Twenty Thousand Words on England (abridged)

***Warning to science-y readers: this is a science-free post***

**Except for the large slide rule and the paleoceanographer**

*And the parakeets*

Last week, the Scribbler E.U. Tour took England by storm. To save you busy people some time, my 20,000 word write-up has been condensed using the well known words-pictures relationship. These were the highlights:

Seeing the Tower of London and Spamalot the same day.

Wild rose-ringed parakeets in Hyde Park drinking from puddles in the sycamores. Here’s a view through the Scribbler’s binoculars.

Sort of a cross between a crow and a chimney-sweep, jackdaws are delightful and spiffy.

The deep low tides that arrive on a full moon are always a spectacle. Even more so when the reef is made of the same bright chalk as the cliffs.

Fish-n-chips as they were meant to be: wrapped in paper, drenched in vinegar, and eaten on a pier. Note this expert’s consistently flawless fried-food-munching technique: (compare with Twinkie).

Sticking my feet in the English Channel for the first time in 27 years. Wasn’t much warmer than last time.

An art gallery (the Tate Modern) with five-story slides you can ride.

The incredible architecture at the Natural History Museum. All three pictures were taken from the same spot; the detail views are from “digiscoping” – pointing the ScribbleCam through the ScribbleBinos. The jackal (right) is sitting at far upper right in the first photo.

At the Science Museum, a 21st-century paleoceanographer confronts a slide rule.

Pints for two pounds fifty are a steal, but the exchange rate is a bit shocking.

Thrill-seeking: a gear-free abseil on a braided hemp rope down a sheer mud precipice. Admittedly, it was 10 feet high and I was following a fearless 12-year-old in pink wellies (Lydia Visick).

My first-cousin-once-removed, Joe Visick (age 7), sketches marvelous birds using something of an Edward Gorey approach.

Beautiful English spring weather makes Bremen (rhymes with “rainin’”) hard to come back to. (First picture, right to left: 21st-century paleoceanographer Mea Cook; writer-photographer-cousin David Visick; musician-of-note Marko Packard)

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Scientists, Librarians Get Iconic On Us

We live in an age where nobody has time to read and few people even have the time to look at pictures. That’s why we live in a world of icons. I like the witty ones.

Those dreadfully clever people at Science Creative Quarterly pulled together a big group of them, then turned them into merit badges for their new society of scientist/communicators. This left-hand column shows three of my favorite badges, ones I hope to earn.

The group’s called the O.O.T.S.S.O.E.R.A.A.A.P., and if you want to know what that stands for you’re just going to have to Look It Up!, which coincidentally is the slogan of the devastatingly clever blog Librarian Avengers.

I mention them because the chief Avenger has compiled a set of icons to warn prospective moviegoers about abuses that occur onscreen. That’s the second (greener) column on the right, above.

In case you haven’t got their meanings completely worked out yet, here they are:

The”destroyer of quackery” badge

The “I may look like a scientist but I’m actually also a ninja” badge

The “I’m a freaking rock star who sings about science” badge

Rated B for British Accent Faked by American

Rated E for Escape-in-front-of-a-fireball

Rated K for Keyboard hacks Pentagon in two clicks

Rated R for Remake of a Better Film

and my favorite

Rated S for Scientific Content ≠ Reality

Now all we need is a set of Scribble icons to let you know whether new posts are worth reading or not… stay tuned.

In the meantime, please be advised that the comments button is now at the top of each post, just under the headline. I have received exactly ZERO comments since changing the page format. The lowly Scribbler has been trying to explain to Scribble High Command that the drop-off has nothing to do with Scribble Quality, but they’re having none of it.

So come on, folks, throw me a fricken bone here. (if only to show you know where that last sentence came from)

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Mac Users Gain Edge in Earthquake-Prone Regions

As if the Apple folks hadn’t made Macs cute and quirky enough straight out of the box, other people are writing freeware to turn your MacBook Pro into a seismograph.

It all started in early 2005, when Apple decided to put motion sensors into the new laptops. Why, you ask? So that if you happen to be playing Frisbee with your laptop, the computer can sense the dangerous accelerations and pull the disk drive head off the disk, safeguarding any tax records or blog archives you haven’t backed up recently.

Enter Seis Mac. Download the freeware and moments later you’re watching the results of your nervous leg-jiggling in three dimensions. There’s even free calibration software in case the fact that the graphs don’t precisely zero out disturbs you.

Here at the Scribble headquarters, we borrowed a handy MacBook Pro, downloaded SeisMac and started waiting for an earthquake. We’ll let you know when we feel one. In the mean time, we made a quiz for you.

Match the graphs in this post to the cause:

(a) a bouncing volleyball

(b) four oranges being unsuccessfully juggled

(c) the Crystal Method playing their big hit “Weapons of Mass Distortion”

(d) a table that didn’t seem nearly so unsteady until we ran Seis Mac

(e) your humble Scribbler waltzing with the MacBook donor

And that’s not all the quirky freeware out there. You can download a program that shows you a near-real-time, 3-D view of how your computer is oriented in space. (You do have to be looking at your computer in order to see the view of your computer, but that’s beside the point.) Soon, you may be able to play your favorite video game simply by shoving your laptop around the table.

Of course, what all this giddy experimentation does to your poor disk drive reader remains unresearched. But Seis Mac creator Daniel Griscom has a detailed disclaimer that only gets better from its first paragraph:

If you’re waving your laptop around watching Seis Mac graph the accelerations and your laptop slips from your hands and goes flying out of a tenth story window, it’s not my fault.

Thanks to Adam Soule for the tip.

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Periodic table of abuses

The Union of Concerned Scientists uses a bit of humor to attack the growing problem of government attacks on scientific integrity. They’ve assembled a list of outrages – in case you’ve lost track of some of them – and instead of listing them all in an endlessly scrolling page they’re mapped out on a periodic table of sorts.

Hover over a symbol for the headline; click for the full story. And since they’re scientists, you can rest assured that the writeups are aggressively footnoted.

Delivering another refreshing blast of humor at the problem, the Union sponsored a cartoon contest poking fun at the sorry state of government-science interactions. You can buy a calendar of the top 12 funniest cartoons here. My favorite punchline: “And if you run the film backwards you can see it contains a hidden message: the glaciers are actually getting larger.”

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Welcome to Moss Landing

A warm welcome to summer tourists, from the Moss Landing chamber of cormorants.

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Cute baby pictures #1

Who can resist baby northern diamondback turtles? These are about 1 day old. Modeled by MBARI intern/Berkeley grad student Stephanie Bush (rocking the sock-flipflops combo).

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Funny sign alert #1

From Ferrell’s Donuts on Mission Ave., Santa Cruz. They’re open late, much to their dismay.

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