Dear NASA and ESA: Thanks for Cassini-Huygens

Seeing Saturn as a child through a reasonably good amateur telescope was one of many formative experiences in my life. When the planetary 'seeing' was good (a still atmosphere is more important than how dark or clear the skies are when looking at anything in the solar system) and Saturn was well above the horizon, a 6 inch f8 Newtonian reflector showed the three main rings, some detail in the atmosphere, and as many as half a dozen moons. Though, really, the moons were just Titan and assorted specks.

Then, for the last 20 years, we've had Cassini-Huygens. Here's a composite image of Saturn eclipsing the Sun. It's one of my favorites, and definitely worth a click.

All day today NASA TV will be rerunning Casssini programming. At 7 a.m., Friday, September 15 (that is Eastern daylight, UTC -0400) they start End of Mission Commentary, etc. There will be new content appearing for a while, then they'll start rerunning it. The schedule is at https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/schedule.html.

It's amazing how much we're learned about the Saturn system my childhood days. There's a good summary of what NASA judges to be the Top 10 at https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2892/cassini-10-years-at-saturn-top-10-discoveries/. Be sure to look at some of the links below the subsections. For instance, under #7 'Vertical structures in the rings imaged for the first time', there's a link to https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2442/cassini-reveals-new-ring-quirks-shadows-during-saturn-equinox/. From that link,

The chunks of ice that make up the main rings spread out 140,000 kilometers (85,000 miles) from the center of Saturn, but they had been thought to be only around 10 meters (30 feet) thick in the main rings, known as A, B, C, and D. 

140E6 meters in diameter to 10 meters in thickness, or 14E7 to 1. That is a remarkable ratio. To look at 14 million to 1 on a more human scale, pack that ring diameter into the distance from Los Angeles to New York City, which is 3940 km or 2448 miles, as the crow flies. That gives us a reduction of 140,000 / 3940, a factor of about 35.5. Our thickness then becomes 10 / 35.5, or about .281 m, or 281 mm, or 11 inches. That seems pretty thin!

If it's the best data available, I would imagine a lot of people spent time arguing about the physics of how such a structure might have evolved and survived. But then came Cassini-Huygens, and an explosion of new knowledge about a dynamical system. From that same page,

In the new images, particles seemed to pile up in vertical formations in each of the rings. Rippling corrugations -- previously seen by Cassini to extend approximately 804 kilometers (500 miles) in the innermost D ring -- appear to undulate out to a total of 17,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) through the neighboring C ring to the B ring.

The heights of some of the newly discovered bumps are comparable to the elevations of the Rocky Mountains. One ridge of icy ring particles, whipped up by the gravitational pull of Saturn's moon Daphnis as it travels through the plane of the rings, looms as high as about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles). It is the tallest vertical wall seen within the rings. 

It seems likely to provide important clues to our understanding proto-planetary disks.  Exploring those links will be time well spent. Unfortunately for me, lunch is now over. But the yield from Cassini-Huygens is very far from over; these data are going to be the basis for important research results for decades. I look forward to it being an enormous time-sink over the coming years. More immediately, I'm going to catch some of that NASA TV coverage tomorrow, cup of coffee in hand. Because it will be 0400 here on the West coast, at the start of what's going to be a busy day.

An Opportunity Cost of Hyper-Partisanship

By 1978, this had become an obvious problem.  Thirty-nine years later, it's a lot worse.

I just heard about the Politico piece Why America Still Hasn’t Learned the Lessons of Katrina. How might that be good news? Because in one of the reddest states of the them all, where you can find entire communities that, according to CNN give little credence to anthropogenic climate change.

Congressman (Republican) Garret Graves, who served for six years as the head of Louisiana's coastal protection and restoration efforts in the wake of Katrina, and is now Chairman of the Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee that sets policy for the Army Corps and holds the power to investigate the agency.

What's more, Politico goes on to say that Louisiana’s approach is seen as a model for states facing looming coastal crises, and its experts regularly host visitors from around the world seeking to learn from its resiliency efforts. And that the most powerful industry in the state, the energy industry, is on Graves side.

It's timely, given that the former Hurricane Harvey is still pounding Houston, promising record or near-record damages, and it reminds everyone of the fear in with Hurricane Ike, in 2008:

While meteorologists have described Harvey’s dynamics as a “worst-case scenario,” with the potential to dump massive amounts of rain for days, it’s not the storm that Texas leaders fear the most. Emergency managers in the Lone Star State got a hint of what their worst-case scenario could look like in 2008, before Hurricane Ike shifted course. That storm still rang in as the third-costliest disaster in U.S. history, but had it shoved the predicted, massive storm surge through Galveston Bay and up the Houston ship channel, hitting the country’s fourth-largest city and the nation’s largest petrochemical and refining complex, it would have been far worse.

Many years ago, I lived in Louisiana. I'm no fan of the place (except for the food!), and I am a life-long believer in science. But neither am I fan of political wing-nuts, on either end of the spectrum. Oregon is fortunate in being one of the states least affected by changes in sea level -- or climate change in general. I live in a conservative county, but just a few miles from one of the most liberal areas of the state. I hear intolerance and wing-nuttery from both sides, and used to occasionally indulge in it myself, particularly when stoked by some particularly heart-felt bit of lunacy. It's possible that I still do it; nobody is always aware of how they come across to others. OK, that's wrong, and it's on me.

Until the general population learns to stop shouting past each other, find common ground, and just possibly rediscover civility, we will continue to pay opportunity costs in the billions of dollars, and in too many lives lost or irreparably damaged.

Can that actually happen? I have no idea, and most days, I doubt it.  But I also wonder how many more encouraging stories, such as this Politico piece, are out there, but never draw an audience.

So, what's with that barrier island image? It wasn't in the Politco Piece.

Why no. It wasn't. Politico supplied an image of disappearing wetlands, but in one of the rare weak bits of the piece, there nothing that plainly stated that it was a before-and-after image of the same place, much less mentioning the dates. And they do cover ballooning costs "to protect highly vulnerable bayou communities and a major oil and gas hub in Terrebonne Parish".

The image I supplied is about barrier islands, which are also part of the Army Corps of Engineers palette of solutions, part of the reason for that Terrebonne Parish problem, and it came from The United States Geological Survey, which I have long regarded as one of the most science-based organizations in all of government. Including the loss of barrier islands adds information, so it's a win. Especially since now I can point to more information by giving the source as Louisiana Coastal Wetlands: A Resource At Risk.

You Can Never Get Enough Corona Time

1m11.4s was the duration, of which I missed the first second or so looking for, and failing to spot,  shadow bands.

But wow, did I get a great binocular look at prominences. After it was over, I caught a broadcast from Nebraska  at https://www.nasa.gov/eclipselive/#NASA+TV+Public+Channel. I was fortunate enough to see far more than were seen there. That pure pink Hydrogen-alpha light is beautiful. Pure like laser light, but without that speckled quality. And I did see a great Diamond Ring at the end of totality.

The 1979 eclipse was better, overall. Longer, and I saw it from a location with long views, and fantastic shadow bands. This time, no bands, and without long views from a high point, I didn't see the moon's shadow racing across the ground. That provides the visual cue that allows you to realize that you are seeing the clockwork' of the solar system. Maybe west Texas in 2024?

OTOH, no racing around trying to find a blue hole to see it through: it was nice and clear. No worries about forest fire smoke, and all I had to do was walk outside and have a seat. If you are ever given a choice of locations, pick the one that overlooks surrounding terrain. It was just unfortunate that I didn't have that opportunity this time.

That said, this is is very far from anything like an expression of disappointment. It was awesome --  a word I don't use casually. I had forgotten about that rapid decrease in light during the last minute or so before totality. Very dramatic, and having forgotten about it, it was pretty much a New Thing for me.

People were parked all over the roadsides, a parking lot at a nearby boat launch was beyond normal capacity, and I could hear the cheering when the corona jumped out from my place, half a mile away. Obviously some very happy people.

What a wonderful morning.

Solar Eclipse Timing for Peoria, Oregon

Eclipse timing for Peoria, Oregon, but times and alt/az will be close for Corvallis, Albany, Shedd, etc. I was just outside planning how I was going to lay out a white surface to try to photograph any shadow bands that might appear. Thought this might be of interest, so I did a quick cut-n-paste from a text file.

Touches down on the Oregon coast between Lincoln City and Newport at 10:15 a.m. PDT.
Following data from:
https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2017Aug21Tgoogle.html
I added the PDT (-7) times.
Lat.: 44.4[redacted]° N
Long.: 123.2[redacted]9° W
Total Solar Eclipse
Duration of Totality: 1m11.4s
Magnitude: 1.003
Obscuration: 100.00%
Event                         Date        Time (UT) PDT       Alt Azi
Start of partial eclipse (C1)  2017/08/21 16:04:50.  09:04:50  6 27.6° 100.8°
Start of total eclipse (C2) :   2017/08/21 17:17:10.  10:17:10  3 39.9° 116.3°
Maximum eclipse :       2017/08/21 17:17:45.  10:17:45  9 40.0° 116.5°
End of total eclipse (C3) :     2017/08/21 17:18:21.  10:18:21  7 40.0° 116.6°
End of partial eclipse (C4) :  2017/08/21 18:37:29.  11:37:29  7 51.2° 139.5°

Crab Nebula with 5 telescopes

The composite is linked above above, from this starting point for all this here on hubblesite.org. There are links to the individual images from the five telescopes involved, covering five spectral regions. Highly recommended.

• Very Large Array (radio)
• Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared)
• Hubble Space Telescope (visual)
• XMM-Newton (ultraviolet)
• Chandra X-ray Observatory (X-ray)

It turns out that there were almost six telescopes involved. Pulling from the science paper (Drubner et. al.):

"We have also used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to produce the first detailed radio continuum image of the center of the nebula at 100 GHz, although the ALMA observations were not contemporaneous with the others ..."

The features near the center of the nebula were moving at ~ 20% light-speed, and over ~6 months of observations of a  supernova remnant that is 'only' 6500 light years away, had moved ~2 seconds of arc. Which led to a corrupted image.

Too bad, but of course there is a lot going on in the immediate vicinity of a pulsar.

Before leaving that page, I have to point out this short linked video https://media.stsci.edu/uploads/video_file/video_attachment/4408/STScI-H-v1721a-1280x720.mp4. It morphs the images through the spectrum, and it's annotated by spectral band. There's also a version without the annotations.

If you'd like to see changes in the Crab Nebula, similar to what I mentioned mentioned, here you go. This is from Chandra as well, but the page won't load. So here it is on YouTube. Seven months of changes, very near the pulsar, in a few seconds.

So, what else goes on in a nearby supernova remnant?

A lot. As one might expect, there is a lot of very energetic physics packed into a small area, only 6500 light-years away. When the supernova which left the Crab Nebula behind was recorded by Chinese, Japanese, and middle eastern astronomers in 1054, it would have been easily brighter than any star or planet in the sky. 

What began as a star on the order of 10 times the mass of the sun, left a neutron star only about 20 miles across, but weighing ~4.5 billion pounds per cubic inch. It's rotating 30 times per second, because angular momentum was conserved during the explosion. The energy it radiates doesn't stop in the X-ray regime that was observed by Chandra, but extends all the way up to ~10 TeV. That is similar to the LHC, whose initial energy was 7 TeV, but is now running at 13 TeV, but at a vastly higher power level. The LHC beam, after all, is about the diameter of a sewing needle.

The magnetic fields involved are enormous. That doesn't happen due to a conservation law, as in rotation; in fact exact mechanism is still unclear.  What is clear is that their reach is large. Here's an image from NASA's Hubble Captures the Beating Heart of the Crab Nebula (recommended). That pearly blue glow is synchrotron radiation, produced by electrons spiraling in a magnetic field.

Everything near a pulsar that can be ionized is ionized due to those high-energy emissions. What's left are carbon and silicate dusts, and even those seem likely to be mostly charged, though electrostatically). So we have positively charged ions, and those now-free electrons. Those free electrons are pervasive, hence the blue glow.

That ionization, the pulsars intense gravitational and magnetic field, and rotation combine to give rise to those famous pulses that gave pulsars their name. The basic mechanism is 

1. some of the material ejected in the supernova is pulled back into the star
2. the in-fall is caught in the magnetic fields, and pulled toward the poles
3. it's beamed back out at the poles, rather like lighthouse beams
4. the beam sweeps across us, in this case 30 times per second

4. is possible because the axis of rotation is not aligned with that of the magnetic field. That seems a bit counter-intuitive, but it's also the case with the sun, and even here on earth (and something that has to be considered when navigating by compass). That's too much to go into here; books have been written about the Crab. Search on 'dynamo effect' or 'dynamo theory'.

We have been learning about this for a millennium now. While the pace of discovery is accelerating, the story of the Crab Nebula is far from told.

Birding data: there is never just one thing going on

Anomalous high counts of White-crowned Sparrow and Steller's Jay have been had here (Peoria, Linn Co., Willamette riverside) during March. WCSP counts have doubled previous records, and STJA are up by 50%. OTOH, I have yet to find my FOY Belted Kingfisher.

This probably means *nothing at all*. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system.

First, let's toss the lack of Belted Kingfisher. There's a correlation with river levels: higher water levels than seen this year bring them in to some bottomland where they (also long-legged waders, which are also absent this year) are easily detected. That threshold hasn't been reached. The same thing might explain a complete lack of expected Great Horned and Western Screech Owls: water levels may have been high too high to support the record populations seen over the past couple of years, due to unfavorable conditions for prey. In short, the river levels seem likely to have been almost perfectly wrong.

How might those river levels effect WCSP and STJA? No idea. The data only run to 7 years, and support no conclusion.I suspect an increasing trend in passage of migrating STJA, but can't prove it. The uptick in counts is only 3 years old. In the greater scheme of things, that cannot be distinguished from noise in the data.

Might increased WCSP counts provide some evidence that something has actually changed? Sadly, no. My recording has changed, in a couple of respects.

1- Serious lack of time, for professional reasons

2- Variance in sunflower feeder habits

I think we can all understand #1. #2 is about racoons, of all things;

I used to keep a sunflower feeder hanging, and just top it off in the morning, or whenever it seemed low (working from home). A few months ago, one or more raccoons found it, and as there was no good means of safeguarding it, it was brought in at night. And (crucially) re-hung whenever I got around to it in the morning.

Whenever I got around to it tended to be at a later time than "breakfast is always served". It's likely that I saw fewer WCSP before because they could visit any time, and more later when they had to adapt to a more limited opportunity, hence concentrating their numbers.

I'm probably going to stop feeding birds now. Well, perhaps hang a hummingbird feeder (FOY *female* Rufous Hummingbird today). It would be interesting to see how the data might skew, and it's safest to do it now, while the hardships of winter are largely over, but before breeding territories are established.

I expect the yearly species count (119, two years running) to crash, but that number won't matter either--just more short-term statistical noise. Food for thought, at best. At worst, it's an entirely fallacious racoon-induced population crash. 

Total Solar Eclipse 2017

I live in a pretty cool place, from a certain nerdy viewpoint. 119 species of birds, two years running, might indicate a certain predictability, but a closer look at the data destroys that notion.

So how cool is this place, really? My subjective measures include things like species counts, whether I can get reasonable photos, etc. Subjective in this case means entirely subjective. So what might tip this place into Coolest Place I Have Ever Lived?

Yeah, that might do it. Though no photo did it justice. Film doesn't have the dynamic range, and digital cameras are worse in that respect. There's a wide pearlescant glow from the solar corona seen IRL which is entirely missing from short exposure times. This image predates optimizing over a set of stacked images.

It's a photo of a photo that has been hanging on some wall of pretty much every place I have ever lived since 1979. Yes, I am an old fart: deal with it. No, it's not related to Sauron in any way, save perhaps as being inspirational to film-makers for major production houses. Possibly. The mechanics of of how films are actually made (and taxes, payments to the Tolkien estate avoided, etc.) entirely escape me.

You may want to visit https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Solar_eclipse_of_February_26,_1979&oldid=761573206

That's the link as of this date: I've been burned by not specifying specifying dates. Pull quote:

Many visitors traveled to the Pacific Northwest to view the eclipse,^[1] since it would be the last chance to view a total solar eclipse in the United States for almost four decades. The next over the United States will be the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017.
Although the path of totality passed through Portland, Oregon in early morning, it was not directly observable from the Portland area due to overcast skies.^[2]

That last line matters. In 1979 I was driving up the Columbia Gorge, seeing small holes of blue sky in wide overcast, and trying to judge where said blue holes might line up with the sun, during that brief period of totality. A fast car and a certain disrespect for law and order won the day. Everything lined up, and I skidded to a stop at Horsethief Lake State Park in time to see the whole event.

• Shadow racing through the gorge at a thousand miles per hour
• Weird greenish light, entirely unexpected, before totality
• Shadow bands rippling across the ground.

It was awesome, in the original sense of the word. This is the Pacific NW. I saw Mount St. Helens erupt a year later, so I'm not a stranger to drama.

So here we are, that long 40 years later, as mentioned in the above pull quote. I'm now a certifiable Old Fart who never expected to live this long. But that narrow path of totality will sweep directly over my place  on August 21. In place of vile winter weather,  I have the best weather of the year, and all I have to do, essentially, is walk outside. How cool is that?

Being a complete nerd, I'll go bit further. I'll spread my parachute canopy across the yard below a second-story deck, and hope for a shadow band photo opportunity, etc. But mostly, I just want to experience the event. I lack the words to describe a total solar eclipse. Perhaps that is the true meaning of 'awesome': you just can't really express it.

Of one thing I am certain: on 2017-08-21, this weird little place in small-town Oregon will become The Coolest Place That I Have Ever Lived.

Exploring Data From the Linux Command Line

A few days ago, we saw the first signs that perhaps the worst of an unusually cold and wet winter might be ending: a temperature over 60°F!

A neighbor commented was made that it had been a long time since the last one, and I was curious as to exactly how long. For reasons of my own, I keep data files on what's recorded at the nearest weather station with what I consider to be fairly reliable data. So it only took a couple of minutes exploratory hacking around at a shell prompt to get my answer. Here’s what I did, and the result I got.

grep ^161[0-2] 1606010000-1612311600 | awk '{print $1" "$5}' | grep -E 6.{3} | tail -n1

1611191600 61.0

It seems longer, but the last day of ≥ 60.0°F temperature was 2016-11-19, and as a side-effect we also get the last time of the last day: 1600 (4PM for those of you who don't use 24-hour time). We could get rid of that side-effect; they are usually a Bad Thing in code. But in this case the source is obvious (as will be shown below), and entirely beneficial. It extracts another piece of information from our data at zero computation cost. Exploratory code for the win.

Before I get into what our pipeline is doing, a note about the file. These are raw data - fields are separated only by whitespace. Lines begin with time and date encoded as YYMMDDTTTT. Hence the first field meaning of the result seen above, and the file name 1606010000-1612311600. It reflects the start-stop dates and times of the file. That can be a useful convention: in this case it immediately reveals that the data are incomplete. The station failed to record after 1600 on New Year's Eve.

Additionally, we can use the wordcount program in linecount mode to see that we are starting with a file containing 5541 lines (records, though there is a 3-line header, which I won't bother to filter out).

wc -l 1606010000-1612311600
5541 1606010000-1612311600

1- grep ^161[0-2] 1606010000-1612311600, in which grep (a pattern-matching tool) is supplying all lines (records) from our file that begin (specified via ^) with 161, if the next digit is 0-2. I was only interested in months 10-12 of 2016 (and 2016 data are all that is in this file), because I knew the last date of ≥ 60.0°F would be in there somewhere. We now have only records from our period of interest. If we ended here, our output would be 

1610010000  24.10    3.0  163.0   53.0   51.0   80.0   12.9  204.0    6.0    0.0

...

1612311600  48.70    2.0   99.0   35.0   35.0   87.0   13.3  173.0    8.0   47.0

I'm using the ellipses in place of 2608 lines of output. wc -l shows 2610. We've filtered out nearly half of our data. Now we pipe (the | character) those lines to awk.

2- awk '{print $1" "$5}', where we instruct awk (a pattern scanning and processing language, of which more later) to print only that first datetime field, a space, then field 5, which contains the temperature, of each line of input it receives. Now we're down to only the fields of interest within our period of interest.  Had we stopped here, our output would still be 2610 lines, but only 2 fields out of 11, formatted as
YYMMDDTTTT NN.N.

This 2nd stage of our filter removed about 2/3 of its incoming data. I'm just guesstimating by looking at line lengths here, but you can get accurate numbers using wc again, before and after this stage. Specify -b instead of -l to count bytes instead of lines. I'll skip the demonstration. Now we send that on to grep again, but specifying different options.

3- grep -E 6.{3} contains the -E (Extended) option, which enables the {} syntax so that we can specify how many instances of a character we want to match. The preceding dot can be read as 'any one character', so a multi-character string would not match.  The trailing '$' matches the end of line -- the opposite of the '^' we used the first time we used when we piped to grep. The net effect is that only content that matches a '6' followed by any 3 single characters, followed by end-of-line, will survive. Given our NN.N format for the field field, we filter out anything except 6N.N and wc -l now shows only 222 of those short lines left, of 2610. Having filtered out all but 1/7 or so of the data coming into this stage, we now we filter down to one line - our answer.

4- tail -n1, which returns only the last n lines, and specify n=1. Because the data are in increasing time/date order (as can be seen in the output of our first filter) this gives us our last datetime, and answers our question, with greater accuracy than we had thought to ask.

If we needed the date and nothing but the date, we could modify our usage of awk, which is a pattern scanning and processing language. GNU awk has some very interesting capabilities, such as floating point math, true multidimensional arrays, etc. This entire task could have been done in awk, but I wanted to show more of the shell tools, and pipelines, not just Cool Things We Can Do With GNU awk'. [1]

The Shell Will Probably Always Belong in Your Toolbox

I often use far more sophisticated tools when I want to take a long hard look at data. But, file formats vary, data may be missing, etc. As a rule of thumb, you can expect to spend half of the total time spent analyzing data just seeing what's there, and cleaning it up. For much of that work, the shell is a great tool, and it's actually very common to spend a bit of time using the command line to explore. In a broad view, command-line tools can help you determine,  quickly, whether a particular data source contains anything of interest at all, and if so, how much, how it's formatted, etc. And finally, the commands can be saved as part of a shell script, and used over an arbitrary number of similar data files. 

To a point, anyway. Shells are slow (particularly bash). Though of course there are tools to quantify that as well, and timing work on a subset of the data can give you an idea of when you are going to have to use something else. 'time' is available as a built-in if you are using the bash shell, and any Unix or Linux will also have a 'time' binary somewhere on your search path if the appropriate package is installed. On this machine it's /usr/bin/time, packaged as 'time'. Everything else, except the shell itself, is in the 'coreutils' package. Which says something about how useful these tools are. If you aren't using them, you quite literally are not using the core of the Linux/Unix tools. 

That is probably a mistake. There is a lot of data out there, stored as textual files of moderate size.

My Ulterior Motive for This

I wanted a post such that:

1. I could advocate the command line, to people who seem to inappropriately default to spreadsheets, which are nothing more than another tool in the box. That box should contain several tools. Consider unstructured data. Or consider binary data formats, which are an intractable problem for both shells and spreadsheets.
2. Had absolutely nothing to do with security work. Because people are going to be justifiably sensitive about exactly whose security data I might be using as an example. But everybody talks about the weather.

If anyone wants to play with the data, it's available at:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0XLFi22OXDpR3h0UUQ1cmNWbkk
Note to self: find another home for this sort of thing. Google Drive can't even preview a text file.
Note to all: this is not a promise to keep it there for any significant period of time. If I need the space for other things (like client-related things), that file is very, very gone. I recently VVG'ed most of what was in /pub.

[1] I do have one idea for something I'll do with awk one of these days. Because who doesn't like univariate summary statistics combined with 4000 year old Babylonian math, and using NIST-certified results to validate (or invalidate, as the case may be) our code?

Greater Yellowlegs

This August, I didn't find nearly the number of species of birds that I did in 2015. This month is also a lot slower. Unlike some birders, for whom the list length is everything (insert obvious crude comparison here), I'm fine with that. Species counts are just another tool I use to try to understand what is going on, on my patch. Counts happen to be a powerful tool, if used well, but it's about understanding, not competition.

Here are a couple of Greater Yellowlegs (a sort of large sandpiper) that I don't see enough of. Work can be a pressure cooker environment, the recent news reports are usually depressing, etc. Being able to walk out the back gate, go down to the river and see a couple of neat birds and fall color, reflected in late-summer low river levels, is a welcome break.

Well. That either matters to you, or it doesn't. If not, I hope you have some other means of coping.

Greater Yellowlegs, Willamette River, Linn C, OR, 2016-09.04



Does work really expand to fill all available hours?

That might be a perception issue. In a second effort (this week) to free up more time, I just invested half an hour to run an optimization experiment. Amazingly successful and I'll probably save 4-5 hours per week, for a month or more. Huge win, to be sure. Counting both efforts, I get 6-7 hours back.

The thing is, I didn't start really looking for optimizations until I passed a pain threshold. I expect that is pretty typical behavior for us all, and that really sucks for me, on a couple of levels.

First off is professional. Always optimizing stuff is part of the gig.

Second is just personal embarrassment, because missing a forehead-slappingly easy test for bias, is, well, personally embarrassing.

That bit of folk wisdom, that work expands to fill all available hours? Like much folk wisdom, not buying it. This was just the most recent iteration of the problem. I think it's much more about pain thresholds, and when we finally realize we can't fit that next Desired Thing into the schedule. Only then do we scurry off and find fixes for the problem.

Perhaps this a LifeHacking thing. Hard to tell: trying to follow whatever fashion is currently playing out on the Internet is usually an expertise in futility.

But I plainly need to lower my pain threshold, and optimize sooner.

Taking a Break with a Bald Eagle

After an 0-dark-thirty start to Monday, I was was ready for a break by mid-morning. Grab a fresh cup of Productivity Fluid, and out onto the deck. That deck is on the second story, and faces a large Black Walnut, the slope down to the river bank, etc. It's a bit of a habit to grab binoculars and a camera on the way out. This morning, the idea was to do a quick bird count, for submission to eBird. Because it's the height of Spring migration, and weird things happen.

And indeed they did. About 40 feet away, in that Black Walnut, were Wood Ducks. Which actually have clawed feet, perch in trees, etc. Hence the name. Photos didn't work out too well. These birds are usually shy, with good reason: there are lot of hunters on the river during the season. Typically, I seem them from a couple of hundred feet away, as the are headed elsewhere. Bummer about the photos, though. Drakes are almost cartoonishly colorful. But the drake had a branch between us, and it was obvious that if I moved much, they were going to spook.

And ... they did.

A few minutes later, an immature Bald Eagle flew into the same tree, and pretty obviously was not worried about me at all. There was a lot of ray-catching and preening involved. Here's the bird pausing from a bit of luxurious back-preening to make sure the silly human isn't doing anything, well, silly.

And of course, I had to take the obligatory head photo. 

That bird hung out for at least two hours. Seemingly just enjoying the morning. I, unfortunately, had to get back to the salt mines. An early start already looks like it will extend into a late night.

How's your day going?

Green-hued Purple Finch

April is drawing to a close. It's a been a great (for small values of great) month on the birding front. I added half a dozen or so species to the April all-years list at my local patch. Which is currently wedged at 99, and seems likely to finish that way. So close, and yet so meh. I'm chalking that up to a somewhat early migration for much of the year so far. Which seems to be ending.

This blog is very much not the place for accounts of the truly rare. Odd, I can occasionally do. My patch is a bit different, in that many local birders see White-crowned Sparrow, while I see White-throated, etc.  Another difference lies in Purple Finch. Which, for whatever reason, seem more common here than what is typically seen along the Benton/Linn Co. (Oregon) border. Common enough that I get to see PUFI (4-letter banding code for Purple Finch),  see the cannonical USGS reference for the whole thing, in unusual plumage.

This group is a bit prone to weirdness. I have photos of House and Purple Finch in hues that might be best described as golden, rather than red/rose/purple, and I've seen references to that being a function of diet. But green is a bit off-the-wall, in my experience. Here is the only green-hued Purple Finch I've ever seen, and that was on 2016-04-01. April Fools Day. No way was I going to post that the day I saw her.

But perhaps not so outlandish as all that. A Web search found one reference, the Purple Finch entry in John J. Audubon’s Birds of America, which seems to indicate that this hue can be common, at least toward the eastern US. OTOH, that was a long time ago, far from my patch in Oregon's Willamette Valley, and Audubon was, well, a bit dubious in some respects.

What do modern field guides have to say? In alphanumeric order, looking for any reference to 'green' I found the following.

• National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America: no mention.
• Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds, 2nd edition: no mention.
• Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds, 3rd edition: no mention.
• Sibley Guide to the Birds, 1st edition: "Pacific females are washed greenish above..."
• Sibley Guide to the Birds, 2nd edition: "Pacific females are washed greenish above..."
• Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America: no mention.

Does this, in any way, constitute a recommendation for a field guide? Well, no. Aberrant golden hues are, in my limited experience as a patch birder, far more common amongst House and Purple Finch. I've seen dozens of golden-hued birds of each species, and exactly one greenish finch. Yet golden birds get no mention at all.

Does that mean that I regard popular field guides as equally wrong? Well, no. Tremendous effort was expended by very talented people in creating these guides. A lot of financial risk was assumed by all parties -- including publishers. Personally, I doubt that the vagaries of plumage variations can ever be adequately described in a field guide. Not least because human languages cannot adequately describe color. Ask a fly fisher what 'dunn' refers to.

I confess that Sibley is my favorite, but this is not an example of why.

Killdeer are Laying

Springs rolls on. While down along the river this morning, I heard my first House Wren of the year (a nesting bird), and found the Killdeer were already at it. As you can see, Killdeer don't go in for nest building --  just a simple scrape. But the eggs aren't actually that noticeable; one could step on them quite easily, and watching where you are walking is advisable. Luckily when Killdeer are in the area, you will likely know it due to their strident alarm calls, and hair-trigger sensitivity, occasionally feigning a broken wing to lure predators away from the nest, etc.

Their appearance is also distinctive. People that have essentially no knowledge of birds often recognize them when shown a photo: they just didn't know what they were called. So here's a photo. The Killdeer is the bird on the left. The bird on the right is a Greater Yellowlegs. This photo was taken April 3, but is likely one of the same birds involved with this nest. I'm using this image because it contains that Yellowlegs. That is a matter for another post, but this way I get to use the same image, and I'm lazy.

In addition to not stomping up a beach like a Marine going into combat, likely crushing eggs, there are a couple of other guidelines related to nests that you might want to be aware of. Simple things like how to minimize the disturbance you cause. All About Birds has already posted one, so I don't have to.

I specifically wanted to limit my time at this nest, on this day. I had already seen three species of corvid (Steller's Jay, Western Scrub Jay, and American Crow). Corvids are infamous nest-robbers. The tape measure is always with me in the field -- it's not like I had to go get it and return, causing two disturbances. My total time at the nest was 1:38 from first to last image according to Exif data, and laying down a tape obviously took only seconds. One other thing I did was place a couple of rocks to point to the site. My total time was still under 2 minutes.

With the rocks, I can find it again from a distance, and have no need to closely approach it. The normal clutch size is 4-6 errors, so these birds just started. Incubation period is 22-28 days. In a month or so, I should see tiny little fuzz-balls on the beach. They can walk away from the nest as soon as their feathers are dry, and they're fun to watch.

Bioswales and Constructed Wetlands

Early this AM, I was looking for some information on native willows. There are a lot of them on the river banks behind my place, and they provide forage for Black-tailed Deer, and nesting sites for Yellow Warblers and several other bird species, including cavity nesters such as Black-capped Chickadee, Tree Swallow, and various woodpeckers.

Searching for "Scouler's willow oregon bird usage" I found a link to an Oregon Department of Environmental Quality PDF titled BIOFILTERS (Bioswales, Vegetative Buffers, & Constructed Wetlands) For Storm Water Discharge Pollution Removal . I glanced through it, and while it wasn't what I was looking for, I noticed the following on page 25.

Obtainable reductions of pollutants in bioswales are:Total Suspended Solids – 83 to 92%Turbidity (with 9 minutes of residence) – 65%Lead – 67%Copper – 46%Total Phosphorus – 29 to 80%Aluminum – 63%Total Zinc - 63%Dissolved Zinc – 30%Oil/Grease – 75%Nitrate-N – 39 to 89%
These results can be obtained for a bioswale at least 200 feet in length with a maximum runoff velocity of 1.5 ft./sec., a water depth of from one to four inches, a grass height of at least 6 inches, and a minimum contact (residence) time of 2.5 minutes. 

It turns out that some random roadside ditch might be an engineered bioswale. Their generic usage is pretty much anywhere there is a need to remove pollutants from storm runoff. While I might care more than some because of where I live, anyone who uses rivers or lakes for recreation, or simply likes the notion of a healthy environment, should care to some degree.

The benefits of wetlands have been written about extensively, but nearly all of what I have seen has been about natural wetlands. What might be regarded as unnatural (though native plants are used) wetlands provide a lot of benefits as well. Also, they aren't subject to the same regulatory regime as natural wetlands. It's not as if, once built, they have to be protected for all time. Hopefully that will tend to increase their usage. We are all downstream of someone.

Northern Flicker (intergrade)

The common race of Northern Flicker over most of the western United States is the Red-shafted. In the Willamette Valley, the eastern (Yellow-shafted) bird shows up occasionally, as one did this winter, and causes a minor stir among local bird lovers. It's not that exceptional, as the nesting variant in Alaska is the Yellow-shafted.

Intergrade birds are more common here -- so common that even I spot them once in a while. Here's an image I've uploaded via eBird, so it is reachable via Cornell University's Macauly Library.

EDIT 2016-04-14: Noticed that the image had become unreachable via Macauly. Possibly (though I doubt this very much) this was a privacy protection measure. Reason being is that location plot is still available from the original link; as is the checklist. It's only the image that is not available. As Cornell is attempting to develop photo recognition software, and has a long history of not being particularly citizen-science friendly (despite vast claims that are on the border of unwarranted and ethics violations) I'm changing the link to a Google share, and will no longer mention Cornell/Macauly in anything like a positive sense until they once again deserve it.

Google does not make image organization easy, in terms of grouping -- bird/sparrow, bird/owl, etc. They are a commercial concern, and this does not not seen to be a commercially useful thing for them to do. I'm fine with that -- if I wanted to be rigid about ontologies, I would put up a proper Web site.

         

Race	Wings, tail	Crown	Face	Nape crescent	Malar
Red-shafted	Orange-red	Brown	Gray	None	Red
Yellow-shafted	Yellow	Gray	Brown	Red	Black
Photographed	Yellow	Gray	Brown	Red	Red/black

Note that "Malar" refers to a malar stripe that some bird species have -- it's that mark next to the bill. The bird I photographed shows predominantly red, but also a bit of black. Depending on the species or subspecies (race), it might be limited to only one sex, might be colored differently, etc. In Northern Flicker, only male birds have it.

As you can see, the bird I photographed shows characteristics of both. The exact mix on any one bird can be pretty much anything.

Workstation Wallpaper, Courtesy of ESO

This is from The European Southern Observatory, specifically the VISTA Magellanic Cloud Survey view of the Tarantula Nebula. For the last several years, an edited version of it has been the wallpaper on my main workstation, which is always named feynman. I'm just a bit strange that way; the wallpaper on my phone is an image from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Before that, wallpapers were slideshows, but that is an historic, and also somewhat biographical, note. But that is for another post, along with that workstation name, which rolls from machine to machine as technology improves.

I could leap from this to some ranty post about why various sorts of hamburger, skate boards, etc., are not awesome. That, too, should be in another post.

I find myself rather sad this morning. Last night I was looking for a bit of imagery related to the UA Mirror Lab. I've mentioned them over at G+. They are currently producing optics for another European effort, the Large Magellan Telescope. No link there, because I just found them trying to do some highly obnoxious Web tracking, involving HTML canvas. That might be another post, but one more suited to my security blog. Some days, the sadness just piles up.

On a brighter note, I found what I was looking for (and much more) by stumbling across, then doing a topic search, on a great blog. GMT4 Unveil, about casting the 4th GMT mirror. Here's the time-lapse video, on YouTube, but you should really read the blog post, and follow the link from there. Casting an 8.4 meter mirror -- a process which takes months, even at what is unquestionably the finest large-scale optical fabrication facility in the world, is a nontrivial process.

So, why so sad?

Because in the course of checking out that great Ketelsens blog, I found a couple of things. One was a mention of Bob Goff. That name rang a bell -- he was a friend of a friend, years ago. Now dead at an early age, as is the friend (Larry Forrest, founder of since-sold Glass Mountain Optics) who used to mention him. Larry died unexpectedly, also before his time. He and Sharleen, his wife of many years, Forrest are two of the finest people I have ever known. Notice my use of the present tense for Larry. That is intentional. In ways that seem important to me, Larry is very much alive; he's just impossible to contact. Which sucks, but there it is.

In addition, the Ketelsens Blog mentions yet another person who has passed far too early, Dave Harvey. They both worked at Steward Observatory, but Harvey was on the software development, as opposed to the optical fabrication, side of things. He apparently regarded himself as more of a photographer. This guy, I can only wish I had had some connection to. Yes, I would be even more sad right now, but I still feel that that was a connection I missed out on, to my loss. 

When I was a child, I messed around with telescopes. No surprise, right. I was mainly interested in the structure of our galaxy, probably because some of the more spectacular sights were accessible to my small telescopes -- the classic 6-inch f8 Newtonian reflector I owned at the time was very mainstream. And even then, what we were learning about something like the structure of the galaxy, or establishing the distance scale of the universe, set the standard for what might be regarded as awesome. An awesome hamburger? Yeah, right. Awesome was a reserved word for me before I even hit my teens, and this not subject to change. Period.

So here's this Dave Harvey guy, also a telescope and software guy, who is using small but drool-worthy gear to photograph to take some fantastic imagery. Such as the Rho Ophiuchus region (Go there. Really. He did it with a 5-inch astrograph.) of the Milky Way, the subject of another long-term wallpaper on feynman. He was also a general-purpose photographer who was deeply knowledgeable about his craft, and who put in a lot of effort to get things right. 

I loves me some birds. Always have. But there are a lot of bird blogs out there by people who do a lot of photography (with far better/heavier/bulkier gear than I am willing to carry) who seem more interested in being cool. I have no firm idea of how birding might be seen as cool, seemingly by the same people who might judge that a hamburger could be in any way awesome, but I digress. More importantly, they don't seem to get things like the time-honored wisdom of 90% of all images needing a border. Or they simply can't be bothered.

In the few images I have ever posted, anywhere, I have tried to follow that rule. But sometimes I got in a rush, or simply lazy, and didn't. I suspect that it would not even have occurred to Dave Harvey to do such a thing. That, my friends, is attention to detail, and dedication to your craft. So Dave Harvey is still around, too, if one appreciates the debt we owe to all of those who teach and inspire.

There is no deep wisdom, now becoming obvious, in all this. At some level we all realize that associating ourselves with smart, dedicated people, who are also willing and able to teach something of whatever it is that they do, is a useful guideline. But it was one of those weird moments, which we probably all have, when many seemingly-disparate things all became connected. 

So why even write this?

Two reasons.

1. The off chance that it might be my subconscious getting impatient and shouty. Which does happen to me. For instance, I have had great results from "sleeping on" problems.
2. Spreading the word about outstanding work by others is always A Good Thing.

520 days in space

Scott Kelly will be retiring from NASA on April 1. I can't help but note that date; he doesn't strike me as the sort of individual that would ever really retire. Retire from NASA? Sure. I can buy that. It might boil down to something as simple as, "At this point in my career, will I ever get another mission?" Or perhaps one really can become jaded to almost anything, and 520 days is quite enough spaceflight, thank you very much.

Obviously, this is all speculation; I am amongst that large collection of people whom Kelly does not call to meet for a beer, and talk about career plans. Duh.

That said, I suspect that Kelly is just _really into it_. Beyond the point of willing to be strapped to the top of an enormous of high explosives and fired into orbit. He has, after all, treated us to a remarkable collection of photos from the International Space Station.

NASA, in their https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/astronaut-scott-kelly-to-retire-from-nasa-in-april press release has managed to ignore this. As I write this, they haven't provided a collection of the photos https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html. That's to be expected, as the NASA Web site has always rather sucked.

That is unfortunate, as many Americans still regard NASA as a huge waste of taxpayer money. This is far from the truth: NASA gets 0.005 of the budget; for every tax dollar half a cent goes to NASA. This is a matter of public record, and can be checked. See http://www.penny4nasa.org/mission/.

Meanwhile, we still have a lunatic fringe who believe that the Apollo moon landings were faked. Dealing with that is an exercise in futility. Real questions, given that NASA can't even get a penny of the budget, seem more likely to involve tradeoffs between robotic vs. manned missions.

I want both. We don't have demonstrated technology to send humans beyond lunar orbit, and robotic missions have an undeniable track record of scientific success. But manned space flight is inspirational. I don't buy purely economic arguments against it. First off, because economists are famous for getting almost nothing right. Secondly, because even if economists had a solid bead on things, some things are worth doing for reasons that have _nothing whatever to do with economics_.

Back to those Kelly photos.

And bite me, NASA. Why do you provide nothing, from one of your own people, while ancient (and largely irrelevant) IT trade rags such as PC Magazine can manage it? Though they will drop a pop-under ad in front of you, despite your settings in popular browsers. Given the rate at which ad networks are currently being compromised, hence being used to compromise user systems, that's a problem. And even then, you still have another click to get to a slideshow. Not going to do a link.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160229-scott-kelly-nasa-astronaut-space-year-pictures-photography/ seems to be one of the more honest ones. You still have to click another link, and you only get 15 images, and there is a bit going on behind the scenes that seems a bit dodgy. As is the case with some mass-media, such as http://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/coming-home-look-back-scott-kelly-s-year-space-n525226.

One might try scottkelly.com but will take you to a domain-squatter.

So, yeah, NASA continues to be it's own worst enemy, in both the PR/outreach and history departments. That is really unfortunate. I didn't save some images that I loved, and they don't seem to be available any longer. Articles that got some press about how they screwed this particular pooch in the past, such as http://www.wired.com/2014/04/lost-lunar-photos-recovered-by-great-feats-of-hackerdom-developed-at-a-mcdonalds/ seem to be lessons not learned.

Oh noes, the weather got beautiful!

Most people I know love to bitch about the weather. Living in western Oregon, my winter sniveling is usually something like, "Oh $DEITY, please turn off this endless {rain|fog}. And please, while you're at it, please pump the duration of reasonably bright daylight to something beyond 12 minutes. kthxbye."

For the record, I have to note that response time is usually terrible. But luckily, I still get to bitch.

During the roughly half of the year that the weather is beautiful, I label various things as official Winter Projects. The professional stuff (there are always new things to learn) take priority, and always get done. Particularly if I'm going to do something that keeps CPU cores/threads pegged for the better part of a week, I'd rather do it in the winter. Because who wants to run the furnace in August? This happens. A couple of days ago a batch job that was spread over two systems pegged a total of 7 cores (14 threads) finished. Wall time 119 hours, with no restarts from checkpoints. And no, public cloud lovers, it was not something that I could run on Amazon AWS. Sensitive data.

Right now, it looks like we might have another early spring. Flowers are blooming, trees and shrubs are budding, bird behavior is changing. So I need to do some math, and run another couple (at least) long batch jobs. Also do a pile of reading, and write more than a little software. It's going to be hard to get through the tail end of that list of winter projects, and some non-professional things aren't going to happen.

One thing that will happen is a bit of work related to a local map, on the scale of a few hectares. Specifically, I need a series of GPS readings from locations that will be impossible to get once trees leaf out. The notion is to gather as much data as possible, then beat the noise level down via least squares. I wonder if it is possible to achieve precision approaching single meters, with on-hand tech. That's more precision than I really need -- I'm just curious.

So, what's with the map? I do a bit of birding. Not well, in terms of what seems to be the standard of who has the longest 'life list' of birds seen. Or county list, or whatever. Types of lists are important to many birders. I totally get that, but am not that into it. I don't even know what my life list would be, save that it would completely fail to impress those who are impressed by such things. If I had to guess, it would be around 275. That's less than the number recorded in just my county (287), according to eBird, but I took seven states to arrive at that number. So it goes, and yes, I suck as a birder. I could write a whole post about that. But I'd rather post a crop of a poor photo of a Merlin. Because I only see this small falcon in winter, when the light is usually bad (complain to $DEITY, not me) at ranges beyond what my gear can really handle.

In the checklists I submit to eBird, I refer to specific locations, such as the Greenway, or the Willow Corridor. That is meaningless to others -- I do it for my own obscure purposes. Now I want a fairly precise map to support those obscure and meaningless purposes. Simple as that. I may suck as a birder, but I prefer to suck precisely.

Spend a couple of decades in system and information security, where attention to detail and nuance is critical, and you too might end up somewhere between strange and deranged. Not knocking the field, mind you. Huge challenge, huge satisfaction.

Interrupted Thought: Pacific Wren

1657, (4:57 PM for the time-challenged) and I was plugging away at work, pretty much lost in thought. Certainly had no idea of it being 3 minutes away from what many regard as quitting time, because in what I do, there really is no quitting time.

Gradually realized that I had been interrupted by a persistent buzzing from the front yard. Pacific
Wren! Since I've lived here in Oregon, I've associated this bird with cold weather -- a winter bird here on the banks of the Willamette River. Right now, it's in the low 60s (F) outside, and Pacific Wren was a bit of a surprise. But this whole fall period has been a bit of a surprise. Several species have appeared early. This is not my first PAWR (to use the bird-banding alpha code, which you can reference at the USGS Patuxent River Wildlife Research Center USGS Patuxent River Wildlife Research Center, and it's a very useful shorthand notation, particularly in field notes) of the year, but I think it might be the most benign conditions.

No photos to show you, which is a bit of a shame, as they're cute little buggers, as most wrens are. But it's an easy image search. Some of the results are even correctly identified! Or you can go to the Cornell Lab http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Pacific_Wren/id - an authoritative source. And apparently the sole US university with more ornithologists than Oregon State, which is just across across the river from me.

I have to get back to work, which one of the reasons I didn't even consider trying to get a photo. Yes they are way photogenic. But beyond that, they are interesting, beyond the cute imagery so beloved by the millions of Internet cat-video fans. Ann Nightingale put up a post back in 2011, writing from Victoria, B.C. It is, of course, filled with cute: that is pretty much unavoidable when the subject is PAWR. But it's also personable, informative, and interesting.

I wish I could do content like that. Sadly, all I can do is point to the people who can.

Late September Birding in the Willamette Valley

I had a great morning. I'll pay for it by working a late night, but unless thing go completely to hell, it will have been worth it. It started innocently enough, drinking morning coffee on the deck, munching on an enormous cinnamon roll, and doing a mental review of what I needed to get done today. Because that's how we roll, on the mean streets of a semi-ghost-town in the central Willamette Valley.

Mostly, I was thinking about infosec projects, data analysis projects, how soon I needed to get firewood delivered, and the huge goodness of that cinnamon roll. Then the birds began to trickle in. I didn't end up with a particularly long checklist, though 30 species counts as good, this time of year, and it took a long time to get there. Hence my expectation of a late night.

Since May, I have been wondering if I were having a Big Year. Not in the sense of the 2011 film of the same title, and certainly not in the sense of what fellow Oregonian Noah Strycker is up to. Which is to see 5000 birds in a year, and he has already beaten the previous record of 4341, with a bird named the Sri Lanka Frogmouth, of all things.

The only thing we have in common is having something like a quarter of the year left.

What is my current idea of a Big Year? 111 species. Seriously. A lot of birders are all about lists and counts. There's certainly a place for that. I use it as a rough-and-ready metric for how much I am learning. My goal is to better understand this very cool place that I inhabit. More species, if careful records are kept, means a better understanding of the flow of seasonal change, etc. All very Thoreau.

But I don't know how many birds might be on my life list, and that's an important thing for many birders. I know it is at least 250, and suspect that it is more like 275 or something. That may seem like a lot of birds, but it is well under half of the species recorded just in Oregon, which I think is around 600. There are probably counties with higher numbers.

As a birder, I pretty much suck. I'm fine with that, as I can still use counts as motivator. Something to get me off my ass, outdoors, and learning about something other than infosec. Previous to this year, there was no month in which I had found 70 species in the yard. This year:

• April: 72
• May: 76
• August: 73
• September 71 (so far)

Today, I picked up on something called a Warbling Vireo amongst a tree full of Bushtit. Neither of these species is spectacular -- far from it. Being able to do it means, to me, that I am slowly getting a clue as to the subtle things that are happening all around me. I'm learning, I can more fully appreciate bird migration, etc.

I mostly use eBird for record-keeping these days. Imperfect as hell, for reasons that I will probably get into in subsequent posts. But they do supply another powerful motivator: bar charts. Seriously. Read eBird: Engaging Birders in Science and Conservation. It worked on me, in that I am constantly looking at bar charts, and targeting birds that I either know or suspect should be here, but have not been able to find. Filling in that last blank spot, turning Belted Kingfisher into a year-round bird, motivates me. Then it might get deeper, as you start to think about the shape of the graph. Does a bar chart begin to show activity in March, gradually, or explode into being in April? How about that unexplained absence in Q3 of July? How did it vary in 2013, 14, and 15? Might weather have affected it? If so, how?

This is a bottomless pit of learning, the scope of which is best appreciated with a cup of coffee, a cinnamon roll, and a complete absence of IT security stuff. Well, except for the data analysis bits, which is common to both. And much else, these days.

So how is my yard Big Year going?  Second-best, so far. At 109 species, I've beaten my 2014 record of 107 species, but I am still one shy of my all-time 2013 record of 110. Even with a full quarter of the year to go, it isn't (quite) a certainty. If you are just looking at your yard, travel is out. And it gets progressively harder to find anything new for the year. Today I added a new bird for the first time since August, and that was the first since probably May. That said, I suspect that I am going to stonk my previous best, and finish the year at 114 or so. Unless life intrudes, which it often does.