Virtual stage fright

I recently submitted a short story to an anthology. Like, really recently. Probably be a while before I find out if it's accepted. 

The process was a little different than usual. The submission was in the form of a Google Doc, made shareable with the editor. Which I could figure out how to do easy enough, but I quickly found that I couldn't actually write in Google Docs. It just felt too public and exposed for me to be creative. I wound up doing 3-4 drafts in Word and finally copying and pasting into Google.

Something bright

Lucky break yesterday. From my apartment I could see a Northern Cardinal perching on an overhead power line. Switched from one to the other, presumably trying to get a better view.

This bird was such a bright red that it had to have been a male. That said, Northern Cardinals are unusual in a way. Females tend to be redder than in other cardinal species. Certainly more than in the Vermilion Cardinal.

This bird must have been around all winter, since they're not really known to migrate, but I hadn't seen him.

Howlers

This isn't the most recent Ecosophia entry anymore, but it's worth reading and rereading. I do like learning that the wolves that have moved onto the land once occupied by the Chernobyl reactor are living and doing their thing without showing the cancerous effects of the radiation that so many expected. You never know with life.

As for Yuval Noah Harari, sheesh, I dunno. His much quoted provocation about how human rights are a fiction isn't as bad as it sounds when looked at in context, but I don't think it stands for anything good either. At the end of the day he seems to be in the business of assuring the managerial class that they can and should control their fellow humans. As someone who would prefer to evade control I'm not really down with that.

UnRed

I find perception to be a highly interesting topic. When I first started attending college I intended to major in psychology. I changed my mind, but I did love the class in perceptual psychology. And colorblindness is a reminder of why.

Note the two color wheels at this link. On the protanopia wheel blue and yellow aren't much affected. Red is greyed out. Orange becomes yellow and purple, blue. But what's strange is what happens to green. Its essence is leeched out, so that it's barely identifiable as greenish.

Now if you see the two versions of one photograph above―the one depicting a redhead kid in a field―you'll notice that the grass is green in both. So apparently people with protanopia aren't entirely incapable of perceiving green. But it seems a complementary opposite does make something more noticeable.

Any old port in a storm

Fact 1: We get a lot of crows in this area. Certain streets and stretches of parkland, especially. And being a big fan of crows, I like to see them fly and congregate, and listen to them caw.

Fact 2: We had a heavy rainstorm today, pretty much all day.

Put together, these two facts made me wonder where crows go during a big storm. And according to this, what they do is take cover within conifer trees and shrubs. Sounds like it makes sense for them, anyway. And it's good to know they can keep relatively dry.

As for the picture of a marabou stork in a bathroom, it's a neat bonus.

Phil speaks

The story of Groundhog Day is colorful and interesting, and not just because part of it takes place at Gobbler's Knob, Pennsylvania, hands down the filthiest-sounding place name in America. It's a little bit of Americana that coincides with some older European traditions. The truth is, though, that the question of whether Punxsutawney Phil is right or wrong in his predictions is rather subjective.

As I write this, we're weeks past Groundhog Day. And in fact we just passed the Vernal Equinox. It hasn't been a particularly chilly March. But the temperature today barely got over the freezing point, and it's a few degrees below it outside now.

It actually doesn't mean much for a rodent or anyone else to predict a long or short winter, because everyone won't agree on when winter ended even after it happened, due to it happening in fits and starts. That's not to say the tradition's not fun, though.

Gentleman's agreement?

Pinterest is sort of a microcosm of how the web has gone downhill. The original idea of it had a definite appeal: the opportunity to "pin" images from around the internet to a public or private board so that you'd have them for future reference. Obviously it didn't meant that you owned them, just that you liked and approved of them.

Over the years, though, they've just degraded the whole experience. Features have been disabled, and it's not a tradeoff where you lose one thing and get another. You just lose options one by one. Also their content and censorship policies have tightened to the point of just nuking entire boards out of existence.

Not a great humanitarian disaster, but it makes you wonder. Another company could probably have huge success just by offering what Pinterest did, say, twelve years ago. Nobody's going there, though.