Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives. - Hedy Hedley Lamarr

Between self-publishing, ubiquitous computing, Martin Picard (and F1), birds of paradise, LOEG and a dozen other things, my head feels like Grand Central station on a busy day. Still, curiosity is way more fun than being a lump. I need to go for a long walk - hooray - tomorrow is Saturday.

A storm is supposed to arrive here sometime late tonight. It’s making the local weather forecasters slightly frantic; depending on the precise track it takes, things might get a bit interesting. If we experience one of the possibilities - freezing rain followed by high winds - power failure is likely. No power means no DoaMNH - rest assured, we’ll be back as soon as electrons are once again available.

I just discovered (via Make:) that one can now embed Google maps. By way of a test, here’s a local landmark - the old prison over at the Navy Yard.

View Larger Map

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My dad served in the Navy - his recollection was that Portsmouth was the end of the line - it’s where people served serious terms for serious crimes. On the other hand, Jack Nicholson headed to Portsmouth with a sailor convicted of pretty minor offense …

A recent comment clued me to the fact that I haven’t provided much background info on some of the things I do (and post on) - assuming that both people who read my blog are already in the know. Seems like I may have more than a handful of readers, so I’ll try to fill in some of the blanks.

I’m a falconer. Click here for a good definition of what falconry is. I have a six year old male Red-tailed Hawk and a sixteen week old female Peregrine Falcon. Brick, the Red-tail, hunts rabbits, snowshoe hare, squirrel and pheasant; I plan to fly Luz, the Peregrine, on ducks on the salt marsh. My falconry bullet point list:

• Falconry. Look at the word. Notice it does not contain the letter “d” or the letter “t”. I don’t know if it’s a local thing or not, but if I hear someone pronounce it falcundry one more time…
• Q: You let the bird go? A: Yes. Q: And it comes back? A: So far. Every time we go hunting there is the chance that - if I haven’t prepared properly - I could come home without the hawk. Lost birds are no joke - falconers try like hell to find them - but that risk is a necessary part of the sport.
• Q: So it’s a pet? A: NFW. I’m not all that sure what a pet is, to be honest with you. I have dogs - they work for/with me every fall when we go bird hunting and the rest of the year have duties around the house (basically, do as I ask) and are demo dogs when I teach dog obedience classes. There are periods each year when they are in charge - if they tell me there’s a woodcock in the alders I damn well believe them. Pets? I guess, but I don’t think of them that way. The birds? Definitely not. I make myself useful to the hawks when we’re out hunting; we strike a bargain - if the human produces slips (opportunities on game), then the hawk will stay interested.
• Q: It brings the game back? A: No. (We’ll put aside some of the things I’ve heard you can do with Merlins). Carrying (flying off with the game) is a vice - a bad thing. They stay put and allow you to approach them (it’s called ‘making in’).
• You may have gotten the sense already that falconry is a vocabulary-rich undertaking. True. Even better, much of the vocabulary has been essentially unchanged for hundreds of years - rich gravy for lovers of good words.

If you are interested in finding out more about the sport, permit me to recommend Stephen Bodio’s A Rage for Falcons. It’s a fantastic overview - not a how-to (those exist too), but a why-to.

Folks who don’t know from falconry, please understand that writing the paragraphs above was more than a little stress inducing. Folks who do know - if there’s something you don’t like, or that you’d like to add, please comment.

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My nom-de-blog, Dr. Hypercube - what’s up with that? First, I’m neither an MD nor a PhD. Also, not multidimensional (beyond three + time). A year ago, as I was starting to blog, I was also setting up a test network. I needed a bunch of host names and rather than do something boring, I decided to use monster names. It was a decent sized net (VMWare rules!); I went to the Kaiju Big Battel web site to replenish my monster supply. From there, it was no leap at all to Dr. Cube - my first modification, Dr. Tesseract, was just too obscure. Hey, presto - Dr. H!

Hooray for Kaiju: professional wrasslin’ moves + crazy monster suits + cardboard buildings in the squared circle = hilarity.

On the subject of anonymity - I thought originally that it might be a good idea. As I did more and more blogging, I cared about anonymity less and less. At this point, if you want to know my real name it’s about four clicks away.

Update - ‘The squared circle’ is the way pro wrasslers refer to the ring. Real wrestling (no make-up, completely trashed ears) is done on a mat within a circle. The pro show is done in a (modified for bounce, I think) boxing ring- a square. Those two factoids plus high school geometry yield a great phrase for the likes of Mean Gene Okerlund.

Heavy inbound linkage from BibliOdyssey - welcome! If this is your 1st visit, you might want to check the Greatest Hits link farm over on the right margin - some of the more popular and/or commented on posts.

“She” referenced in the post below is an immature Peregrine Falcon. She’s mostly pealei and weighs a little more than a thousand grams. I’m manning and taming her following the suggestions made by Ronald Stevens in Observations on Modern Falconry.

Boston’s Logan Intl. Airport has always been tough to navigate, but after years and years of arrivals, depatures, pick ups and drop offs, I had it pretty well mastered. Now, in the aftermath of the Big Dig and Ted Williams Tunnel project, I’m back to square one. Thursday night’s trip to the cargo center at Logan was highlighted by an involuntary 2 way transit of the Splendid Splinter (aka Corpsicle) tunnel ($3 toll, thank you very much) and beaucoup white knuckle driving. When I know where I’m going, I can do a pretty good job of getting into a Boston driving headspace (aggression punctuated by near psychotic behavior); when I’m unsure about turns or really need to get somewhere, I become one of the herbivores, cut out of the herd and slaughtered by predatory cabbies. Sigh.

One year ago today, I put my first post up on DoaMNH. It’s been a great year - thanks to readers, commenters, correspondents - I hope I don’t run out of ideas or shiny intellectual magpie gewgaws to post on any time soon.

Too many recent posts have been on tech-weenie topics. That will change over the next month or so - I promise. A tease:

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And a combo tech/funny pointer - the Chile D. mustache Flickr pool!

You might have seen long load times for DoaMNH over the past couple days (or maybe not - what do I know?). I’ve been seeding the Ubuntu Studio torrent - I have the torrent bandwidth throttled back, but the number of simultaneous connections is stressing my little consumer-grade router. I’ve turned off BitTorrent for the day - I’ll probably try to run it overnight (east-coast US, which means late night into the morning UK/Europe and early evening to late night western US). The Ubuntu Studio folks are getting hammered - their web site is currently down - but for those who don’t follow such things, Ubuntu Studio is a variant of the very popular Ubuntu Linux distribution with added packages for audio, video and graphics editing. Tutorials and Studio download status here.

Non-technical version of above - the site may be slow - it’s probably on purpose, because of weird stuff I’m doing - I’m going to try to make it as painless as possible.

We’re back - hopefully for a while. A little bit of New England springtime knocked out power sometime in the wee hours last night, power came on this morning just long enough for me to brew a pot o’ joe (hallelujah) and came on again - for good, I hope - a half hour or so ago.

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There’s always a silver lining - to keep the house warm, a nice fire in the woodstove was needed. Janey was able to work on her research project: testing how close to a stove a dog can lay without bursting into flame.

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