Small airplane caught on satellite camera

 kw: interesting things, satellite imagery

I do many geographical investigations for my work at the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science. Today, looking on Google Maps for a certain geographic feature that was reported "North of the Miami-Dade County line", I saw this:

What I actually saw at first was a row of three white dots. Upon zooming in, I could see it was three views of a small airplane. The dashed line is the county line I was following. It is evident that the satellite was taking strip images from north to south, and three in a row caught the airplane as it passed to the southwest. You can see this for yourself; type in to Google Maps (or in Google Earth) these coordinates: 25.95717 -80.65822. Be sure to put a space before the hyphen so the numbers are correctly interpreted as coordinates. This image was produced 1/4/2021, so later this year we can expect a newer image to replace it. Never fear: the "historical imagery" button will let you backtrack to the date of your choice.

Zooming in further, we can glean a little information about the photographic method used:

The rainbow effect shows that the satellite doesn't operate like a digital camera, but takes successive images through color filters. In this case, we can see at least blue, cyan, green, yellow and red, although the cyan and yellow colors may result from overlap of blue, green and red. Google Maps allows taking a measurements of the airplane: wing span 40.5 feet, length 35.5 feet. Airplane buffs can look up what kind of plane this is likely to be.

It ain't the King's English any more

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, linguistics, united states, dialects

When I was about twelve my family attended a Congregational church in Salt Lake City, Utah. We frequently arrived early, so I would help the ushers fold programs. One day one of the ushers, an elderly man who must have originally come from New York, said to me, "Youse is a good kid." "Youse" is pronounced "use", the noun not the verb, as in "Put that elbow grease to good use." It's the only time in my life that I've heard that, even though I've been to NYC a few times in the ensuing 65 years.

Some 48 years ago we spent part of a year in Houston, Texas, and visited people we knew in Louisiana a couple of times. We got acquainted with a couple of variations on "you". You may have heard the parting greeting, "Y'all come back now, hear?" They do say that in Louisiana, where "y'all is the typical plural form of "you". But in Texas "y'all" is singular, and the plural is "all-a-y'all" or even "all of you-all". I once kidded some of our friends in Texas, "There's a popular convenience store out West, that would have to change it's name if they open any here: Y'all Totem!" (the store was U-Totem, out of business since 1984).

Based on our experiences, living and vacationing all over the continental US, I've compiled this generalized map of various ways people supply the missing plural "you" in "standard" English:

This is strictly from my own impressions and memories. I'd expect a professional linguist to have a more accurate take on this pattern, and perhaps a few expressions I've missed. One such is Rosemarie Ostler, in her book The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century. As a matter of fact, the descriptions of "you" usage in the book are practically identical to these, although with more detail about where certain variations are common.

Much of the discussion in the book concerns vowel shifts that have occurred over the centuries since English immigrants began coming to North America in large numbers. The sounds of a language change over time as the way that the commonest words are pronounced is made easier by shifting the vowels to be easier to say. To a linguist, changing the sound of a vowel is accomplished by changing the position of the tongue and the shape of the mouth and upper throat. For example, the "ee" sound most of us use in "feet" has the tongue high and forward, while the "ih" sound in "will" has the tongue halfway up and still forward. In some regions, however, "will" is pronounced more like "weel", which means the "ee" sound had to "go" somewhere else. Either the mouth now opens more, turning "feet" into "fate", or the tongue moves further back, which yields "feht", where "eh" represents the schwa (shown as "ə" in the phonetic alphabet IPA). That may cause a speaker to move the schwa in words like "about" to a more open "a" sound (think of "about" sounding like "abbot"). And so it goes.

It's amazing that such shifts occur unconsciously. People don't get up one day and say, 'I'm going to harden the "i" in "will" from today forwards.' And however it was that the singular pronouns for second person (formerly "thou" and "thee") were dropped, it didn't take long for people to devise substitutes. Although the area seemingly dominated by "you/you" in the map above is vast, few people live in the middle of the continent; it's "flyover country" for a reason. The number of folks using a regional pluralism is a pretty high percentage.

Again and again I read that words from other languages and cultures were assimilated into English, as English-speaking people spread across the globe during the Colonial Era in North America and the period of the British Empire, and people from all over the Earth immigrated to the United States. Thus "tycoon" and "tsunami" are of Japanese origin, "kowtow" is from Chinese ("t'au kau" is Mandarin for "pray" or "worship"); the verb "smelt" is very old, having entered Anglo-Saxon via Danish, while the noun "smelt", a type of fish, is either Dutch or Danish, and refers to the fishes' odor. A host of food words have both Germanic (Anglo Saxon) and French (Norman) synonyms: meat vs beef, chicken vs pullet, deer vs venison, dove vs pigeon. And many Spanish or Mexican Native words have been mainstreamed ("taco", "amigo", etc.)

Where other languages may take in a word or name and bend it into a more "native" form, English speakers tend to take words in wholesale. Sometimes, a nickname becomes "the name"; for example the painter Dominikos Theotokopoulos, who signed his paintings with his full name in Greek, had the nickname "the Greek" throughout Europe, but the Spanish version of his nickname is the one used here: El Greco.

Such promiscuous borrowing has led to English being the largest language. The initial Oxford English Dictionary had about 291,000 entries, but about 10% have been removed in more recent editions. A comprehensive dictionary of that sort for American English would likely have between half a million and a million words! However, those in common use number about 100,000. A typical U.S. fifth grader knows about 50,000 words. But, as this book shows, going around the country, which 50,000 words a youngster knows will differ. This is why thesauruses exist for English but hardly at all for other languages. English has lots and lots of synonyms. If one were to boil down the "meanings" in a well-constructed, comprehensive thesaurus, the number would likely be in the 20,000-40,000 range.

It took me longer than I like to read the book. It is well written, but the subject does not lend itself to page-turning prose. It can get tedious. The author does well to gather facts in as interesting a way as possible, but there are limits… There are just too many facts, and it is clear she was being very selective, because if the book consisted simply of word-pair lists and other groupings, without any "glue" or other text, it would be quite a bit larger than 230+ pages. The appendix has a useful summary of where phonetic sounds are made in the vocal cavity, and explanations of how the various vowel shifts produced the most common "American English".

He brought the lions back

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, natural science, cougars, mountain lions, memoirs

It takes a real optimist to wait fifty years to write a memoir. The kind of optimism that motivates a young naturalist to stake the success of his PhD research on his determination to work in the tough Idaho wilderness surrounding the River of No Return, to track, capture, and study the most elusive apex predator that North America has to offer: the cougar. Furthermore, when he began the study he had a family. That's exactly what Maurice Hornocker did, and thus his recently-released memoir relates events that occurred in the period 1964 to 1973. He was 91 when he began to write…

Cougars on the Cliff: One Man's Pioneering Quest to Understand the Mythical Mountain Lion—a Memoir kept me up late several nights. It is the kind of page-turning book one would not expect from a scientist. Dr. Hornocker has a co-author, "roving reporter" David Johnson, who must have had something to do with the compelling prose. But artful prose needs something to work with, and boy, was there a lot to work with!

Possibly more dangerous than the big cats were the hunters, the ranchers, and others with a vested interest in destroying as many cougars as possible, and in keeping them classified as "vermin", so that there would be no "hunting season" or other restrictions on the slaughter. In the face of disparagement and occasional threats, and even attempted sabotage of the research project, Maurice (not Dr. Hornocker yet), with immense help from Wilber Wiles, caught the cats he needed to catch, re-caught them repeatedly, tracked them through several winter seasons (there was no radiotelemetry before the 1970's, so tracking in snow was a must), and gathered priceless data on their habits. Slowly, the data itself, and his passionate advocacy, made itself felt. At first, a temporary moratorium on hunting the cats (after a few collared cats were killed) was put in place, allowing the study to be completed, and eventually, a new law was passed giving the Idaho Fish and Game Commission the power to declare the Cougar a game animal, and thus to regulate it, including barring hunting the cats in specific areas. Eventually the largest contiguous wilderness area was created in central Idaho, where no persisting human presence is allowed: visit but leave only footprints, and gather only photos.

Cougars manage their territories well, and they practice "mutual avoidance", a term Maurice stressed and possibly coined. They manage their own reproduction. Rather than being rapacious monsters that kill for the fun of it, cougars kill to live, and their natural tendency to take down the weak and the old, primarily elk and mule deer, actually manages the prey herd to encourage strength and to ensure a thriving population. The "demon cats" of superstitious lore would soon wipe out the entire herd, and descend into starvation. Big cats can do cost/benefit analyses. Once this was understood, the wind went out of the sails of the "cougars as vermin" viewpoint.

How would one describe a typical day during the winter cougar-study season? It seems impossible, mainly because what Maurice and Wilber did are impossible to most of us. They began by preparing (sometimes building) and stocking ten camps throughout the study area. In each season, they both, and the 3-4 dogs they had with them, traveled on foot more than 1,000 miles. Not flat miles, but up hill and down dale, often in knee-deep or hip-deep snow. The average mileage required to track, tree, tranquilize and tag & measure one cat was about 100. In the initial three (exhausting!) seasons, somewhat more than 30 cougars were tagged, and multiple observations of previously-caught cats, plus re-catches to replace missing tags or collars: all added up to a ton of data about them. In addition, the men took samples from prey animals, to assess age and condition, so as to compile a picture of the ecology of cougar country.

The picture above shows a lioness with two half-grown "kittens". The book doesn't use the word "cubs". An interesting fact learned from the population studies, and from the author's family raising two orphaned kittens that weighed ten pounds at the start, is that the ears stay about the same distance from the chin as a lion's head grows, so that the mother cat, on the left, had her ears set lower compared to her young. Females have smaller heads than males, so mature males have ears set even lower. Once this relationship was understood, it was possible to determine the sex of a cat from a distance, and also estimate its age during its first few years. The heaviest females seldom exceeded 100 pounds, but most grown males were heavier; the heaviest was 182 pounds, though the average was more in the 120-140 pound range.

I worked at DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware for many years. For a few of those years a cougar resided in northern Delaware and southeastern Pennsylvania. One snowy day, a laboratory building at a DuPont facility was ringed with cougar tracks. The animal could smell the lab rats inside the building, and circled it a few times trying to find a way in. Later it bedded down at an outdoor YMCA facility a few miles away. For about a week, the Y Camp was its home base. Then it seemed to vanish, until reports in Maryland indicated it had moved on. Many white-tail deer live in this area, and it probably reduced the herd to the point that leaving was necessary. By the deer being "reduced" I mean partly eaten, and partly scared into moving on themselves. The big cat followed its food supply. Curiously, I don't know a single person who every actually saw the cat as more than the end of a tail as it vanished into the woods. They are secretive and very hard to spot!

When I say in my title above that Dr. Hornocker "brought the lions back", I refer to bringing back the concept of the cougar as an integral and necessary part of the natural world, throughout North America. Before his work, they'd become almost extinct outside a few wilderness areas such as the Bitterroot Mts of Idaho, because of their "vermin" image. That has changed. A change for the better. Just as the local family of foxes keeps the squirrels in our neighborhood on the alert, and limits the population of mice and voles, so a resident cougar or two keeps the deer from becoming vermin themselves. P.S. This juvenile fox had just awakened from a nap in our back yard. I took the picture from the family room window.

I don't mind that this memoir looks back half a century. The adventures are as fresh as yesterday's snowfall. Dr. Hornocker is one of the great benefactors of wide-scale ecology studies.

Spreading your wings beyond butterfly collecting

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, natural history, insect collecting, moth collecting

I got my start as a collector collecting butterflies, using a net made from discarded a lace curtain. Later I collected all kinds of things, such as stamps, shells, minerals, and fossils. These days I collect primarily photos; they take up less space and they aren't heavy (like the two tons of low-to-medium quality agate I discarded many years ago). If I wanted to take on another collecting hobby, Tim Blackburn's new book would motivate me in the direction of collecting moths.

His book is The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature's Hidden Rules. Dr. Blackburn is a professor of Invasion Biology in London. He bought a lighted moth trap online at the beginning of the Covid lockdown, and found that moth-ing fit in well with his profession and proclivity. He discusses the interconnectedness of ecology and the many interactions that drive the evolution of moths, and by extension, all animals and the plants they eat.

As a student of Invasion Biology, he begins his book with that poster child of invasiveness, the Gypsy Moth, Lymantria dispar. This male moth has the characteristic enormous antennae, with which the male detects very tiny amounts of the pheromone emitted by the female. This image is similar to one in the book, but more clear and in color (only black-and-white photos adorn the book's pages).

Gypsy moths are pan-Mediterranean and Asian originally, and their presence in various part of the British Isles has ebbed and flowed with the vagaries of time. Their introduction into the United States by Leopold Trouvelot in 1868 at first didn't make much impression. His intention was silk production, but that didn't work out well. Some moths escaped (As Malcolm says in Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way."). For a decade they didn't spread far, but then their population exploded. Their caterpillars erupted on trees in such numbers that a tree could be stripped of leaves in a few days, and major portions of some orchards were destroyed. The species name dispar means "destroyer".

Another moth called The Uncertain, Hoplodrina octogenaria, is discussed as one of a group of species that are hard to tell apart. The photo in the book shows three small moths that look alike in markings, though they have slightly different base tones. The Uncertain can only be identified "for certain" by dissecting its sex organs. Only particular differences in this bit of anatomy keep the look-alike moths from interbreeding!

At rest, like this specimen, their size is about 20mm (3/4 inch). In flight their wingspan is about 38mm (<1.5 inch), so they are medium-sized…for a moth. Size is a peculiar matter with moths. A number of taxonomic families consisting primarily of species measuring less than 20mm wingspan are called "micromoths" or "microlepidoptera", yet each family includes some members that are larger, perhaps quite a bit larger. Furthermore, some families consisting primarily of "macromoths" include micro-sized species, including the Noctuidae, to which The Uncertain belongs. So it is a macromoth, but some of its sister species are only 1/3 its size.

This unnamed moth is a typical micromoth. The wings are about 8mm long, so its wingspan is probably 16-17mm.

The smallest moths include those having caterpillars that are "leaf miners": the larva lives between the surfaces of a leaf, eating the flesh between. A caterpillar that can fit inside an oak leaf will develop into a very small moth. Following the rule that small things outnumber big things, there may be several thousand of the big, day-flying moths we call "butterflies", and tens of thousands of similarly-sized night-flying moths, but there are hundreds of thousands of smaller moths known, and it is likely that the total number of moth species is several million. We just don't now yet. Dr. Blackburn surmises that moth species may outnumber beetle species.

Each chapter focuses on a few related matters, such as predator-prey dynamics, migration and other issues of movement, or strategies of food sources. Again and again he reminds us that ecology is a whole, but a very dynamic whole. The year-to-year changes in environmental conditions, including more or less rainfall or higher or lower average temperature (which affect food sources and species vitality), or in-migration of a new species or local extinction of a formerly common species (which may be either a predator on or the prey of certain moths): all affect the continuing vitality of every species. Some become more abundant and some less, and there are often cycles of abundance.

Gradually one realizes that a matter introduced at the beginning of the book is the key to the title. This picture shows a lighted moth trap. This is the jewel box. Every morning it contains many new jewels.

The author reports frequently collecting 200-300 specimens from the trap when used in his London home (a terrace apartment), and about 50% more when used at his parents' place in the Devon countryside.

This emphasizes that moth trapping is a time-consuming hobby. If you are trapping to collect and identify and store the insects you trap, it takes a significant chunk of your day, every day! If the few hundred moths caught belong to 50, or 60 or more species (80 is a common number in a London trap), just the sorting and identifying takes much time, at least when one is learning to recognize the species. I reckon the process gets quicker with experience. Collection trays then multiply…

A similar device for collecting moths, and other night-flying insects, is a sheet with a light shining on it. It is used for an hour or two rather than overnight. A sheet trap is particularly useful if one doesn't plan to collect (and kill) the moths, but just to census them from photographs. The dozen largest moths in this picture can probably be identified right off. A series of closeup photos should allow identification of most of them, at least to genus level.

I have used this method. In my experience, if a sheet trap is used in a backyard, one will gather mostly moths. If it is done in a forested area, a lot of beetles will join the moths, and frequently, a number of flies and small wasps also.

The book is full of ecological information, on which I have barely touched. The author's enthusiasm for his new pastime shines through every page. This is a very enjoyable book, and it may introduce some folks to a rewarding hobby. Natural History Societies in many U.S. states and in many countries have ongoing data collection efforts to which citizen scientists can contribute. The Moths Matter site is one place to start.

I have one issue I must mention. The term "moth-ers" is used in the Acknowledgements, referring to moth collectors and enthusiasts. Throughout the book the hyphen is not used, and confusion with the word for "female parent" is evident. The hyphen is needed! It must never be dropped. Although we have the term "birder" for bird watchers and bird enthusiasts, there is no competing meaning for this word, so no hyphen is needed for it. But please, moth people, embrace that you are moth-ers. Thank you.

Back into tumbling (rocks)

 kw: hobbies, rockhounding, lapidary, rock tumbling, jasper

In March 2008 my brother and I went into the upper Mojave desert, to Lavic, to collect jasper. I wrote about the experience at the time; this post includes several pictures of the jasper. This is a view from the collecting area on Lavic Lake, north toward mountains above the Sidewinder Dunes, a hiking area. The colorful mountains are part of the same series of ranges that includes Calico, which is to the northwest, closer to Barstow.

Looking down near my feet from the same spot, small chunks of the unique jasper known as Lavic Jasper are scattered everywhere. Rock collectors call this "float". More than a dozen pieces of red and brown jasper are seen in this picture.

My wife and I had collected here a few years earlier, but brought back only about ten pounds of rocks. This time my brother and I gathered closer to 30 pounds. 

After I got home I bought a small rock tumbler—on this trip I had visited the Diamond Pacific store in Barstow and obtained grinding grits and polishing compound—and began to tumble in earnest. 

I wore out the cheap tumbler I had bought, so I did more research to get a better quality one. I bought a Thumler's Tumbler, and it has the staying power I need. I finished the last batch of really "clean" stones, those with no serious cracks or pits, in 2012, and reported on the that batch then (with more pictures of the lovely material). I replaced the drive belt once during those four years of on-and-off tumbling.

A couple of months ago I decided to go through the remaining rough material and pick out some that might be worth tumbling. I eventually settled on about six pounds of chunks and pieces, weighing between 10 and 120 grams each. It's best to tumble a range of sizes together. The small rocks get into indentations in the larger ones and help them get abraded more uniformly.

I put just over two pounds (967 grams) into the tumbler along with an appropriate amount of rough grit and water, and set it going. After six days the drive belt broke. I ordered a replacement along with some extra parts I thought I should have as spares, such as the lid, which can wear through. Here is a picture of the larger stones after six days of tumbling. At the start they all had sharp corners.

The third one from the left in the top row features in what comes next. I like it because of its mix of red and green sections. Green is the rarest color for jasper. This picture is one of a series taken November 30, 2023.

I had weighed the stones before I started (967 grams), and I weighed them at this point (925g). The 42 gram difference is 4.3%.

I reloaded the tumbler, including a charge of fresh grit. These clearly need a lot more material removed. I let it go two weeks and then took the stone out, to inspect and weigh (842g, down another 8.6%). I took another series of photos. The yellowish stone at upper left had such a hole in the end that I decided to break part of it off. I added the 2g piece so removed when I reloaded the tumbler and ran everything another two weeks. More photos and more weighing (742g, down a further 10.3%, for a total removal of 23.3%).

I'll quickly show three examples of tumbling progress. Firstly, the green-plus-red one I pointed out above.

I did my best to take all photos at the same scale. Here we see some interesting things happening. Firstly, of course, the stone is getting smaller. The white mineralized crack is still there, and at the right, white mineralization has begun to appear at the tip of the stone. The deep crack at the opposite end shows that this stone may not be suitable for further rough tumbling. I may need to use epoxy filler. Finally, the green material is seen to be rather thin, and much of it has been abraded away. This is a further indication that I should fill the cracks and proceed to finer grinding and polishing with this stone.

Secondly, one of the red stones.

This stone began substantially smaller than the prior one, weighing less than half as much. In the left and middle views, there is a deep gouge, which is almost totally gone in the third view. I'll probably remand this to another round of rough grinding to see if some of the whitish areas can be removed.

Thirdly, a greenish yellow stone with red striping, quite a small one. It started out as about ten grams.

The smallest stones lose the most proportional mass. This one has lost nearly all of the big gouge, so it is almost ready for finer grinding.

This batch of stones is presently set aside while I rough grind another batch. I noticed that the two sessions of two weeks' duration resulted in a slurry containing no trace of the coarse grit I started with. The six-day run still had plenty remaining (which I added back in). For the batch that is running now, I'll start with a ten-day run, and adjust run times to just barely use all the grit.

It will be several weeks before I have more to report. My plan is to do rough grinding on all six pounds of stones, then select which ones to continue with for finer grinding and polishing, or mix-and-match them into two batches for finishing.

Women embracing monsterism

 kw: book reviews, speculative fiction, fantasy, anthologies, women, stereotypes

What would you call a woman who stands up for herself? We'd like to think, "hero" (or heroine), "victor", "winner". Isn't is much more likely that she'd be called "harpy", "bitch", "virago", "termagant"…depending on one's vocabulary? Rarely a word with a positive sense.

Virago Press began fifty years ago, but I only just learned of their existence. The volume in hand just now is Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild, and Untamed, introduced (edited?) by Sandi Toksvig. I find it curious that the subtitle of the book includes the word "wicked". Really? "Wild" and "untamed", great. I'd have preferred those latter two words to be paired with "dynamic" or "intense", or both. Particularly because, while a number of the characters can indeed be wicked, that's not the point.

A virago is an assertive woman. The word initially had a neutral connotation, but it's used negatively (if at all) these days. Depending upon the dictionary one uses, definitions of "virago" can be quite positive: "A strong, courageous woman"; "A female warrior". But it goes downhill rapidly. The opening sentence of the Wikipedia article on the subject is quite condescending: "A virago is a woman who demonstrates abundant masculine virtues."

The opening chapter, "Siren" by Margaret Atwood, consists of an address by that most musical of mavericks to various creatures assembled as the Liminal Beings Knitting Circle. It is at once hilarious and searching. The fourteen chapters that follow are primarily riffs on fourteen culturally negative words for a strong, or untameable, woman: Virago, Churail (from Pakistan), Termagant, Wench, Hussy, Vituperator, Harridan, Warrior, She-Devil, Muckraker, Spitfire, Fury, Tygress, and Dragon.

I'll make only the briefest of comments on a few of them, to avoid spoilers.

First, as a student of the Bible I am very familiar with the story of Deborah, the judge of Israel and prophet, from Judges 4 and 5. "Warrior" by Chubundu Onuzo elaborates on the Biblical account to show how Deborah arose to save Israel when all the male rulers had failed. In the Song of Deborah, the major part of Judges 5, she mocks them thus:

The rulers ceased in Israel, they ceased,
Until that I Deborah arose,
That I arose a mother in Israel.

By the way, the term "the Mother of Israel" is used a few times in the chapter. The quote from Deborah's song is the accurate rendition. She is saying she acted as any mother would to protect her children, and as Jael did in her turn, when she lured the Canaanite leader into her tent and assassinated him with a tent peg and a hammer.

Secondly, "Tygress" by Claire Konda expands a little on the theme "tiger mother". I'm familiar with the concept, from frequent contact with our many Chinese, Japanese and Korean friends. Twin girls that were our son's friends once told him and me that their mother was not satisfied with them receiving all "A" grades. They had to be at the absolute top of the class. My wife remembers her Japanese childhood, taking extra courses after school at a private tutoring organization. Not because her mother had pretensions of her daughter attaining to a higher class, but just because that was expected even at second-class schools.

And finally, the one story I didn't care for was "She-Devil" by Eleanor Crewes. It's in graphic novel style, much too enigmatic. It tries for Gothic horror and instead achieves banal dread. No question is answered, no conclusion reached.

Each story, with that one exception, brings a fresh take on an old word. An excellent collection.