Overheard at the Bubble House

Some stoned philosopher:

I am the sum of all my lovers.

I am light. I believe in God, yes.

You have much potential for growth as I have ability to make a PDF document.

What am I gonna do, form a charity of sperm capitalism?

Birding with Joanna and her Dad

Definitely the most frustrating part of Finals period is not necessarily the stress and the busyness, but the fact that I have to miss spring migration! Finally, I got a chance to head into the Crum this morning with Joanna and her dad, which was a nice treat. We headed out around 1030 am, which is a bit of a late start for me, but it didn't matter as we found some great birds!

Alligator Rock was the most productive I've ever seen it, as I got great looks at most of my warblers there. On the way down to the creek, a crow raucously attacked a Sharp-shinned Hawk that had strayed into its territory, and the hawk settled into the forest edge by the Science Center parking lot. At the creek itself, I found my very first Spotted Sandpiper for the Crum! The other highlights include several great looks at a Veery, two Great Blue Herons soaring over the meadow and perching together, and getting to share the birds with two other people!

1. Great Blue Heron - 2, flew over the meadow and settled into a tree. Probably a mated couple.
2. Turkey Vulture - 1
3. Sharp-shinned Hawk - 1, behind Science Center
   
4. Spotted Sandpiper - 1, new for the Crum! Middle of creek, at upper pipe creek crossing
5. Mourning Dove - 7
6. Red-bellied Woodpecker - heard only
7. Downy Woodpecker - heard only
8. Hairy Woodpecker - 1, gorgeous male, Hemlock bluffs
9. Northern Flicker - 4, great looks at several flying birds in the Holly Collection
10. Eastern Wood-Pewee - 1, sallying at Alligator Rock, caught a yellow butterfly (a sulfur?)
11. Acadian Flycatcher - 1, upper pipe creek crossing
12. Blue Jay - heard only
13. American Crow - several
14. Tufted Titmouse
15. Carolina Chickadee
16. American Robin - innumerable
17. Wood Thrush - 1, heard only at trestle
18. Veery - 2, behind Science Center and at Hemlock bluffs, latter calling
19. Gray Catbird - 1, heard only, across from rhododendrons
20. Northern Parula - heard only, Alligator Rock and Holly Collection
21. Chestnut-sided Warbler - possibly heard behind Science Center
    
22. Black-throated Blue Warbler - heard only, Alligator Rock and above Holly Collection
23. Yellow-rumped Warbler - 2, Alligator Rock
24. Black-throated Green Warbler - several heard, one given great looks at Alligator Rock
25. Black-and-white Warbler - 1, great looks at Alligator Rock. Still can't hear these guys.
26. American Redstart - 1, great looks for Joanna at Alligator Rock.
27. Ovenbird - 2, below amphitheater
28. Northern Cardinal - 1 bright male by Lang
29. White-throated Sparrow - 5 above Holly Collection. Still here?!
30. Song Sparrow - 6, singing around Crum Meadow
31. Brown-headed Cowbird - 8 in Crum Meadow, both male and female
32. Common Grackle - 2 at Holly Collection entrance
    

Where Things Lie

How many times have I written in this blog since the school year started? Once? Maybe twice? In any case, not frequently enough.

It's not that I don't know what to write about. I have a lineup of potential talking points, ready to go. The thing is, I have a lot to say about those talking points, and not enough time to really expand on them to the point where I'd be satisfied with what I had to say. I'd prefer not to spend only a single paragraph talking about Global Warming, for instance, but that's all it seems I have time for these days. I guess I could write these posts paragraph-by-paragraph, but I feel like that would lack any consistency in voice and view. If I were to do that, I might as well write a book, or a formal essay for publication or something. Somehow, my blog doesn't feel like the right forum for that sort of thing anymore.

I'm not abandoning this blog completely, I still plan on writing in it occasionally, for sure. But to fit my more time-constrained lifestyle these days, I'm starting to transfer my thoughts to Twitter instead. So if you're still interested in where I'm at these days, subscribe to this blog's rss feed, and follow me on Twitter. Links continue to my posted at my del.icio.us page. And thanks for keeping up!

Spring Migration Timing

Currently re-reading Scott Weidensaul's Living on the Wind, a personal account of bird migration in the Americas, while studying how and why birds migrate, and what the future of migratory bird conversation looks like. In high school, it was one of my favorite books, as it combined both my scientific fascination of birds along with my more personal connection to birds and their environments. There's a lot of really scientifically interesting stuff on the mechanisms of bird migration, but there's also some really emotional stuff about the death of thousands of Swainson's Hawks due to insecticides in Argentina, for instance.



Re-reading it now, it's not quite as good as I remembered. The book doesn't have a clear narrative arc, which I'm fine with, but it also doesn't do the 'sprawling New Yorker style' that McPhee does so well, and that I've been reading so much of lately. Instead, there really doesn't seem to be much of a structure at all, and feels like facts and stories haphazardly thrown together. There are probably better ways to structure this book.

Anyways, one small factoid caught my attention as I was reading the second chapter. It was mentioned that birds know when to migrate based primarily on two factors: genetic predisposition, and photoperiod (length of daylight).

You would think, then, that birds' arrival and departure times would be really consistent. Photoperiod doesn't vary much from year-to-year as far as I know, and genetic predisposition is obviously pretty immutable. The only thing delaying departures and arrivals that I can think of would be things like weather encountered en-route.

Sometimes, birds do arrive really consistently. I'm terrible about keeping records about this kind of thing, but I've heard of Dark-eyed Juncos showing up in people's yards on the exact same day every single year, plus or minus one day, as just one example of consistency.

But on the other hand, spring migration for the past few years has not been consistent at all. Again, I don't have set dates for this at all, but most other birders seem to agree, from what I can tell. Freshman year, I was getting most of the exciting neotropical migrants a week or so before Finals period started. It was fun and frustrating at the same time, I could use birding as a break from my studies, yet that only made me want to spend even more time in the field. By the end of the semester, Alison and I had even found Baltimore Oriole nests, presumably with young already inside, being tended to by adults. That must have meant that the birds had arrived many weeks before.

Yet Sophomore year, the major spring birds didn't arrive until the last week of Finals. I didn't even see my first Baltimore Orioles until the day before I left, not to even speak of nest-building and young-feeding. That's a two or three week delay, compared with their arrival time my freshman year! I was abroad in Australia my junior year, but from what I heard reported on the email listservs, migration was also unusually late last year. Everyone's been blaming it on Global Warming, but is that really the case?



So if migration is driven by genetic predisposition and photoperiod, neither of which seems variable, how could migration timing be so off? Global Warming doesn't seem to factor into that. I thought about it some, and the best explanation I can come up with is that natural selection actually acted on genetic predisposition. Freshman year, the birds I'd seen arrive before or at the peak of migration may not have had very good breeding success, maybe because temperature-driven fruits and insects hadn't fully emerged yet. Therefore, the late arrivals, had the highest breeding success rates, and so the next year, they and their offspring arrived late, as that is their genetic predisposition.

I obviously have no data whatsoever to back this up. If fruits and insects emerged late, I guess that means it was a cold spring, so I could go back and look at temperature data, if I wanted. What that might also mean is that migration arrivals are fluctuating, but self-regulating. Over the next few years, small genetic mutations may create early arrivers, who will do well, and gradually migration timing will become earlier again, but then another cold snap could occur, and we'd see late migrations the next year. I'm sure the data on migration timings vs. temperature exists, I just need to find the time to seek it out.

How's my theory sound?

By the way, sorry for taking so long to write another post. It's gonna be a busy, busy semester.

Rain Dogs

A few months ago I saw Knocked Up, and it was pretty good, but the reason I'm bringing it up now is because recently I've been listening to a lot of Tom Waits, and I just now remembered a scene in the movie where one of the stoners is wearing a Rain Dogs t-shirt, and I was probably the only person in the theater who noticed that, and laughed. Along those same lines, the album's Wikipedia article tells me that one of the guitarists in Panic! at the Disco has Rain Dogs lyrics tattooed on his wrists. What?

Maybe it's the indie elitist in me protecting hallowed artistic principles from being exposed to the unsophisticated bourgeois, because that could lead to ruin! Joking aside, despite all the bizarre attributes of Mr. Waits and his music, I think that I always realized that at its core, his music is really quite simple. His songs are pretty much all folk or blues melodies, but he mangles them with his trainwreck of a voice, the noisy avant-garde jazz instrumentation, and the sometimes disturbing lyrics. At its core, there shouldn't be anything wrong with the uneducated masses having the ability to enjoy Rain Dogs, because it's really no different in structure from what everyone's heard before. Starostin noted this before, but Rain Dogs is a great album that can appeal to the common consumer with its traditional structures and melodies, but thrill the experimental connoisseur with its exhilarating voicings and backdrops, and finding that collision of accessibility and experimentation is really at the core of every music fan's lifelong search.


photo by Anton Corbijn, from Anti Records

But one thing I've come to realize about Rain Dogs is that unlike the vast majority of albums out there, it is actually an album, not just a convenient collection of recently-written songs. On most artists' albums, and even on most albums from Waits himself, it's easy to find a few tracks that you think are great, listen to them over and over, maybe throw them on a mix or your radio show, that sort of thing. But not with Rain Dogs. I find it practically impossible to isolate any one track on this album, and still enjoy it. These songs sound very incomplete when on their own, but totally come to life in the context of the album.

There seems to be an emotional arc to Rain Dogs, and it reaches two peaks. In the first half, we get a lot of sinister quiet and some frustrated rage, and it builds and builds until we reach the gloriously cathartic 'Hang Down Your Head', before slowly unwinding with the wonderful 'Time'. The second half seems to veer between sentimental introspection and chaotic, drunken ramblings, before finally our hero takes those internal emotions and pours out his heart to the world in the passionate 'Downtown Train', which Rod Stewart probably butchered but I haven't actually got the interest in seeing how badly he did it. And finally, we're left with 'Anywhere I Hang My Head', which as I'm typing this suddenly appears to be a reference to the earlier 'Hang Down Your Head', which would suddenly construct a brilliant structure to the album, but ignoring that for now, it's musically a glorious close. It's very, very interesting to me that despite the album's noisiness, creepiness, and overall strangeness, the two emotional peaks are both very straightforward rock songs, and I think that works outstandingly well.


photo by flickr user _ken_

Because of its cohesiveness, listening to Rain Dogs the whole way through is akin to watching a good movie, it seems to me. And that made me start thinking about the scales on which popular creative output operates. The standard pop song is 3-4 minutes long, a music album is around 45 minutes, the typical movie is somewhere around 2 hours, and finally, we've got books, and depending on the reader's dedication, those could take days, weeks, even months to finish. And I'm very curious as to how those scales of digestion affect the overall impact. Are books more powerful than songs, because they have more room to expand, and you're immersed in them longer and deeper? Or should songs be lauded because they can pack so much into so little time?

For me personally, though I enjoy all of them, I've always gravitated towards the album, but unfortunately it also seems to be the hardest to pull off successfully. It's relatively easy to craft a song, but crafting an entire album to bring the listener along on seems like a much more difficult task, and one that many artists seem to ignore completely. I think it's almost analogous to a chaptered novel, or perhaps closer, a collection of short stories. There isn't much of a cinematic equivalent, as collections of short films are rare, only Coffee and Cigarettes really comes to mind, and that wasn't all that great. The very rarity of the cohesive and consistent album might actually be the reason that I enjoy them so much, as I appreciate the effort that the artist has made to ambitiously craft a work on that scale.

With all that said, I guess I haven't really said much about how much I actually like Rain Dogs, eh? Well, you don't need me to tell you that it's really great. This is not an album you can knock. My only complaint is the aforementioned opinion that the songs feel really weak when stripped outside of the album. If this was an album filled with perfect singles somehow cohesively arranged into a brilliant whole, then well, I would probably stop listening to music. As it is, it's got pretty good songs, but mostly it's a brilliant album. One of the best ever, really.


Rating: 11.3/12



photo by flickr user ferminet

The RBC Center is the Entertaiment Mecca of Raleigh, North Carolina

Couldn't find the words...should've brought a poet...

The End of Harry Potter: Predictions

Disclaimer: Obviously, I haven't read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet, so what follows are some predictions I'm making on what will happen. I correctly predicted the ending for book 6, so who knows, maybe my strategies and hunches will work again. That said, if you want a clean slate heading into your reading, avoid this post. But if you're curious and speculative like me, I'd love some feedback. Again, what follows are just predictions, reader discretion advised, so I'm not responsible for totally ruining your appreciation.

I knew Dumbledore was going to die in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince once I took a look at the prominent place he had on the book's cover. Off the top of my head, every other book in the series features Harry alone, and so Dumbledore's presence told me that his place was going to be prominent, and given the book's tone and place in the series, the only logical conclusion would be that he wouldn't make it to the end. And that turned out to be correct.

And I think that's key to unlocking these books: the cover. Mary GrandPre, the cover artist for the US edition of the books, gets an advance copy from Rowling, reads it, and creates the art based on what she sees fit. Clearly then, the cover of the books must hint at the book's major plot points and themes, you can see that in every book's cover. There's always Harry carrying a wand or a broomstick or whatever, but littered throughout the cover are also symbols representing the book's plot. It's always been a joy of mine to go back and re-examine the covers after finishing the books, and finally noticing all the things that the covers practically foretell. With all the hype surrounding the release of the 6th book a few years ago, I used that to figure out that Dumbledore would probably be killed. Rarely is the major revelation so clearly shown, usually only minor plot pathways are illustrated, but with a book as important as the final book in the series, the ending must be hinted at somewhere.


So that's why I think the cover is important. Without fail, they provide us with valuable clues to uncover the book's plot. Now, let's try that strategy with the cover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:



There isn't too much to be said about this. The front cover only shows Harry gesturing into space, presumably at an enemy, which is presumably Voldemort. The setting appears to be some sort of cemetary, just like in Goblet of Fire. So there's some sort of major battle, it seems. Obviously that's not a surprise, though I would've been amused if Harry had just accidentally fallen off a cliff during a Horcrux-finding mission or something, ending the book.

But I wanted to know what's on the back cover and the sleeves, in other words, the full artwork. The results absolutely stunned me:



Based on just the front cover, we thought Harry Potter was casting a spell at Voldemort, but what's this? Voldemort is found to his left, the direction opposite to which Harry has his attention focused. And moreover, this is the part that completely floored me, it actually looks like they're facing the same thing! They're not battling at all!

Let's take this in for a moment. The front cover matches our expectations, as Harry Potter engages in some sort of battle. But when we zoom out, and look at the entire artwork, we find that Harry Potter and Voldemort aren't even fighting! In fact, it looks like they may even be cooperating and fighting a common enemy. This is not an accident. This is what the artist intended.

---

But how can this be? Some quick Wikipedia research to jog my memory uncovered exactly what I was looking for: a mysterious section near the end of book 4, after the Triwizard Tournament and Harry's witnessing of Voldemort's return. I quote from the text:

"He said my blood would make him stronger than if he'd used someone else's," Harry told Dumbledore. "He said the protection my mother left in me - he'd have it too..."
For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore's eyes. But next second, Harry was sure he had imagined it, for when Dumbledore had returned to his seat behind the desk, he looked as old and weary as Harry had ever seen him.

Even at the time I first read it, this excerpt was extremely puzzling to me. Dumbledore expresses a flicker of triumph, only for Harry to become convinced that it was something illusory. Why? Perhaps more importantly, why would Rowling care to point this out? It's never referred to ever again.



But there is significant reason to believe that it plays a crucial part in what will happen in book 7, based on this interview with Rowling, excerpted:

MA: Does the gleam of triumph still have yet to make an appearance?

JKR: That's still enormously significant. And let's face it, I haven't told you that much is enormously significant, so you can let your imaginations run free there.

I think that's key. And I think it's connected with my interpretation of the book's cover, showing Harry Potter and Voldemort almost collaborating.

So here's my theory:



Dumbledore expresses throughout the series that Lily Potter's love is the reason that Harry survived Voldemort's curse, as Voldemort does not understand love. Dumbledore believes this to be his downfall, as he believes that love can conquer even the greatest magic. This is driven home even deeper in book 6 after his death as everyone is recuperating in the hospital.

In the quote then, we see that Voldemort essentially takes some of Harry's love to make him stronger. While Harry finds this to be a cause of concern, I think that Dumbledore sees it as an opening. Perhaps, he may think, Voldemort can now appreciate the power of love, and can perhaps even be swayed by it.

And this is where I think the cover comes in. With a bit of hand-waving, here's my conclusion.

Harry and Voldemort are shown as allies. Because of Dumbledore's gleam of triumph, I believe that Voldemort also comes to understand the power of love, joins forces with Harry on the side of good, and the series ends in peace.

Let me repeat that. Harry and Voldemort become allies. For the side of good.



With that out of the way, there's a few minor things I want to note. First, notice that the cover has curtains on both sides, almost like stage curtains closing. Nice touch for the final book.

It's also worth noting that this cover reveals practically nothing about plot details, at least as far as I can tell. We have no clue about the fate of the horcruxes, the identity of R.A.B. (the consensus seems to be Regulus Black, which makes sense), or how Wormtail will repay his debt to Harry, if ever. And there's dozens of other plot lines that are still unresolved, but those are the ones I find most important to book 7. Besides, of course, the true allegiances of Snape, which I doubt anyone can predict, I have to give credit to Rowling for setting that up well.

And of course, my prediction could turn out to be completely wrong. It's still greatly possible that Voldemort kills everyone on the planet, and the book ends in darkness. I'd be really interested in seeing the popular and critical response to the series if something like that were to happen. For that reason, plus the marketing repercussions, I can't see it happening.

But there's two things to worry about with regards to my prediction. First is the prophecy, that only one of them can live while the other survives. I haven't looked at the wording closely, but perhaps there's a loophole? It wouldn't be the first time Rowling has used the trick. The other is the title, which must be equally as important as the cover. What is meant by the Deathly Hallows? I'm at a total loss. It sounds very dark, but that's about as far as I can get. It certainly doesn't match my prediction.

But none of this will matter in one week. The book will be out, we can look back at this post and laugh, and sort through the aftermath of the end of Harry Potter. I'm not ready to think about it yet, I need to reserve judgment until I read the book. Until then though, let me know what you think about my theory, and offer up your own.