So Glenn said, “Let’s do it,” and I said, “if it can be done quickly.” He got one, I got two, and it was done skillfully and in admirably short order.

UPDATE: Bev got it right. It’s my simplified cartoon, which I may have to redraw for a minor inaccuracy, of the exquisite response to infection, which in this case happens to be vaccination. From the bottom up:

Purple antigens from the inoculation are taken up by the yellow APC, the antigen presenting cell. It presents the various bits and pieces onto surface receptors, and these are sampled by passing lymphocytes, including helper T-cells (green). Through surface receptors, and the major histocompatibility complex, the helper T-cells match up with the appropriate (and only the appropriate) progenitor B-cells (blue) and cytotoxic T-cells (red). The latter are fed cytokines to stimulate them to begin to multiply (clonal amplification). Within a couple of weeks there will be millions of only the right type of B’s and killer T’s to do the job they may have to do.

In the case of B-cells (blue), the appropriate antibodies, the Y’s, will be secreted, and will bind and neutralize the virus that may appear if there is an actual infection. In the case of the cytotoxic or killer T-cells (red), normal body cells that may be infected will be killed and absorbed. The hairy surfaces there are receptors that will sense those abnormal virus proteins that infected body cells blindly present, and that are the call to arms.

Yesterday I found a box turtle carapace in SBS Creek, just downstream from the big gully. I ran the photos for comparison to discoveries since I started documenting in 2005, and was relieved to find no match. It was just by chance that I found this post from March 2008, which involved discovery of a freshly dead female in the creek about 400 feet farther upstream. It’s the same one, so it took about 20 months for her remains to wash down that far.



I spent a few hours this morning going through the photos and selecting a few from each discovery. They go into a composite, about four turtles each. Here are tiny presentation versions of the 2009 discoveries.



Anytime I find a new turtle I go through these things to see if it’s a new or rediscovery. Highlights of 2009: Eleven new discoveries, not including Sylvia, rediscovered in April after almost two years, and that adds up to somewhere around 29 turtles last seen alive. Six of the eleven discoveries were made on the new property. 2009 also marked the earliest discovery of a box turtle, on March 21.

This does not include the three hatchlings of September 18th, (described and released) but does include their mother.

A strikingly colorful male was found in April, and in May,the smallest turtle I’ve found so far, a four inch female.

2009 also marked the earliest point in the season that I found the last turtle of the year. July 20th I found two males, and then nothing for the rest of the year. This is odd, since from then on I was spending hours eradicating Microstegium (by handpulling, of course), and that usually nets me an occasional turtle.

The previous post on the bright yellow-green coating on beech trees brought some interesting comments that I’d like to address here.

One of the reasons I noticed the growth was the time of year. We don’t have snow like Diane does but in a world of dominant brown at the moment the color stood out strikingly here too. Diane mentioned that she saw similarly colored growth in a number of other places, including concrete wall and outdoor wooden stair railings. I took a look and also see fading (it’s dry now) yellow-green growth on our railings and steps. I’m not sure it’s the same thing, but the hook of bright color at this time of year is a cozy coincidence.

I think Swampy got it. Lichen was one of three possibilites but I was fixating on crustose lichen. Although her suggestion is crustose, it’s something a little closer to what I’m seeing in the powdery aspect of the coating. It’s that aspect that suggests that this is not a cyanobacterial mat, as I was originally favoring.

Swampy suggested Chrysothrix, or gold dust lichen, and I bet that’s very close. It’s “corticolous,” meaning it is often found on bark, although it may be found elsewhere too. And it’s “leporous,” meaning that it lacks the gross morphological structure that we admire in lichens, and is more of a powdery coating. And it has the right color, too. All that comes from this site on Identifying Lichens, which looks like a very useful start point for that endeavor.

There is another lichen, Lepraria, or green dust lichen, that is a possiblity. I do think I’ve seen this coating the boles of pine trees on wet days. That was one of the other documentations I’d planned to make along these lines but had no idea until now what it might be. Lepraria is less yellow, depending on species, and more green or gray but has the same textural aspects.

As to the actual lichen species, I don’t know. Chrysothrix candelaris is found in the southeast US, but the only distribution map I found shows it to favor the coastal plain south of us. There are several other possibilities, but we’ll just have to stick with genus.

So there’s that, on the possible identify of the colorful growth. And then there’s this:

Bev brought up a whole new thing, beech bark disease. She was concerned about white patches in the photos - I’ve checked, and these are not lesions or exudate but rather another less colorful crustose lichen - I’m pretty sure of that.

However, the suggestion did cause me to take a closer look at some of the things she mentioned, and there is considerable reason to be watchful over the next few years.

Beech bark disease is ultimately fatal to susceptible trees. At the moment it’s a major problem in the northeast US and adjoining Canadian provinces. As Bev points out, BBD is a result of a combination of an insect’s depredations combined with an opportunistic fungus that actually does the damage.

The insect is Cryptococcus fagisuga, or beech scale. It’s an exotic, introduced by accident into Nova Scotia in 1890. For several years it was thought that the insect did the damage but in 1914 the association with a Nectria fungus was made. The insect does its damage by boring into the bark, and then if the fungus is around it colonizes the wound and enters the tree. It grows into the bark, consumes cambium and phloem, and eventually kills susceptible beeches.

I wasn’t able to get Bev’s link to a pdf to work but I found something similar. This figure (pdf) is from RS Morin, et al., (USDA Forest Service) Can. J. For. Res. 37, 726-736 (2007). The paper analyzes historical data to document and predict the spread of BBD.



The figure shows the predicted advance of BBD over the next couple of decades. It made several discontinuous jumps. One was to the Great Smoky Mountains, and it looks like that nucleus will spread outward, reaching us in the next few years.

The progression is described on several sites, but this one has additional information and lot of photographs. The first wave is the appearance of the beech scale insect, the Advancing Front. The Killing Front, the fungus, can “arrive” anywhere from three to twenty years later. Once it does its damage there is the Aftermath Forest endemic with disease. Since a mature beech forest is a climax forest, it’s pretty much a disaster.

The first thing to watch for is the insects. They appear to be easy to spot - their exudates will leave a waxy coating (Bev’s concern about the white spots on the bark) on the bole of the tree, and the insects themselves are readily visible. There may be slime exudate from dead spots in the bark, something else to look for. Fortunately I haven’t seen anything like this on these large trees.

Another thing to look for is the emergence of the fungus’s fruiting bodies. They produce “perithecia,” bright red clusters of sporulating emergences, from mid summer into fall.

The fungus is one of a couple of species of Nectria (aka Neonectria). The main culprit seems to be the specific Nectria coccinea var. faginata. An alternative species implicated in at least one Virginia location is Nectria galligena, and that would be bad news. That species is much broader in its preferences, and attacks many hardwoods. In fact, I identified it three years ago as a potential candidate for the huge galls that I find on many of our tulip poplars. So that potential source of fungus may already be here, waiting.

What to do besides watch for the insects? Not a lot. There is a ladybird beetle, Chilicorus stigma, that feeds on the beech scale, and there’s a hyperparastic fungus, Nematogonum ferrugineum, that goes after Nectria. These are biological controls, but you have to just hope they’re in the area. Insecticides are a possibility but the usual comment is that there is just about nothing that can be done for a large climax forest at this point.

None of this means I’m pessimistic - there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. Maybe the scale insect isn’t happy at lower hotter altitudes, for instance. There does appear to be the emergence of resistant young beeches in the middle of heavy infestations in the northeast. Beeches are typically high altitude trees - ours are quite happy here in the relative lowlands, and could it be that the selection for that adaptation means a different susceptibility to the insect or fungus? Maybe. And we’re in the early stages here, at the worst, for the moment. It’s also something to keep an eye on, which could be valuable information as things progress.

Thanks for those comments on the previous post, too. I’m convinced that our dozen or so huge beeches are uncommon and special. I wouldn’t have thought about taking a closer look at a precarious future without those thoughts.

I’ve been looking at ephemeral coatings on tree bark for awhile now, and here’s a colorful one, on one of the old beeches that we find in the southernmost reaches of the little feeder creek hollow. It’s not on all the beeches, but I don’t find it on other trees in the area. I don’t see it any farther up than about ten feet from the ground, and it seems to grow on the south to southwest side of the trees. It brightens up in the wet, and becomes a little more subtle as things dry out, which is how you see it here. Fairly extensive internet searches haven’t netted descriptive text, although I’ve seen a couple of beech photos that seem to have the epiphyte present, though unremarked. It’s a very thin yellow green layer unevenly coating portions of the bark.

A little closer, there still isn’t any structure, though you can tell some thickness to the coating. It had been several days of dry weather after a rain, so that may explain the powdery appearance.



I see three possibilities - an epiphytic cyanobacterium, a coincidentally yellow-green fungus, or that living symbiosis of the two: a crustose lichen.

Even crustose lichens usually show some symmetrical growth pattern, and at some level some morphological structure. Even at the closest my camera can come there just isn’t any recognizable (recognizable by me, anyway) structure.

Much, much closer: at this level there’s certainly a powdery aspect to it. It could still be a fungus, with the colors just coincidental rather than an indication of photosynthesis. Everything taken into account, if it’s not a lichen, I’d probably go with a cyanobacterial mat of some sort.



At any rate I doubt if it’s any indicator of disease. This seems to be a commensal epiphyte - the bark just supplies it with a surface to grow on. There is beech bark disease, but this isn’t it. I took some scrapings but despite the appearance the growth is extremely thin and I didn’t get much. I’ll try for some more after a rainy day, which should happen on Wednesday and Thursday.

Merry Christmas, with valuable Tips, via LovelyListing.com. Yes, you love your relatives and you’ll be just fine, so long as you have a private getaway and remember the essentials.

A Merry Christmas Eve and Day to everyone. Hope you all are where you want to be doing the things you’d like to do. For us, we’ll have a cold wet one, starting this afternoon, with wind and rain throughout the night.

Here’s a panorama of four photos, with only a slight jarring stitch, of an interesting seventy foot stretch of Goulding Creek. I’ve been observing this area where the old roadcut ends for 24 years now, since we bought the property in 1985. Somewhere there is probably a photo taken back in the days when you had to get photos developed, for even then that treefall fascinated me. At that time we only owned the section from center rightward, upstream; now we own midcreek leftward (downstream) another 2000 or more feet.

The complexity in the center is due to a major treefall more than a quarter century ago, since it was there, much fresher, when we first laid eyes on it. It has changed the features of this part of the creek many times.

The image is clickable for a larger version on a new page:



While there has usually been a locklike damming of the creek upstream (to the right) of the treefall, this is probably the greatest difference in water height, about a foot. The treefall has acted as a dam, accumulating debris, sand and silt until it effectively blocks the creek from flowing under the treefall. Instead it’s diverted to the back and around, widening the creek as it has eaten through the far bank. We now have a quiet deep pool that you can see in the center. There is some outflow from that pool through the curving arm of the white sandbar you see at center left.

The original treefall is marked by the sweetgum growing out of the debris that has collected at center. There has been an extension, at right, of the near creek bank into the creek. Barely visible in the right foreground is a rivulet over large rocks. The heavy rains of the last four months have rapidly configured this so that the creek runs through it when even a little high. At some point it will run through all the time, and we’ll have a nice little island in the middle of the creek.

None of these details is important - they’ll all be recast again and again, and someday when that old treefall finally disintegrates, washed away entirely. But they’ve been fun in the meantime.

It’s that time of the year to make lists: lists of the best and worst, lists of movies, books, sexiest examples of the sex of your choice, hot travel spots, hot events, and hottest days.

Here is my end of the year list: A few of the now 415 extrasolar planets known (as of December 18!).

Even just a decade or two ago there were no known planets outside of the solar system - a few unconfirmed suspicions, but that was it. Suddenly improved optical design and several methodologies allowed the means to directly or indirectly tease out the tiny influences of a planet from its overwhelmingly larger star. And now we have a veritable zoo of exoplanets - 415 of them revolving around 350 stars, which means some of those stars, 44 of them, have multiple planets. 87 of these were discovered in 2009 alone - a new planet added just about every four days.

To guide us on our tour, here is a plot I generated at the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, which keeps track of new discoveries.

The plot is of the length of the year in days along the x-axis versus the planet’s mass in Jupiter units. It’s a log-log plot, but read the same way as any. I’ve added the planets of our own solar system to orient us.

I’ve also added the names of exoplanets that represent extremes in one way or another, and it’s these that we’ll be exploring.

Image: Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia

(You might have noticed that there’s quite a large hole in the lower left quadrant. That’s of some interest since it’s in this region that we would expect to find earthlike planets. Does that mean that there are very few earthlike planets? The answer lies in the methodologies and their limitations, and I’ll have more to say about that in another post.)

Image: R. Hurt, NASA/JPL-Caltech

Starting at the very small planet at the bottom and working our way clockwise we begin with PSR 1257+12 b. The romantic “PSR” means pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star, and the “b” at the end means the first planet discovered in this system. The unusual appearance of the pulsar star is due to vast amounts of radiation being flung out of the two ends of the spin axis, and so we would not be comfortable there. This teeny tiny planet, 1/45 the size of Mercury, was discovered in 1992. The pulsar is 980 light years from us, and this planet circles the remains of the star in 25.3 days. There are two other planets in this system, both larger than Jupiter. Both are expected to be rocky, not gassy, and that’s what you’d think might be left after a parent star becomes a supernova.

You might well wonder how we could detect such a tiny planet across a distance of 980 light years, not to mention know all these sorts of things about mass and period!

Next up is a “superearth,” CoRoT-7 b. The lovely name comes from the European space-based satellite that made the discovery early this year, COROT. This superearth circles a previously unnamed star 489 light years away. CoRoT-7 b is a little under 4 earth masses, which means you’d feel a little heavy walking on it. You’d also fry - this planet circles its sun, a K0 just slightly smaller and redder than ours, in less than a day. That means it’s really really close, and speeds around at 130 miles per second.

Image: European Southern Observatory

Image: ESA/C.Carreau

WASP-18 b, again named according to the project name, SuperWASP. It lies 330 light years away, and like the above CoRoT circles its star in just under a day. The star is an F9, hotter and somewhat larger than our sun, and the planet is a superjupiter, many times larger than our own Jupiter. It’s expected to gradually spiral into its sun in less than a million years. Wouldn’t that be a sight to behold!

This image is actually *not* of HD 43848 b, but it is similar to the “brown dwarf” that is HD 43848 b. A brown dwarf is a failed star. It’s enormous - 25 times the size of Jupiter, but just a bit too small to ignite the fusion process that would turn it into a real star. It does generate a lot of heat, though, and here we see an accretion disk surrounding the dwarf. This one circles a sun very much like our own, 121 light years away, and in this case the star was previously known. The HD tag tells us that it was included in the Henry Draper Catalogue. Unlike the extremes above, HD 43848 b takes 650 years to circle its sun, and so lies much farther out than even our own Pluto.

Image: NASA

Image: NASA, ESA and P. Kalas (UC, Berkeley)

Fomalhaut b may not be extremely large, perhaps as much as three Jupiters, but its massive hot white parent star Fomalhaut is only 25 light years away, practically next door. Fomalhaut b, which circles its sun once in 872 years, is one of the few to have been detected directly by visible light. The Hubble Space Telescope took these over a period of several years and the discovery announced in 2008.

OGLE-05-390L b is another superearth, a little more than five times the size of our earth, discovered in 2005. It’s cold, cold, because it revolves around its tiny red dwarf sun, taking 9.6 years to complete the trip. What’s remarkable about OGLE-05-390L b is that it’s 21,500 light years away! That places it nearly in the center of the galaxy. Now how could we know about something so distant? It’s all in the name: the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE).

Image: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)

A good number of the stars with discovered planets have the tag “Gl,” or “GJ.” This denotes inclusion in the Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars, nearby meaning within about 80 light years. This includes many tiny red dwarfs, which generally are ignored as “vermin of the galaxy.” But it also turns out that quite a few exoplanets circle these ancient dwarf stars. Here are two such systems.

Image: unknown

Gl 581 e is the smallest known exoplanet circling a “normal” star. In this case, “normal” means a M3V red dwarf, a third the size of our sun, 20.3 light years away. There are four planets in the Gl 581 system: b, c, d, and e. They all circle very close to their cool parent; the widest orbit doesn’t stretch out to the size of even Venus’s orbit in our solar system. It was originally thought that Gl 581 c would be in the narrow habitable zone of this system, but recalculations suggest that it’s actually Gl 581 d, the fourth planet out, that might be comfortable to us. Temperature-wise, anyway, but as a superearth seven times larger than our earth, it would be crushing.

Recently there has been considerable interest in another Gliese, this time GJ 1214 b. Again, the star is a tiny (1/6 the size of our sun) red dwarf located 40 light years away. What’s interesting is that the planet, which revolves around its primary in 1.6 days, appears to be a waterworld. A hot hot waterworld, nearly 7 times the size of our earth, on which the planetwide ocean is thousands of miles deep. At those pressures and temperatures, water doesn’t exist in its usual form, but possiby something more like Ice VII. You’ll enjoy this article by DarkSyde on “Water World,” which also features a very nicely imagined painting. NPR had a good piece on this discovery a week or so ago.

Image: unknown

Red dwarf stars are extremely long lived; they will still be here trillions of years from now. It would be strange and perhaps difficult to live on a planet whose parent was a red dwarf.

Finally, and although not labelled on the plot at the top, here is epsilon Eridani b, discovered in 2000. It’s the closest known planetary system, just 10.5 light years away. Eps Eridani is a K2 star, redder and about 4/5 the size of our sun. The only planet we know of is half again as large as Jupiter, and circles eps Eridani in just under 7 years. As the map below indicates, an inner asteroid belt has also been detected.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

And so that’s a few, just a few, of the 415 exoplanets known. In just a few days there will be another one or two added to the list - they are being discovered at a rate of one every four days. And to imagine that twenty years ago we knew nothing of any of these, and wondered even if there were other planets circling other stars!

Just one of those things, sorry!

For those in the northern hemisphere, happy winter solstice, for those in the southern, a good summer to you. It comes at 12:47pm EST, this year.

It’s the day when the northern hemisphere noontime shadows are the longest.



And it’s probably appropriate that we had our seasonal low, so far, this morning: 24 degF.

The system that boiled up out of the Gulf hit us around 7am this morning, and lasted all day. Temperatures were fixed between 34 and 35 degF, with a good bit of wind, so it was fairly uncomfortable. There was talk of snow but this didn’t materialize. It will for our friends in the northeast, though!

At 5pm we had had 2.1 inches of rain - we might get a little more, but not much. That will put us almost exactly at 7 inches for December (so far), which averages 3.8 inches over the entire month and normally 2.1 inches by this time of the month.

Taking it all in: even if we didn’t have any more rain before the end of the year (and it’s in the forecast for another event around Christmas) we’ll have achieved about 60 inches for the year. With 49 inches about the average, we’ll be in the top eight years over the last ninety years of records.

It seems to be time for another link baiting scheme - the latest rash of emails, this time from “Caroly.n Fried.man,” is making the rounds, announcing the “Top 50 Botany Blogs.” The last award ceremony was back in February, that time hosted by Caroly.n’s friend “Kelly Sono.ra.”

I received my top 50 honor via the usual email, last night, and looks like I’m on the way up - last March I was only in the top 100. Soon you will see hapless suckers humbly announcing the honor of their inclusion, complying with the request to mention the bait site on their blogs.

As scams, this one may be relatively harmless, but it’s as cynical as they come. Google the names above (sans periods), along with “top 50” or “top 100” and you’ll find numerous lists at unrelated sites. Top 50 pediatricians, radiologists, dieticians, oncologists, graphic design blogs, iPhone Apps, ultrasound techs, online scripture; you name it, it’s there. All to get you to click through.

Earlier, back in March, we talked about link baiting here, so I won’t go further into it. However you can recognize the connection that links all these baiters - the last line of the congratulatory email regardless of which of the half dozen sock puppets it comes from: “In any case, thanks for your time!”

There may be a number of explanations for this fresh (within the last week?) destruction of the bark on a nearby young tulip poplar, but I’m going to go with deer rub. It’s the right time of year for aggressive bucks to be mangling trees, and there is certainly plenty of older evidence of this. This is the freshest and most enthusiastic rub I’ve seen.

It’s about 4.5 feet off the ground, and penetrates quite deeply into the wood.



Even though this might be woodpecker sign, let’s go with the assumption that the damage is associated with a buck. It seem that there are scrapes and there are rubs, and for hunters these are important indicators of deer presence and behavior. It’s a little frustrating trying to figure out how a scrape differs from a rub from an internet search. Many writers will extoll the importance of knowing the difference, and then fail to define a scrape or a rub. To top it off, the writing among hunting websites is liberally copied and pasted from one site to another until any evidence of the original writing is obliterated.

Searching images, rather than writing, helps. From what I can tell a scrape is found most often beneath a tree, and is disturbed soil into which a buck has inoculated glandular secretions from digits and urine. The tree branches, if low enough, may have been messed with in some way, too.

A rub is probably what we’re seeing here, where bark has been chipped away at or around head height. This seems to happen on two occasions during the year: first, when a buck is growing his antlers out and removing the velvet (too early to explain this rub) and then in rutting season when a buck is marking his territory, attracting does, and engaging in manly combat with trees. This damage could have been caused by antlers or by front hooves from a standing deer. That it’s only 4.5 feet above the ground argues against the latter.

If it helps, here’s the pattern of the wood that was rubbed off. It fell in distinct chips, rather than peels.



I’ve seen a lot of older, some much older, scars on trees that are still living and apparently doing just fine. You might imagine that damage that significant would have a lethal effect.

And it might, though more likely through introduction of disease to the wounds. Here is a couple of cartoons that depict what’s going on. The brown depicts dead tissue (it’s meant to be dead), and the greens depict living tissue.

Bark is not just the dead corky outer layer - botanically it also includes the living phloem that conducts sugar to the roots and other destinations. The living cambium layer beneath produces the new dead xylem for the year, through which water travels upward from the roots, and on the outside the new phloem for the year. (There is also cork cambium scattered around, and that produces the woody outer bark that most imagine as all there is to bark.)



The figure on the right depicts the damage, which clearly penetrates past the living material. That means that destinations under the damage are not going to get their food, a fairly devastating effect. At 4.5 feet above the ground it’s not clear whether an entire portion of the root system below will die, but it’s possible. Above the damage, water through the xylem may be interrupted, so that branches above may die.

If these things happen the result would be a lopsided tree both above and below. The loss of roots beneath the damage will compromise the stabilizing grasp of that part of the root system. The loss of branch weight above the damage will tip the balance of mass onto the other side of the tree. Both effects, it seems, could result in a treefall in the direction away from the damage.

The most likely long term damage to the tree will be at the edges of the wound, where entry to the living phloem and vascular cambium is now possible for bacteria and fungi. These can now spread and cause further damage and disease.

Still, as I mentioned, I see a lot of trees that have sustained this kind of damage. Some have survived and some have not.

Saturday, 12 December 2009, was the annual parade down Smokey Road in Crawford. This year Queen Lewis took over the directorship from Delbra Favors and the route of the parade was reversed, but otherwise it was the usual event. Mostly Fire Engines, Ambulances, Rescue, Sheriff, Muscle Cars and an odd float or two. There was an empty Athens Transit bus towards the end of this year’s parade.

The local Fire Departments of Crawford, Arnoldsville, Devils Pond, Beaverdam, and Wolfskin each brought a pumper. I was unable to identify the second pumper in line. It was probably a second Crawford pumper but my apologies to another department if was theirs. Josh Adams rode the back of the Wolfskin pumper. Brian Mixon drove and Jack Adams and I were passengers.

Most of the images have a Title; mouse over the image to view it.

Do you have an Appointment?

Shall we look in the Book, hmmm?



Glenn unearthed three volumes of old Wolfskin FD minutes. They’re full of precious things, like the mouse coprolites that I shook out before selecting a few entries.

From the Oct 1978 meeting discussing the formation of WVFD. Note the last paragraph. The more things change, the more they stay the same!



Below are some nice tidbits from Nov 29 1982. The first truck? The very file cabinet from which Glenn recovered these records, “kept in a safe place” all these years! And we still have that same desk, which has lost one of its drawers sometime in the last 27 years.

Early safety issues; and oh that barbecue shelter. We finally filled it in two years ago.



O tempora, o mores!



An early attempt at inventory, June 4 1992. And look who makes their first appearance! Actually, I believe we had just completed our training, and had been around for six months or so by then. It’s probably worth noting that most of Glenn’s and my students were in their Terrible Twos that year. Some of them still are.



Glenn, being a careful observer, notes that the individual crossed out not once but at least twice made a second attempt in 2007. How many “Busters” can there be? We have, with regret, crossed him out since then, too.

Here is an astrophotograph taken by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) of the Carina Nebula, a southern hemisphere bright object.



The Carina Nebula, 8000 light years away, is home to one of the larger star nurseries in our galaxy, and also to the hypergiant star, Eta Carinae. At 100-150 times the mass of our sun, Eta Carinae is skirting the edge of possible size, and is destined to sooner rather than later hyper or supernova.

The European Southern Observatory has put together a number of remarkable zoom videos of stellar objects, and I’ll have more to say about that later. The video I’ve selected below zooms deep into the circled area in both of these photos. The incredible resolution is due to the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator, and toward the end VISTA, with its infrared capabilities, kicks in and the obscuring dust magically disappears to show the lovely very young star cluster Trumpler 14. For your Saturday pleasure click on the photo to the left, which will deliver you to the Trumpler 14 star cluster page. I highly recommend that you choose one of the higher resolution videos at the right sidebar - I like the quicktime full screen option. It’s 10 MB, but that’s no problem if you have a reasonably fast internet connection - even *I* can manage this.

If you liked that, look at the left sidebar on the above page. There are a multitude of such videos - the key word is “zoom,” for what I consider the best of them. I’ll add a few of my favorites later.

Is there any other kind? This one was growing out of the soil in a particularly wet area along the floodplain with walnuts in the vicinity.

This has the superficial appearance of a “cup fungus,” an ascomycete. But those have the reproductive structures in the bowl of the cap, and it looks here like the elegant shaggy ribbing along the sides serves that function.

The ribbing makes me think a chanterelle. That would be cool, since I’ve not seen any chanterelles of this color and shape.



Closeup of the ribbing, which consists of flattened sheets terminating in a fork. Any ideas?

We’ve had a lot of rain in the last few months, and it has been paving the way for the late autumn emergence of oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus. I saw half a dozen such emergences yesterday. We’ve visited examples a coupla times before (in fact, Dec 11 2007 last time), but this was such a lush crop that I couldn’t resist another entry. They’re growing in a small box elder. As far as I know, the fungus is not itself a plant pathogen - it is generally found on dead and already decaying wood. This box elder is *mostly* dead, but there are still some living meristems since a few long shoots can be seen popping out of what’s left of the bark. Box elder is nothing if not persistent. Oyster mushrooms, named for their appearance and not so much their taste, are choice edibles, and have the additional virtue of being large and beautiful. They’re also “carnivorous,” with sticky adaptations to their hyphae that glom onto passing nematodes. The inside of decaying wood is very nitrogen-poor, and the unfortunate nematode passes on its nitrogen as the fungal hyphae grow into it. This isn’t a unique strategy - it’s the very one by which carnivorous plants make their living in nitrogen-poor bog soils.

A nice photomicrograph of a nematode victim here, by the way.

Well, that was interesting, although others will have had a completely different experience! Here’s what things look like at 5:30am EST:



You can see how we supplied much of that water for the heavy snows that are falling up north! Here we got 1.01" of rain throughout the day and evening yesterday, accompanied by steady temperatures in the mid 40s, F.

Then within an hour before 4:30am temperatures rose 20 deg. That eastward-moving band of thunderstorms swept over us, accompanied by tornado watch, severe thunderstorm warnings (thought we only got a little lightning). Temperatures dropped 10 deg in an hour, and so did another 0.36 inches of rain. Total for the 23-hour period, 1.37". We’ve now had 4.43" of rain for December, a little over the usual monthly total.

Another event, significant because it only happens three times a year:

The last classes of the semester were held yesterday, and five days of finals start tomorrow. All the CHEM finals are held at the same time tomorrow and so today will see the last of most of my students until next year. There will be a couple more days with the BIOL students and then that’s it for the year.

First up, NPR’s Morning Edition has a short interview with NASA climatologist James Hansen. As I listened to him, I thought - his delivery, articulation, and accent sound *exactly* like someone I know, and I’ll bet he sounds exactly like someone you know too. On that basis, I pegged his origin as Michigan - it’s actually Iowa, Iowa, and Iowa. He’s hell on cap and trade, and he’s not happy about Obama’s work on climate change. Neither am I, although I’m not in 100% concordance with Hansen.

Second, a weather event we can all experience together, and one in which I ran across a new term: lee cyclogenesis.

Lee cyclogenesis is apparently what’s happening now. It’s not named after a Mr or Ms Lee, it occurs on the leeward side of a mountain range. It’s an atmospheric rotation, yes, a cyclone - a mini hurricane - that results from the movement of an air mass up a mountain and then down on the other side. As the air mass descends, coriolis forces cause it to begin a counterclockwise rotation around a center of very low pressure. (That’s northern hemisphere.) At this time of year that can (and will) result in snow. This particular center will move across the country’s misection and then veer northeastward toward the Great Lakes and beyond.

How low is the low pressure center? It might get as low as 980 mbars in this event. Genuine hurricanes can drop as low as 900 mbars, often even below that. Our typical low pressure systems seldom go below 1000 mbars; high pressure seldom above 1030 mb. Just to give you a range.

Here is the situation at 1am this morning (Tuesday). The system hovers over west Arizona, with roughly circular and tight pressure isobars indicating high winds rotating counterclockwise around the center.

If you click on the figure, you’ll get an animation of the next two days. It’s about 400 KB and will appear in a new page:



A couple of interesting things:

The cyclone briefly loses a bit of cohesion as it moves across New Mexco into Oklahoma, southeast Kansas, and into Missouri from early this afternoon (Tuesday) into early evening. It’s also beginning to draw up a lot of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, and on the north side, especially the northwestern side, it’s cold enough to precipitate as snow. Here, we’re getting a lot of rain over the next 24 hours.

By 1am EST Wednesday it has tightened up again, and will remain tight with high winds and moisture freezing into snow, I’d expect. It’s now over the intersection of Missouri, Iowa, and Indiana. The moisture that it’s drawn up from the Gulf has given us a good rain.

By 1pm Wednesday, it’s very tight, very windy, into a cold cold region over the Great Lakes and moving slowly to the northeast into Ontario and Quebec by 1am Thursday.

We won’t get snow - the temperatures have actually risen into the mid 40s since very early this morning. But the pressure might actually drop quickly and maybe even below 1000 mb, along with what might be a good bit of wind. And we certainly feel good about supplying all that moisture that our northern friends are going to see as snow.

Something we can all participate in - a system affecting half the continent.

Third, I got a good laugh from Andy Borowitz this morning.

I suppose this post is more for PC users than Mac users, bless their hearts. There may be parallel things you can do with a Mac, although you may not really need to. And for anyone who doesn’t want to know what’s going on within their software, you’re Microsoft’s best customers! Let’s do ourselves a favor, instead, and play around with what Windows thinks is best for us.

A little story first:

You might recall that along about the beginning of September, my PC crashed. Glenn dropped it off at PC-Help on Gaines School Road, and we got it back a week later. There were some small issues but three months later everything is working much better than before.

On Friday *Glenn's* PC crashed, or so we thought, so since PC Help had done such a good job, Glenn bundled the computer into the truck and took it down there Friday afternoon. The guy plugged it in and it worked fine. He had a name for this syndrome that Glenn can’t recall, but basically the computer gets cranky and you smack it and everything’s ok.

Glenn took the opportunity to ask them to put in a 500GB hard drive, might as well, and while the fellow was looking over a few other issues had a productive chat which I will pass on to you.

But before that, I’d like to reiterate that you save photos, documents, and such into homemade folders outside of the program folder. Windows will tempt you into saving your files into their own folders - don’t do it! If Windows gets corrupted and has to be reinstalled, you risk losing all of that.

I mentioned that PC-Help had installed free versions of AVG Free 8.5 (Anti-virus free). Glenn asked what made them prefer that over Norton (or presumably McAfee). Whether plausible or not it’s their feeling that viruses target the weaknesses specific to the larger antivirus software, much as viruses target PCs rather than macs. Whatever - I did have superduper McAfee for the last couple of years, updated and scanned on a daily basis, and still had six viruses when they looked at the PC in September.

They also talked to Glenn about tweaking the Windows OS configuration in several ways to increase operating speed. Apparently Windows sets a lot of stuff operating in the background that most people don’t need, prove to be annoying, and it turns out you can uncheck a lot of it.

I’m not a computer or software expert, but I don’t mind playing around with things. I don’t see anything that follows that can’t be undone, so long as you write things down so you can restore them if you want to, and proceed slowly, testing things out. I’d uncheck only a few things at a time, writing them down so you can check them again later if you need to. After applying a few changes, make sure everything continues to work the way you want before unchecking more.

So here goes. Don’t be timid!

You can get into the configuration by clicking on the Start button at the very bottom left of the screen. You should get a display that looks like the one to the left. I’ve circled three things to pay attention to. (This is for Windows XP, and Glenn confirms it’s also true for Vista; don’t know about the most recent incarnation, but it’s probably similar.)

Let’s dispense with number three first. If you click on All Programs, you’ll find just that. Up at the top, probably, you’ll find Accessories. Clicking on that will give you a number of options including System Tools. Use these! Defragmenting the disk, after a long period of use, can help. Disk Cleanup is a good way to get rid of TEMP files that accumulate to a huge extent and create all sorts of problems. Use it periodically and get rid of that crap.

OK, on to #1, Run. You’ll want to click on run, and you’ll get the dialog box to the right. Type in “msconfig” without the quotes.

You’ll get the system configuration utility box below. The Services and Startup tabs contain some interesting things you can do. I wouldn’t mess with any .ini tabs!


Below is the Services list of options. A lot of things are checked here, and the list scolls down several iterations. I haven’t unchecked a lot of stuff here, but I have unchecked Google Update Service, Java Quick Starter, NBService, NMIndexingService, PrismXL, Cyberlink RichVideo Service, Themes. Basically most of the stuff that doesn’t carry the Microsoft Corporation manufacturer description. It may surprise you that I’d uncheck Security Center and Automatic Updates. I have my own security and 90% of what Windows wants to constantly bother you about updating has to do with the evil Internet Explorer, which I never use.



This is all supposed to help make your computer run faster, now, remember!

Below is the Startup tab list. Everything in it is unchecked except for what you see. I won’t list all the things that are unchecked, but I will mention MSMSGS - MS Messenger. Probably a good idea to uncheck that, unless you use it. You’re going to have a somewhat different list because you will have some different applications from me.



Here’s what’s likely to have the greatest effect on speed:

#2 from the START button in the first figure above. Right-click on My Computer, and select Properties from the menu. You’ll get the System Properties box below.

Take a look at the Automatic Updates tab. Since I don’t want Windows constantly nagging me to install the latest Internet Explorer, I “Turned off Automatic Updates.” Whew! That really improves the quality of my life.

But we’re really interested in the Advanced tab, so click on that.



Click on the Visual Effects tab. You can tweak performance options here. Most of this stuff you’ll never notice is gone, and I suspect it takes up a lot of CPU time.

To the left is the Visual Effects box. The default was to “let Windows choose what’s best for my computer.” BAD IDEA! “Adjust for best appearance” is going to saddle you with all kinds of crap like animating and swirling windows and expensive visual effects. You might like that, but I chose “Custom:”, and then I only checked three boxes.

I checked “show window contents while dragging,” "smooth edges of screen fonts" (otherwise fonts look squiggly), and “smooth-scroll list boxes.” Somewhere in here I lost the color scheme of my windows frames and buttons so they’re all gray now, but who cares?

Hmm, I just clicked on the Advanced tab in the figure above. Check to see that the processor and memory options are checked for best performance of Programs. I can’t imagine why you’d want your Background services to be the do all be all of your processor’s capabilities. I didn’t mess with the virtual memory option.

So, really, this was mostly for me. I forget if I don’t write it down, and what better place to keep it?

Despite the 90% chance of rain last night, we didn’t get any. And so we also didn’t get the snow that was an on again off again forecast for north Georgia.

The large system that produced a lot of rain moved northeastward, but never reached farther north than central Georgia. Radar throughout the night indicated sleet and snow throughout Mississippi and Alabama but all that slipped abruptly northward, disappearing before it got to Georgia, except for possibly the Atlanta area and north of that.

I can’t be too discombobulated - at this point we’re at 58.99 inches for the year, when our normal rainfall is 48.4 inches, and the year isn’t over yet.

Still, it would have been interesting to have had a snow event in early December!

Wolfskin’s annual business meeting, to elect next year’s officers, was held last night. Our 501(c)(3) bylaws, largely boilerplate tailored to the specific needs of the department, require *three* meetings with specific agendas. The arcana of protocol always occasion moments of mirth as we inevitably screw up, so Glenn studied up and acted as parliamentarian. We still messed up a little, but it was all to the fun of it.

We have our usual monthly business meeting, and then that one is adjourned. That’s when the circus starts.

A new meeting is opened, and this one is the annual firefighter members meeting. Their agenda is to elect a new, unassigned Board of Directors. There are eight directors, five of whom must be firefighters. From that slate the firefighters then elect a Chief/Board Chair and an Assistant Chief/Board Vice Chair. In addition, the firefighters choose a Firefighter of the Year.

*That* meeting is adjourned, and then the final meeting of the old Board is called. Their sole function is to elect from the slate of new Board members a Treasurer and Secretary. That meeting is adjourned, and we’re done. It was fun. Glenn did a great job.

So in the end I’m Assistant Chief, despite all those little pecadillos, and I ended up as Firefighter of Year.

I’ll be crowned in February for the latter, and here’s my tiara (or a reasonable facsimile):



If you don’t recognize it, it’s a combination seat belt cutter, window punch, and oxygen tank wrench. It’s made of, oh, I don’t know, neutronium or something. It’s to die for.

Miss America only had to worry about making porn movies when she was 16. If I carry this thing on UGA campus, I’m probably going to get arrested.

It’s The Month of November, Number 46 in a series. The hurricane season has ended, with very light activity, although our local area did get the effects of Ida, around Nov 10, with 4.2 inches attributable. This was our most significant contribution from tropical storms in several years. Without it, we’d have been under the November average.

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 November above or below the average for November over many years, plotted in colors. The anomalies are in Fahrenheit.



That’s some high anomalies for just about everyone except for the Gulf states and a tongue job into the north Pacific states. Wow.

September was unusually warm for the north, October was unusually cool for the northern tier, and November switched back to unusually warm for much of the US. The southeast continued its trend of being somewhat, but not particularly warmer or cooler than average.

The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center seems to have finally stabilized the location of their precipitation plots here.



Look at all that brown. It astonished me, as we were sitting in the wealth of rainfall this past month.

More monthly switches: September had continued dry in the southwestern US and in much of Florida. October had brought wet wet weather to much of the US, with the exception of southern California. Now we’re back to dry dry dry for a lot of the US. The exceptions are the mid to south Atlantic seaboard states, with normal to much wetter than normal weather in November for Virginia through Alabama, with the exception of Florida. The Pacific states, except for Washington coast were quite dry in November.

In most places these switches average out just fine, but in the case of the central US, I’m sure they appreciated the relative warmth and dryness.

For Athens:

For Athens, the rule was somewhat warmer than usual but for the third month in the row remarkably wetter than usual.

Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of November 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 broke no records. In fact, November was quite mild, for the most part, and it was something of a surprise to me to realize how mild.

We had 3 days of high temperatures that was at least one standard deviation higher than average, and the usual number of such days is 5.5. We had 0 nights below the standard deviation for our usual lows, compared to 4.8 such nights. It seems that both our days and nights have been slightly above norms.

That’s where unremarkable ends. In November we had a repetition of the rains of October and September. November’s rains had a lot to do with TD Ida as it moved brutally north and slightly east and indundated our area. Ida was the first tropical depression in quite a long time to add to our rainfall totals.

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. The blue in the middle understates the surplus this month - we ended up with 1.4-1.9 more rain than usual.



For the third month in a row we’ve had way higher than normal rainfall. That constitutes Autumn in Athens, and here’s what we’ve got, Sep-Nov.

Athens offical - 24.05 inches. Yours truly in Wolfskin, 23.08 inches. Normal for this three-month period, 9.7 inches. Holy cow! That’s got us down to a 16 inch deficit since the drought intensified four years ago. At the worst moment we were 31 inches below normal, at this time last year.

People wonder why I take such a long view - there were those last year at this time declaring the drought was over because we got a few inches extra rain in last year, after a very dry year. But for months, I’ve had a conduit into those who’d had their wells drying up over the last few years, and I knew this was crap. And as well there were my personal observations of low lying creeks that don’t flow much even after what the aforementioned pinks would consider a lot of rain.

Well there’s a reason for that. Gotta fill the subsurface before you can see it on top, and finally it looks like that’s happening.

I’ll grant you that things could reverse at any point, but for the last few months we’ve been on a roll.

I’ll continue to link to this neat prognosticator in which you can get variously timed precipitation and temperature outlooks. El Niño seems to be having an effect now, and you might want to check that out. The current 1-3 month option shows us having unremarkable weather, other than cooler and wetter temperatures. I smell snow!

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update has not changed since last month. We’re now well into an El Niño event of sustained proportions. It has continued to intensity, and is projected to last well into winter 2009-10, and possibly into summer.

Relive your favorite weather events of the year 2009, courtesy of NOAA. NOAA has a neat State of the Climate product. By clicking on the year, such as 2009, you can get to monthly and even weekly reports and zero in on regional descriptions that are much nicer than my own.

The weather should be very interesting here through Thursday morning. It looks like the same situation that occurred in the latter half of September - the one that brought torrents of rain to north Georgia. The difference will be in the duration - this will last only a day or so instead of several. One quick blow up from the Gulf, sandwiched in between two cold fronts - lots of wind and rain. I’m looking forward to it - it should begin by late tonight.

Something you probably don’t know about me is that I work fairly intensively with student-athletes in several chemistry courses. Biology as well, as you might more likely expect, but in this post, we’ll concentrate on the chemistry. For professional reasons I don’t generally write about this. I’d love to, because I have a deep respect for the majority of my student-athletes and their complicated concerns, and have a certain resentment for those who snidely dis and dismiss them, but it’s usually better that I keep silent. It’s hard to do so because they are and have been for fifteen years a large part of my professional life.

Chemistry was my major as an undergrad at Florida State University, and as well in grad school at University of Georgia 1977-1983. General Chemistry is a snap to tutor, but Organic Chemistry is something else entirely.

Not many of my students take ochem (or “organic,” as we used to call it back in the 70s - there is a whole lot of getting used to in that sense), but the ones who do, a half-dozen or so every semester, tend to be really hardworking, conscientious students. They emerge from General Chemistry with trepidation at the prospect of Organic Chem - “it’s really hard, I’ve been told.” This semester in Organic I have a football player, a gymnast, a swimmer, and an equestrian. Without exception they’re all hardworking students - I’ve worked with them in GenChem - I know them well by now.

I don’t like to up their anxieties, but I do tell them: “Organic Chemistry is like nothing you’ve ever done before.” And it isn’t!

Both General Chemistry in the first year, and Organic in the second, are highly problem oriented, but in nearly completely different ways. General Chemistry demands math skills, Organic practically none at all. Indeed Organic demands as background from GenChem, well, not a whole lot. A comfort with some basic principles, all of which are reviewed in the first few weeks of Organic.

Often it turns out that students who did very well in GenChem have difficulty in Organic - I was like that. Conversely, students who had trouble in GenChem often find they have a quick intuitive grasp of Organic. There are those students who seem to effortlessly do well in both, but we harbor internal resentments there. The two disciplines really seem to use distinctly different thought processes.

From the past: Here is my old text from 1974, the 1973 edition of Morrison and Boyd. Yes, I kept it. I think it was probably because it turned out to be such a love-hate relationship at the time - I had a great deal of difficulty with organic. My old professors from FSU, Delos Detar and Werner Herz would probably be a bit horrified that *I* would be tutoring in their field. (I’m pleased to see that they’re still kicking, too, as professors emeritus. They were wonderful teachers. The google is wonderful.)



If you look into this text ($19 when I bought it), you’ll find that it’s about as stark as you can imagine. No color, rough paper, dot density painfully trying to depict three dimensional shapes. It’s still a good text and not a whole lot has changed wrt basic introductory Organic Chemistry in 35 years - a few reagents, a few new reactions. Some terminology dissonance - what we called carbonium ions then are now called carbocations, which is a superior term, actually.



Here’s one contemporary text I favor now: Paula Bruice’s Organic Chemistry. The pages are slick, as they must be since they are filled with eye catching and informative color figures that augment understanding. The three molecules at the top are colored according to electron density (red is the densest), something you have to gain an intuitive feel for in order to be able to analyze and predict organic reactions. This simply wasn’t possible in Morrison and Boyd. Concepts like that had to be handled in the text.

On the other hand, you’ll pay $170 for this text now, rather than $19 from 1974.



My students begin, in the first days, almost like kindergarten students with their huge pencils that they can more easily hold in their hands, laboriously drawing organic compounds with all their carbons and hydrogens. Within a few weeks they’re dexterously handling a more compact way of depicting organic compounds. And by this time in the semester they’re confidently presenting (no multiple choice on organic exams!) a huge variety of mechanisms of reactions like this one:



This is “hydrohalogenation of a conjugated diene.” By this time in the semester, they’ll understand everything about it. The curved arrows show electron flow, bond breaking and bond formation, and they can handle that with ease. They understand the “resonance stabilized allylic carbocation pair,” and how it means that *two* products are formed, the expected one and the unexpected one.

Actually, if they were to present this figure in answer to a question, they’d probably get a few points marked off. They also need to show the electrons around the bromides, and the attack using arrows onto the carbocations. Picky picky but they know that.

They certainly complain about all the work, and there’s a huge amount of it, but in our very best sessions, we very often get deeply into working a problem. I generally have them at the white board, drawing mystical structures, with cabalistic curved arrows everywhere, comments and questions flowing, and when we finish and I remark - “well, that was very nice,” they typically agree with what I firmly believe to be a collegial and sincere satisfaction. It’s a remarkable experience, however small it may be, to have that brief communion with people who are by simple age and cultural difference so dissimilar to me in many ways.