Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

… asking, nay, begging for it.

h/t neatorama

For those of you who don’t read BoingBoing, but do like pictures of the high places of Asia - the photography of Mr. Gutierrez:

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Well, I ended up needing to execute on the cell phone thing earlier than I had originally planned - my current cell started to flake out. My priorities for the new phone were, in order: good phone function (duh!), Bluetooth, decent camera capabilities, and 3G network access. I ended up with a Samsung SGH-A707 - it does what I want it to do. The camera is OK - not great for closeup work (as you can see in the bonus bookshelf blogging shot below), but ok for a quick snap. An excellent extra is that it will record video; I’ve got some footage (can you call it that when it’s a pile of bits?) of my Dendrobates tinctorius that I’m trying to edit so I can post a clip. Unfortunately, iMovie doesn’t seem to want to deal with the camera’s file format - my copy of Final Cut imports it fine, so it looks like I’ve got to get busy climbing the Final Cut learning curve.

The shot at the top of the post is the cell, taken with my junky lo-res digicam. I tried to take it using the cell’s camera, using my cat-like speed (and quantum uncertainty) - unfortunately, I ran into the same problem I experience whenever I try to look at the back of my head by spinning around really quickly. The cell picture is here as a hat tip to Señor Lex10, who posted the graphic goodness I’m using as wallpaper - thanks!

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I like maps - old, new, fanciful, technical, you name it. I was very happy to stumble across the strange maps blog this morning (thanks, Bruce); this one’s going to get added to my netvibes portal and to the blogroll.

One of the best rides I ever got back in my hitchhiking days was a short one - one town to the next one over, here in NH - in an old Saab. It was powered by their three cylinder two-stroke engine, sounded like a pack of angry chainsaws (and smelled like one too) and was driven by a tiny woman with a salt and pepper braid about 3 feet long. She pulled over, I hopped in - noticed the box full of cans of two-stroke oil in the back seat - and we passed a pleasant 10 minute ride talking about cars and who can remember what else. Pointless reminiscence inspired by metacool - also, check out his Flikrstream (this is not a Saab!):

Later - I can’t believe my friend Eliza’s pea soup green 96 slipped my mind - what a good car!
Even later - I remembered another great set of Saab pics driving home tonight - Coop’s from La ‘06 Carrera Panamericana. Click through and scroll down just a bit. Check out those Minilite wheels (and that chainsaw exhaust)! More info from el equipo Saabpearl Svenska here.

Just for grins - I think that every so often I’ll post a picture of a random couple feet worth o’ bookshelf (mine, that is). Anyone who wants to reciprocate and post on their blog (if you don’t blog, email the pix to me and I’ll post for you) - way cool. Hopefully, this isn’t too much information…

A few things I’ve run across that I wanted to post…

• One of my very favorite web cartoonists (graphic web-page-ist?) visits the Google campus. Personally, I would have risked failure and filled my pockets at the hundred dollar bar. Also, Echo and Siouxsie Sioux? Awesome!
• A brief trip down memory lane courtesy of Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber. The linked post on ‘embodied energy’ (and the subsequent link at the Yorkshire Ranter) are interesting in and of themselves, but it’s the reference to Piero Sraffa and theories of value that takes me back. In the mists of prehistory, when I was finishing my BA in Economics and doing an ill-fated year of graduate work on same, the big battle royale among the theory types on campus was Neo-Ricardians versus Marxists (forget the neoclassicists - boooring >grin<). Ah, good times...
• Inexpensive book scanner. The Plustek Optibook is optimized for scanning bound material - the glass runs right up to the edge, cutting down on shadows and the amount of squashing (grits teeth just thinking about it) one must do to get a good image. Maybe with one of these I could scan some of the books I really ought to cull, making me a little more likely to do so. Haaa, ha, ha, gasp, snort - who am I fooling… h/t BoingBoing
• Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Lot’s ‘o Lovecraftian fun on the interwebs over the past few days - if Darren Naish is going to venture into the biology of Howie’s critters, I can help out with research on the Old Ones - Arkham isn’t too far away and I assume the Miskatonic University archives still have material from the ill fated Pabodie expedition. Semi-seriously, though - I re-read At the Mountains of Madness and The Call of Cthulhu recently - spurred on by Charlie Stross’ A Colder War (you can read it on line by following the link) - and I think that Rucker’s Hollow Earth needs to get queued up on my nightstand. Incidentally - the edition of Mountains of Madness I linked to above is a two-fer - it’s got a great introduction written by China Mieville.

That ought to do it for now…

Or: Robosex on the Leks

Some very cool research on Sage Grouse is being done by Gail Patricelli and Alan Krakauer out of UC Davis. From Dr. Patricelli’s site:

Using a 24-microphhone recording array as an ADM system, Alan and I plan to examine whether males adjust their acoustic radiation patterns to direct the energy of their displays toward females, and whether variation in directionality affects male courtship success. Since females often move during courtship, we will examine the degree to which males adjust their positions and/or acoustic radiation patterns to track females, and whether the ability to do so affects male courtship success. To examine this experimentally, Alan and I collaborated with Tom Fowler of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to build a robotic female sage-grouse that will allow us to measure each male’s ability to track moving females and respond to female behaviors by adjusting their displays. The robot is equipped with a microphone and video camera, allowing us to quantify the male’s display from the perspective of the receiving female. Using the ADM system to measure the signal that the male radiates in all directions, and the robot to measure the signal received by the target female, we will have a unique ability to quantify how directionality shapes male display behaviors and female choice in sage-grouse.

Be sure to click through and check out the fembot spycam footage (or just click here, you lazy dubba >smile<).

From the sublime (Andy Goldsworthy) to the ridiculous (Kaiju Big Battel) in honor of Darren Naish’s foray into the science of Godzilla.

Nice to see my merely three-dimensional earth relative get some YouTube time, and jeez, that Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle has got some moves!

Later - just in case anyone misinterprets - Kaiju Big Battel = ridiculous (in a good way); Darren’s post = great stuff.
h/t Steve for the Naish link

I don’t know art, but I know what I like: Lascaux, Guernica, Todd Schorr, Scythian animal style, Persian miniaturists, and Andy Goldsworthy…

…not a complete list, of course. h/t warren ellis