Via The Economist, recent research published by Evan Preisser and Joseph Elkinton yields an interesting result to those concerned with the conservation of Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees. From Virginia to Connecticut, the species has been getting clobbered by an invasive hemipteran, Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (Adelges tsugae), native to Asia. However, comes another sap-sucker, Elongate Hemlock Scale (Fiorinia externa), also invasive, to feed on the hemlock. According to the paper, in experimental infestations, trees inoculated with both bug species fare better than those inoculated with just the adelgid.
A solar-powered bicycle tour?
Via ArtsJournal, Steven McElroy reports from the launch of Broadway Goes Green, an effort sponsored by the New York mayor’s office and the Natural Resources Defense Council to reduce waste (paper, electricity, etc.) in the professional theater and promote a sustainable stage. Turns out that the effort is already underway.
The mayor’s office approached the Broadway League in March about working with theater owners to study the efficiency of their buildings and to find ways to decrease the load on the overburdened electrical grid of Midtown. “They were very surprised to learn that all of our theater owners were already in the middle of doing things on their own,” Charlotte St. Martin, executive director of the Broadway League, said of the city representatives.
Appalachian whiskey
The Scots-Irish seemed little moved by the magnificence of the Great Forest. The Germans were just as brutal to the land, only neater and more law-abiding about it. The English had already swept away coastal pineries to build tobacco plantations run by slaves. They all took from the forest without thinking of anything but their own desires, certainly not thinking that there might be anything sacred there. In this the new Americans were solidly in the mainstream of Western thought. What is distinctive about Appalachia is not how it differed from the rest of the country, but how it distilled the American experience to moonshine clarity. And how long the hangover is lasting.
—Chris Bolgiano, The Appalachian Forest: A Search for Roots and Renewal
Changes, again
Well, I can’t say that I’m overwhelmed by the changes to the profile system provided by Six Apart. What was a TypeKey Profile is now a TypePad Profile.
The profile page is burdened with upsell messages. The shrouded e-mail address feature is gone. Despite what the instructions say, URLs in the About Me section are not auto-linked. And URLs in the Around the Web section don’t render nicely under Safari (woof! it looks even worse under Win/IE7!). Other than that, it does the same job for me that the old system did.
Or, How a mistake by the fabrication shop became a design element
Via The Morning News, Paul Shaw tells “The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway” in a deliciously-illustrated nine-page essay, which includes digressions into the history of the system map, the Chrystie Street Connection snafu, and a refresher on 1970’s-era type technology.
Tells a story
Using the Google Chart API, I added a nifty summary graph to the page of historical data on Wood Duck and Hooded Merganser nest box activity at Huntley Meadows Park.
A force for nature
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a new recruiting video online. No fancy drills with firearms, no freehand rock climbing, no jumping out of helicopters; but some impressive photography nonetheless.
The active chaperone
Something that we always thought we understood, but now we really do: household bleach kills bacteria by unfolding certain proteins in the cell and causing them to irreversibly aggregate—like a hard-boiled egg—according to research published by J. Winter et al. Co-author Ursula Jakob explains the research to Ira Flatow.
At the park: 22
We mustered out this morning to do some finish work on a stream restoration project at Huntley Meadows Park, under the direction of Park Manager Kevin Munroe. The watercourse is East Barnyard Run, which is thought to rise from a spring near the park boundary. Nonetheless, it also drains nearby subdivisions and flows downstream into the main wetland of the park. The streambed is almost fenceline-straight; perhaps it follows the path of an old drainage ditch. In any case, the objective of the restoration project, performed by contractors, is to add some obstacles to the water to calm its flow: an old log, a vein of small boulders, a little island to make a traffic circle.
Our work was to finish some shrub plantings that had been started a couple of weeks ago: elderberry, buttonbush, Viburnum species including Arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum) and Blackhaw (V. prunifolium). Last time out we also planted plugs of Virginia Wildrye (Elymus virginicus), a member of the grasses, and some asters, as I remember. The point of the plantings is to establish a root system to hold the clay of the streambed in place, lest it wash downstream as silt, choking the crayfish and other watery denizens of the marsh.
Much of today’s work was installing anti-deer tree protectors around our shrub plantings. Rather than the familiar plastic tubes, we used a biodegradable gadget made of thin stakes (of cedar?) lashed together and closed around the stem with a bead-and-loop gizmo. It’s sort of like macramé for naturalists. None of what we planted is taller than the protectors yet, so what you see now in the photo is just a grove of stakes. We also surrounded each shrub with a ring of matting to discourage competing plant life.
The island of stakes is easy to find: from just north of the main parking lot, follow the sanitary sewer easement northwest about 150m to the stream, then go downstream about 50m. I will check back in the spring to see what has leafed out.
Crooked Koger watch: 1
Jeffrey S. Koger has pleaded guilty to charges of wire fraud and tax evasion, associated with the embezzlement of homeowners association funds that he managed. Sentencing is set for 6 February 2009. He still faces charges in connection with a shootout with police officers this past February.
Boom
How did we get here? How we know for sure? And most importantly, how do we tell the story of how we got here? These are the questions explored in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s thought-provoking Boom, a highly theatrical science-fiction riff on one culture’s creation story.
Thomas Kamm’s set design for the show does its darnedest to treat Woolly Mammoth’s proscenium-shaped space like a black box. A basement biology research lab with attached living quarters is pushed forward into the auditorium, removing the first three rows of seats; while an upper-level playing space is extended to wrap around to the balcony seating: the effect is a little like the bowl of an operating theater.
In the lab, mysteriously fortified like a bunker, Jules (ever-endearing Aubrey Deeker) and Jo (tough chick Kimberly Gilbert) meet up for a few drinks and some premeditated casual sex—or perhaps the poorly socialized marine biologist Jules has other plans for the two of them. Deeker finds a way to reveal Jules’s unique geekiness without sliding into stereotype. The action is punctuated by loud Kubrickian movie music and louder timpani rolls from Barbara (infra-manic Sarah Marshall), up in the gallery. Jules and Jo don’t seem to be aware of her, although Jo gets a migraine every time Barbara hits the drums, but Barbara seems to be following their story as if she were reading a score.
When disaster strikes, Jules is prepared, more or less; Jo lodges herself somewhere between the denial and anger stages of grief; and Barbara seems to have it all under control.
The piece has some lyrical, positive moments. Jules explains that “biology is optimistic” (somehow I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere before) and that even mass extinctions result in the favorable outcome of new life: the radiation of the mammals from shrews, for instance. And there are some quite funny bits: we all loved the story of the “Halliburton Shale.”
Are there gaps in the narrative? Perhaps. Does the quality of Jules and Jo’s sexual history make sense? Not really. But then there are “gaps in the fossil record,” too.
It all comes unravelled in the end, of course. Jules holds the keys to new life, but doesn’t know it. And as for Barbara, well, imagine Zardoz in charge of the Creation Museum.
- Boom, by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Field trip
Then she happened across a large tunnel burrowed into the side of a wave. “Oh my God!” she cried. “A groundhog hole!”
…Ms. Lin laughed and then paused, reflecting, “I think we’ll cover it up?” But within moments she had changed her mind. “I think you have to let it be what it’s going to be,” she said.
Maya Lin visits her earthwork Wave Field, to be opened to the public at Storm King Art Center next spring.
Doctor Atomic
So what do you get for your $23 ticket to The Met: Live in HD? Well, the food court at Tysons Corner Center doesn’t have the cachet of the plaza at Lincoln Center. Twenty-three bucks doesn’t get you a reserved seat in this almost-full medium-sized auditorium in the AMC Tysons Corner 16, and the program is a simple one-sheet affair. The subtitles are onscreen, not in the chair backs, and the AMC’s technical execution was only serviceable, not flawless (the image was not framed properly for a few minutes; sound and lights came up and down with peculiar timing). But you do get the opportunity to munch popcorn in your seat (a few of us indulged). And the proceedings are framed by backstage patter: it’s awful darn cool to get to hear the SM pass the “maestro to the pit, please” call.
What you do get is a good taste of something like the live experience, and in the case of this electrifying production about the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site in New Mexico, under the scientific direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, that’s something special.
Julian Crouch’s set makes the first impact. Projected on a scrim is the periodic table of the elements known at that time, quaintly missing Francium and Technetium and stopping at Plutonium. The scrim is pulled to reveal a three-level set for the chorus: the effect is of pigeonholes in a rolltop desk, or a warren of office cubicles. The stage is abuzz with activity as preparations for the bomb test are being made.
In the second scene, Sasha Cooke as Kitty Oppenheimer sings a lush, intimate “Am I in your light?” to her husband Robert. The act closes with a powerful “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” from Oppenheimer, sung by Gerald Finley of the piercing, haunted blue eyes.
John Adams is known for his choruses, and the second-act “At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous” is a stunner, as the atomic energy workers react to a vision of Vishnu in the skies. The put-upon meteorologist Frank Hubbard (Earle Patriarco) reports that weather conditions have finally cleared, and the test is on. The penultimate moments of the opera, as the atomic explosion ignites an era, perhaps carry more effect in the actual theater.
Generally, the multi-camera work is unobtrusive (the Met has been televising live performances effectively for years, of course) and follows the action, mixing long shots (a four-shot of Oppenheimer, Kitty, her shadow, and his gigantic one is well-framed) and extreme closeups—pans, zooms, and tilts up from the vantage point of the pit. Once in a while the lighting and exposure levels for Ms. Cooke wash her out.
Which leads me to the following question: do Met performers adjust their makeup when they’re being televised? What I saw looked natural in closeup, so I wonder how it plays in the upper reaches of the balconies.
And where can we score some of those great prop cigarettes? Oppenheimer and Kitty were rarely without one, and the cool thing about the prop is that you can take a drag from it and get a little puff of smoke.
- Doctor Atomic, composed by John Adams, libretto by Peter Sellars, conducted by Alan Gilbert, directed by Penny Woolcock, Metropolitan Opera, New York/HD Live
5-second rule
As reported by Irby Lovette for Living Bird, research by Tomohiro Kuwae et al. provides evidence that Western Sandpipers (Calidris mauri) take a substantial portion of their diet from the biofilm that forms on tidal mudflats. Studying birds during spring migration in the Fraser River estuary in British Columbia, the authors back up their findings with high-speed video and analysis of stomach contents. In addition to the known diet of these beach foragers—macroinvertebrates such as polychaetes, molluscs, crustaceans, and insects—the gooey millimeter-thin layer of “microbes, organic detritus, and sediment in a mucilaginous matrix of extracellular polymeric substances together with non-carbohydate components secreted by microphytobenthos and benthic bacteria” provides up to 50% of the bird’s energy requirements, according to Kuwae and fellow scientists. They also cite previous research that the bill and tongue structure of the Dunlin (Calidris alpina) would also be suitable for biofilm grazing.
Another non-coincidence
Lifehacker posts an entry on archival preservation of newspapers.