Cities as Designer Ecosystems
Having grown up reading Rachel Carlson's "Silent Spring" and watching empty lots and fields turn into shopping centers and housing developments, the quantity and variety of wildlife I stumble upon in my neighborhood travels constantly amazes me. Either the predicted ecological collapse fizzled, or the vacant lots and streams of my youth must have been knee-deep in wild creatures. What's going on?
An article at http://www.livescience.com/environment/050110_designer_ecosystem.html seems to offer some clues. Animals aren't only adapting to human environments, but whole new adaptive ecologies are developing, in many cases with greater populations than before.
If this is so, then there really may be more deer in Connecticut grazing on home gardens and decorative landscaping, then there were in the past when the best meal around was some tree bark. Or, putting a more subtle interpretion on it, the ecological wildlife issue isn't really population density, it's population diversity, and the resulting ability of those populations to withstand environmental stress through adaptation and growth.
More Neighborhood Critters
Driving the back way to the local post office, we came upon a flock of wild turkeys walking across the road. Two big ones and three only slightly smaller ones, all in full feather and looking like they're having no problems finding food during the winter.
As a gentle reminder to the reader (or should that be "as a reminder to my gentle readers"?) please note that this is in a densely populated residential area about two miles from Boston, and a couple blocks away from a major State highway.
I guess I shouldn't be so surprised at the amount and variety of the wildlife population. Twenty-some years ago, we'd often flush a flock of pheasants in the back yard as we went out to get in our car in the morning. They, alas, seem to have disappeared along with a big chunk of open land along the state road, once a private estate but now gone to Condos. There are rumors they're still around, hiding in the tall grass around the old reservoir, but few will admit to seeing them.
January Thaw
Winter in New England is different. When winter comes to the Midwest it stays, with the snow building in layer upon layer until the highway department trucks it away or spring finally arrives. In New England, however, we've got this fine tradition called "the January Thaw," where as if by magic the grimy snowpack briefly melts away before the cycle begins again in February.
The temperature at sunset today hovered around freezing but had risen twenty degrees by the time the dogs and I started on our evening walk, putting it exactly at the dew point. Still air flowed down the hill ahead of us chilled by the residual snow cover, forming banks of fog which turned into rolling cylinders of cloud as they reached the level ground where we stood. The slight warmth from the streetlights and the still-warm asphalt of a driveway carved out streaks of clear air that twisted about, creating streamers of cotton candy that cascaded from the light into the darkness beyond.
The dogs ran back and forth over the melting snow, happy to be out of the house after a long day inside. They were shadowed by ghost clouds, which twisted in the breeze of their passage. As we walked further into the fog, the light became more diffuse and sounds more muted, until finally it seemed we were wrapped in cotton.
Occasionally, we'd hear what seemed like thunder around us. The homes where we walk are old, dating from an age when houses were built one at a time by a few carpenters or masons, probably revered great-grandfathers by now. There are Victorians with their clapboard and gingerbread trim, Federalist with their tall columns, and brick Colonials. The roofs are steep and covered with slate, and the snow packs that build up on them in the winter come avalanching down in the thaw with a rumbling crash. Folks around here are used to the sound, and generally react with an unconscious twist to the thermostat to compensate for the missing insulation the snow provided their upstairs rooms. The most prudent make mental notes to see if any slates came down along with the snow, warranting a call to the builder's grandsons and great-grandsons for some repair work in the spring.
The dogs were starting to look tired as our path took us first up and out of the fog, and then down again to the turn that took us home again. Taking them inside, I towelled off the mud and grit they'd kicked up as they walked, and smiled as they curled up next to each other for a nap.
The temperature reached sixty by dawn and it began to rain, but snow was predicted for the weekend. Welcome to New England.
The 6 Myths Of Creativity
I stumbled upon an article at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/creativity.html that resonated powerfully with me. It discussed a range of creativity-motivating schemes that I'd seen tried over the years; paying out "innovation bounties," assigning arbitrary deadline dates to projects to "keep the adrenalin flowing," and of course the infamous "two team horserace" internal competition. I must admit that in my experience anything good that resulted seemed to occur in spite of those management tricks, rather than because of them.
The teams I've seen at their most creative (and coincidentally, also the ones that demonstrate the most consistent productivity) seem to share a very different set of characteristics. First of all, they've had some sleep; a nasty side effect of a 60-hour-plus work week is sleep deprivation and its associated mental sluggishness. They're playful at work; you hear the banter of ideas being brought up, merged, discarded, even turned inside out. Finally, there are enough participants to provide some diversity of experience and background (and enough hands to record the ideas before they're lost,) but not so many that interpersonal interactions turn into scheduled committee meetings. Just enough people to share a large pizza or pot of coffee seems to be optimum.
Now, if I could only figure out how to package a managment technique that's based on bringing together a handful of creative folk who actually have time for a life outside work, and then leaving them alone to do their stuff. "Extremely Normal Development"? "Ultra-Rapid Regular Work-day Teams"?
Time for a fresh pot of coffee. This one's going to take an all-nighter....
The Joys of Java
(Something from the slush pile, brought back by request. Some comments follow.)
As I'm writing this, I'm waiting for StarOffice to launch. I can tell because of the constant "ticka, ticka, BRRRT, bzz, bzz, ticka" from my laptop's hard drive. Obviously, powerful forces are at work. Mighty Java classes instantiating. Windows says there's about 51 MBytes of 'em in RAM.
What are they all doing?
I have this odd notion that it's the software equivalent of class warfare. Root classes spawn multiple children, which beget subclasses of data structures and pointers for generation upon generation, until finally some bit of executable code by accident (I can only assume) gets in the way of a stack pointer and in spite of everyone's best efforts is actually caused to run.
Big mistake.
Now, a mighty battle rages within memory space, with Windows (sitting on 95 MBytes) and StarOffice (with its 51 MBytes) battling it out with Mozilla (merely 21 MBytes) and a few mundanes like my email program (8 MBytes) locked in a territorial battle for my 128 MBytes of physical memory. Lazy Java classes are goaded into execution, forcing idle DLLs to be paged out into the virtual darkness. Windows responds with a batch of gratuitous Wm_event messages, causing every icon to repaint and grab back their individual chunks of real-space.
Finally, some compromise is reached, with the victorious Java classes executing in a fragile equilibrium with the remaining Windows Explorer DLLs, now forced to mutter plots of anarchy among themselves via backchannel APIs known only to Gates and God.
Then, more the fool I, do something truly stupid and try to scroll down on my document. Again, the screams of an anguished virtual memory manager, as it attempts the software equivalent of juggling a raw egg, a bowling ball, and a running chainsaw simultaneously. The Java virtual machine interprets my action as an unabashedly bourgeois attempt to associate its common working classes to a individualistic (and perhaps capitalist?) endeavor, and pulls out its big guns, as the display window shows the merest hint of the upper left corner of an embedded drawing object. It launches Acrobat.
Four minutes later, I declare defeat and go off to fetch a cup of coffee as my PC continues to grind away.
That's what it wanted me to do.... Java has won again.
---
Other than the intended laughs and occasional wry smiles signaling "been there, done that," I received a rather odd bunch of comments on this the first time around.
"But, you weren't using Java correctly," they go, "it works much better if there are ten or a hundred users sharing that one copy of Star Office, and that one JVM. Each user would hardly be using any incremental virtual memory then." Generally, these experts also add "You really shouldn't worry about memory utilization anyway. Memory is so cheap it's almost free, after all."
Absolutely, positively correct. Unfortunately, it's really hard to get 100 people logged into my laptop over a dialup connection in a hotel room, which is where I happened to be when I first wrote this, and where I had the profound pleasure of waiting twelve minutes for a rather complex document someone mailed me to open. As for memory, in the abstract it's gotten rather inexpensive, although in the particular, such as a memory upgrade for a 3 year old discontinued laptop that has exactly one proprietary memory slot, it can be quite expensive indeed.
So, let's agree that all tools have their purposes, and even a Swiss Army Knife becomes rather irritating when presented with a couple hundred drywall screws and a stack of two by fours.
Rocky, no Bullwinkle
We had some unexpected visitors over the holidays. Our dear friends Bob and Judy decided to drive up and stay with us over New Year's eve, putting an end to the tag line "we never see each other anymore" that had come to close every telephone conversation with them.
During one lull in the evening's conversation, Bob glanced into a corner and asked "was that a cat?" No, we replied, both cats were sleeping upstairs. "I swore I saw something," he continued, "you don't still have Guinea Pigs, do you?" Long gone, we replied, just dogs, cats, and us, all accounted for. "Then, what's that?" he said, pointing to a cute brownish-gray furry creature with big eyes now quite visibly perched on top of an arm chair by the window. Jaws dropped; Elissa, our resident naturalist, announced "oh, that's a flying squirrel. Northern, I think."
A flying squirrel. In the living room. INSIDE the living room. Chaos ensued.
The best way to describe the next five minutes would be to direct you to the nearest video rental store, way in the back corner where they keep the pile of old black-and-white movies. Pick up a "Keystone Cops," anything by Harold Lloyd, or in a pinch an early Charlie Chaplin. Fast-forward in about ten minutes and hit 'play' and you'll get the idea -- three guys, armed with waste baskets and rolled up newspapers, trying to scoop up a four inch scurrying ball of fur running up the curtains, between our legs, through the potted plants, and then behind the furniture. The ladies sat back and laughed at our incompetence, occasionally cheering us on with a hearty "be careful not to hurt him!"
Finally, the squirrel took a time out behind the radiator, and we fell back to regroup. We realized that catching the squirrrel wasn't really the goal, but only a step on the way towards getting him outside. So, we decided to eliminate the (utter fiasco) of the interim step, and go straight for the goal. We propped the front door wide open and, armed with brooms and newspapers, proceeded to prod, steer, and direct the furry beast out of the living room and towards the door. Finally, it saw the opening and ran out into the darkness, finishing with a tremendous gliding leap into the bushes.
Laughing, we closed the door and settled back into our seats. "Good thing we got him out," said Bob, "ten more minutes of that and they would have revoked our credentials as predators."
The dogs watched the whole thing, amused by our antics but uninterested in joining the fun. The cats slept through the whole event, although one of them did make a big show of sniffing the squirrel's trail behind the furniture later in the evening, tail thrashing furiously. The big faker....
Lucky for us, our flying squirrel came alone. We really weren't in a mood to deal with a talking moose.
