An Evening Bike Ride in Raleigh

Since my calf is still injured and I’m not running much, I thought I’d go for a crepuscular (I love that word) bike ride and show ya’ll what I see. My apologies to Sophie first: I wasn’t quick enough to take pictures of the rabbits.

Retail.(Sorta)Easy

I hope I didn’t go too overboard with my Retail.Easy blog post this month. I gotta little happy with coding in R.

Image from the Home Front

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A Touch of Sebastopol

I enjoy my evening walks around Raleigh. The weather is marvelous. The neighbors wave. This front yard reminded me of Sebastopol. I think the density of fig trees is greater here than in Sonoma county too. I hope they ripen before I leave.

Birding

I’ve always been a whatever-level-comes-below-novice birder, though if birding madness is genetic I’m bound to get it one of these days, especially if it skips generations. I went birding this morning with a resident expert, who is also a professor in the SIBS program. Coincidentally, his last name is Swallow.

We had a lovely outing in the woods, though we heard more birds than we saw. We did lay our ocularly enhanced eyes on kingbird, meadowlarks, indigo bunting, mockingbird, some kind of thrasher, grackles, fish crow, mourning dove, phoebe, cowbirds, and the rare to see grasshopper sparrow. This is why it helps to go with an expert – I can be in awe at the appropriate times. [As an aside, there’s a fantastic (as usual) radiolab show on cowbirds and the unintended consequences of trying to eradicate them to save the Kirtland’s warbler.]

The grasshopper sparrow inspired me to write one of my even more rare poems:

Conversation Between a Grasshopper and a Grasshopper Sparrow

You flathead on the fence trilling such prattle.
The last note of your tune has too much rattle.

Young grasshopper, be more circumspect.
I’m a bird, not a mere insect.

A bird! said the grasshopper as he scurried away,
Life is too melodic and sweet to be prey!

Oy vey, thought the sparrow, these hoppers are mad.
I’m called a ‘life bird’, he should be glad.

In Wonder at the Age of Wonder

Nuggets from the Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes:

Experiments on nitrous oxide (laughing gas) were among first to use blind experimental method:

“[Humphry] Davy now pioneered the ‘blind’ experimental method. He deliberately did not tell his subjects what concentration of nitrous oxide there were breathing, or whether they were in fact inhaling regular air (which sometimes they were).” p. 262

Davy recorded some his early experiments in verse: “Not in the ideal dream of wild desire / Have I beheld a rapture-waking form; / My bosom burns with no unhallowed fire …” Ahem, I’ll have whatever he’s having.

Coleridge on Science and Poetry:

“[Samuel Taylor Coleridge] thought that science, a human activity, ‘being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was poetical’. Science, like poetry, was not merely ‘progressive’. It directed a particular kind of moral energy and imaginative longing into the future. It enshrined the implicit belief that mankind could achieve a better, happier world.” p.268

My New Ride

A single speed SE rented from the NCSU rec department.

What the Future Will Bring

Raleigh is full of good art and music. Iris Dement is coming the North Carolina Museum of Art on July 16th. They have a nice outdoor amphitheater there. Here she is performing with John Prine.

At 1:02, notice what book the women takes her credit card like boarding pass out of. It makes my happy to know that the folks at Microsoft know this book.

It’s Like Watching a Game of Frogger

Silent Look