Vacuum

Typepad Google Analytics setup snafu

Noted:

I lost a few days of Google Analytics data because the setting I made here had an extra space at the end of the GA tracking code.

links for 2010-06-22

• TED Speakers: Stuart Brown
  (tags: tedtalk creativity play)

Father's day: stick fishing

What's brown and sticky?  A stick.

One of my favorite parts of the Huron River, strange as it may seem, is the mill race downstream of Argo Dam.  It's utterly unloved, used for recreation only as a canoe portage.

M. and I went to the spillway that connects this mill race with the Huron, just upstream of the Detroit Edison Argo Substation.  There was a lot of trash - sticks, logs, aquatic weeds of various kinds, the odd can and bottle - clogging the spillway.  I brought two old cross-country ski poles, and we went stick fishing.   The object is to catch a stick and then pull it so it goes over the spillway.  

Both ends of the ski pole are useful.  The pointy end is better for poking and pulling.  The grip end has a loop to secure your hand in which can be used to snag a branch.  If you twist the loop you get a secure hold and can pull just about anything.

When we were done stick fishing, most of the spillway was free of brush and weeds.

We did see one couple who had caught some bluegills somewhere nearby, don't know exactly where.

Great 1910 Fire

I'm reading Timothy Egan's The Big Burn. Here's other information online about that disasterous fire.

The Great 1910 Fire of Idaho, Montana, and Washington site - 1910fire.com - is run by Wade Bilbrey of Avery, Idaho.

The Idaho Forest Products Commission has Idaho Forest Fire Stories: The 1910 Fire, written by Jim Petersen and originally printed in Evergreen Magazine, Winter Edition 1994-1995.

a wet month here, a dry month elsewhere

About this analysis, from the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service of the National Weather Service

:

"Observed" data is a byproduct of National Weather Service (NWS) operations at the 12 CONUS River Forecast Centers (RFCs), and is displayed as a gridded field with a spatial resolution of roughly 4x4 km. "Observed" data is expressed as a 24-hour total ending at 1200 Z (same as Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT), with longer periods simply being a summation of multiple 24-hour periods. 1200 GMT is used as the ending time for a 24-hour total, because it is the end of the "hydrologic day", a standard used in river modeling. Additionally, 1200 GMT closely coincides with the reporting time for most of the National Weather Service's cooperative observers, whose data are used as a quality control on the dataset. 1200 GMT coincides with 8 AM EDT, 7 AM EST, 7 AM CDT, 6 AM CST, etc.

The map shows Michigan: Current 30-Day Departure from Normal Precipitation Valid at 6/12/2010 1200 UTC - Created 6/12/10 22:16 UTC. The color palette below provides a key.

The usual complaints

That's not news.

Is this news worthy... really?  

Who cares?

How can writing so void of analysis and content, based on innuendo and false assumptions be so widely admired?

Slow news day.

Follow the money.

There's a law which I haven't formed completely which notes that those who complain the most about the comments have the least to say.  On the other hand, when some does a rewrite to your intern's story, you know that they are reading you quite carefully.

There's always "Muphry's Law", which states that those who criticize your spelling are most likely to have mispelled a word.

art on a shovel: looking forward to February

February is thirteen months long in Michigan. - A Primer, Bob Hicok, The New Yorker

Looking forward to February, a civic project: a Marcel Duchamp readymade project, a retrospective civic installation of his work Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915). See Shearer, 1997 for more.

The installation would provide a convenient hook for each of these readymade pieces. Care must be taken to ensure that the works of art be completely decorative and not functional.

More: Tout-Fait, the first interactive, multi-media journal focusing on the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp.

More: Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity, an introduction by Jeffrey Schnapp, Michael Shanks, Matthew Tiews in Modernism/Modernity, v11n1, 2004.

More: in An apprehensive aesthetic: the legacy of modernist culture By Andrew McNamara, p. 118.

post-storm mushroom 5/5

post-storm mushroom 5/5, originally uploaded by Edward Vielmetti.

Big storms came through town and dumped somewhere between 2 and 4 inches of rain in the neighborhood. A morning walk showed a lot of mushrooms that came out including these unknown varieties growing on a dead (or partly dead) tree.

Posted by Edward Vielmetti from Flickr.

a2b3 logo

for reference:

The A2B3 logo design is by Laura Fisher of Mitten Artworks.

The font is P22's London Underground.  Accept no substitutes.

The stickers I printed were printed at VG Kids in Ypsilanti.  We used a 2.75" x 4.25" oval, and one of their standard templates.

The hoodie with the top secret illuminati lining is still under construction.

Update 6/13/10: Typekit has the P22 London Underground font, for $25/yr.  Hmm.

Sand County Almanac, June: "The Alder Fork - A Fishing Idyl"

We found the main stream to law that the teeter-snipe pattered about in what last year were trout riffles, and so warm that we could duck in its deepest pool without a shout. Even after our cooling swim, waders felt like hot tar paper in the sun.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. This 1989 Oxford Paperbacks edition, ISBN 0-19-505928-X, as an introductory essay from Robert Finch commemorating the 100th anniversary of Leopold's birth.

We see Leopold, the rural sage, tracking a sunk in January, cutting a venerable dead oak, stalking a legendary fish on Alder Fork or an elusive grouse on an abandoned farm, surveying his private unofficial domain before dawn, wrestling with god-like decisions about tree-thinning, or experiencing a "curious transfusion of courage" from his pines in deep winter.

Sand County Almanac is a good book to come back to every month year round.