Ok, I’ll start off this new opening of the thread in science-y mode by attaching a link to a recent paper of mine on snowy owls. You’ll need to click on the pdf link on the webpage yourself for a copy, but the journal is open access so hopefully it works OK…
Anyways, I’m following this one up with some work on migration routes of snowies in relation to landscape features. If you’re not into all the boring stats in the paper 
, you may still appreciate the visuals in the figures that show the annual movement tracks of the owls into the high Arctic where they breed. These birds amaze me!
7 Likes
Wow. That more than maybe reflects a lot of watching and waiting? And hiking.
2 Likes
Well…a lot of driving around the backroads of Saskatchewan in winter at -30 C to trap and tag the owls. And yeah, I was out with a few grad students then doing behavioural observations for their own thesis topics and at times we froze our butts off. But other times, you sit in the cab of the truck with a thermos of hot coffee, waiting for the owls to do something.
Once the transmitters are on, the cool thing is that they download GPS locations via cell phone towers. So one can just track the positions of owls from the warmth of indoors, by looking at a computer screen. Lazy fieldwork then!
5 Likes
Nice.
Okay, well, for science stuff I’ve done since I posted on this thread last, I’ve actually published an identification guide on the Waccamaw Formation mollusks. I think I’m up to about 50 copies having been sold or given away. I also now have a 2.5 page erratum/addendum for it…
8 Likes
This is the last thing I’ve worked (and worked, and worked) on that has produced output: Malaria surveillance reveals parasite relatedness, signatures of selection, and correlates of transmission across Senegal - PMC
6 Likes
Thanks. I greatly appreciate anything to do with malaria. I have flashbacks of cerebral malaria on the wards with kids, and a hematocrit of 4 (normal being about 40), etc–in those who survived!.
3 Likes
In college choir we did a piece where that was used, bouncing from tenor to soprano to bass to alto and back to tenor. Rehearsing that piece up to concert quality was annoying until suddenly the interval made sense.
And field notes. My volcanology professor insisted on thorough field notes, which were to be attached to the papers we turned in.
These days with a smart phone and the ability to record voice I think things would be different, probably more sketching and less writing.
LOL
I recall in a computer science course where my “documentation” was little more than reminders to myself that were pretty much worthless outside the context of my own thought processes.
I think the difference is whether it is sung as an interval or as a chord.
1 Like
I just finished writing the annual report for my NfP organization.
Now it’s time to scour the national forest dunes near here for small pine, fir, and spruce to transplant to increase the native forest extent out in the dunes where we removed a lot of invasive scotch broom over spring and summer. It will be nice if we can get enough funding we can buy small saplings though searching out the young trees where the national forest people don’t want them has become a bit of a tradition.
2 Likes
(Don’t know exactly why this ancient thread is open again.) Sometimes a composer will deliberately use the “crudeness” of the tritone to make a point. Consider Stravinsky’s ballet “Petruska” ( Don’t worry; this is just a short clip)
2 Likes
What, not Le Sacre du Printemps? That has way more of them (and an insanely complex series of changes in time signature, but that’s a different issue).
Primarily because I decided to share what I’ve been working on, and it wasn’t a locked thread.
1 Like