a period of several years. What a crapshoot!

Here we have a couple of golfball-size groundnuts, Apios americana,also known as indian potato, potatobean, hopniss. The plant is a large perennial climbing vine, producing large racemic clusters of reddish brown wisteria-like flowers, and beanlike fruits. This is a native legume that contributed substantially to the diets of native Americans and in turn to that of early European colonists. It’s the swollen tubers that are of interest here, for that is the main edible portion of the plant. The “stem” connecting the two tubers is in fact a kind of a stem, a rhizome, a stem that runs horizontally underground. Here we have a true rhizome, as opposed to a stolon (also an underground stem, but formed a little differently). White potatoes, Solanum tuberosum, form from a stolon, so the tubers are a little different in their origin.

The yellow white stem coming out of the upper tuber is a shoot that started up a few days ago. It’s about a foot long now, and here’s the other end of it. While the leaves haven’t started to expand it looks like that’s what this part is going to become, the aerial portion of the plant.



Let’s sacrifice one of these tubers. Unlike a white potato, the outside skin is more woody, and a bit thicker. I can attest that the description of the white starchy material inside is correct: it is crunchy, more fibrous than granular, as in a raw white potato. It has a sweetness to it, too, and a slightly bitter aftertaste. Actually you’re not supposed to eat them raw.



For some reason, mostly that I haven’t really thought about it, I’ve long conflated groundnut and peanut (Arachis hypogaea), imagining that the two were related. And they are, since they’re both legumes, but not as closely as I’d thought. Though they’re in the same family (Fabaceae) and subfamily (Faboideae = Papilionoideae), they’re in different tribes. The tribe that contains peanut has little else that we’d immediately recognize but the tribe Phaseoleae that contains groundnut also contains common beans, cowpeas, mungbeans, and soybeans. Wisteria is also in this tribe, and if there were a common plant I’d invoke that most reminded me of the habit and appearance of groundnut, it would be that.

Here’s another difference, from USDA Plants. Groundnut is a North American native, well adapted to a huge southern to northern range. Peanut is an introduction from Central South America, probably Bolivia, and confined to a more southerly, semitropical climate.

Groundnut is also a perennial, and peanut is an annual.



But a little thinking about how the edible parts of the plants are different from each other would have told me they’re not closely related.

The storage tubers of groundnuts derive from the underground stems, similar to white potato. Culinarily we’d think of this as a “vegetable”, since it is not a seed-containing fruit.

And that’s exactly what peanut is. The papery peanut shell with the several edible seeds inside is the fruit of the plant. It just happens to be found underground, and that’s because the fertilized yellow pea-like flowers will then grow into the ground, where the fruit will form.

The fruits of the groundnut, not usually considered the edible part, are much more like the pods of a bean or pea, or wisteria, and like those form above ground.

I was hearing, at meetings years ago, from research groups, especially in Lousiana, trying to isolate cultivars of Apios americana that produced larger tubers, with less objectionable side tastes. They seem to be having some success there.

This is a good opportunity to talk about storage organs of flowering plants, and there are many. Let’s talk about onions, carrots, radishes, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, and groundnuts. We think about these the most, around here, since we eat them. And the parts we eat are none of them fruits, since none of these parts contains seeds.

Onions and their Allium relatives (and of course they’re monocots, very distantly related to any of the above), store their excess energy in bulbs. Bulbs are modified basal leaves. As you peel an onion or a garlic, you can see the leaflike structure in the layers that peel off.

Carrots and radishes are swollen taproots. The swollen portion is inline with the shoot above and the smaller roots below. The two examples are in completely different families, Apiaceae and Brassicaceae, respectively. In the latter family we also find turnips, similarly a swollen taproot.

The remaining ones we refer to as tubers, but that’s an imprecise word that encompasses storage organs formed in distinctly different ways and from different tissues of the plant.

Sweet potatoes are the swollen tubers that form on true roots. Sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family, Convolvulaceae, distinct from the last two.

And as mentioned before, white potatoes and groundnuts are swellings of underground horizontal stems, stolons and rhizomes, respectively. White potatoes are in the Solanaceae, the nightshade/potato/tomato/eggplant/green pepper/petunia/tobacco family. And groundnuts, of course, are legumes, Fabaceae.

In the comments to a previous post, Bev and I had some fun talking about science fiction book cover art. Really, there can be no more garish examples, unless it’s the gothic romance genre. We laughed about the flesh and tentacles art of the pulp fiction pre-1960, and you really must visit this site to fully appreciate it. I seem not to have collected any of these.

But I have collected a coupla thousand paperback science fiction books over 40 years, and I figured I could surely find some stinkers.

A few of these here fall into the category of “what could the artist have been thinking,” but at least half are honest efforts, though they may have little to do with the book’s content. (A couple of them fall into the “what could *I* have been thinking” category.) I think the explanation for the disconnect between a cover and the content lies in the publisher’s choice, and some publishing companies were more egregious this way. There was a tendency to simply find a cheap image and slap it on the cover, regardless of any relevance. Likely some publishers simply didn’t think it was important for cover art to be relevant to the contents of a book.

The cover art of the 30s through the 50s was mostly of the pulp magazines, with some novels thrown in for fun. They tended to be rather over the top, and correspondingly fun. I don’t have either of these books, I just found them while surfing for bad cover art.

Left, sure glad I wasn’t in Iceland on Wednesday. Right, “this can happen to you,” note doggie making good its escape. Hilariously awful - no good can come of this. I’m not sure what the green fluttery thing is.



The 1960s and 70s brought us some truly appalling cover art that makes you yearn for the extravagantly awful pulp covers of the earlier several decades. In keeping with the psychedelic nature of the times, many covers were a mishmash of odd impressionism that had little or nothing to do with the content of the book. Or perhaps they did - much of the New Wave science fiction writing of the time proved to be just as bad as the bewildering cover art promised. While I seem to have never reaquired a particular stinker that I lent out, I think these will convey the impression.

Left, not a bad book actually but garish psychodelia, yes. Right, way too much art. I need dramamine.



More from the 60s-70s: if you look closely, you will see connections between the cover art of this printing, and the stories within the three Foundation books. But the style is consistently grotesque - you have to give it that.



From about the same period, on the left, an example of - what, photorealism? Looks like a ripoff from Star Trek, note “the evil planet.” Take a plastic model and lay it on a surface next to a crumpled ball of aluminum foil. Photograph and blur. On the right we have an example of total ambiguity. Whatever it was intended to convey certainly doesn’t connect with the story within the pages of the book.



Another feature of the times was painful symmetry, as shown by the cover on the left. Again, there’s no obvious connection to the story. I enjoyed the book on the right, but the art is rather clumsily metaphorical.



What’s not to like about a 33-book serial, written faithfully over a quarter of century? Our hero is trying to get back to the planet of his birth, the mythical earth. The basic structure of each book was formulaic: a hint from the previous book starts off the events of the next one. Adventure follows. Disappointment. Clue! Despite all this, the books were surprisingly varied otherwise, and I hear the author is coming out with a new one after a long hiatus.

On the left, a common theme: heroic male and fleshy female. This was #1, and though other cover art shows up on the internet for this book, this particular one does not. I could well have an original printing, here. The cover on the right is in the cartoonish category. I think this one was #10 in the series. The subject of the cover, by the way, is male.

Let’s continue the heroic male/fleshy female theme. “His big one,” as it says right there at the top. Well, there can be no doubt about that, can there? Vaguely in line with the story, if only because the hero behaves pretty much like he’s depicted here. I really can’t believe I bought this one - it must have been the writer. Sort of like this, which we’ll keep real tiny:

One of the classic science fiction novels, made into an unfortunately clunky though highly promoted film, is “When Worlds Collide.” There must be a zillion different book covers for this one, but I particularly like the ones below. Notice the odd resemblance. Now what’s that all about?



After “When Worlds Collide,” what could be more natural than “After Worlds Collide?” Not without its good points, the permeating racism is jarring.

I actually think the left selection is fairly cool, so let’s balance that out by the utter banality of the cover on the right. Yawn!



So there you have it. When I started collecting these, I anticipated writing witheringly about them. But as I looked through them, I couldn’t really do that. In most cases, the artist is certainly not dishonest, though he or she may be incompetent. I’d bet that the artist may not have even anticipated that the work would be used for a book cover. And the writer certainly has little control here. If there’s any responsibility for boring art, tiresome style, or lack of relevance, I think we must lay it at the feet of the publisher.

Last year I was delighted to find a single gray petaltail, Tachopteryx thoreyi, for the first time. This year I was just as thrilled to find the second one, and since then I’ve seen them everywhere, from the yard around the house to both creeks, and between. A few days ago, I watched one perched on a porch post periodically zooming out to catch something, and then return to the same position, time after time. I’m almost tempted to catalog them as individuals, like the box turtles.

If there’s such a thing as a charming dragonfly it would be this species. I’m fairly careful of propagating information gleaned solely from the internet, but here’s one objectively independent observation that I see over and over. People get excited about finding this particular species, and they all notice the same things: gray petaltails love to perch on vertical surfaces, and they’re uncommonly bold.

This one decided that my pant leg was just the place to be, and would not be dislodged.

So to speak.

The last few days have been a whirlwind of morning and afternoon appointments, so writing has been less than regular. Most of those appointments have been of little outside interest but yesterday’s is. We closed on the new adjoining property, shown as that very odd polygon to the left, marked with a blue icon. The two red icons mark other, adjoining properties as they’ve been divided up in the last few months. Although I didn’t write about it at the time, we had chatted with the owner a couple of years ago when he mentioned he was planning to portion off the 300 acres of “consortium” land to our west. He wondered if we were interested. It was last May 2008 when we started working with him in earnest on this. A few small snags along the way, but by and large he was a pleasure to deal with, remembering and keeping us in mind for all of that two years, and understanding without much explanation exactly what we wanted.

Nonetheless, it is a little, just a little, like being 50 or 60, kids all grown up and gone away, and choosing to have another baby.

Here’s the larger context of the property, the northwestmost block in yellow, attached to the current northeastmost block. It’s not too hard to tell from the contours that much of the property is sloped or floodplain. I’ve described the area several times in the last year, including as recently as February 26.



A cropped version of the above: the odd shape was because we wanted that floodplain and slope, along with the two upper elevations. The new extent along Goulding Creek makes for a total of just under a half-mile walk down the creek.



During a hiatus in the closing, Glenn asked me if he should inquire what the plans were for the remaining 300 acres adjoining the new property. I suggested that that might be proprietary information but why not? So we learned a few things. Over the last twenty five years it’s gone from paper company land to use primarily by a hunting club, with rumors that a 300-unit housing development was in its future. It seems that that is highly unlikely. The two individuals who each own portions will likely keep it as it is for the foreseeable future, and if developed in any way would consist of fairly large tracts with low density homes. The history of the current developer shows that that is how he prefers to work, so we see no reason to believe otherwise.

If you live in the southeast US, you might have noticed it’s been a little hot the last week or so. Two interesting things about the last 5 days, as shown by these two anomaly plots. Top panel is for daytime highs - a real dichotomy between the southeast and the west. We’re 4-8 degF above normal highs and the west is the same amount below. However, look at the nighttime low anomaly. Again our nighttime lows are 4-8 degF above normal, but in the west the lows are at least somewhat above normal in most places.

Sounds like maybe lots of clouds and rain in much of the west. We certainly haven’t been getting it, and the culprit is a high pressure area that is diverting moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Looks like it will be breaking up a bit over the next few days, though.

A few weeks ago I reviewed some books united by a common theme, but different authors. Here are two books that are united by the virtue of loosely linked themes and a common author, Ursula K. Le Guin. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned her work - that would have been back at the end of 2004 (could that really be post #45, preceding a glut of more than 1500?), for "The Lathe of Heaven".

“The Lathe of Heaven” doesn’t fit into the universe that Le Guin created to explore her fascination with human cultures. That book deals with the consequences of someone whose dreams change reality retroactively. The following two books, probably the best known, are among a half dozen others that explore the Hainish universe. It is hard to put all this together, because Le Guin seldom comes right out in the open to present you with the larger picture. Most of the backdrop is delivered in tidbits in dialog between characters. However it’s probably not a SPOILER to summarize it:

In Le Guin’s creation, the Hainish are our ancestors, and they’ve had a culture that has a history encompassing a million years. Not only are they our ancestors, they’re the ancestors of at least 83 now subspecies on as many worlds, established as colonies hundreds of thousands of years ago. Hain has had boom and bust cycles, and several hundred thousand years ago during one of those boom periods the Hainish colonized dozens of star systems, including our own Earth. Then they retreated, leaving at least eight-odd planets with their colonies to survive on their own, adapt, and develop their own cultures. Our own world is one of these, and the half-dozen works by Le Guin explore the rediscovery of some of these worlds, the union of the rediscovered called the Ekumen, and of course gives her the opportunity to do what she does best - figuring things out - and us the opportunity to enjoy her efforts thoroughly.

A couple of other details that are important - star travel still takes years, by NAFAL, “nearly as fast as light.” Somehow in their million years of civilization the Hainish never got around to developing FTL, “faster than light.” However, there is the ansible, one of Le Guin’s clever creations, a kind of “radio” that allows instantaneous communication between any two points, and we’ll want to remember this. Earth, rediscovered centuries in the past and for you and me some centuries in the future, is a devastated world, essentially rescued by the altruistic and guilt-ridden Hainish. Nonetheless the Earth humans, the Terrans, take an important, though usually very peripheral role in Le Guin’s stories.

Although it comes late in the chronology of the books, "The Left Hand of Darkness" (1969) is the first one I’ll deal with.



It takes place on the newly rediscovered world of Gethen, also called Winter. As befits the name, the planet is in the midst of a hundred thousand years of a glacial period. The adaptations that have evolved to survive the cold are not the strangest though - the inhabitants are androgynes, neither male nor female. Five sixths of the time they have no sex, and then for a few days an individual will go into “kemmer,” or what we know as estrus. If paired, one of the pair will become female and the other male.

The Envoy from the Ekumen, Genly Ai, has spent decades in travelling to Gethen, and his mission is to establish a possible consulate with the 83 planets of the Ekumen. He’s having a lot of trouble in the rambunctious Kingdom of Karhide, ruled by a king who is not only paranoid, but also recently pregnant. In some despair over his inability to communicate, the Envoy makes his way over the icy sea to the other nation on this planet, the Commensals of Orgoreyn.

The Orgota are culturally diametrically opposed to the Karhide, though there has never been war between the two, a likely consequence of androgyny. The Orgota are clearly an ultimate realization of what we (or at least some of us) know as the Soviet state, with children brought up by the state after the first year, completely apart from their parents, whom they never know. The control of communications and social order by the state is absolute. Karhide, in contrast, is analogous to the western democracies, although it takes our Envoy quite a while to realize this, seduced as he is by the comfortable order of the Orgota after the chaos of the Karhidish.

One, and maybe even the most, important part of the story is in the complicated relationship that develops between the male Envoy, and one particular androgyne, as they flee across the terrible glaciers in an effort to make their way back to Karhide. (And look! You can see them fleeing in that second cover art above.) And interspersed throughout are what amount to short stories that all Gethenians know as the backbone of their history.

The second book is "The Dispossessed" (1974), and though Le Guin wrote it after, actually occurs before the events of “The Left Hand of Darkness.” Here the story is not told from the point of view of an Envoy - it’s from the perspective of the physicist Shevek, who is an inhabitant of the inhospitable, barely liveable, desert planet Anarres. Anarres is one of a double planet system, and the other, larger planet is the mother planet, the lush and beautiful world Urras. Nearly two centuries before, the followers of the female philosopher Odo, essentially an anarchist, were allowed exile to follow their own path on the inhospitable moon, Anarres. Shevek is the descendent of those people, and this is his story.



We don’t have androgyny here, though the Anarresti and Urrasti are a subspecies physically and genetically distinct from us Terrans. Urras is a reflection of our own Earth, with the Soviet Union, the United States, and even a Third World representative clearly depicted. Anarres, with its anarchic culture, has no parallel. Shevek, our hero on Anarres where most of the story takes place, is about to discover that nothing about these cultures is what it appears, and that’s why the subtitle is “An Ambiguous Utopia.”

As in “The Left Hand of Darkness,” "The Dispossessed" is interspersed with flashbacks from Shevek’s childhood and upbringing, and gives us an understanding of the implications of an anarchic culture - what its ideals are, and where Shevek begins to understand that it fails. The synthetic language of the Anarresti, Pravik, has no possessives. For instance, in a revealing scene between Shevek and his daughter, she offers him her handkerchief. But her language only allows her to say “You can share the handkerchief I use.”

The main plot here revolves around Shevek, and his development of a once-in-a-million-year idea, the General Temporal Theory - he is a physicist of the caliber of an Einstein. (The “ansible” I mentioned earlier, allowing instantaneous communication between vast distances, turns out to be a spinoff of this theory, with suggestions that faster than light travel will also result.) Shevek’s conundrum - who does he share this with? His own people, the Anarresti, who seem not to care? The greedy, materialistic Urrasti of the mother planet, who covet it? Ultimately he decides on a third way, which is informed by the unselfishness of his upbringing.

Ursula Le Guin’s novels always carry an undercurrent of sadness to them - bittersweet because they are such good stories and by no means bummers. Earth humans, Terrans, occupy very little space in her stories as a culture but we do get a glimpse of what has happened to us. We are a failed culture, redeemed by the kindly Hainish and certainly active in the society of the Ekumen but undeniably ghosts.

Everyone who has read “The Dispossessed,” and likes it (and that seems to be most readers), comes away with a different part of the book that affected them deeply. Here’s my own, and I don’t think this is a SPOILER, because it doesn’t reveal anything of the resolution of “The Dispossessed.” It is, in fact, quite peripheral to the main story, and certainly not the only moving passage. But it does come at the end and so you may want to skip it. The quotes below are also much longer than what I’ve ever quoted from a book, and that may be inappropriate, I’m just a little pensive about it. We’ll just have to see. The passage affected me hugely when I was in college 35 years ago, and it still does. The written language may not be elegant but the clash of perception as to what constitutes Paradise and Hell is.

It’s a conversation between Shevek and the Ambassador from Earth, Keng. Shevek, who has now long experienced his own anarchic, idealistically unselfish desert world of exiles, Anarres, as well as for a brief time the lush and beautiful but materialistic mother planet Urras observes that for him Urras is hell:

...there is nothing that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here [Urras] but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and the fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box - Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.

Ambassador Keng responds:

We are both aliens here, Shevek... I from much farther away in space and time. Yet I begin to think that I am much less alien to Urras than you are... Let me tell you how this world seems to me. To me, and to all my fellow Terrans who have seen the planet, Urras is the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of all the inhabited worlds. It is the world that comes as close as any could to Paradise...

I know it’s full of evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste. But it is also full of good, of beauty, vitality, and achievement. It is what a world should be! It is alive, tremendously alive - alive, despite all its evils, with hope. Is that not true?

And then Ambassador Keng from the Earth lets us know how she *really* feels:

Now, you man from a world I cannot even imagine, you who see my Paradise as Hell, will you ask what my world must be like?

My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed our world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert.... We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do - they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species. We are here now, dealing as equals with other human societies on other worlds, only because of the charity of the Hainish. They came; they brought us help. They built ships and gave them to us, so we could leave our ruined world. They treat us gently, charitably, as the strong man treats the sick one...

DSL was out this morning, so after a polite period of waiting I talked to a nice person on the other side of the world who made me do something terrible, something I would never have done had I had the chance to think. She made me push in the hard reset on the DSL modem. And with that, the specialized settings went to factory default.

So it wasn’t even possible to tell if DSL was working, since I wasn’t exactly sure that that was what was happening. A bit ago I decided to bite the bullet and reload the software, after dragging out notes of the special settings from three years ago. Fortunately DSL was back up and there have been no problems.

This seems to have come about from last night’s events.

As I drove home from work I noticed frequent heat lightning to our northeast, around 10pm. The radar map confirmed that there was a small storm on the GA-SC border, about three counties away in that direction.

Over the next two hours that small storm grew enormously, moving south until it covered just about all of northeast Georgia. Really quite an amazing expansion - I felt a disturbance in the force, for sure. And then all that lightning and thunder was all about us, with a considerable amount of rain that didn’t end until after 2am. A completely unexpected event.

And so that’s probably why the DSL went out, a very rare occurrence, but always disconcerting when it happens. As happens numerous times during the day I think of something I wanted to know and start for the computer to search, and then have to remind myself that that’s just not possible at the moment.

Last night’s storm did cool things off slightly. Temperatures are supposed to be around 100 for the next three days, our first real taste of summer.

There’s a lot of alphabet soup here, but don’t let it distract you.

Yesterday the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) released their report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.

The USGCRP began in 1989-1990 and coordinates and integrates research on all aspects of climate change and impacts via thirteen different US departments and agencies, including the EPA, USDA, NSF, NASA, and DOE. This is not the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, although the USGCRP would contribute to that international assessment and advisory panel. In all fairness I should point out that the creation of the program was by presidential directive during the GHW Bush Administration, through the Climate Change Research Initiative (CCRI).

The website is easy to navigate and provides both summaries and more detailed analysis. I’d recommend a look at the predictions by region, as well as the section on abrupt climate change, both accessible from the front page.

Abrupt climate change, as the phrase implies, refers to sudden changes in regional or global climate via some kind of tipping point. This was the subject of a report released by the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) in 2008. That report is downloadable (*). I read portions of the 477 page pdf document at the time. (The CCSP has now reverted to its original name, the USGCRP, but there are still the two websites.)

Abrupt changes include such things that will sound familiar: thermohaline circulation in the Atlantic, massive methane release from thawing organic deposits in permafrost regions in the Arctic, melting of sea ice in the Arctic, and sudden changes in sea level. The report did not find high likelihoods of any of these things changing abruptly in the next century (tipping points), but did underscore that progressive changes were likely throughout the next century. So, for example, while it did not consider a *massive* release of methane likely, it did find that a continued increase in methane release would occur. Similarly it did not find it likely that the thermohaline circulation in the Atlantic would abruptly collapse, but that a progressive decrease in the northward flow of waters to the tune of 25-30% would continue over the next century. It does indicate that rapid and sustained arctic sea ice loss will continue to occur in the 21st century.

The one abrupt climate change candidate (in the US) at the moment seems to be the onset of increased drought in the southwestern US.

(I should emphasize two things: first, that the USGCRP/CCSP doesn’t consider *abrupt* climate change likely doesn’t mean that they’re understating the massive effects of progressive climate change. Second, if it’s difficult to assess the likelihood of any of the above progressive changes achieving some kind of tipping point, it’s practically impossible to assess the *cumulative* effects of all of those trends interacting together.)

The USGCRP page also addresses ecosystem changes as an aspect of abrupt climate change. (Downloadable*) They consider the sudden outbreak of spruce bark beetles in the western US to be an indicator of an increase in winter temperatures. They mention coral bleaching as a result of increased sea surface temperatures and ocean acidification.

Depending on your level of awareness, most of this may not seem exactly new, but it does allow more direct access to the information that gets distorted by individuals who write about it on a blog after hearing about it from a friend who has an uncle whose mother saw it on TV.

*The two reports I mentioned can be downloaded from this page. The abrupt climate change report is SAP4.2, and the ecological thresholds report is SAP3.4. Both are pdfs.

No, the surface of the Hyla Pond is not covered with mercury or other heavy metals - just the time of day and angle of the sun.



I am confused though. This is the same frog as above, from the front. I’ve assumed that all the seven or eight frogs that have been hunting this pond have been bullfrogs, Rana catesbeiana. The calls, which come from these yellow forms, sound right for bullfrogs, and I haven’t heard any characteristic green frog calls. Three or four have been becoming an increasingly yellow color - really startling when they call to see a big brilliant yellow balloon pop up.



I haven’t yet found any references to male bullfrogs turning a yellow color. However I do read that male green frogs, R. clamitans, have yellow throats. On the other hand, the backs of these frogs don’t look so much like green frogs and again, I don’t think I’ve heard the guitar string *plonk* call of a green frog, particularly.

Here’s a couple of other yellow forms. The four photos below are all of different individuals:



The other three or four frogs in the pond do not display the yellow color. I have not heard them calling.



So I guess the question would be: are these all bullfrogs, with the males now coloring up? Or are they green frogs, or a mixture of the two species?

By the time it was light yesterday morning the turtle was long gone. Glenn had retrieved an old bee super with a mesh cloth stapled over it so for the moment it’s used as a nest guard and to keep pedestrians away. It’s not flush to the ground so there are exits but whatever hatches is still a couple of months in the future.



The problem, anyway, was not in guarding the nest, but rather in what comes after. There is a period of several weeks of vulnerability while the yolk sac absorbs and the carapace hardens. One option would be to keep the baby turtles sequestered and protected for that period of time but at that point they become “pets,” I assume, and fall under the umbrella of Georgia wildlife laws. We’ll just have to see.

For the last couple of months Glenn has been involved with the newly formed Oglethorpe County bee club. Yesterday was a meeting, and Glenn pulled out construction materials for five hive bodies. The meeting was spent in constructing them, and Glenn kept three, donating the others. For several of the group constructing a beehive was a first, so it was a good and productive way to spend a meeting.



The materials are left over from the early 80s, when we had a couple of beehives in town and had thought we might build some more. We eventually moved them out here in the mid 80s but were unable to really keep them up. Still, everything had been boxed up and looks well preserved. These still have to be painted, and the brood frames need to be constructed and inserted into the bodies, where they’ll hang, ten of them, side by side.

These are the lower bodies that will serve as brood chambers. During honey season, you begin to pile on supers that contain frames for building cells that will contain the developing honey. To keep the queen from creating brood cells in the honey supers you insert a queen excluder, a board with slats just wide enough to permit the workers, but not the larger queen. After all, who wants larvae and pupae in their honey?



This is a foundation, a film of wax spread over a hexagonal mesh. It will fit into a frame like a stretched canvas.



The individual hexagons provide the template for the bees to build their brood cells in an orderly fashion, one layer on each side. The frames hang just far enough apart so that there is space between one frame and the next for the bees to be able to move between them, after building a single layer of cells.



There have been quite a few developments in the 25 years since we first got into this beekeeping stuff. There weren’t africanized honeybees to worry about at the time, at least not here. It was an option, then, to re-queen now and then but now it’s a necessity. And there are a few more diseases and pests now, too.

(The re-queening issue is an interesting one. You don’t want the queen to mate with males that might have africanized ancestry, so you buy one that’s been mated in a controlled fashion. You begin the hive with a few thousand worker bees. Rather than let them make their own queen, you introduce the purchased one in a little edible box. The workers chew through the box and by the time they’ve opened it they’re perfectly happy to accept the new queen. Theoretically they won’t make a new one, now.)

There will be a lot of things to re-learn, terminology for one. And hive psychology for another - I recall endless discussions of what the bees might do if we did this particular thing, and how might we discourage them from doing the other thing. It was usually our experience that if we thought of two things they might do in response to some action, the bees would think of a third unexpected response.

Beekeeping is one of those things that can get as involved as you care to make it, transiting if you wish from hobby to profession. It can be as sociable an occupation as you care to make it. Myself, I max out on my social tolerance between work and fire department but Glenn seems to be enjoying his bee club group. He’ll probably have some things to say about that.

Here is the 27th box turtle, and the ninth of 2009 (five or six have been males). She, for we know instantly that she is a she, is doing something interesting.



We had had a quarter-inch of rain three hours earlier, and Glenn arrived home around 7pm. As we walked back down from the truck he looked down and said, oh look - there’s a box turtle. I had walked right past her on the way up and hadn’t noticed.

She’s laying eggs in a nest dug out on the side of the gravel path just below the parking area. The ground cover she’s partially burrowed into is thyme.



I watched her for an hour. During that time, she *slowly* pulled sandy soil, seemingly grain by grain, over the three visible inch-long eggs. Since the nest is supposed to be 3-4 inches deep, and these eggs are sitting an inch below the soil line, there may be another layer of eggs beneath this one.



It took her around two hours to nearly cover the nest over. I was hoping to catch her do the final urination on top which the female is said to do, but it got dark before she had completed her task.

The back legs were fascinating in their movements. They were being used for something other than walking, to be sure! More like little paddles going about a completely specialized task.



I didn’t want to disturb her so didn’t get a full range of documentory photos. I certainly didn’t need to turn her over to tell that she was a female!



Now what? My usual inclination is to let nature take its course, but the nest is right on the side of the path and I’d hate to tread on it. It seems it should be protected, and Glenn has a couple of suggestions along those lines. There are some cool suggestions here. Sounds like we’ve got about 70-80 days - blessed event around August 21-31, so mark your calendars!

A couple of interesting things from that web site: it is suggested that the nest be protected (raccoons, and I’d guess opossums and maybe armadillos too). It is suggested that the eggs not be messed with unless absolutely necessary. I didn’t know that the baby turtles were born with a yolk sac still attached to the plastron! And like alligators, the sex is determined by the temperature at some point during incubation. While incubation period in the south is 70-80 days, it’s longer in the north. Box turtles will probably lay eggs later in the spring, too, so the eggs will often overwinter. Here I’ve seen turtles active in late October, so I’d guess overwintering eggs are not a southern phenomenon.

I also happened upon this site, which links to individual state laws regarding North American box turtles. The link to Georgia DNR produces a list of animals not allowed to be kept as pets, and box turtles are among them, so technically I should not even be messing with newly hatched turtles without a permit. (I wouldn’t be keeping box turtles as pets, but messing with them would fit that classification.) This page, at the DNR web site, is a jumping off point for more about the legal restrictions on native (and nonnative) wildlife in Georgia.

Now is that provocative or what? And I’m not even going to tell you what it means yet, but we’ll get to it eventually. Of course there is always the google.

But to start with, an overview of immunity is always a good idea. And this is an extremely superficial overview in which I’m neglecting a lot of detail. So those who actually know about this may object to the approximations, but it’s generally correct.

All living organisms have evolved some form of immunity to infection by outsiders. “All living organisms” includes protozoans, plants, fungi, even bacteria, and of course, animals.

Before we begin, there are a several key concepts that it would be very good to have a firm grasp of. One of these is the idea of proteins, and specifically receptor proteins:

1. Proteins do all the work. They’re strings of amino acids and depending on the specific sequence of these amino acids will assume a particular shape. That shape is crucial to what a particular protein does.

2. The instructions for making a protein are found in the DNA, the gene that encodes that protein. The protein is sometimes called the gene product. We don’t have to go into how all that’s done, but it is good to know that you’ve got about 20,000, maybe 25,000 genes that encode at least as many different proteins.

3. Proteins do a lot of things. Some make reactions go faster (enzymes), others transport molecules like oxygen (hemoglobin) and still others provide structure so that you don’t fall apart (keratin in your skin and hair and fingernails, collagen for the framework that holds your cells and tissues together).

4. The proteins that are important to the immune system have the ability to recognize shapes. They will bind to any molecule or portion of a molecule that has that particular shape. And often they will do something interesting, when that happens.

These proteins are called receptor proteins. The shapes they recognize and bind to are called antigens (or epitopes). Change a single amino acid in that protein and it may bind to a different shape, or it may be unable to bind to anything at all. Antibodies are an example of a kind of receptor protein, but they aren’t the only example, not by a long shot.

Just to underscore: the concept of receptor proteins is the key to getting you into all kinds of interesting things, and not just the immune system. It’s pretty important to fix the existence of receptor proteins in your mind. They are the basis of communication and interaction between cells.

Now let’s get into the immune system.


Innate Immune Systems

The kind of immunity to outside infection found common to all organisms is fairly nonspecific. It’s often termed innate immunity. Let’s talk about that briefly before going on to the more sophistocated adaptive immunity that is found in jawed vertebrates.

Innate immunity has different levels of sophistocation.

1. At the least sophistocated level, we’re talking about mechanical barriers such as cuticle, skin, or exoskeleton that help to prevent entry of invaders. Not the most exciting thing about immunity.

2. Failing that, there may be the more sophistocated production of molecules that bind and neutralize invaders that have made it through the barrier. This includes a generalized biochemical attack system called the complement system, as well as production of inflammatory biochemicals to attract the attention of specialized ingesting cells:

3. In animals, there may be specialized cells that patrol about, looking for trouble, but they only find it if they can see it. Let’s talk more about that.

Those specialized cells (and here we are talking about animals) are usually phagocytic in some way, ingesting the invading cell. To do this, they have to be able to distinguish the invader from the self. This is done by the means of receptor proteins on the surface of the phagocytic cells. Receptor proteins have a special region, or domain, capable of binding to some specially shaped molecule, or part of a molecule. The receptor proteins on phagocytic cells specially bind to lipopolysaccharides, or other targets, that will typically ornament the surfaces of invaders such bacteria, but not the victim’s cells.

That may seem pretty sophistocated, but if an invader doesn’t have these recognizable ornamentations, then it is invisible to the phagocytes. The innate immune system relies on adaptations, such as the phagocytic surface receptors proteins, that only in a general way recognize features present on bacteria (for instance) that are not present on the cells of the animal. So it may be sophistocated, but it’s not very general.

By employing the strategy of targetting only what is known, the innate immune system can miss a new, previously unknown invader.

The Adaptive Immune System

Jawed vertebrates use the innate immune system, but they have also evolved the adaptive immune system. This is probably what most people are thinking about when they (for instance) take echinacea to “boost” their immune system. The components of this system include the different types of T-cells, and B-cells along with their secreted antibodies that recognize and bind to foreign antigens, and a lot, lot more.

Just briefly:

B-cells: These are the cells that, when activated, produce antibodies and secrete them into the circulatory system.

T-cells: There are several types (helper, cytotoxic, suppressor). T-cells don’t produce antibodies, but they do recognize body cells that are behaving strangely. Cytotoxic (or killer) T-cells then destroy those cells.


The adaptive immune system also uses receptor proteins and binding of antigens, or molecular shapes, but it uses a different, more generalized strategy. Rather than target only what is known, it initially targets everything and then gets rid of anything that targets self. To make this work, it uses two approaches:

1. The MHC: Most of the nucleated cells in the body of a jawed vertebrate are ornamented with surface proteins that identify those cells as being self. These surface proteins are the gene products of the major histocompatibility complex, the MHC. The MHC proteins have several functions, but the one I’ll mention here is self-identification. The proteins that dot the surface of your cells are like fingerprints, or an identifying bar code, to the policing cells - they tell the police to let this cell alone. Unless,.... but we’ll get into that later.

2. Selection: The adaptive immune system employs specialized cells called lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are white blood cells that eventually become B-cells and T-cells. The initial armies include all cells, each of which recognizes a different antigen, *including* self shapes (see VDJ recombination, below). The cells then go through a process of maturation in which any cell that recognizes self shapes is killed. What’s left behind, then, are cells that recognize *potential* non-self invaders, even if the organism has never encountered them before.

Now that’s brilliant. It’s also potentially very dangerous, and there have to be special mechanisms that keep the adaptive immune system under full control, and in tight balance. You can imagine what would happen if identification failed, for instance, and those nasty lymphocytes went after cells that were actually self. This does occasionally happen, and the result is some sort of auto-immune disease.

There is one other process that deserves a light mention, because it is a very clever way of extending coverage without using much DNA.

It’s called VDJ recombination, and it occurs to produce millions of B-cells, each expressing a slightly different type of antibody. A similar process occurs in T-cells, to produce a large number of T-cells each of which expresses a slightly different type of T-cell receptor. For each antibody receptor produced by a B-cell, there is a roughly similar analog of T-cell receptor that will recognize the same (foreign) antigen.

Here’s what’s elegant. If this were done brute force, you’d have to have millions of genes, each of which would be required to produce a different antibody or T-cell receptor. Obviously you don’t. You do have a relatively small number of parts of the genes that go to make up one receptor or the other.

Early in the process of making B- or T-cells, the precursor cells undergo a shuffling of those relative few genes, and then an excision of all the rest. This means that there will be remaining a single antibody receptor gene in one cell that is slightly different from the same gene in the next cell, and so forth. The result is several million descendents of B-cells each of which produces a slightly different antibody receptor. And the same is true for your final army of T-cells.

Part 2 should probably take up the major histocompatibility complex, a cluster of a coupla hundred genes. These include nine genes which produce a combination of proteins that adorn the surfaces of most of your cells, and identify them as belonging to yourself.

The weather of the past few months has resulted in luxuriant growth of a number of species of plants. Poison ivy is popping up in places I’ve never seen it; maple, redbud, and sweetgum seedlings are everywhere. I’m seeing clumps of Microstegium coming up in places where I thought it had been essentially eradicated. And then there’s this:

It’s Solanum carolinense, Carolina horsenettle (or horse nettle), and USDA Plants tells us that it is found pretty much everywhere. It’s native in the US, but not in Canada, it can be invasive, and either way it can be pretty noxious. One reason I brought it up (besides that it’s coming up) is that it occurred to me that this might be the source of yesterday’s odor. But Glenn says no.

The flowers look just like tomato flowers (or potato, or eggplant) and that places it in the Solanaceae along with all those others too. It will produce round fleshy fruits in the fall, and they look somewhat like small tomatoes. That gives it two of its other common names, devil’s tomato and apple of Sodom. Those names have an ominous quality to them, and there’s a good reason. All parts of this plant are toxic, including the fruits. Like many members of the Solanaceae the plants are pharmacopias of poisonous alkaloids.



Besides horse nettle, another common name is tread-softly, and both names reflect numerous spines along the stems and even along the midribs under the leaves. The flowers are sort of pretty, and it would be easy to fall victim to the picking impulse. Don’t. Life is full of surprises and grabbing one of these plants and getting a handful of the fragile spines is common to many gardeners.

If it pops up and you have to get rid of it, use gloves and grab it at the very base of the plant stem where the spines don’t grow as densely. The stem will probably break off the roots, but you’ll want to dig those out too, since the plant is a perennial and will just come back from the roots.



The spines don’t carry a chemical irritant that I’m aware of - they just feel that way. Unlike blackberry thorns, which are at least somewhat resilient, these spines are easily broken and remain in the skin, which they will do with the slightest provocation.

The name “nettle” is a misnomer, other than that it conjours the idea of a prickly plant. True nettles are in a completely different family, the Urticaceae. Unlike horsenettle, the true nettles do carry chemical irritants, and the delivery trichomes are not visible as spines. They’re basically stinging hairs in true nettles. The casual hiker in shorts strolling through a dense stand of true nettles (yes, that was me) will have gone too far to turn back when he begins to feel the burning and stinging in his legs. Nasty!

Glenn walked out on the deck late last night, smelled the air, and reported that Datura stramonium, Jimsonweed, has flowered.

I haven’t yet found any plants of it around here (although they pop up now and then) and there’s a good reason for that. It’s a night-flowering plant, primarily, with big white flowers. The flowers will stick around in the early morning and that’s how *I* at least will have to be content to locate it.

And it could be quite far from here. According to Glenn the odor is extremely intense and heavy - “puts Magnolias to shame,” is how he described it. Of course if you don’t have Magnolias where you are this may not be much help.

So I don’t have photographs of this plant yet, but the above link is helpful. For me, the plant will be more obvious later, as it is a tall member of the tomato/nightshade/eggplant/green pepper/petunia/tobacco family Solanaceae - take your pick - with very distinctive, large prickly capsules filled with seeds.

Jimsonweed is not a native. It can be found practically everywhere in the US and Canada. It is considered noxious and invasive. And - don’t eat the seeds, or any part of the plant. People have been known to wander the woods bereft of reasoning capability for days after having ingested a few seeds. If they survive.

Yesterday I mentioned a water moccasin (cottonmouth) claimed to have been killed in western Oglethorpe County. Best I could determine, it seemed like it was outside of Winterville, about ten miles north of us. I asked our resident wildlife biologist and based on the weekly newspaper’s photograph he identified it confidently as a black rat snake. As I mentioned yesterday and as well to him, the lack of a heavy body structure raised my suspicions.

This is to address for the local residents who read the blog and may have missed my update that there was most likely a misidentification. This isn’t too surprising for anyone who hears stories - water snakes are commonly misidentified as water moccasins, and practically any snake around here will be viewed as a copperhead.

The range for water moccasins in Georgia is peculiar. To our east in South Carolina and points north, and to our west in Alabama, the species is found way north of us. But in Georgia their northernmost range officially ends at the fall line. That’s the geological discontinuity that drives northeastward, midway across the state, between the piedmont where we live, and the coastal plains to our south. It’s a strange transition to drive through, and creeks and rivers that traverse it acquire a vitality and wild flow that you’d normally associate with the mountains much north of us.

That’s not to say that there may not be isolated moccasin populations in our area - Jeff says that he’s confirmed a specimen in Wilkes County immediately to our east.

Here’s a panorama shot (image is clickable for larger in new page) with the roadcut across Goulding Creek centered in the frame. The bear claw on the left, and the crownbeard on the right are now about 3-4 feet tall. Would you traipse through that stuff? Not without peering down through the canopy at where you were stepping, you wouldn’t.



Not a bad pan! Three images were stitched together. Two did not have to be adjusted for lighting - the last on the right did. I see now that estimating aperture and exposure time, and putting the camera on manual is the way to go.

If you compare to the single shot of the roadcut taken May 10 you might get the impression that things are a little less verdant now. You can see it in the pan on the right side - the cool season grasses like six-weeks fescue that were so lush a month ago have now senesced and exposed the ground in large areas. Summer grasses are starting to come into evidence, but are slower to grow and less dense under the tree canopy.

Water moccasins are not really supposed to be around here - the range at this longitude cuts off far south, at the fall line. East and west, in South Carolina and Alabama, the range is much farther north than we are, so climate isn’t a problem. Nonetheless there are said to be isolated populations in our area, and a couple of weeks ago our weekly newspaper the Oglethorpe Echo printed a front page photo of what was said to be a discovered (and killed) specimen in western Oglethorpe County. That would be near us. It really wasn’t possible to tell from the photo what the snake was, and it looked awfully skinny to be a moccasin (or for that matter, a nonvenomous water snake). Still, it behooves us to be careful.

UPDATE: I have it on trustworthy authority that the photo was of an executed black rat snake. Not a water moccasin. Too bad for both the slaying and the misinformation. Identification would have been so simple after the killing (if not before) that a kindergartener could have done it. In fact, one of the kids in the photo probably was a kindergartener.

Nothing to fear from #26, 090606m! Unless you want to sit for 10 or 15 minutes while his elegance contemplates coming out of his shell, you have to take what you get, and he was quite burrowed into the grass.



He doesn’t match up with anyone we’ve seen so far. He was discovered in the middle of the floodplain, just to the left out of range of the panorama at the top of this post, in fact. I thought he might have been the same one I found on a very hot day in Sep 2007, but no.



And the usual documentary thumbnails:

The weather has been good to us. After some fine, dry days in the lower 90s, Thursday and Friday netted our immediate location 2.05 inches of rain. We’ll swelter today, but it should again be dry and pleasant until mid week. A far cry from the early June last year, and the year before, when temperatures were approaching 100 degF for days at a time.

This is one of my favorite plants, Elephantopus tomentosus, elephant’s foot aka elephantsfoot, hairy elephantfoot, devil’s grandmother.



That’s an impressive little colony of several hundred plants holding forth in its favorite location, upland, fairly dry, pine floor. It’s distinguished from the other three species we might see around here by large hairy leaves that grow flat to the ground in twos and threes. This probably give the plant a measure of protection from deer.

USDA Plants shows that all four nontropical species have about the same distribution - mainly the southeast and adjoining states.

The plants won’t flower until midsummer, and when they do they’ll have lilac-colored heads with linear ray petals nestled in triangular bracts of three. Here are some nice photos of the flowers.



We also have leafy elephantsfoot, E. carolinianus, and it grows in a completely different habitat. I don’t think I’ve seen the two overlapping. Leafy elephantfoot prefers the moist soil under the hardwood canopy over the little creeks. Missouri Plants has some nice photos of that species.

It’s probably something of a conceit to think that the generation that I grew up in, that of the 60s and 70s, has been mentally and emotionally screwed with more than any other. But certainly no other generation, past or present, had to be born, grow up, make plans, and mature with the daily threat of complete and utter annihilation, with fifteen minutes warning. I do wonder how much of the way our society and civilization works has to do with this unique warpage.

I have more or less vague memories before this, but my first really significant, *effective* memory (other than Guy-Ann and Anna-Sue’s father vomiting on my bare foot in Danville, Arkansas) is of a coupla years later in my parents' bedroom one evening, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The television was on and my father, called to duty, was packing. The news was the Cuban Missile Crisis and we had no idea when my father was going to be home again.

I never had to do the duck and cover thing, but there were fallout shelters, there was “this has only been a test” CONELRAD, and the wailing of sirens did not mean a tornado was coming. Later there was MAD, and MIRVs, ICBMs, and ABMs.

Here are four books, and I’ve limited them to pre-1962 publication dates. With one exception they deal with nuclear holocaust. Only one author probably considered himself to be a science fiction writer, and probably not at that time. Although many more books were written after my cutoff date, and even more movies have been made, these are arguably the iconic classics of the genre.

First up, Nevil Shute’s 1957 “On the Beach.” You’ll notice that’s a hardback, and is the fourth printing. My cousin Marcia gave me that in the mid 60s and I’ve kept it ever since. I only really gave it a fair reading a few weeks ago. It’s unusual in that it’s more of a psychological drama, exploring how people react to the knowledge that in six months every human being on earth will be dead.

You gradually gather as the book opens that there’s been a war, but it’s only little by little that you realize there has been a massive nuclear exchange that has rendered the entire northern hemisphere uninhabitable. The forlorn and eventually unrealized hope is that the atmospheric barrier between the northern and southern hemispheres will prevent the atmospheric fallout from reaching our heroes in Melbourne, Australia. However the fallout has equilibrated over the equator and is approaching day by day toward the south. Radiation levels are rising.

The book was made into a movie of the same name in 1959. Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, and a very young Anthony Perkins play the principal characters. Variations on the theme of "Waltzing Matilda" appear throughout the film with devastating effect.

Pat Frank published “Alas, Babylon” in 1959. Here we experience the actual events of the nuclear exchange. From the pre-dawn perspective of remote, rural Fort Repose, Florida, the ground shakes and the skies light up as Miama, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville are incinerated. Somehow this little town in central Florida has escaped the fallout and is left to cope in isolation.

Also in 1959, “A Canticle for Leibowitz” was published, by Walter Miller. Originally published as three loosely connected novellas, Miller thoroughly revamped the stories in order to stitch them together as a coherent whole. The setting in all three stories is the southwestern desert and the Leibowitz Abbey. Each story takes place 600 years after the previous, and the first is 600 years from now, when the Flame Deluge took place.

The first story places us in the middle of a future Dark Ages, the remnants of 20th century civilization. What knowledge exists is preserved in the form of old books that the monks have patiently copied and recopied for centuries. Our hero, the clumsy Brother Francis Gerard of Utah, is just about to discover the remains of a fallout shelter, along with the incongruous artifacts inside, including this cryptic handwritten note that turns out to be from the Blessed Leibowitz:

Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels - bring home for Emma.

The last book I’ll mention is by George R. Stewart. “Earth Abides” was published in 1949 and does not involve a nuclear holocaust. You might think that a 60-year-old book would have become dated, but with very few mistakes, Stewart manages to present a timeless story. He avoids referring to current events of the time, stays away from detailed descriptions of technology, and as a result the story could just as well have taken place now.

Isherwood Williams is living in the remote southwest gathering data for a dissertation in ecology. Following a week in a feverish state after having been bitten by a rattlesnake, he drives to the nearest town to find that there is no one there. A virulent plague has spread quickly and killed off 99.9% of humanity. There’s not much dialog - much of first third of the book is told as narrative impressions as Ish travels the country from California to New York and back, encountering just a dozen or two people on his journey. Settling for good in the Bay area, he begins to build a little community as one or two people wander in every year. The middle third of the book takes place two decades later. The community supports itself primarily by scavenging the remains of civilization, and Ish has grown increasingly anxious about its complacence. He despairs of finding anyone with a “spark” to carry on, until he discovers that his nine-year-old son Joey has taught himself to read.

Yesterday I reported the formation of a little storm pretty much directly above our house. It was unusual in the sense that it was clear that this was a very isolated rainfall. It was even more isolated than I thought. On Tuesday there was no rain at all in Georgia except in four counties.

Our Oglethorpe County CoCoRaHS reporting is usually a little better than this, but people do often delay or do not enter zero rainfall events. Still, my suspicions were corrected. The purple “trace” of rainfall north of us fell two minutes into my period. That station is about 3 miles from us. None of the surrounding seven counties, and far beyond that, got any rain.

The current issue of Science has an update (subscription wall) by Robert Zimmerman on the bat epidemic situation in the northeast US. Large drops in bat populations in New York were noticed first toward the end of winter 3 years ago. Since then monitored caves and mines showed 50-100% population kills in hibernacula in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia as well.

One of the oddities of the bat deaths was the presence of a cryophilic fungus (hence the term “white-nose syndrome”) but whether this is the cause or simply an opportunistic infection is unclear. Samples collected this year will be analyzed by fall to help determine this.

What seems to be the case is that affected bats wake more frequently during the winter, leave their winter roosts prematurely, with an unusual loss of stored fat, and die from the cold or starvation. Several researchers are testing ideas along these lines. One avenue has to do with chitinase-producing bacteria.

Bats eat a lot of insects in order to prepare for the winter, and also seem to store away the hard, usually indigestible chitin exoskeletons. During the winter then, symbiotic bacteria produce chitinase enzymes that aid in digestion of this potential energy source. It seems that affected bats may not be harboring these bacteria and would therefore not be able to digest chitin, but data are preliminary right now.

That still doesn’t explain the ultimate cause of the problem but may indicate some kind of infection separate from the possibly opportunistic fungus.

In the meantime measures are being taken to avoid contamination between caves and mines. US Fish and Wildlife is encouraging cavers to forego spelunking in caves in affected states. The US Forest Service closed all northeastern caves and mines for one year, a month ago, and is expected to do the same in the southeast US shortly.

This wave of bat disappearance echoes the honeybee colony collapse disorder of the last few years, and the amphibian declines of the last decade, both of which are ongoing events. Only the abstract is available but the always great Elizabeth Kolbert has a very good article (summary only unless subscribed) in the New Yorker for May 25. It’s entitled “The Sixth Extinction?”, and as a facet of the broader topic of great extinctions, details the amphibian and bat declines.

Except when it isn’t.

Let’s take a look at when images and written words lose their appeal, and why that might be.

First up, a real pretty picture. This, surely, is worth a thousand words, and as the writers for National Geographic know, the words will go largely unread.

This is an American Lady (I think). That may be where the interest in the words ends for a good portion of the audience. I could add that it is Vanessa virginiensis, and that is going to turn some off right there. It’s on the infructescence of a thistle of some sort, and the word “infructescence” is worrisome. I could speculate as to why it’s on the nourishment-poor seeds - perhaps there’s some moisture there that I can’t see, or maybe it’s just resting. Small update: I see that there’s an optical illusion of the butterfly’s orientation generated by the odd angle of this photo. Once you have fixed on one orientation, the other is extremely difficult to see, at least for me.

When I run into the occasional person who reads this blog (but doesn’t comment), the most frequent reference is to the photos, which they like “but I usually skip the writing.” Well, that’s ok, more than ok, since I don’t usually post photos I don’t like, too, and so it’s a compliment. People can take whatever they want from what’s here and that’s always how it’s been. And photos are certainly a kind of graphic imagery, but they’re not the kind I’m talking about.

Let’s look at another one, a map, and here I lose another quarter of the potential audience.

Today when I enter my 0.03 inches of rain into CoCoRaHS, I may be the only one in Oglethorpe County (or even the surrounding counties) to show any rain. Last night at 7:07pm, a little rainstorm formed above us and dropped rain for 30 minutes. And then it scooted off to the southeast, maintaining its compact little shape. Nothing else for at least 50 miles in any direction.

I can tell you, if you didn’t know already, that there are people who can’t (or won’t) read maps. And yes, most of them are men. A good quarter of the post-dispatch radio chatter with Oglethorpe 911/Central will be in giving directions to a fire call. The reason is fairly simple - a lot of firefighters won’t look at the extremely convenient and usable map book of the county that 911 gives out.

For the third example, let’s ratchet up the abstraction a bit. We’re entering into the area where both images and written words begin to fail for a lot of folks. Maps begin to carry an element of abstraction that can become uncomfortable, so let’s turn on the heat.



There are a lot of folks who have trouble with something like this. It’s certainly not due to a lack of smarts, but more I think to a lack of patience and practice. It takes awhile to sort out what parts of that image are standard and always present in some form (the title and the axis labels, for instance), and what parts of the image tell a new story (the green, blue, and red lines). In this case the image might also be too small to read, but that’s not the point.

In not too long a time, after some practice, the general intent of a graph like the above becomes evident at a glance. “Oh yeah, it’s a time versus temperature graph,” and all is right with the world. It takes a little longer to ponder over it and extract out the more specific lessons learned by, say, comparing the peaks and valleys of the red and blue lines, or noticing the long term swings in addition to the very regular daily ups and downs.

You’ll note the truth of this if you’ve seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. He presented a plot much like this one, and he knew he couldn’t get away with that. He used a hydraulic lift to focus interest and cement the crucial point in his audience’s minds.

So for everyone now, here’s one that will really blow your mind. I found this in last week’s issue of Science.

The fine graphic is from a short perspective on phenology, and the image presents a conceptual framework. The article ("Seasons and Life Cycles", H. Steltzer and E. Post, Science 324, 886-887 (2009)), unfortunately behind a subscription wall, explains a way of thinking about phenology and interactions between the species in a community. The graphic is a generalized one, useful for thinking about what happens to - not just each species alone (the horizontal red bars in each cell) - but also to the interactions between them (the gray shaded area in each cell) when something like climate change causes a change in the timing or duration of the seasonal life history of some species.



It took me about five minutes to mostly figure it out, and that was with the explanation added, and knowing what the subject material was. Part of the trouble was that the form of the graphic wasn’t instantly recognizable to me. It’s a combination of a graph and a table (another thing that people have trouble with). Users of spreadsheets will recognize it as a table with top and side labels, and then the cells. Except that each cell here has a lot more information than the usual spreadsheet cell. And you’re also supposed to compare the meaning of the contents of each cell with the others.

Here, let me add the graphic’s caption. You’ll appreciate how terse but at the same time how precise the description is:

A conceptual framework. This table is a guide to determining how individual species are responding to an extended growing season by observing the duration of peak season. The life history of a species—from the onset of greening through the end of senescence—is illustrated by the length of the solid lines. Each case represents a shift in the timing (columns) and duration (rows) of one or more species in a hypothetical three-species community that includes an early-, mid-, and late-season species. The growing season begins when the first species greens and ends when the last species senesces. The peak season (gray shaded area) occurs when all species have started and none have completed their life history. Reproductive life history events likely begin before the peak season and are completed before its end. The final row and column list changes that can be observed through frequent observations of surface greenness.

CREDIT: ADAPTED BY P. HUEY/SCIENCE

There seem to be several general blocks to viewing abstract graphic images like these. They’re not independent of each other:

1. Subject matter. It really helps if you are interested in and have some familiarity with the subject.

For instance, most of us have had to learn more about economics in the last eight months than we ever wanted to know. To help us along, even commonly encountered articles and blurbs will present graphs. But to understand them, you have to know the meanings of mysterious economic terms like foreclosures, deficit, unemployment, and those are the easy ones! Fortunately there’s google and wikipedia to help us through with that.

In the image above, it helped to know something about ecology. The graph is referring to how to think about the interactions between species in a community, and right there are two more terms you have to have some familiarity with.

2. Level of abstraction. Interest wanes at least directly, maybe exponentially, with how much abstraction an image requires to process.

The butterfly picture has a level of abstraction to it, but processing it is something most of us are capable of. Most, but not all, are capable of reading a map. In that case the reigning block may be more the subject matter (yesterday’s rainstorm) or level of interest (who cares what happens in southwest Oglethorpe County).

The temperature plot is going to lose a lot of folks. It’s very interpretable, but is tagged to concepts like diurnal cycles, long and short term variations, and local differences. If I’d simply used degrees Celsius instead of degF, it would have turned quite a few US readers off. It may interest me, but certainly not everyone. As chancy as it is, it is still something that is eye catching enough to at least garner a glance, and maybe a little more than that.

The last graphic, elegant as I think it is, is so abstract and requires so much attention that most will not approach it at all. And yet the odd thing is that the concepts are pretty simple, and are something that anyone could understand even if you had to tie them down to force them to listen. If they did, and if you simply described it verbally, most anyone would get it. Pictures are not necessarily worth a thousand words.

To be clear, there are other kinds of abstract thinking too, or maybe it’s just subject matter and interest. I know firefighters who can open up the main panel on the tanker, take a look at the wiring, and figure out which fuse is at fault, having already figured out that that’s the likely issue. Electrical wiring is pretty formidably abstract to me. Similar consideration goes to those who can take a look at the pump assembly and figure out why we’re not getting full flow out of a ball joint valve. Yet they would have no patience at all with the last two images above, and perhaps not with the map, either.

Myself, I wouldn’t have designated myself as competent to diagnose and repair these problems until I listened and followed through with my colleagues. And then I think - I can do this.

3. Patience, practice, and persistence. Attention span and focus.

These are all linked to interest and subject matter. The firefighter who fixed the fuse had no trouble focusing his attention for a long span of time, but better get the ropes ready with the last two figures above.

It seems to me that for a lot of people the written words and images quickly begin to fail in getting across information and concepts. Yet even for the last image, verbal communication would easily get across the concept, though you’d have to resort to a level of physical coercion to be successful.

This is why, whether they know it or not, you are seeing written text beginning to disappear from news sites such as CNN, and being replaced by videos (dog bites off baby’s head: WATCH). The technology allows it, and the videos, especially the verbal part, seem to be a more effective medium for most. For me, it’s the opposite - I get much more out of the written explanation, especially coupled with an abstract graphic.

I find a similar reaction to reading a book versus listening to a recorded audio version. A recorded version presents the story too slowly - it leaves me with too much empty space to fill. I wander off, mentally, and lose track. With written material I can read as fast as I can process what I’m reading.

None of this bothers me - it’s simply the way things are with people. My ratio of images like the butterfly to images like the rest is pretty high, and I think these are the basic reasons for that. I take advantage of the tolerance to the images in order to add the words, though the words are mostly for me and not everyone.

First off:

Starting in June, I’ve taken over from the first CoCoRaHS Oglethorpe County coordinator. It’s a fairly simple job that mostly involves keeping an eye on the eighteen Oglethorpe County stations, answering questions, and such. The most work is involved in publishing the weekly rainfall totals for each reporting station in the local weekly, the Oglethorpe Echo. And that’s that. Onward:

It’s The merry Month of May, Number 40 in a series. This was the third month of relatively normal weather. Others had much more interesting things to talk about.

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



The northern tier of states from the Pacific to the Great Lakes were unusually cool for at least the third month in a row (and I presume these temperature anomalies extend into Canada as well). Looks like Kansas and some of the surrounding states were a bit cooler than usual. The eastern US was just slightly warmer than usual in most places.

The most remarkable anomalies occurred in the southwest where parts of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico experienced temperatures 6-8 degF warmer than usual.

The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center is hiding these precipitation plots here, and that’s where we’ll find the plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US over the month of May:



Parts of the southwest got a little relief in the form of rain, but much continued to be dry, as has been generally true since November. Pacific states, except for southern California, got a little extra rain. Conditions were somewhat dry throughout the central states. But the real story for the southeast was rain.

After the sixth month of unusually dry conditions Florida got rain with a vengeance, and much of that spread into south Georgia. A few days ago I posted on the odd nature of the couple of weeks of continuously cloudy or wet weather so I won’t go into that so much here. But I also noted that locally we were about an inch below normal - if you look closely at that map you’ll see that there are tiny patches of neutral white amidst all that green. If you look closely enough you might just see a patch of brown hanging over our house!

For Athens:

It only seemed cooler here than it should be - it really wasn’t, so memory doesn’t always serve.

Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of May in Athens. (It seemed appropriate to present high temperatures this time.) As usual, the black dots are for the 18 years 1990-2007 (black dots), 2009 (green line), and 2008 (red line).



We almost broke a low on a couple of nights around May 20, and never approached record highs. Nonetheless our average temperature in May was 70.5 degF, compared to 70.0 over many years.

We had NO days that were more than one standard deviation above the mean high daily temperatures, and only two nights more than one standard deviation below the average. That’s so average it’s almost painful.

For rainfall, the figure below shows the Athens data which are official for our area. As usual 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. We were above average for most of the month, and then officially ended right at about the average. That figure doesn’t quite display it properly, mainly because the red line average isn’t where it should be, at 3.86 inches. That average is over many years whereas my day to day average is only since 1990. The average rainfall of 3.0 inches you see there is correct for the last 19 years. Take home lesson: The Month of May has become much drier in the last 20 years.

Depending on where you were, May brought both below- and above-average rainfall. Official Athens rainfall was 3.58 inches, compared to a normal 3.86 inches. Here in Wolfskin we got 2.87 inches, so we were below normal. However, looking at the CoCoRaHS reports shows an average of 4.15 inches for Oglethorpe County (we were at the low end here), with a couple of areas getting more than 5 inches. So rainfall was quite variable across the county.



A word about our annual rainfall to date:

Athens has had 21.5 inches officially since January, and that’s about the same (21.38 inches) as we’ve had in Wolfskin. Normal would be 21.3 inches, so there you have it. We’re officially off the drought list, although reservoirs still haven’t fully recharged.

I’ll continue to link to this neat prognosticator in which you can get variously timed precipitation and temperature outlooks. April’s predictions were not so accurate for us, over the one-month outlook, but they couldn’t take into account the unusual tropical moisture that swept the southeast. The prediction for June has moderated a bit to average rainfall and only slightly above average temperatures. Looks like the next three months will be average in both respects. Of course tropical weather drives things around here in the summer so who knows?

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update indicates that we’re out of the La Niña conditions that did not hang around quite long enough to be officially a La Niña. Looks like ENSO neutral conditions as far as the eye can see.

Relive your favorite weather events of the year 2008, courtesy of NOAA. NOAA has a neat State of the Climate product. By clicking on the year, such as 2008, you can get to monthly and even weekly reports and zero in on regional descriptions that are much nicer than my own.