Author Archives: caitlinburke

Artificial Tree Stands

Dutch photographer Gerco de Ruijter has taken a series of photographs of tree nurseries and grid forests in the Netherlands using a camera mounted on a fishing rod. They are both hard to recognize and unlike aerial photographs. I like this one, but most of them have a very different sense, exploiting the wide angle of the lens and shadows thrown by the trees.

“On top of this rod is a 2.5″ x 2.5″ camera with a wide-angle lens. A self-timer is adjusted to give me enough time to telescope the rod and manoeuver the camera above the subject. The frame of the image begins in front of my own shoes and measures roughly 30′ x 30′.”

More about these photos and an exhibit of them

Welfare Queen

She’s still there.

A Cooper’s hawk flew into the Library of Congress last week. In a series of blog posts, the LoC recounts the efforts to identify this bird and form a plan to retrieve her and help her out of the building. She has since stolen bait food that was intended to lure her into a trap (for relocation), and I wonder if she’s planning to settle in. After all, it’s a pretty nice gig – weather protection, some gorgeous clear sight lines I’m guessing, and free delivery.

Watching Our Researchers Like a Hawk
And Watch a Hawk Makin’ Lazy Circles in the Dome
Time for Another Hawk Update

Update: She “finally got evicted”.

Wrong Side of the Tracks

Science has always been a craft-based activity and the best scientists tend quite literally to be “hands on”. […] Gentlemen do not get their hands dirty in that way. So the greatest of British scientists have tended to be from the fringes of the UK, geographically or socially. The two towering figures of 19th-century British science were Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Faraday, Mrs Thatcher’s favourite scientist, was the son of a blacksmith and an adherent to an obscure religious sect, the Sandemanians. Maxwell, the brilliant theoretical physicist, was a Scot.

The Secret Sex Life of Marie Curie and the personal dimension of practitioners of science.

Suicidal Seagull

Dear Diary:

On a balmy fall night, my wife and I saw a seagull strutting up Fifth Avenue.

Suddenly, the bird darted across the street into the rush-hour traffic. I cringed as it avoided the first car, then got clobbered by the second one. Like a punch-drunk fighter, the gull got up and limped toward the fine shops on Madison Avenue.

Unable to watch a drama that was destined to end badly, I raced toward the kamikaze bird. Shaken, it tried to fly away, but a broken wing kept it earthbound. As I picked it up, it stared defiantly and bit me.

Read the rest at the New York Times feature, “Metropolitan Diary”

Scrub, Sarah, Scrub – We Still Have Copies

Gabrielle Giffords was shot today at an event in her constituency in Arizona. She is a young woman, recently married, just re-elected to her third term in office. She is a member of the House Committees for Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Science and Technology. She is pro-choice, pro-renewable energy, and, yes, pro-gun (though not enough for the NRA). Her husband is an astronaut. I send my best wishes to her friends and family, who are not only at risk of losing a loved one of accomplishment and promise but now have to deal with the political environment in which this happened.

The revisionism, of course, is already beginning, so as much as I respect the sentiment that the politics can wait, I think it’s at least as important to reinforce clearly that no matter who did this, we are still well aware of the overall context of this horrible attack.

This was the centerpiece messaging for Sarah Palin’s “Take Back the 20” campaign, before 2010’s midterm elections. She can revise her web pages any way she likes today—it won’t change the fact that she published this image right alongside her own smiling face.

Note: www.takebackthe20.com’s accessibility has been spotty for several hours, and it’ll probably be hit hard for a while yet.

Update: Giffords herself on this overheated rhetoric, in an interview shortly after the healthcare vote, when Giffords’s office had been vandalized:

Update January 9: The spin is dizzying. As Dave Weigel notes, Current Palin spin for target map would make more sense if she didn’t spend 2010 doubling down on it.

Among the people who gave the impression that these were targets: Sarah Palin. When she announced the list in a tweet, she wrote “don’t retreat, instead – RELOAD!” I’m not an expert surveyor, but I’m not sure what sort of tools need reloading. Jonathan Martin points out that after the election, Palin tweeted about her success (18 of the seats went to the GOP) by saying “remember months ago ‘bullseye’ icon used 2 target the 20 Obamacare-lovin’ incumbent seats?” Throughout 2010, when Palin was criticized for the target map, she either didn’t respond or mocked the “lamestream media” for interpreting her gun metaphors as calls for violence. At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, for example, she got big applause when she said “Don’t retreat, reload — and that is not a call for violence!”

What are you eating?

I once went into a few local restaurants to surreptitiously test the tuna they served. Some tuna was tuna, some was grouper, some was Nile perch, but all of it looked the same when cooked. In many cases this is not a case of restaurants misleading customers, or even being mislead themselves, but simply a problem with the length of the supply chain. The more intermediates that a piece of fish has to go through to get from the boat to your table, the more chances there are for it to be misidentified.

Southern Fried Scientist (commenting on a TED talk by Stephen Palumbi) on a challenge to supply-side conservation.