The image of the day. The lines remind me of cave paintings. Turn your head to the right and imagine that you're looking up at long-winged birds gliding and hovering like sea gulls, a portrait in blues and whites. Or is it slender foxes fleeing, seen from overhead? Or gazelle migration?
This afternoon the snow melted. The art vanished, except from memory.
The raptor had its hawk eyes on our bird feeder—one of several clues that helped us as we tried to identify it.
The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.—physicist Werner Heisenberg, summing up his famous Uncertainty Principle, a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and the study of atoms and sub-atomic particles
The more closely the coloration of the bird matches the photo in the field guide, the less likely some other element of the bird is to match the photo in the field guide. And vice versa.—personal observation, based on personal observation
In this episode of CSI: Maine, (CSI as in Coastal Species Identification), we try to figure out what was sitting in the tree outside our house at 7 this morning.
Pamelia and I knew it was some sort of hawk. We studied it with binoculars and snapped some grainy photos with a pocket camera. The raptors the two of us most often see here are bald eagles and red-tailed hawks, but this wasn't either. It was way too small. Pamelia wondered if it might be a kestrel, but it wasn't quite that small.
An American kestrel. These are only nine or ten inches long. Not what we saw.
Out came the bird books. For once, the descriptions and photos seemed consistent with what we'd seen—well, mostly. The color pattern, the size, the tail shape, the range map, the habitat, the proclivity for hanging out around feeders looking for small birds to kill...everything said that our raptor had been a sharp-shinned hawk except that we couldn't see its shins, which are supposedly exposed and thin (thus seemingly "sharp").
Notice that the tail is squarish. That helped us distinguish the bird from the similar-looking Cooper's hawk.
So, with a degree of uncertainty, we declared our sighting a sharp-shinned hawk. Among birds of prey, it falls in the category called accipiters, or bird hawks, from a Latin word meaning "to take or seize." Goshawks and sparrowhawks are also accipiters. Accipiters are able to maneuver deftly between trees because of their short wings and long, rudder-like tails.
I wasn't sure if our camera was to blame for the red eyes the hawk seems to have in the photos, but it turns out that all North American accipiters have red eyes as adults and yellow eyes as juveniles.
All you need to see them, of course, are the eyes of a hawk.
Art Events For Your Calendar (At Least If You're Going to Be in New York City) •
Rocco Alberico, whose inventive multi-media architectural constructions have delighted Naturalist's Notebook visitors for the last two years, will be showing pieces at the Fountain Art Fair in New York from March 9 to 11. The specifics: 69th Regiment Armory 68 Lexington Avenue at 25th Street Hours: 1pm – 7pm daily $10 day pass / $15 weekend pass www.fountainartfair.com
Here's one of Rocco's pieces (complete with 3-D viewers) enchanting a couple of visitors at The Naturalist's Notebook in 2010. A mechanical mosquito is flying around the top of the structure.
• Works by filmmaker and Notebook friend Nancy Andrews, who teaches at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and whose works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, will be shown at the 92nd Street Y Screening Room (200 Hudson Street) on Wednesday, March 21, at 7:30 p.m.
One of Nancy's inventive and thought-provoking short films.
Here's part of the Y's writeup of the event: "Nancy Andrews and Jim Trainor [who also has films being shown] create highly original work that borrows freely from existing film genres both high and low—shaped, inverted and recombined to their own ends.
"Both filmmakers share a fascination with animals, with the uniqueness of sensory apparatus in other species, and with how their consciousness in turn differs from that of the human animal. To do so demands a certain speculative empathy and a willingness to embrace the humor that comes with the territory—animation, in this endeavor, lends itself well to the task. Andrews’ multi-styled “montage of attractions”—including puppets, pixilation, costumed animals and song—exhibits all the no-holds-barred moxie of a vaudeville revue as produced by paranormalist Charles Fort."
The two films of Nancy's being shown are Behind the Eyes Are the Ears (26 minutes) and On A Phantom Limb (35 minutes). Nancy will be on hand to discuss the movies. Go see her and Rocco!
Answers to the Last Puzzlers
1) Here are the unscrambled nature, science and art words:
a) mexipreten = experiment
b) tbraib = rabbit
c) creatorlow = watercolor
d) yaneh = hyena
2) The Water in the Cup riddle from braingle.com asked you to figure this out: A man in a restaurant asked a waiter for a juice glass, a dinner plate, water, a match, and a lemon wedge. The man poured enough water onto the plate to cover it. "If you can get the water on the plate into this glass without touching or moving this plate, I will give you $100," the man said. "You can use the match and lemon to do this." A few minutes later, the waiter walked away with $100 in his pocket. How did the waiter get the water into the glass?
Stumped? Here is braingle.com's answer: First, the waiter stuck the match into the lemon wedge, so that it would stand straight. Then he lit the match, and put it in the middle of the plate with the lemon. Then, he placed the glass upside-down over the match. As the flame used up the oxygen in the glass, it created a small vacuum, which sucked in the water through the space between the glass and the plate. Thus, the waiter got the water into the glass without touching or moving the plate. You can try this experiment at home with appropriate supervision.
Today's Puzzlers
1) Unscramble these words from nature, science and art:
a) flacterych
b) exfoglov
c) ioncrate
d) loarchac
What species of kite is this kite?
2) What is the nature-based origin of the word kite?
a) The Norse word kitte, meaning small, lively animal
b) The Old English word cyta, which described the type of hawk that we now call a kite
c) The Chinese word qi tao, meaning flying dragons of the sort that nowadays are displayed in Chinese New Year parades
The other night we were feeling sleepy and it was too late to drive to the Dr. Seuss movie. Pamelia and I chose the obvious entertainment alternative: a Great Courses DVD series on particle physics.
O.K., we didn't make it through all 24 lectures. But over time we will. University of Colorado professor Steven Pollock, worthy of his status as a Pew/Carnegie National Teaching Scholar, carefully guided us as we zoomed in on the so-called microcosmos—the realm of atoms and of particles even smaller than atoms.
This is the world stripped to its basics. Particle physics dismantles objects into their most minute component parts, going from, say, a stick of butter to its molecules to the atoms that compose those molecules to the sub-atomic particles that make up the atoms. You would think that this would be a process of simplification, like sorting your dark socks from your light socks or paring an apple until you end up with one little seed in your hand. It is not. The laws of classical physics that apply to bigger structures don't apply to nano-particles. The wacky laws of quantum mechanics do, and they are a DVD set in themselves. And then some.
The enthusiastic Professor Pollock steered us clear of the details of quantum mechanics but, before we dozed off, left us with some vivid images of size and scale. I know I'm always talking about size and scale. I really don't mean to bring the subject up so often, but it's hard to fully understand how the universe and the Earth evolved and how the world works without at least trying to grasp how long 13.7 billion years is or how far it is to the next galaxy or how tiny some of the most important pieces of the world are.
So let's think small. All atoms are roughly the same size (though not the same mass), according to Professor Pollock. They are one ten-billionth of a meter across. How small is that? In size, an atom is to an apple as an apple is to planet Earth. Pause. The circumference of an apple is several inches. The circumference of the Earth is 25,000 miles. Wow.
But let's think even smaller. An atom is made of a nucleus that has electrons revolving around it—sort of (but not really) like planets circling the Sun. Now imagine that the nucleus is a grape sitting on the 50-yard line of a football field. The electrons (which are too small to even measure) would be circling out near the end zones. That is a startling image. It means that atoms, the building blocks of our world, are made up almost entirely of empty space. That in turn means that your seemingly rock solid body, your six-pack abs and your buns of steel are airier than Swiss cheese and donut holes. And that is where today's particle physics session ends.
With the right animation and some zany particle-character names, this might just be a cool topic for a future Dr. Seuss movie.
Birds and Worms We're seeing more goldfinches, nuthatches, robins and other species as we move closer to spring. On a walk early this morning we passed a tree full of cedar waxwings. Here are a couple of photos from this week.
Those are two of the cedar waxwings in the top photo. They're gregarious birds who love to eat berries. This fluffed-up robin was a striking sight on a snowy afternoon.
Upon seeing the robins, I wondered where the earthworms are. The answer is that many of them are as much as six feet underground, below the frost line, waiting for the soil to warm up. They burrowed down there last fall, formed a protective, slimy ball around themselves and hunkered in. Some types of worms produce a non-toxic antifreeze that keeps them alive all winter. Others lay eggs in cocoons in the soil (these look like little pearls) in late fall and then die; the eggs hatch when the ground is warm enough.
The One-Sentence Challenge
Back to physics for a moment. One of the greatest and most creative physicists ever was Richard Feynman, who made major contributions to quantum mechanics, worked on the Manhattan Project, and was the scientist who figured out that a faulty O ring caused the Challenger disaster. As a professor he was known for trying hard to describe even the most complex concepts in comprehensible terms. He believed that if a subject couldn't be explained so that a college freshman could grasp it, scientists didn't adequately understand the subject themselves.
Here's a thought-provoking question Feynman once asked: "If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?"
That is an intriguing question to ask not only about science but also any other field. What would that sentence be if it had to convey all of our collective knowledge about art? Or baseball? Or music? What one sentence, if passed on to a future generation, would best describe and explain you personally? I'd love to hear any suggestions you have—a single sentence on any topic.
For the record, here is Feynman's one science sentence: "All things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."
One More Thing...
In his talk on the tininess of atoms and sub-atomic particles, Professor Pollock passed on this poem from Jonathan Swift, the Irish writer better known for Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal:
So, naturalists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite 'em And so proceed ad infinitum.
Five Questions Actor Alan Alda is a science geek. He is a founding member of the Stony Brook University Center for Communicating Science. This week he published an essay in the journal Science challenging scientists to more clearly explain their theories and findings. He launched a month-long contest in which the challenge is to answer the question "What is a flame?" so than an 11-year-old can understand it. A panel of 11-year-olds will choose the winner. Entries can be in the form of writing, video or graphics and can be submitted to the website: http://www.flamechallenge.org/
Alan Alda
Alda notes that kids often ask seemingly simple questions that are tricky to answer. But those sorts of questions help all of us understand concepts more clearly. In a recent survey in the United Kingdom asking parents what science-related questions their children posed, these were the five most common ones:
1) Why is the Moon sometimes out in the day?
2) Why is the sky blue?
3) Will we ever discover aliens?
4) How much does the Earth weigh?
5) How do airplanes stay up?
No one ever said being a parent was easy.
Food for Thought
This month's bulletin from MOFGA (Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, one of the oldest and strongest such state organizations in the country) listed a showing of the documentary Two Angry Moms. I hadn't heard of the film, but I did some research and found that (along a similar line as Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution) it focuses on the dismal state of school lunch programs and why those programs serve so much high-fat, high-sugar, low-nutrition food. Here is a lengthy trailer for the movie if you're interested:
Notebook Flashback
Three years ago this month we were preparing for the first season of The Naturalist's Notebook. The building in Seal Harbor was undergoing a massive renovation, a pair of young collaborators, Pat Johnson and Anne Mittnacht, had just moved in with us, and on a warm March day we went down to the water's edge at low tide to tear woolen fabric into strips to make what some of you have come to know as the Notebook's unique and colorful braided rugs.
Pat and Pamelia tearing the strips.
Some of our rug coils that the ocean-front tearing (plus a lot of cutting, sewing and ironing) produced.
Today's Puzzlers
1) Unscramble these words from science, nature and art:
a) mexipreten
b) tbraib
c) creatorlow
d) yaneh
2) This is a riddle borrowed from the Braingle.com website (http://www.braingle.com/Science.html), where you can find lots of fun brainteasers:
A man in a restaurant asked a waiter for a juice glass, a dinner plate, water, a match, and a lemon wedge. The man poured enough water onto the plate to cover it. "If you can get the water on the plate into this glass without touching or moving this plate, I will give you $100," the man said. "You can use the match and lemon to do this." A few minutes later, the waiter walked away with $100 in his pocket. How did the waiter get the water into the glass?
The story behind the Grand Theater in Ellsworth, Maine, is that in May 1933, in the middle of the Depression, a mentally troubled dishwasher overheard two businessmen talking about what to do about some dilapidated buildings in town. The dishwasher decided to light the buildings on fire. The ensuing conflagration destroyed most of downtown Ellsworth.
Five years later the reviving city invested in a new movie theater on Main Street. The Grand opened with a showing of Holiday, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Over the next 40 years, like a thousand other old downtown theaters across America, the Grand slowly declined. At one point the owners even installed a boxing ring and started holding weekly bouts in order to bring in more money.
The theater was rescued by a nonprofit in 1975. Today, after a few more ups and downs, the Grand hosts events 330 days a year, from concerts to plays to Metropolitan Opera simulcasts. The other night, Leonardo da Vinci showed up.
We settled into our seats in the old theater to watch Leonardo Live, an entertainingly produced, high-definition tour of the acclaimed da Vinci exhibition that opened at the National Gallery in London last November. The same film may be showing right now at a theater near you. Go see it. You'll learn more about not only da Vinci's work and life but also about the details of staging a big art show.
As I've mentioned before, if The Naturalist's Notebook had its own Mount Rushmore, da Vinci—a genius in both art and science—would be carved into it. Here's a photo quiz to test (or add to) your Leonardo knowledge (answers at the bottom):
Lady With An Ermine
1) Why might have da Vinci have painted the woman above holding an ermine?
a) The ermine was a symbol of Lorenzo de Medici, who was Leonardo's patron for seven years.
b) The ermine was a symbol of purity; da Vinci himself wrote that an ermine would rather die than let its coat get dirty.
c) The ermine was a symbol of science that da Vinci snuck into the painting; he wrote in his diary that "the mind of a stoat [another name for an ermine] exceeds in capability all but the most practical of princes."
2) When was da Vinci born?
a) July 4, 1584
b) October 2, 1602
c) April 15, 1452
The building in the background of these questions is the National Gallery in London, which hosted the da Vinci exhibition.
3) (above) What is an alternate title of the Mona Lisa
(I'm repeating the questions in the photos, some of which are hard to read; the multiple-choice answers seem easy to read)?
The full name of the exhibition in London was Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan.
4) (above) Leonardo worked as an apprentice to which Italian artist?
The architectural drawings of da Vinci are famous, but when the National Gallery was built in the 1830s it was ridiculed for having mishmash of disproportionate architectural elements. The building was only one room deep because a workhouse was located behind it. Writer William Makepeace Thackaray ridiculed the gallery—which has since been expanded—as "a little gin shop of a building."
5) (above) Why are Leonardo's notebooks very difficult to read?
The National Gallery sits on London's Trafalgar Square.
6) (above) How did Leonardo study anatomy?
The da Vinci exhibition is considered the most complete show of Leonardo's works ever staged.
7) (above) Leonardo's famous drawing of the proportions of man is called what?
Da Vinci had a reputation for not finishing works, but the incomplete sections of some of his pieces seems to add strength and emphasis to the finished sections.
8) (above) Leonardo is believed to have been...
Leonardo and Michelangelo—who was a generation younger—were rivals of a sort; Leonardo once said that the musculature drawn by Michelangelo on a man's back made the back look like a bag of walnuts.
9) What country did Leonardo move to [later in life]?
This little Leonardo hung out at the Notebook last summer before someone purchased him.
10) Because he had so many talents and such a curiosity about the world, da Vinci is considered the model of the: a) Renaissance Man b) Inquisition Questioner c) Basso Profundo
Here Comes The Lorax Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, would have turned 108 years old on March 2. His birthday coincides with the release of The Lorax, a big-screen version of his famous environmental fable. Here's a sneak peek at the trailer:
Answers to the Last Puzzlers (da Vinci answers are farther down):
1) The unscrambled words:
a) pitapoopmush = hippopotamus
b) noidratia = radiation
c) rusiv = virus
d) pyhonot = typhoon
2)
a) It is TRUE that DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid.
b) It is TRUE that human DNA contains about 25,000 genes.
c) It it NOT TRUE that one gene contains about 25,000 types of DNA.
d) It is TRUE that plants and animals both have DNA.
Answers to the da Vinci quiz:
1) b
2) c
3) c
4) c
5) a
6) b
7) b
8) b
9) a
10) a
