About a year ago, I told Fred that, the next time he had his chainsaw out, he might want to think about taking down two of his trees. They stood just outside his back fence; one, dead, the other, dying.
This evening, I am happy that I wasn't trying to get more photos of the garden spider. Had I been doing so, I would have been hit by one of the branches from one of his trees, as it fell. Instead, I was chatting with Hunky Husband, heard the commotion, and watched the upper parts of the trees fall. One tree snapped off at a fairly high point, fell onto the other tree, snapping it off (a bit lower, of course).
I haven't seen Fred - not sure he is in town. Sent him the photos via email.
Most of us have long known of service animals (usually of the canine variety) and work animals (horses, in my day); but there is a new variety about which I may/may not have heard in the past: Mine-Sniffing Rats. The New York Times article tells about a rat that received an award for bravery while working at a speed that humans can only envy.
Rat That Sniffs Out Land Mines Receives Award for Bravery
Magawa, a 5-year-old African giant pouched rat, was recognized with a prestigious honor for his work detecting mines and explosives in Cambodia.
The medal awarded on Friday lauded the “lifesaving bravery and devotion to duty” for work detecting land mines in Cambodia. Its recipient: a rat named Magawa.
Magawa is the first rat to receive the award — a gold medal bestowed by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, a British charity, that is often called the “animal’s George Cross” after an honor usually given to civilians that recognizes acts of bravery and heroism.
....
...The ability to sniff out TNT makes him much faster than any person in searching for land mines, as he can ignore scrap metal that would usually be picked up by a metal detector.
He can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, whereas a person with a metal detector would usually take four days to search an area of that size. When he finds a mine, he signals to his handler by scratching at the earth above it. Unlike humans, Magawa is too light to detonate a mine, so there is minimal risk of injury.
In case you are interested: Magawa is two feet long.
Alert to Twitter users
According to The Verge, "Twitter says it’s working on bringing its “read the article before you retweet it” prompt to all users “soon.” The company began testing the prompt in June, which shows up when people go to retweet a story they haven’t clicked through to actually read."
Monday, 9/21/2020: Having decided to get down to the task of making more/better face coverings for Hunky Husband and me, I was disgusted with myself for having forgotten my lack of elastic for the ear pieces. Gah! I bought three yards of silk for the double inner layer of fabric, but failed to order the elastic. In case there is someone who missed the announcement: Walmart is trying to compete with Amazon as a "go to" online merchandise ordering website. However, there are items for which they have taken time to establish ordering capability. Such was the case with the elastic. It has, since, become available and I have ordered several yards of white and several of black. It is to be delivered during the first week ofOctober. [Added note: The wild bird seed that was ordered at the same time was delivered on the 22nd.]
I still seek a source of two types of light bulbs - and - sanitizing hand wipes.
Tuesday, 9/22/2020: The Wild Turkeys and I are having a contest. They try to see how much of the mulch around our new trees in back they can remove, and how quickly, while I attempt to rake the mulch back into place during my daily outdoor chores. The photo, below, was taken in July; but, it shows some of the turkeys and points out the mulch that they love to scatter.
Wednesday, 9/23/2020: As I stepped outside to gather in this morning's newspaper, there were a couple of bat-like flyers tumbling over our front yard. I could not imagine that we had bats as large as these two appeared to be and, by the time I had taken another step, I realized that there were a number of these tumbling flyers. Aha! It is September. The Common Nighthawks are migrating south with their more-or-less wheeling movement. As happened, it was early enough that it was nearly dark outside, and it was foggy; thus, the birds were flying a bit lower than normally they would have been observed to do. Their tumbling flight was to catch insects around the street light that is near our yard, fueling their long flight to South America. I did not/could not have captured their aerobatic flight; but, YouTube came to my rescue. I recommend full screen for viewing this video (under 2 minutes).
Several times since moving into this house, I've observed migrations of nighthawks - following the same track each year as far as I can tell. Otherwise, seeing nighthawks in our little town is so rare that I cannot, reliably, recall any instances. I do recall (1940s and early 1950s) watching nighthawks dart about in the even smaller town in which my great-grandparents lived. They lived on a relatively busy street, across from a small hotel. As I recall, some of the nighthawks nested atop that hotel - on its flat roof. Their in-flight squawks are unmistakable.
Did I mention it was foggy? Thirty minutes later, as I left for my walk, I found that the "perfectly dry" outdoor surfaces were then "perfectly wet". During my walk, within 0.4 mile of the house, I experienced a "Seattle rain". The rest of my walk was dry.
I continued my fall cleanup in the yard by yanking out another tomato vine (this is the 5th one, so far, this year.) You can see how huge the plant was in the photo, below. It was late producing ripe tomatoes and sparse in production. It's fruit were tasty, however.
The fall yard cleanup continued with my raking cottonwood tree leaves and sticks - for the ninth day in a row. It has been only a couple of hours since I raked and, in the next photo, it is obvious that tomorrow will be another raking day. Unfortunately, I failed to snap a photo "before". The splice of two photos to provide a wide-angle look isn't perfect; but, close enough for government work!
Thursday, 9/24/2020:
On this, my late mother's 106th birthday, News for Nerds led me to a report at The Guardian, concerning the effectivity of impermeable face shields in protecting against aerosol distribution of the novel coronavirus.
Simulation using world’s fastest supercomputer casts doubt on effectiveness in preventing spread of coronavirus
Obviously, my dentist is ahead of the curve since she insists that all staff working on patients wear a surgical mask under the transparent face shield. I would also point out that dentists have used the transparent face shields "forever". I had always understood it to guard them against droplets of spray.
A large garden spideris having her last fling of summer. It's to be in the low 90s (as high temperature of the day) over the weekend, then into the 60s during next week. It was in the mid 60s when I spotted this beauty, below. I never had the opportunity to show her back in a photo - only her front and side.
Friday, 9/25/2020: One of the items at News for Nerds, this morning, concerns helping people become addicted to Facebook. I understand that, just because one uses FB does not imply that they are addicted; but, there are frequently reports in the traditional media that might lead one to conclude that a non-trivial number of users are, indeed, addicted.
Posted by BeauHD from the engaging-analogies dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society. His analogy continued: "Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis. Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more."
Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content. "The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding -- at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war." As director of monetization, he added, "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page form Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."
This item is no longer as timely as usually are my postings from News for Nerds. It got postponed/lost when overcome by other happenings; but, I still think that spying activities in Germany and the US are of interest.
Yeo "would end up using the professional networking website LinkedIn, a fake consulting company and cover as a curious academic to lure in American targets." Some of the targets that Yeo found by trawling through LinkedIn were commissioned to write reports for his "consultancy", which had the same name as an already prominent firm. These were then sent to his Chinese contacts. One of the individuals he contacted worked on the U.S. Air Force's F-35 fighter jet programme and admitted he had money problems. Another was a U.S. army officer assigned to the Pentagon, who was paid at least $2,000 (£1,500) to write a report on how the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan would impact China... According to the court documents, his handlers advised him to ask targets if they "were dissatisfied with work" or "were having financial troubles"...
In 2018, Yeo also posted fake online job ads for his consulting company. He told investigators he received more than 400 CVs with 90% of them coming from "US military and government personnel with security clearances". Some were passed to his Chinese handlers... Dickson Yeo does not appear to have got as far with his contacts as his handlers would have liked. But in November 2019, he travelled to the U.S. with instructions to turn the army officer into a "permanent conduit of information", his signed statement says.
He was arrested before he could ask. The 39-year-old now faces up to 10 years in prison for being an "illegal agent of a foreign power" — but the article notes he was "aided by an invisible ally — the LinkedIn algorithm.
"Each time Yeo looked at someone's profile it would suggest a new slate of contacts with similar experience that he might be interested in..."
IMHO: The article, below, nicely illustrates a good reason why I long ago came up with my "rule" that, "Just because one can do something does not mean that one must do it."
The music piece by the American composer John Cage is played on a special organ inside the medieval church... A compressor in the basement creates energy to blow air into the organ to create a continuous sound. When a chord change happens, it's done manually. On Saturday, soprano singer Johanna Vargas and organist Julian Lembke changed the chord. The BBC notes the score for the 639-year composition is just eight pages long. But though the piece was written in the 1980s, it wasn't until nine years after the composer's death in 1992 that anyone dared to attempt playing it. That performance then began — with a pause that lasted nearly 18 months.
The next chord change is scheduled for February 5 of the year 2022.
The health-news site Stat reports: What caught experts' attention about the case of the 25-year-old Reno man was not that he appears to have contracted SARS-CoV-2 (the name of the virus that causes Covid-19) a second time. Rather, it's that his second bout was more serious than his first. Immunologists had expected that if the immune response generated after an initial infection could not prevent a second case, then it should at least stave off more severe illness. That's what occurred with the first known reinfection case, in a 33-year-old Hong Kong man.
Still, despite what happened to the man in Nevada, researchers are stressing this is not a sky-is-falling situation or one that should result in firm conclusions. They always presumed people would become vulnerable to Covid-19 again some time after recovering from an initial case, based on how our immune systems respond to other respiratory viruses, including other coronaviruses. It's possible that these early cases of reinfection are outliers and have features that won't apply to the tens of millions of other people who have already shaken off Covid-19. "There are millions and millions of cases," said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The real question that should get the most focus, Mina said, is, "What happens to most people...?"
Researchers are finding that, generally, people who get Covid-19 develop a healthy immune response replete with both antibodies (molecules that can block pathogens from infecting cells) and T cells (which help wipe out the virus). This is what happens after other viral infections.
Sir Martin Hairer is an Austrian mathematician working in the field of stochastic analysis, in particular stochastic partial differential equations. He is Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London, having previously held appointments at the University of Warwick and the Courant Institute of New York University. Wikipedia
I am in awe of the work done by the fellow in the above photo because stochastic vibrations was a course in my graduate studies days, years and years ago (before Hairer was born, but who's keeping track?)
Lanodonal writes: A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia. Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige. Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem. His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to "regularity structures," so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.
Hairer, who rents a London flat with his wife and fellow Imperial mathematician, Xue-Mei Li, heard he had won the prize in a Skype call while the UK was still in lockdown. "It was completely unexpected," he said. "I didn't think about it at all, so it was a complete shock. We couldn't go out or anything, so we celebrated at home." The award is one of several Breakthrough prizes announced each year by a foundation set up by the Israeli-Russian investor Yuri Milner and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. A committee of previous recipients chooses the winners who are all leading lights in mathematics and the sciences. Other winners announced on Thursday include a Hong Kong scientist, Dennis Lo, who was inspired by a 3D Harry Potter movie to develop a test for genetic mutations in DNA shed by unborn babies, and a team of physicists whose experiments revealed that if extra dimensions of reality exist, they are curled up smaller than a third of a hair's width.
The size of the eggs shown in Tidbits from naturewas under discussion in the comments to that posting. It reminded me of some photos from previous years that I liked. I may have posted some of the following photos, before; but, I cannot find those postings.
Wren nest - June 2012
The first photo is a closeup, revealing three eggs that later hatched. (Only the bare edges of two of the eggs show at the 5 o'clock position.)
The next photo is of the same nest, from a bit farther away...
...from farther, still...
...and from far enough away that it is undetectable.
Eastern bluebird nest - 2011
The first photo is a closeup of inside the nesting box showing three eggs that later hatched.
The last photo shows Eastern bluebird eggs found between layers of nests, in the box, at the end of the season. I don't know the story of why another nest was built atop these five eggs. Five seems to be the normal number of eggs in a hatch, as far as I've seen in our own nesting boxes. I've also observed that, in general, there are two successful broods each season with a third "incomplete" clutch of eggs abandoned in the heat of summer.
Looking out our kitchen window the other day, I saw a red-shouldered hawk in the grass acting strangely: It was trying to hold some type of critter down with its talons. I had the perfect perspective - head on - to watch until the critter came into view. Thinking it most likely a vole, small bird, or large grasshopper, I waited. It was a medium-sized garter snake, without which (as far as I could tell) the hawk eventually flew up into a tree. Not having had the opportunity to get my camera into play, I am pleased to include the following video from YouTube of a similar happening. The big difference is that the red-shouldered hawk in the video ate the snake. Also, in the current instance, the snake was larger and raised itself up ala one rising from the basket for a snake charmer.
Cleaning out most of the bird nests in our yard, the other day, I found some eggs. Unfortunately, I let them sit around so long that they eventually cracked from expanding gases, leaking onto the saucer into which I had put them. The only ones left in good enough shape for me to photograph were those in the photo, below. The speckled egg is the only Carolina wren egg left in the nest under the foliage of a house plant (spider/airplane plant). The other egg is one of three that were left in the Eastern bluebird nest inside our nesting box. I've not yet set up the ladder to retrieve the house finch nest in the miniature swing hanging from the ceiling of our front porch.
The only nest that I found/could reach in our yard that did not have left-over eggs seemed to be a small bird's nest - in the center of a holly bush. I cannot identify the bird species.
In Halloween came late to our house and other tales of the weekI posted about losing the crown off of my #9 tooth and having a replacement made and installed. Truth be told, the replacement was not very satisfactory having been made too wide, too long, and too thick - not properly shaped or of a hue to match it's next door neighbor, my #8 tooth.
Halloween came early, this year! As I was using my oral irrigator the other night, part of the new crown spalled off and I discovered that the crown had split, vertically, right in the center. I carefully wiggled the "loose" half into place and, again, wore the appropriate night guard to keep me from displacing the crown's pieces during the night.
Carol Ysidro, DDS
Mehvash Shahzada, DDS
When I had my teeth cleaned in June, I had switched back to my previous dentist, Dr Ysidro, rather than the one who lives next door, Fred. I had been unhappy with the new crown and believed that part of the problem stemmed from the method that Fred's office uses in making crowns (milling the crown, themselves, using CAM, and baking it in a small kiln). Dr Ysidro's office has a lab fabricate crowns.
I called Dr Ysidro's dental office the morning after discovering the split crown (her office opens at 7:00am), and was able to make an appointment for 9:00am that day. Had I been unwilling to have Dr Ysidro's new associate, Dr Shahzada, work on me, I would have had to wait for a day.
Ashlie, Dental Assistant
As is usual, most of the work was accomplished by Ashlie, a dental assistant. I was quite pleased with the patience and perseverance shown by Ashlie and Dr Shahzada in accomplishing the computer visualization/digital work to send to the lab; their decision to replace the structural post in the tooth; and the design, fabrication, and fitting of the temporary crown. They took great care in matching the color of the new crown to the crown that is on my #8 tooth. On September 10 we are scheduled for them to install the permanent crown.
Mask up: Although I know exactly how Dr Ysidro looks and I know that the photo of her, above, is a good likeness, I've no idea how good are the likenesses of Dr Shahzada and Ashlie. They had masks and transparent face shields on during the whole procedure, of course. Reflections in the plastic face shields allowed me to watch some parts of the procedures.
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