soapbox

Could it be?

Yes/no?

Courtesy the blog feed over at PvP.

(click image to view larger)

I thought I’d stick with the avian theme today: European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) on Boston Common, 16 Sept 2007.
focal length: 432 mm, aperture: f/3.5, shutter: 1/160, distance: 2.5 meters

It is estimated that the North American population of european starlings numbers around 200 million. All these birds descend from a population of 60-100 individuals which were brought from Europe and released in New York’s Central Park in the early 1890’s. This specimen is a juvenile. Adults are more predominantly black.

Intro story: we’ve been doing a good bit of Craigslisting the past couple weeks, and interestingly enough the best acquisitions have been free: flower pots, an analog multimeter (with working 9-volt battery!), and a hummingbird feeder. The flower pots have so far been not fully realized, with just a small basil plant planted, but the multimeter allowed me to fix a lamp (that we had previously acquired FOR FREE), and the hummingbird feeder has been very successful.

We cleaned, filled, and set up the feeder yesterday afternoon, and by the evening we’d seen four different hummers! A couple females, one male which we have come to nickname “fatty”, and another smaller male, maybe of a different species. I think we’ve seen Calypte Anna (Anna’s Hummingbird), and also a Broadtail?

Which brings us to this post’s headline: I was using a crappy little digital with minimal manual features, plus the hummingbirds are skittish about big moving creatures inside the apartment so I had to be careful. B/c I’m shooting into the sky, both photos are backlit, and the females flew off before I could move the screen door out of the way (thus, the camera autofocused on the screen and not the birds.)

In case you haven’t seen this article, it’s kind of interesting. Some people thought a meteor landed near their village and large scale sickness and nausea resulted.

The really lovely thing though is one of the quotes where U. Chicago geophysicist Larry Grossman says “”Sometimes these things land hundreds of thousands of miles away from where [people] think they will land.”

Given that the circumference of the Earth is only a few tens of thousands of miles, I’m wondering where all these things are landing. Then again, maybe the reporter confused “of” with “or”.

Scientists Doubt Meteorite Sickened Peruvians

Online, it’s all too common to see “you’re” and “your” switched or the various their/there/they’re permutated in unholy ways. Why don’t you see people talking about naval piercings though? That seems like it should be a very easy mistake.

Firemen lift a car with water pressure.

It’s sort of a water powered lifting platform, and by lifting, I mean 20 feet.

Here is K’s new “office” building:

In Chris’ terms, her building is the left nut, from this perspective. Anyway, Wilder 302 doesn’t have a bad view, but if you could get a West-facing window at Scripps, then nice work indeed.