Day 5062: Happy 4th! & Roadrunner vs Rattlesnake.

"Broken Bridge": photo, junk paper, digital collage.

                                                                       

  

Want music?

    Click: Maroon 5, Lovely Day.

2GN2S

Happy 4th!

My cousin Sheryl sent me photos of Lebanon, Indiana's wonderful community quilt made back in 1976, where it now hangs again in the Boone County courthouse this week.

   

Sheryl found our family’s squares and knew I would like to see them. Aunt Pauline and Uncle Owen had one,  Cousins Donna, Bob, Sheryl and Scott had one, Aunt Martha’s was directly under theirs and she found Aunt Vonda‘s as well. Wonderful to enlarge them and study the stitches that they took the time to make.

Qwen, Pauline, Donna. Bob, Nancy, Jack, Martha, John, Sheryl, Scott, Paula,
Denise, Janice (Brian not born yet)

   

Donna, Bob, Sheyl, Scott, Lebanon, Indiana & Martha Beaty Adams w/art palette

   

Aunt Vonda Mae Kouns w/ plane for husband Kenneth MIA WW2

Sheryl also mentioned that Uncle Owen and Aunt Pauline got married today in 1928, so today is their 98th wedding anniversary. I am picturing a festive heavenly party?

 

  

The greater roadrunner kills rattlesnakes

Texas Parks and Wildlife describes the full sequence. The bird circles the snake at speed, leaping into the air to stay clear of the fangs, then darts in and drives its pointed beak into the snake's skull.

Repeated blows stun it. Once the snake is dazed, the roadrunner seizes it and beats it against the ground or a rock until the spine and skull are crushed. When two roadrunners hunt together, one distracts the snake from the front while the other pins its head from behind. They do this to rattlesnakes. A bird that weighs about a pound, killing a venomous snake with its face, on foot, in the open desert.

The roadrunner is not a raptor. It is a cuckoo. Its scientific name, Geococcyx, means ground cuckoo, from the Greek for earth and cuckoo. Unlike every other cuckoo on the continent, which lives in trees, the roadrunner lives almost entirely on the ground. It can fly, technically, but only for short bursts and only when it has to. Its wings are short and rounded and built for gliding off a ledge, not sustained flight. It runs instead, up to about 20 miles per hour, which makes it one of the fastest running birds in North America but, despite what the cartoon suggests, nowhere near fast enough to outrun an actual coyote.

It eats everything it can fit in its beak. Insects, scorpions, lizards, mice, other birds, fruit, and snakes, venomous or otherwise. It disables scorpions by biting off the stinger first. It gets almost all of its water from the animals it eats and almost never needs to drink. Excess salt is excreted through specialized nasal glands, which means the bird can live in deep desert with no standing water at all.

The desert tries to kill it at night. Temperatures in the Mojave and Chihuahuan deserts can drop forty or fifty degrees after sundown. The roadrunner handles this by entering torpor. It drops its body temperature from about 104 degrees Fahrenheit to 93, cutting its energy expenditure by more than thirty percent. In the morning it climbs onto a fencepost or a rock, turns its back to the sun, drops its wings, and raises the feathers along its spine to expose a patch of dark skin between its shoulders. The dark skin absorbs solar radiation directly into the bird's body. It can sit like this for two or three hours, essentially solar-charging itself back to operating temperature before it starts hunting. The behavior was first described in a 1971 paper in Science by Ohmart and Lasiewski, who called it energy conservation by hypothermia and absorption of sunlight.

Its feet have two toes pointing forward and two pointing back, an arrangement called zygodactyl, which leaves a track shaped like an X. You cannot tell from the print which direction the bird was going. The Hopi and other Pueblo peoples considered the roadrunner a medicine bird that could ward off evil spirits, and the X-shaped tracks were regarded as sacred symbols because they concealed the bird's direction of travel. Stylized roadrunner tracks have been found carved into rock by the Mogollon cultures of the prehistoric Southwest. Roadrunner feathers were placed on Pueblo cradleboards for spiritual protection.

Source: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department / Cornell Lab of Ornithology / Ohmart and Lasiewski (1971), Science / Birds of the World.

 

  

 

A 1+ minute video, Baby can't swim yet, here.

 

 

Just because ...

Red-crested Turacos (Tauraco erythrolophus)

Saturday's Smiles ... 

   

   

Hoping you see all the good things in your day.

  

 

 

Day 5061: ‘Flowerscapes’ & Finland's Tunnel Solar Panels.

"Hydrangea": photo, digital collage.

                                                                   

  

Want music?

    Click: Doobie Brothers, Listen to the Music.

2GN2S

All images © Theo Bosboom

Theo Bosboom's Bug’s-Eye  ‘Flowerscapes’

 

Stand in any forest and look up, and it’s hard not to be mesmerized by the swaying of tall trees and their elegant canopies casting shade onto the woodland floor. But imagine being an ant or beetle and peering up at the stems of wild geraniums, garlic, or buttercups and experiencing the same sensation. For photographer Theo Bosboom, this ground-level view of flowers and plants gave rise to a series that captures them in the way we might photograph a grove of towering, ancient sequoias.

Traversing local landscapes around his home in the Netherlands and sometimes venturing across the border into Germany or Belgium, Bosboom explores forests, dunes, public parks, roadside verges, and virtually any place that flowers grow. These excursions also sparked concern at the lack of pollinators he found among the flowers. “At times, it was eerily quiet,” he shares in the preface for his book, Flowerscapes, A Bug’s Eye View. “This matches recent studies showing that the numbers of flowers and insects have declined sharply across Western Europe over the past decades.”

There are a lot of reasons for the steep drop in insect populations, not just in Europe but around the world. Most of the reasons stem from human activities such as agriculture, pesticides, urban development and habitat destruction, pollution, and changing temperatures as a result of the escalating climate crisis. Bosboom finds reasons to hope, however. He has observed how the Netherlands has adopted more environmentally friendly road management practices, and how people are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of native plants and wildflowers in supporting not only insect populations but entire ecosystems.

   

The diversity and resilience of flowers really struck a chord with Bosboom, who says, “The endlessly surprising perspectives completely captivated me, and I found myself constantly marvelling at their beauty, elegance, and strength.” He was also drawn to reducing his environmental impact by working more locally, sticking to destinations he could reach on foot or by bike or with just a short drive.

Purchase Flowerscapes, A Bug’s Eye View on Bosboom’s web shop, where you can also purchase prints, and explore much more of his work on Instagram

  

Finland is installing solar panels inside its Arctic tunnels — generating clean electricity from artificial lighting that mirrors the midnight sun through the polar winter.

Finland's underground highway tunnels — built through the granite bedrock of its southern coastal cities — host thousands of high-intensity LED lighting systems that operate 24 hours daily, 365 days annually. The electricity consumed by tunnel lighting across Finland's motorway network exceeds the annual consumption of a small Finnish city.

The Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency — Väylävirasto — has developed a radical efficiency program that pairs tunnel lighting systems with photovoltaic panels mounted in the tunnel ceiling and walls. The concept is counterintuitive but physically sound — the LED lights emit precisely calibrated wavelength spectra, and thin-film solar panels tuned to those wavelengths recover a portion of the electrical energy before it is absorbed by the tunnel walls as heat.

The efficiency gain from tunnel photovoltaic recovery is modest — approximately 8-12% of tunnel lighting electricity is recovered — but the tunnel infrastructure is permanent, the installation cost is low compared to outdoor solar requiring land acquisition, and the recovered electricity directly offsets the tunnel's operational power demand without transmission losses.

Traficom's pilot installation in the Kehä III Ring Road tunnels near Vantaa has confirmed the technical performance — 180 kW of thin-film panels across three tunnel sections generating 150 MWh annually from tunnel lighting energy recovery.

 

Home

  

 

A 4 minute video, Bamboo-Mozart, here.

 

 

Just because ...

Kalij pheasant

Friday's Quotes ... 

 

Hoping you feel all the good things in your day.

  

 

 

 

Day 5060: A Special Dinner & TBT & A Wet Nose.

   

"3": junk paper collage, acrylic papers, digital.

 

  

Want music?

    Click: Aretha Franklin, Natural Woman.

2GN2S

Tuesday turned out to be a doubly special day. In the evening I was invited to dinner with the Sakai family at Kagura Tonkatsu Restaurant in Costa Mesa. They specializes in Tonkatsu, which I love. A very popular venue with great revues.

688 Baker Street, Costa Mesa, CA 92626 (714) 760-4728

We each took a picture of our selection.

Mika & Soma both ordered Pork Tonkatsu.

Atomu (Chris's) order, chicken katsu

Taigen's order, Wagyu beef.

I ordered Katsu-don: pork, egg, onions on rice, my favorite.

me, Atomu, Mika, Soma, Taigen

As good as it looks, it tasted even better. But, if I had to pick between the meal or the family, I would pick the family. There is a little history behind us. Atomu, the father, was my student over thirty five years ago, can you imagine? I called him Chris back then, and it usually pops out now too. Chris was a very special student who really exemplified what I hoped for in a student. He was especially adept at help other student learn in his own quiet way. I never knew what he did exactly, but who ever he helped got noticeably better that day. It was amazing. I was sorry to lose him when he started high school, but that is often the case, and I wouldn't want any student to miss out on high school activities.

But, some years ago as I was training at our Honbu Dojo with Demura Sensei, and I was asked if I had met a new adult student, Chris? I looked and said what is your last name? He said Sakai, and I said I know you. He smiled  and said you taught me about thirty years ago. And so we got to train together as adults and I was so lucky to be there when he earned his black belt.

But there is more! Chris and his beautiful wife, Mika had two great boys, Taigen and Soma, who were little, and sometimes would come to the dojo and sit quietly as we trained. Sometimes they would read, sometimes they would watch and now they are both jr. red belts, which is our highest rank for juniors. At age 15 they can start all over again working towards a black belt. They are both taller than me and just the nicest young men. I love to be around them. Full circle.

  

 The tiny groove under a dog’s nose, known as the philtrum, really does help keep the nose moist. It helps move moisture from the mouth area toward the nose, which supports the damp surface dogs use to smell more effectively. That part is true. A wet nose matters because scent particles in the air stick better to moisture, making it easier for dogs to pick up smells.

That said, it would be an overstatement to say this groove alone is what gives dogs their incredible sense of smell. The philtrum is only a small part of a much larger system. Dogs are able to smell so well mainly because their noses are built for it. They have far more scent receptors than humans, a powerful scent-processing system in the brain, and specialized structures that help them separate and analyze odors in detail.

So the correct explanation is that the line under a dog’s nose helps channel moisture and may help keep the nose wet, which can improve scent detection. But it is not the main source of a dog’s smelling power. Their amazing ability to detect scents comes mostly from their advanced nasal structure and overall biology. In simple words, the groove helps a little, but the dog’s entire smell system is what makes its nose so powerful.

 

   

front: Kim Israelson, Rachel Maher, Raquel Friedman, Cheyenne Lopez, Chloe Brown
back: Lius Perez, Tyler Kerce, Brandon Nomura, Brian, me, Michael Keating.

 

Some of Costa Mesa Dojo after 

Demura Sensei's Kangieko (Cold Weather Training)

Huntington Beach, CA 

2001

  

 

A 11 minute video, if only lonely, here.

 

Just because ...

Marico Sunbird

Thursday's Smiles ... 

 

  

  

Hoping you feel all the good things in your day.