Keeping Squirrels out of Owl Nest Boxes

I've been lucky this year and had no problems with squirrels in my screech owl nest box. Significantly, I think I know why.

Upper-left: Screech owl nest box in gray.Middle: Fox squirrel nest box in green.

Though I've seen fox squirrels taking an interest in my squirrel nest box at various times, for lack of built-in video cameras or other instrumentation, I remained unclear as to what, if

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The Best Screech Owl Photo I Never Showed You

Readers with long memories may recall my mentioning that I'd setup an experiment during the last week of my 2012 screech owl nesting. The experiment was a home-brew motion sensitive trigger for my digital SLR camera, with trigger and SLR mounted such that they could catch the adults as they flew back and forth from the nest box. (You can see the sensor in the photos; it's the white plastic thing

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Mme. Owl Spends the Day in the Next Box

Mme. Owl, in a move that I hope has nothing to do with impending eggs (it’d be about 10 weeks too early for eggs around here), spent the entire day of January 2nd, 2013, in the nest box, starting at 6:28 AM CST and ending at 6:01 PM CST. The movie below shows all of the portions that triggered automatic recording. (In future, I will allow movement in more of the nest box to trigger recording.)

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May 3, 2012: A Most Unusual Food Delivery

What makes this food delivery unusual? First it happened during the day. Second, it was a whole mouse (wondered where my bold bird feeder mice went to). Third, Mme. Owl was spending daytime outside the nest due to the heat, but showed-up, called to her mate, and eventually he arrived with this mouse, still in daylight, a time when screech owls especially do not want to be seen. So this is one of

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December 29/30 Mme. Owl Visits Again

Mme. Owl visits the nest box once again, complete with egg depression work. Not sure what more to say, except that, if all of these visits start to look the same, the frequency of them is well worth observing and recording. Also, at some point, we should witness the male owl call to his mate from the nest site, as part of, what I believe to be, the start of the mating ritual (“See: I found you a

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December 28/29 Nest Site Preparation

Mme. Owl stopped by the nest box at 6:04 AM CST to do a little nest site prep. That consists, as usual, of kicking around the bedding material to make a depression for the eggs she’ll eventually lay. Another means to the same end, not seen here, is for the female to push the bedding material around using her breast like the blade of a bulldozer. That behavior, however, may be reserved for looser

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December 27/28 Mouse Withdrawal

Whichever of the owls (I suspect Mme. Owl) deposited the mouse in the nest box last night (December 26/27) was back tonight to make the withdrawal. Think of it as getting dinner from the leftovers in the fridge.


December 28, 2012, 3:14 AM CST29.6 MB MPEG-4 movie.

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December 26/27 Owl Visits

There were two screech owl visits to the nest box last night, December 26/27, 2012.

In the first visit, at 1:54 AM CST, Mme. Owl gives herself away by briefly kicking around the bedding material, which is a classic female screech owl behavior: making a depression for her eggs (even though there shouldn’t be any until March).



December 27, 2012, 1:54 AM CST29.6 MB MPEG-4 movie.


The

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2012 Owlet Family Portrait

I gather some loyal followers have been waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for the official 2012 Owlet Family Portrait. Well, happy Christmas, and merry holidays; wait no more.




From left to right, that’s owlet 4, 2, 1 and 3 (ages in days: 25.16, 28.15 ±16 min, 28.2 ±54 min, and 27.19). Owlet no. 1 tested its wings on a number of occasions by flying away from the photo shoot, forcing me to

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Owls from the Archives: Being Pushed Around

Yesterday’s video showed the owlets, almost ready to leave the nest, competing for food deliveries. This video shows them a month earlier. A lot can change in a month.


April 23, 2012, 3:07 AM CDT16.7 MB MPEG-4 video.

Mme. Owl is seen here engaging in one of her routine brooding duties: shuffling and rolling eggs. The former you can see, at least for two eggs. The latter is being done

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Owls from the Archives: How to Get Fed

Here's something from the video archives that accumulated during this year’s nesting season: owlet food begging, and two food deliveries. As one of the owlets has learned, and demonstrates with the second food delivery, the best way to make sure that you’re the one who gets fed is to be the owlet nearest the entryway.


May 23, 2012, 9:21 PM CDT17.5 MB MPEG-4 video.

If you’re remembering

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December 20/21 Owl Visit

The owls (or at least one of them) continue to monitor the nest box. Since live owlets emerged from this nest site this year, it will be their first choice for a nest site this coming year. Therefore, they probably give it far more attention than any other cavity in their territory. It’s been a long time since I was able to gather data on the frequency of owl visits to their would-be nest site

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Owls Return After Nest Box Maintenance

Last Sunday, December 16, I brought the screech owl nest box down, removed the long-since unnecessary owlet rail in order to discourage squirrels, and gave the camera windows and compartment interiors a thorough cleaning, so the cameras could acquire clear pictures again. Also, as part of my eternal, and perpetually failing, quest to eliminate hum in the audio signal, I added some ferromagnetic

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“Apple, Customer Service; Customer Service…”

Apple’s MobileMe services, including the various web hosting services associated with homepage.[mac|me].com were shutdown at the start of this month. Apple, a company that has built data centers the size of small towns to support its iCloud Internet services, appears not to have been able to find any resources to keep its existing Internet services going (even after spending years integrating

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Owl Cam’ Acquires Real-Time Animations

Stealing Inspired by an idea from my old friend Chris Cooley, author of the Owl Nest Box app, I’ve created pages (for now, and 12 hours ago) that animate the last four minutes of activity in the nest. There’s nothing like animation to make even tiny motions clearly visible, so these new pages reveal that those times when nothing seems to be happening are, far more often than not, merely a

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Owl Cam’ Acquires -12 Hours Views

My eastern screech owl nest box cam‘ has acquired a new set of viewing options: The “twelve hours ago“ views. I see these as a major enhancement for everyone whose sleep schedule overlaps night here in Austin, and thus the owls’ period of maximum activity.


In the past, for instance, schools in the UK have been able to use this cam’ as an educational tool, but not (for the most part) schools in

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Weren’t All Those Quarters Enough?

Official sign on a gas station air compressor: “Feed Me Starving Children”

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The Screech Owl Cam is Live Again (at Last!)

The paint is still wet on the new OwlCam software, but an hour ago it finally gave every indication of working, so I put it into production and, voilà!, images from the nest box are showing-up on the web site every 60 seconds once again.

The new software or hardware could malfunction at any time, but I’ve been studying the software’s internal behavior and everything looks solid so far. Fingers

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Owl Status Report

A few people have asked for a status report. The owls and eggs are fine.

There. I hope you’re happy.

Expanding on that a little, we’re in the long, dull ~30 day incubation period. All four eggs look good (there’s been no opportunity to weigh or measure the last two, regretably). Mme. Owl is comfortable and, due to mild temperatures, can leave the box with some regularity, albeit not for long

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Egg no. 4 Happens

Egg no. 4 happened sometime today. Four eggs is the normal size for a screech owl clutch (well, a mean of something like 3.75 is, if memory serves, what Gehlbach came-up with), so this is probably the last of the eggs. Now, Mme. Owl settles into relentless incubation for the next 30 days, and then continues that task for some weeks afterward as she broods the owlets.

It must be mighty boring for

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Three Eggs and Half an Owl

Not a lot to report, because we’re still at three eggs, and Mme. Owl is still in brooding mode, as she will be until the owlets are about three weeks old (although nest box temperatures will affect whether she’s actually brooding at any given time - if it's hot enough in there brooding becomes redundant).

Are more eggs still a possibility? Yup, but for a limited time only.




Meanwhile (for the

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Egg no. 3 Arrives

Egg no. 3 was laid this morning sometime between 12:27 AM and 2:17 AM CDT, at which point Mme. Owl went into brooding mode. Meanwhile, her mate is doing a good job of supplying food, most of which appears to be caterpillars (a possible benefit of the natural tall grass, etc. that I've allowed to develop in my yard, especially around the nest box tree).

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Egg 1 and 2 Metrics

Mme. Owl made the mistake of spending the night out hunting, so I was able to do some basic science on her eggs while her back was turned.

I can't tell the eggs apart, so I can't say which is the first or second one laid. I can say the following: one of the eggs weighs 20.0 ±0.2 grams and measures roughly 36.44 x 31.75 mm, and the other egg weighs 20.6 ±0.2 grams and measures roughly 36.35 x

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Egg no. 2 Debuts

Visible for the first time at 8:13 PM CDT, egg no. 2 was laid sometime this afternoon (after 1:55 PM). Well done, Mme. Owl, and keep up the good work.




One of my screech owls once laid a clutch of six—as big as clutches come—and I’m still hoping to see that happen again, as rare and challenging for the parents (and owlets) as it is. That said, any clutch that produces healthy owlets is fine

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Egg no. 1 for 2012

I took down the nest box last night, March 25, not long after Mme. Owl exited for the evening. (Incubation of the eggs generally waits until the second or even third egg is laid, so Mme. Owl still has her nights free, provided they don’t become dangerously cold.) Debris deposited in the nest box by starlings was blocking the side vent (visible in the lower right hand corner of the far wall, a

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First Egg of 2012

Mme. Owl provides a glimpse of this year's first egg, not more than two hours after it was laid, I'd guess.

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Both Owls Roosting

You don't see the following very often: The mated pair of screech owls roosting in the nest box together. In my experience it happens only one day early in the nesting process, but it always happens. Pair bonding shortly before the stress of the first egg's arrival? Just trying it out for size? I don't know.
I had hoped to to encourage this behavior on the part of the male by adding the internal

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Would the Owner of a Small...

...striped, gray and white, large-eyed bird please come and claim it. It's filling my owl nest box.




Looks like nesting has begun, as Mme. Owl spends her first day in the nest box. The first egg is probably still a day or two away. I must now work to make the owl cam' operational at an even more frantic pace. Please bear with any delays.

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Busy Nest Box

They come and go by day...




...and they come and go by night.

The owls will win control of the nest box, but not before the starlings have made complete and utter pests of themselves, as long time viewers can attest. Also, the starlings continuously dump new bedding material into the box. I cleaned out the box this weekend to ensure that it wouldn't pile-up so high that it would block the

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FireWire 400 Devices Incompatible with FireWire 800 Macs?

If anyone knows of a solution to this, it'd sure come in handy.... I'm dealing with several converters that turn analog audio/video signals into standard DV video. All of them use the FireWire 400 interface, as is traditional for DV devices. My problem is that my Mac, a Mac Pro (4,1), has FireWire 800 ports. I've bought two different FireWire 400-to-800 adapters, both of which make the DV encoder

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Owls Preparing to Nest

A depression in my nest box's bedding material has suggested for several days that a female screech owl is planning on nesting there. Last night, I finally saw one of her visits, when (sure enough) her primary concern was moving the bedding material around to create a depression for the eggs that are on their way. This is normal pre-nesting behavior for a female screech owl, so it's a very good

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David Bamberger on 60 Minutes Tonight

My friend David Bamberger—who has been working since 1969 to restore the worst piece of land in Blanco County, Texas (and maybe the rest of the Texas Hill Country) in order to prove that what's good for the environment is good for the rancher, and vice versa—will appear on “60 Minutes” tonight as part a of piece on “hunting ranches in the U.S. that offer exotic big game species.”

David’s ranch

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Watch the Solstice Approach (and Recede)

As an equinox or a solstice (in this case) approaches, my year clock starts indicating the time of the event with increasing precision, using indicator arrows like the one shown below (each equinox and solstice has a unique arrow; this one is for the winter solstice).


While such arrows are visible year-round in the clock’s year ring, as the month of the event is entered an arrow appears at the

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Check Your Drug Interactions, Avoid Rude Surprises

I recently found myself in a situation in which an over-the-counter pain medication prescribed by one of my doctors began to poison me, and, given enough time, probably would have done permanent damage to some major organs I've come to depend on over the years. I didn't realize what was happening at the time, I just lost feeling in a section of one hand, as the pains that were supposed to be

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Wolfram|Alpha: How it Came to Be, What it Does, How it’s Done, How it Grows

I’ve been sending this link to people for a year or more. I think I’m overdue to make it available to everyone:Making the World’s Data ComputablePersonally, I found it fascinating and illuminating after being left clueless about what Alpha was by the industry press.Need some specific examples to understand how to use Alpha? See their examples page.And if you try Alpha and it doesn’t meet your

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Maintaining In-House Technical Skills

From Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions by Robert C. Seamans, Jr., pg. 84:When conducting advanced technical efforts, it’s imperative to maintain in-house technical skills of a high order. But high-grade technical personnel cannot be stockpiled. They must be given real rabbits to chase or they will lose their cutting edge and eventually seek other employment.

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The “Glass Teletype”

From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 131:Early computers used printers as their sole output. When programmers at various large traditional computer companies were first given monitors, they immediately duplicated the printer interface on their green, glowing screens, giving rise to the term “glass Teletype.” With this lavish investment of more than 20 minutes of design time behind

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The Intuitive Person vs. Western Education

From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 103:Western education is heavily biased toward intellect over intuition: Intuition is endowed with a perverse habit of delivering results most slowly when the need for speed is greatest. [....] Telling a bunch of kids to “think about it for a couple of hours, a day, a week—whatever it takes—then get back to me” just doesn't fit into our

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Goldilocks

From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 91:For those not well-versed in English folk story tradition, “The Three Bears” is the story of a young juvenile delinquent who breaks into a neighbor’s house, vandalizes it, and manages to kill herself while trying to escape. Good parents read it to their children, instead of letting them watch all that violence on television.

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The Cost of Imperial America

From War Is A Lie by David Swanson, pp. 284-285:

We are [...] proud, however, of shoveling huge piles of cash through the government and into the military industrial complex. And that is the most glaring difference between us and Europe. But this reflects more of a difference between our governments than between our peoples. Americans, in polls and surveys, would prefer to move much of our money

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The Syntax of Photography

From The Keepers of Light by William Crawford, pp. 6-7.[....] Are there "syntactical" rules of structure for the way we turn objects into photographs, rules that compel the infinite possibilities to fall along a finite line, just as there are rules for the way we turn concepts into statements? How you answer this question tends to determine how you approach the study of the history of

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Consultants

What’s great about hiring consultants is supposed to be that your organization has no committment to them. What isn’t much mentioned is that, by the same token, consultants have no committment to your organization.

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The Measurement of Misfortunes Revisited

A few days after posting Mark Twain and the Measurement of Misfortunes, I realized something obvious that I’d overlooked for years: The bad habit of seeking an external yardstick by which to measure, compare and disregard human pain and suffering—well examined by Twain in that quoted material—is the basis for a reductio ad absurdum.

The reduction is straightforward: If the pain or suffering of

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Mark Twain and the Measurement of Misfortunes

Ever since reading Mark Twain’s autobiography years ago, I have, with some regularity, found myself presented with situations that brought the following passage to mind. Another such situation arose recently, and caused me to search out the passage, as my memory had stored the lesson well enough, but had come up lacking in the matter of retaining the story sufficiently to pass it along properly

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All Branchers (and Owlets) Safe and Sound

All three branchers were sighted at the same time in the same tree (the tree in which I deposited owlet/brancher no. 5 after it left the nest on the 8th). The brancher that appeared largest had its own perch, while the other two (presumably owlets 1 and 2, who left the nest together on the 10th) were perched together on another limb. Those two had to cross perhaps 75 feet of "open" space (the

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Owlet Family Portrait and No. 5 Grows Up

I brought down the nest box late this afternoon to install the owlet rail. Fortunately, as I was in the process of assessing what pieces of its mount I'd have to replace, I discovered that (once again) I'd made a spare. So, the only part I actually had to replace was the branch that forms the rail. The old one would probably have been fine, but I tripped over it while owlet herding, and the rest,

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Owlets Four and Five on the 21st

Since acquiring owlet no. 4 for medical treatment, Sallie, my raptor rehabber friend, has acquired two more young screech owls, which she refers to as “screechlets” to distinguish them from the three great horned owlets, and four barn owlets she was also caring for on the night of the 21st when these photos were taken. One of the screechlets, now designated owlet no. 5, is young enough to fit in

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The Owlets on the 17th

As people following my notes on the screech owl cam’ page will be aware, on the 17th I brought down the nest box mid-afternoon in order to remove a worrisome build-up of what appeared to be fire ants (the small, vicious, invasive species we have here in central Texas; not the big, relatively relaxed natives that live further north in Texas). Needless to say, I took the opportunity to photograph

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Today’s Chickens; Yesteryear’s Goats

Observed on my street today: A pair of chickens browsing someone’s front lawn. Not the sort of thing I see everyday. Or ever.

However, there was a Christmas day around ten years ago when I looked out of my front window and saw someone leading a herd of goats down the street. I’ve checked on subsequent Christmas days and not seen a single goat, which has been disappointing. I wouldn’t like to

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Fourth Egg Laid

The fourth egg has been laid, but, due to the exceptionally poor reliability of the video capture system lately, I wasn’t able to get a picture of it. With luck, the video capture system will stay up for a while, and Mme. Owl will reveal the eggs again soon.

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A Better Look at All Three Eggs

With Mme. Owl out for a bit of hunting, a good look at all three eggs was available this morning. Next step: Reviewing the image archives to try to determine more specifically when they were laid.

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Egg no. 3 Arrives Early?

Noticed just now: Egg no. 3 has arrived. Unless my memory is going, the interval between the laying of each egg in a clutch is supposed to increase over time, but I don’t think that has happened in this case. I’ll have to review frames from the nest box this weekend to try to narrow-down the time at which each egg appeared, but I think the delay between eggs no. 2 and 3 was either the same, or a

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Egg no. 2 Appears

Egg no. 2 was laid sometime this afternoon, probably between 1 and 5:50 PM. Right now, I can’t narrow down the time better than that.

The time between eggs will increase with each egg, so some patience will be required before we know the size of this clutch. As always, stay tuned.

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Egg no. 1 Debuts

Well, I’m going to have to start updating the nest box cam’ site properly, now; Mme. Owl has laid her first egg. And the viewers get the credit for this find. I thought that I was watching the owl cam’ as I worked frantically into the wee hours on a major project at work, but I failed to notice in between all of the work that my web browser had stopped updating the page hours before. There was

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Mme. Owl Spending Her 2nd Day in Nest Box

Mme. Owl spent all of yesterday in the nest box, which suggests that the appearance of the first egg is very near. She’s now begun spending her second consecutive day in the nest box, which suggests that that bit in the first sentence about “the first egg is very near” is correct. You can see for yourselves on the owl cam’, assuming it isn’t de-railed by one of the technical issues I’m trying to

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Mme. Owl May be Spending Her First Day in the Nest

Mme. Owl may be spending her first day in the nest box this year. If so, things are moving along a bit faster than I expected. The first egg, if memory serves, may appear within two days.

Mme. Owl in the nest box this morning, amid debris deposited there by a pair of starlings. So far this year, she hasn’t remained in the nest box for more than about 10 minutes at a time (although the number and

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Owl, meet Owl Box; Owl Box, meet Owl

I haven’t brought-up my eastern screech owl nest box cam’ for the year, because nesting isn’t underway, but I’ve been running the image capture software anyway, trying to confirm my suspicion that my local owls are actually preparing to nest in my box. And, as you can see, I now have confirmation.
That’s the female owl shoving around the bedding material to create a depression to hold her eggs at

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The Screech Owl Nest Box: A Depression Sets In

My ability to sleep and my sleep patterns are in ruins, my local medical community notwithstanding. As an example, I just got back from 16 hours at the office. Why a sleep-deprived person can even do that, I don’t know. But for some reason I did, and there went my opportunity to keep an eye on owl TV last night in hopes of seeing a visitor.
Sigh.
Nonetheless, I tuned in as soon as I got home. The

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Bee Removal Phase 3: The Box is Back

It took about eleven contiguous hours of work, but my screech owl nest box is back in business, and not as a bee hive.

The nest box had to be disassembled to properly clean all of the bee grunge out of it. That meant breaking it down into its major components: (1) the frame, which includes the back wall visible in the photos, (2) the fold-down front with integrated infrared entryway sensor

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Bee Removal Phase 2: The Smell of Honey and Death

Yesterday (Saturday), it was misting heavily when I would like to have begun the nest box cleanup, and, under those circumstances, just handling the plastic covered steel cable that runs through a block and tackle to raise and lower the box would have been a challenge. Also, I’d’ve either had to stifle in a rain suit, or be soaked during the time it would take to get the box down and begin the

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Bees Dead. Next Step: Cleanup.

I've just pulled the No-Pest Strip from the entry hole of the screech owl nest box. It was full of dead bees, and there were no signs of live ones, so I think that a little more than two days of exposure to the fumes from the Strip has ensured that the hive is dead. There's no time to begin cleaning-out the box now. That’ll have to start (and, I hope, finish) this weekend. Perhaps, in the

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Bee Removal Commences

Well, I couldn’t have put it off any longer without absolutely guaranteeing failure, but I’ve finally begun the process of removing the bees from my screech owl nest box. It’s a very simple, but ugly process: stuff a Hot Shot No-Pest Strip in the entry hole and get away fast. Of course, you have to find a safe way to do that. If you do it in freezing weather, the bees are incapacitated by the

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White-Tailed Deer Amid Zexmenia

White-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus, amid blooming Zexmenia,Wedelia hispida. Bamberger Ranch Preserve, June 9, 2007.Photo ©2007-2011 by Chris W. Johnson.

I keep telling David Bamberger that he should share random photos of interest from around the ranch with his blog readers, even if he has nothing to say about the photos, both because it gives the readers a chance to see something of the

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Now Playing on Radio Paradise, My Photos

Radio Paradise, an Internet radio station, that also happens to have been my favorite radio station since a friend (thanks Brendan) introduced me to it many years ago, is now offering a high definition video feed to accompany their music. They’re accepting photos from anyone, provided that the photos meet their admittedly subjective criteria.
I’d been meaning to submit some of my own photos for a

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Human Face Recognition, a Presentation by Dr. Shalini Gupta

The Austin Forum, on the evening of January 4, 2011, hosted an interesting presentation by Dr. Shalini Gupta entitled “Digital Human Face Recognition,” which I attended because I find digital face recognition a fascinating technical challenge, an increasingly important social issue, and because I have an interest in a lesser, related problem: automatic face isolation (without regard to identity)

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A Dog I Did Know

My family passed along very few stories to me, or, at least, very few that proved memorable. One of them was Grandpa Johnson’s bacon, to which I was not a witness, though I choose to believe it. There’s another story I choose to believe, one to which I must have been a witness, though, to my sorrow, I’ll never, ever remember it. And I kind of hate to share it (it’s my story, and, in that special

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A Dog I Don’t Know

I was sure I’d included this story here at some point in the past, but I went looking for it yesterday and couldn’t find it. Therefore, I now pass along the following story from Mark Twain’s autobiography, as edited by Charles Neider, pg. 256:
Doctor John [Brown] was very fond of animals, and particularly of dogs. No one needs to be told this who has read that pathetic and beautiful masterpiece,

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How Should the Troops Die?

Alan Grayson, Democratic congressman from Florida’s 8th district, who urged his colleagues to vote against war funding in order to shut down those wars and bring the troops home, was accused by one of his opponents, Kurt Kelly, of putting “our soldiers, and our men and women in the military in harm’s way, and maybe he wants them to die.” Naturally, the accusation was made on Fox News. Here’s the

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Geminid Meteor Shower 2010 Time-Lapse Movie

I’ve taken my 686 photos of the 2010 Geminid meteor shower on December 13/14 and transformed them into the following high-definition (1080p), time-lapse movie, which I hope you will enjoy. It spans 6¼ hours of time in two minutes, contains approximately 34 meteors, several airplanes, and a couple of satellites. Also, you get to watch the sky as it appears to rotate around the polestar, Polaris.

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Flame Leaf Sumac

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Geminids with a Side of Turkey

I spent the night of December 13/14 in my favorite meteor watching field on the Bamberger Ranch Preserve (thanks to David and Lois, respectively, for making that possible). I was counting, and, most of all, trying to photograph, Geminid meteors. Watching commenced in earnest only after I’d finished setting-up my camera and started it clicking away at 11:56 PM. It was freezing up there, and when

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’Twas the Night Before Christmas — In the Computation Center

I forgot to post this last year, which was when I discovered it during my effort to locate and preserve the rapidly disappearing history of The University of Texas at Austin Computation Center, but this year I shall not forget. So, without further ado, for the computational old-timers amongst us, I offer “Twas the Night Before Christmas — In the Computation Center” by Kathy Atkins, from the

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Good article on Bat “White Nose Syndrome”

The decimation of the bison herds and the extinction of the passenger pigeon were epic environmental events. The ongoing decimation of bat populations by White Nose Syndrome (WNS) may be much more serious. Wired magazine has a good article on the subject.

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Jay Lake Provides One Moment of Shining Clarity

A moment of shining clarity, thanks to Jay Lake.

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RWA Scale Test Fixed

My thanks to R.C.H. who has pointed-out to me two bugs in my implementation of Bob Altemeyer’s RWA Scale. As always, I find bugs in my code embarrassing, and I’m grateful to R.C.H. for not only finding the bugs, but reporting them. Consequently, the code has now been fixed. So, for those who’ve answered “strongly disagree” (-3) to questions 7 or 8 in the past, if you retake the test, your answers

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New Nukes

From Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary by Stewart Brand, pp. 81-82:

As to footprint, Gwymeth Cravens points out that “A nuclear plant producing 1,000 megawatts takes up a third of a square mile. A wind farm would have to cover over 200 square miles to obtain the same result, and a solar array over 50

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Climate Change

From Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary by Stewart Brand, pg. 9:
Climate is so full of surprises, it might even surprise us with a hidden stability. Counting on that, though, would be like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded but one.

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Bamberger Ranch 2007 vs. 2010 – Compare and Contrast

David Bamberger recently posted an item on the Bamberger Ranch Journal showing photos of the water flows created by the rains brought by tropical storm Hermine on September 7th and 8th. I have at least two images in my files of areas pictured in David’s blog entry during the ranch’s last “wet year,” 2007. Bamberger Ranch Journal followers might find the contrast adds some perspective to David’s

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U.T. Austin Main Building and Tower, Predawn

Most photos of the U.T. Austin Tower neglect the Main Building, which is its base. While shooting some test panoramas the other night, I thought I’d take a different approach and emphasize the Main Building. To get all of the Main Building and Tower into the photo, I shot this as two rows of three photos. Every photo was shot at three different exposures, 3 stops apart, so that a high dynamic

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The First Mercury Launch

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 376:


The very first shot in the Mercury program was named Little Joe-1, ready for firing August 21, 1959, on Wallops Island. Half an hour before the planned take-off time there was suddenly the noise of a rocket roaring and smoke enveloped the launch pad. When the smoke cleared, literally speaking, Little Joe was still

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What Was Not to Be: The Apollo 18, 19 and 20 Landing Sites

From Footprints in the Dust, chapter 11, by Colin Burgess, pg. 336:

Apollo 18’s Lunar module was scheduled to land in Schroter’s Valley, the site of intriguing transient lunar phenomena and possibly even volcanic activity. The two-man landing crew of Apollo 19 would then have explored the collapsed lava tubes of Hyginus Rille. The most hazardous but ultimately benficial mission of all would have

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How (Not) to Launch the First Satellite

“If Project Orbiter had gone ahead as planned, the United States would have placed a satellite in orbit during the summer of 1956.”
From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pp. 304-323:


In the spring of 1954 the Space-Flight Committee of the American Rocket Society had worked out a satellite proposal which had been submitted through various channels. The time was

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Man in Space? “Utter Bilge!”

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 361:


In 1959 the newly appointed Astronomer Royal of England, Australian-born Richard van de Riet Wooley, told the British press that space travel was “utter bilge.” Ever since, the British Interplanetary Society has had a fine time giving him reports such as “An American named Carpenter has penetrated utter bilge for the

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Knocking the Atlas Missile – With Hammers

The Atlas missile was a highly capable launch vehicle due to its very low structural mass. The place where the greatest mass saving was realized was in the fuel tanks which were, in effect, giant, load-bearing, stainless steel balloons whose strength came not from their dime-thin walls, but from their internal pressure. Without that pressure, the Atlas would have collapsed under its own weight,

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Astronaut Benefits

From Walter Cunningham’s forward to In the Shadow of the Moon, page xii:


[....] When I went to work as an astronaut, in 1963, I earned a little over $13,000 a year. I once calculated that, during my Apollo 7 mission, I had earned the great sum of $660. But we weren’t doing it for the money—nobody does a job like that for the money. Any one of us would have paid NASA to have the job!
[....]

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Video: Bats’ Morning Return to the Bamberger Chiroptorium

I had the opportunity last week to watch the bats return to the Bamberger Ranch Preserve’s chiroptorium. The morning return isn’t as dramatic as the evening emergence, but it’s still something to see. Realizing that, for the first time, I had a device that could capture high definition (720p) video, I propped up my iPhone 4 on the fence at the mouth of the chiroptorium and let it record for about

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Java Text – A Closer Look at the Ugly

Because the failings of the native Java text renderer have had such an adverse impact on my recent work, I think additional examination of the issue is merited. So, to further illustrate the difference between text rendered by Java 6 on Mac OS X and Linux, I’ve taken two paragraphs of text and written a program that fits them on-the-fly into an image of a specified size. Text fitting is vital to

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Java Text - When Platform Independence Fails

I‘ve recently been working on a Java web application that does server-side rendering of complex graphics that include text. Having sweated all the details to maximize the quality of the application’s output; having finally made the application sufficiently stable and feature-complete to enter beta testing; and having jumped through some unrelated hoops to make the production host usable, I

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Stephen Wolfram discusses “Computation and the Future of the Human Condition”

As found on the Wolfram Blog, Stephen Wolfram provides a transcript of his talk “Computation and the Future of the Human Condition” delivered at the H+ Summit @ Harvard on June 12, 2010. I found it interesting. Unfortunately for me, just as when I read his book A New Kind of Science (NKS), I think I can grasp the general ideas, but I can’t make the intellectual leap necessary to understand how to

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“Rotating Spiral” becomes a Google “Chrome Experiment”

My combination of Javascript and SVG that produces a rotating spiral graphic (“you are getting sleepy... very sleepy”) has been accepted by Google as an official “Chrome Experiment.” You can find the Chrome Experiments main page at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/, and my spiral experiment at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/rotating-spiral/.

I’ve also submitted several other of my

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Gus Grissom Gets His Way

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 390:

Except for GT-III the Gemini spacecraft were not given names as the Mercury capsules had been. GT-III did have a name; it was called the Molly Brown. The name was chosen by the command pilot of the flight, Virgil Ivan Grissom. Grissom (generally known as “Gus”) had had to swim to safety when his Mercury capsule Liberty

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Government Secrecy, Andrew Jackson Style

Here’s a dose of perspective on government secrecy for this July 4th. I don’t mean to suggest that today our government can be as open as it was in Andrew Jackson’s (or Lincoln’s) time, but the following provides some perspective on how much the openness of our American government has decreased over the course of the past 150 years. To be sure, we’ve added some improvements, like the Freedom of

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Happy Longest Day of the Year

I’m about eleven hours late (allergies, or something like them, knocked me for six), but “happy longest day of the year” to everyone. According to my calculations, the June solstice occurred today at 6:28:16 AM CDT.

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Dear Apple: Typography Still Matters

As others have pointed-out (thanks to Jay Lake for that link), Apple’s ebooks have abandoned good typographic practices, and instead embraced problematic practices like full justification for all text. Apple has now carried these failings over to the generally wonderful “Reader” mode of version 5 of their Safari browser. I’ll confine myself to the issue of full-justification here, and leave the

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Guncotton and the Utility of Failure

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willey Ley, 1968 edition, pp. 80-81:

Guncotton [...] had been discovered [in 1845] by German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein, who had tried to dissolve cotton in a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids. Of course, the cotton had refused to dissolve and Schönbein, writing off the experiment as a failure, had gone home for supper, after putting the

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The Reagan Administration Meets the AIDS Pandemic…

…and allies itself with the virus, rather than politically unpalatable science. From Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC, by J.B. McCormick, M.D., S.F. Fisher-Hoch, M.D., with Leslie Ann Horvitz, pp. 174-177; McCormick is writing:



Two very important discoveries began to emerge from our investigation. For one thing, we were recording far more cases of AIDS in women than we were used to seeing in

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Bees Move into the Nest Box

Like last year, bees have moved into the screech owl nest box. One more problem to deal with. Or maybe not – for some reason they abandoned the box at some point last year. (During the worst of the drought? Probably, but I can’t remember.) Then, one or more fox squirrels cleaned out the nest box, initially, I presume, as a means to harvest the honey. A rare treat for a squirrel, I’d guess. They

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Screech Owl Nesting Complete

Owlet no. 3 (the last of the two owlets that successfully hatched from the four eggs that were laid), left the nest box around 9 PM last night, and successfully climbed its way to safety in the high, outer branches of the nest box tree. The picture above shows owlet no. 3 beginning that climb.

So, that’s pretty much that for the 2010 nesting season. There may be a few more updates if I catch

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The 2010 Models – Eastern Screech Owls

I brought the owls’ nest box down early this morning and attached the owlet rail outside the entry/exit hole (see the final photo). This was done in anticipation of the eldest owlet leaving the nest soon, and in the expectation that having a perch outside the hole must make that critical leap from nest to tree easier.
This also gave me an opportunity to open the nest box and take some family

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Photos of the Adult Owls

Here’re the promised photos of the adults. Don’t ask me which is the male and which is the female – unless I was lucky enough to observe sexually distinctive behavior (like tearing up prey and feeding it to the owlets, which only the female will do), there’s no way for me to know.


Alternately, if both owls suddenly took leave of their senses and let me get hold of them, I might be able to

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