Good afternoon. I had to psych myself up to do something I didn't look forward to doing because there were hassles involved, but promised myself I'd get done today, and now that's out of the way. And of course I still feel like I got nothing done. But for some odd reason I seem to feel that way on days when I actually got a project done that I've been meaning to get to. Maybe it's that time passes quickly when I'm doing something. I don't know. But I have developed a habit of jotting down the things I get done each day, so I can always look at the list.
Not a cat. A helpful bird, who says something that sounds like words. I don't believe I've ever heard or seen one, though. I think they're mostly gone from northern Illinois.
Every change seems good to some but not to others. I was just reading about book about oak trees, and it said they host many more species of insects than other tree families.
True. And it is noticeable. There’s not nearly the amount of windshield bug splatter on long highway drives that there once was. While it’s welcome as a driver, you have to wonder about the creatures that lived on all those insects…
Interesting varmints. They’ve become rare here to the point of no one’s heard them in half a century. I assume it has something to do with human influences, almost all of which are indirect and unintentional. As our civilization evolves, so does our use of the landscape. For some species this change in landscape makes a big difference.
The pre-Columbian Eastern forest landscape is believed to have been managed by fire to clear out undergrowth. One assumes natural predator populations were also kept down so as to limit competition. When European peoples came and replaced the natives, the forests reverted to wilderness in many places, were burned and cleared for smallhold farming in some regions.
Then came the logging boom and forests were clearcut. The family farms also killed off natural predators, either eradicating them or decimating populations. Who wants to lose chicken flocks the family depends on to the wildlife? That would have had to benefit a lot of fragile wild species.
Now things have mainly reverted to unmanaged wilderness, and predators aren’t populous enough to cull the deer herds, for example. But they are numerous enough to make backyard chicken coops extremely challenging.
The effect of human civilization on the wilderness isn’t as bad as its reputation in popular culture. Man’s impact is not all negative to the exclusion of everything else. As with climate hysteria, the story is told too one-sidedly to be of practical use.
Have you tried using the Merlin App? Created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the app listens for bird sounds and creates a list of the birds it can hear and identify.
I don't remember where I read this or the metrics cited, but a recent article covered how the reduction of particulate pollution in global shipping had a measurable impact on global warming - because less particulates allows more sunlight to reach the ocean. Unintended consequences. Two words under appreciated.
That makes sense. There’s been an long-standing effort to reduce general “carbon black” particulate emissions from every type of industry. It strikes me as sensible in general, too. But it comes in other forms nowadays. A lot is in the form of automotive tires fraying due to friction. The latest strain of thought connects this emission source to “micro- and nanoplastics” that are the new hotness in environmental research. (Not meaning to sound dismissive: maybe it’s something we need to address with other technology.)
Wait! So here I thought I was reducing methane emissions by retiring my OX-driven cart and now you're telling me I'm equally culpable due to the tire wear on my EV?
D did a presentation on micro plastics. It's one of those subjects that is worth considering but almost certainly is not as catastrophic as it's made out to be in some media, because nothing could be.
I have to confess that I’m cynical at first about a lot of the reporting on health and/or environment. I often suspect there are big-money law firms promoting advance publicity before attempting to put together a major plaintiff class. Now, that does NOT mean that there’s not a legitimate case and a legitimate concern. It’s just that they stretch every bit of evidence to the utmost, trying to soften up the general public as a potential jury pool.
I’m pretty sure the birds chirping outside my hotel room are house sparrows. They are nesting in the beams, the bat rastards. Yesterday we rode the CO National Monument. Beautiful! I think I would freak out driving it by car. It was pretty warm, 90, and very windy which caused us all the abandon the 18 mi afternoon ride. We are up early today for the same ride but in reverse. The unfortunate part is that it’s 18 miles of climbing. We should have a nice tail wind though. We will ride back if the wind isn’t too strong.
I would much rather ride uphill than ride into the wind. At least I know the hill has a top, while the wind never stops. But riding where it's beautiful, it's all good. :-)
The descent was pretty brutal. It was the strangest ride I’ve ever been on. It looked like the road was downhill, but we knew it wasn’t as we were in granny gear at times. The lack of horizon makes you question whether you’re going uphill or downhill. When we turned around I couldn’t believe the hill we climbed, 11 miles long.
Good morning, everyone. There was more rain overnight. The plan for today is to visit a lighthouse. My husband reserved six "climb up" tickets: there is a daily capacity limit. We'll see who is up to it!
That should be good exercise: here's some info about the Oak island lighthouse. It's the newest one in North Carolina.
As the last lighthouse built in North Carolina, Oak Island Lighthouse is as durable as they come. Twenty-four concrete-filled pilings were driven sixty-seven feet into the ground to provide a solid foundation, and an octagonal concrete base, measuring thirty feet wide and three feet deep, was used to cap the pilings. The tower itself stands 158 feet tall and is made of solid, eight-inch-thick, reinforced concrete.
Two brick towers, space 130 yards apart, were constructed on Oak Island in 1849 at a cost of $8,985 as an additional guide for mariners entering the mouth of Cape Fear River. Each of the towers was equipped with ten lamps and reflectors that were placed in operation on September 10, 1849. The antiquated lighting systems were replaced by fifth-order Fresnel lenses in 1855. Because of their proximity to Fort Caswell, the lights were often referred to as the “Caswell Lights.” During an inspection in 1851, it was noted that John G. Brickman, keeper of the range lights, could not read or write and had to get a friend at Fort Caswell to make his quarterly reports.
Unlike traditional lighthouses, Oak Island Lighthouse has no spiral staircase. Instead, its keeper had to climb a series of ships ladders with a total of 134 steps. Tools are hauled to the top in a metal box attached to a long pulley. The aluminum lantern room, which now houses four 1000-watt aerobeam lights, weighs 1,740 pounds and had to be installed by a Marine Corps helicopter. With its 2.5 million candlepower lights flashing intermittently and visible twenty-four miles out to sea, Oak Island Light is one of the most powerful lighthouses in existence.
On May 15, 1958, eighty-five-year-old Captain Charles N. Swan, who was born at Amelia Island Lighthouse, served aboard Frying Pan Shoals Lightship, and was keeper of Cape Fear Lighthouse on Bald Head Island from 1903 to 1933, threw the switch to activate Oak Island Lighthouse. Twenty minutes after its activation, the light went out, but a fuse was quickly replaced, and the beacon was back in operation before darkness fell.
Thanks for this! We often hear whippoorwills while camping in the PA state forest Greenland tract. This area is highly managed for wildlife. (Which is often criticised because it includes significant selective cutting and managed burns.
Cutting and burns are essential for habitat maintenance. It's going to take a long time for the general public to assimilate that, after generations of “save every tree” indoctrination.
Having seen sides of mountains that have been “clear cut for maximum harvesting,” it’s hard not to hold a “save every tree” position. Definitely a place for compromise—which eventually occurred in CA, but the resentment on both sides has not yet.
In my 'Economics of Energy and the Environment' class in the 70's (during the depths of the energy crisis) I was shocked, shocked I say, to discover that woodland management was a thing. And that thing was touted as beneficial to woodlands, woodland creatures, and humanity. I had never gotten to the point of wanting to chain myself to a tree. Too lazy to put that much energy into my hazy environmentalism, I guess. But I clearly remember the shock of realizing that just maybe I didn't know everything there was to know about everything.
Having one’s assumptions effectively challenged is good for inducing cerebration.
It’s funny: I remember going off to college in the late ‘80s and hearing several professors and lecturers explain that they were there to challenge our assumptions. Since I grew up an NPR-listening bleeding-heart lib, that never really happened in those general undergraduate classes.
It wasn’t until I was exposed to econ classes that I started to think that was closer to what the world looked like to me than the black-vs-white, fat-cat-vs-poor-downtrodden narrative I’d come up hearing about. All that business about incentives and such from the field of econ sounded a like a better explanation of how the world worked to my impressionable young ears. That moved me significantly toward the conservative-libertarian end of the political spectrum…
My Marx professor would often rant about how we were being trained to just memorize stuff to spit back on a test. One of his main goals was to 'teach us to think for ourselves'.
"We're all Keynesians now" was the reality in most of my Econ classes. Our Marx professor showed us repeatedly how Keynesianism was 'indeterminate'. I often remember that lesson with gratitude.
40 years ago, Whippoorwills were a staple of summer nights. Ten years later, they disappeared. Like so many things, they were annoying as all get out, but now that they’re gone I miss them.
As a kid growing up, we had lightning bugs. Then for about 25 years they disappeared. Where we live now, we see more of them, although they are not common.
When my youngest first saw one, he was fascinated by them. "Look Mom, this one has a light in its butt"! I think he wanted to become one for a few days, but grew out of it.
But good news, he just opened his grades for the spring semester and got all As. He was sweating his organic chemistry class; he didn't do well on the final, but the professor appears to have curved it.
Good afternoon. I had to psych myself up to do something I didn't look forward to doing because there were hassles involved, but promised myself I'd get done today, and now that's out of the way. And of course I still feel like I got nothing done. But for some odd reason I seem to feel that way on days when I actually got a project done that I've been meaning to get to. Maybe it's that time passes quickly when I'm doing something. I don't know. But I have developed a habit of jotting down the things I get done each day, so I can always look at the list.
Not a cat. A helpful bird, who says something that sounds like words. I don't believe I've ever heard or seen one, though. I think they're mostly gone from northern Illinois.
A great read.. Thanks
"Declining insect populations" as a bad thing - that perspective doesn't pop up very often in my experience.
Every change seems good to some but not to others. I was just reading about book about oak trees, and it said they host many more species of insects than other tree families.
Doug Tallamy? Convinced me to stop mulching my leaves and let them lie.
I think so.
True. And it is noticeable. There’s not nearly the amount of windshield bug splatter on long highway drives that there once was. While it’s welcome as a driver, you have to wonder about the creatures that lived on all those insects…
Interesting varmints. They’ve become rare here to the point of no one’s heard them in half a century. I assume it has something to do with human influences, almost all of which are indirect and unintentional. As our civilization evolves, so does our use of the landscape. For some species this change in landscape makes a big difference.
The pre-Columbian Eastern forest landscape is believed to have been managed by fire to clear out undergrowth. One assumes natural predator populations were also kept down so as to limit competition. When European peoples came and replaced the natives, the forests reverted to wilderness in many places, were burned and cleared for smallhold farming in some regions.
Then came the logging boom and forests were clearcut. The family farms also killed off natural predators, either eradicating them or decimating populations. Who wants to lose chicken flocks the family depends on to the wildlife? That would have had to benefit a lot of fragile wild species.
Now things have mainly reverted to unmanaged wilderness, and predators aren’t populous enough to cull the deer herds, for example. But they are numerous enough to make backyard chicken coops extremely challenging.
The effect of human civilization on the wilderness isn’t as bad as its reputation in popular culture. Man’s impact is not all negative to the exclusion of everything else. As with climate hysteria, the story is told too one-sidedly to be of practical use.
Sometime, when I have time (which isn't today) I'd like to catalog the birds in our little forest. They are noisy! But I like them.
Day three of the new bird feeder is working well. It uses suction cups, so we hung it on a window in the kitchen. No squirrels nor raccoons yet.
Have you tried using the Merlin App? Created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the app listens for bird sounds and creates a list of the birds it can hear and identify.
Gonna have to try that. Thanks!
It's both easy and free! 😃
I don't remember where I read this or the metrics cited, but a recent article covered how the reduction of particulate pollution in global shipping had a measurable impact on global warming - because less particulates allows more sunlight to reach the ocean. Unintended consequences. Two words under appreciated.
That makes sense. There’s been an long-standing effort to reduce general “carbon black” particulate emissions from every type of industry. It strikes me as sensible in general, too. But it comes in other forms nowadays. A lot is in the form of automotive tires fraying due to friction. The latest strain of thought connects this emission source to “micro- and nanoplastics” that are the new hotness in environmental research. (Not meaning to sound dismissive: maybe it’s something we need to address with other technology.)
Wait! So here I thought I was reducing methane emissions by retiring my OX-driven cart and now you're telling me I'm equally culpable due to the tire wear on my EV?
D did a presentation on micro plastics. It's one of those subjects that is worth considering but almost certainly is not as catastrophic as it's made out to be in some media, because nothing could be.
I have to confess that I’m cynical at first about a lot of the reporting on health and/or environment. I often suspect there are big-money law firms promoting advance publicity before attempting to put together a major plaintiff class. Now, that does NOT mean that there’s not a legitimate case and a legitimate concern. It’s just that they stretch every bit of evidence to the utmost, trying to soften up the general public as a potential jury pool.
Excellent summary.
I’m pretty sure the birds chirping outside my hotel room are house sparrows. They are nesting in the beams, the bat rastards. Yesterday we rode the CO National Monument. Beautiful! I think I would freak out driving it by car. It was pretty warm, 90, and very windy which caused us all the abandon the 18 mi afternoon ride. We are up early today for the same ride but in reverse. The unfortunate part is that it’s 18 miles of climbing. We should have a nice tail wind though. We will ride back if the wind isn’t too strong.
I would much rather ride uphill than ride into the wind. At least I know the hill has a top, while the wind never stops. But riding where it's beautiful, it's all good. :-)
The descent was pretty brutal. It was the strangest ride I’ve ever been on. It looked like the road was downhill, but we knew it wasn’t as we were in granny gear at times. The lack of horizon makes you question whether you’re going uphill or downhill. When we turned around I couldn’t believe the hill we climbed, 11 miles long.
Your group could think about doing this on your way home!?
https://www.independencepass.org/2025-ride-for-the-pass
The not fun part is the temp maybe 50 starting then in 30s at top. Or not. Just depends on the weather.
Wow, I'm impressed!
Best wishes for a fun and safe ride!
Good morning. About 65, getting into the 70s and rainy. The Ladder Lady is in rehab now, will be seeing her shortly.
The mothership is reporting “Trump blinks n China tariffs” while the FP is covering Trump’s penchant for “peace deals”.
Morning. All rain, all day today. Supposed to stay in the mid to low 60s.
Good morning, everyone. There was more rain overnight. The plan for today is to visit a lighthouse. My husband reserved six "climb up" tickets: there is a daily capacity limit. We'll see who is up to it!
That should be good exercise: here's some info about the Oak island lighthouse. It's the newest one in North Carolina.
As the last lighthouse built in North Carolina, Oak Island Lighthouse is as durable as they come. Twenty-four concrete-filled pilings were driven sixty-seven feet into the ground to provide a solid foundation, and an octagonal concrete base, measuring thirty feet wide and three feet deep, was used to cap the pilings. The tower itself stands 158 feet tall and is made of solid, eight-inch-thick, reinforced concrete.
Two brick towers, space 130 yards apart, were constructed on Oak Island in 1849 at a cost of $8,985 as an additional guide for mariners entering the mouth of Cape Fear River. Each of the towers was equipped with ten lamps and reflectors that were placed in operation on September 10, 1849. The antiquated lighting systems were replaced by fifth-order Fresnel lenses in 1855. Because of their proximity to Fort Caswell, the lights were often referred to as the “Caswell Lights.” During an inspection in 1851, it was noted that John G. Brickman, keeper of the range lights, could not read or write and had to get a friend at Fort Caswell to make his quarterly reports.
Unlike traditional lighthouses, Oak Island Lighthouse has no spiral staircase. Instead, its keeper had to climb a series of ships ladders with a total of 134 steps. Tools are hauled to the top in a metal box attached to a long pulley. The aluminum lantern room, which now houses four 1000-watt aerobeam lights, weighs 1,740 pounds and had to be installed by a Marine Corps helicopter. With its 2.5 million candlepower lights flashing intermittently and visible twenty-four miles out to sea, Oak Island Light is one of the most powerful lighthouses in existence.
On May 15, 1958, eighty-five-year-old Captain Charles N. Swan, who was born at Amelia Island Lighthouse, served aboard Frying Pan Shoals Lightship, and was keeper of Cape Fear Lighthouse on Bald Head Island from 1903 to 1933, threw the switch to activate Oak Island Lighthouse. Twenty minutes after its activation, the light went out, but a fuse was quickly replaced, and the beacon was back in operation before darkness fell.
Thanks, Jay. It was a nice climb up ladders rather than real stairs.
Fresnel lenses!!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens
Arguably, this early (1830s) optic, saved thousands of ships and more lives.
Another optic has saved millions of lives.
What is it ?
Is that a historical lighthouse? Cape Fear or thereabouts? The newer ones have been fully automated and uninhabited for the last 50 years or so, IIRC.
Hope you get to enjoy the climb.
According to Google, there's an Oak Island Lighthouse. I don't know if it's the one, though.
Thanks for this! We often hear whippoorwills while camping in the PA state forest Greenland tract. This area is highly managed for wildlife. (Which is often criticised because it includes significant selective cutting and managed burns.
Cutting and burns are essential for habitat maintenance. It's going to take a long time for the general public to assimilate that, after generations of “save every tree” indoctrination.
Having seen sides of mountains that have been “clear cut for maximum harvesting,” it’s hard not to hold a “save every tree” position. Definitely a place for compromise—which eventually occurred in CA, but the resentment on both sides has not yet.
Yes, there was definitely a justification.
In my 'Economics of Energy and the Environment' class in the 70's (during the depths of the energy crisis) I was shocked, shocked I say, to discover that woodland management was a thing. And that thing was touted as beneficial to woodlands, woodland creatures, and humanity. I had never gotten to the point of wanting to chain myself to a tree. Too lazy to put that much energy into my hazy environmentalism, I guess. But I clearly remember the shock of realizing that just maybe I didn't know everything there was to know about everything.
Having one’s assumptions effectively challenged is good for inducing cerebration.
It’s funny: I remember going off to college in the late ‘80s and hearing several professors and lecturers explain that they were there to challenge our assumptions. Since I grew up an NPR-listening bleeding-heart lib, that never really happened in those general undergraduate classes.
It wasn’t until I was exposed to econ classes that I started to think that was closer to what the world looked like to me than the black-vs-white, fat-cat-vs-poor-downtrodden narrative I’d come up hearing about. All that business about incentives and such from the field of econ sounded a like a better explanation of how the world worked to my impressionable young ears. That moved me significantly toward the conservative-libertarian end of the political spectrum…
My Marx professor would often rant about how we were being trained to just memorize stuff to spit back on a test. One of his main goals was to 'teach us to think for ourselves'.
"We're all Keynesians now" was the reality in most of my Econ classes. Our Marx professor showed us repeatedly how Keynesianism was 'indeterminate'. I often remember that lesson with gratitude.
Your first two sentences may be the best intro to bird lore I’ve ever read.
I was never disturbed by Whippoorwills. As a kid, I’d whistle back at them.
40 years ago, Whippoorwills were a staple of summer nights. Ten years later, they disappeared. Like so many things, they were annoying as all get out, but now that they’re gone I miss them.
Ohio is supposed to be part of their range but I don’t remember hearing them, maybe because I didn’t grow up around woods.
As a kid growing up, we had lightning bugs. Then for about 25 years they disappeared. Where we live now, we see more of them, although they are not common.
When my youngest first saw one, he was fascinated by them. "Look Mom, this one has a light in its butt"! I think he wanted to become one for a few days, but grew out of it.
But good news, he just opened his grades for the spring semester and got all As. He was sweating his organic chemistry class; he didn't do well on the final, but the professor appears to have curved it.
Lightning bugs seem less common now than when I was a kid.
There were lots of them in the suburb where I grew up. I still see some around my city neighborhood in late summer.