hooray for sunshine in winter time

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These pics were taken on Jan 6.

Hooray for blue skies and sunshine when it's January out!

Random information, as seen on a library bookshelf.

Paper flowers, chain mail, beadwork, knife making, stained glass..........  Hooray for libraries!

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December 30, 2018

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Sunrise, just after the solstice.  Dec. 30, 2018.

Shifting the (phone) camera just a bit to the left of the above.  This is looking basically straight east.

How long has it been since you've seen one of these? 

Shortly after sunset.

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October 21, 2018

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Here is a candidate I believe I can happily support.

The first time I read about Ammar Campa-Najjar, he talked about how he became involved in Obama's campaign for the presidency.  Ammar said he figured tall skinny brown guys with funny names had to stick together.  :-)  He worked on the campaign, and then worked in the administration.

I'm thinking that anyone who got a job in Obama's administration is likely to be an honorable public servant........

In our culture, most people think that buying things will make them happier. The research is pretty clear, I believe, that the reality is that accumulating another thing (even big things, like cars or houses) may give us a temporary blip of happiness. Emphasis on temporary. 

The way our discretionary funds can give a longer-lasting boost to our well-being is if we buy experiences, or if we spend the money on helping things be better. Other people. Or the planet. 

This book is an interesting light read. Recommended.

Walking.  Here's something I'd never seen before.  Orange and black flamingos.  :-)  (These are not at the Rat House.  Same street, but a couple of blocks away.)

Aster, and someone else's red leaf.  A true geranium, I think.

We had dinner at the Sherpa restaurant.  I like the vegetable stew.  Lots of veggies, and interesting spices.  Plus really fat "dumpling" noodles.  Yummy, and good leftover, too.  (I bring my own leftover container, so I can have one that I have more confidence is sealed.)

The sky was cool when we came out.  (The restaurant is in a strip mall, so there is lots of big sky available for our viewing pleasure.)

Phone camera not so good at focusing on hazy cloudy distant objects..... 

Looking east.  Nearly-full moon.

Looking west.  Sunset.

A little later (we drove from the Target parking lot on Ann Arbor-Saline to the Pittsfield library parking lot).

The same cool clouds, apparently clearing up at the horizon.

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October 15, 2018

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If you love trees, love forests, love the outdoors, and/or love learning about cutting edge science, I think you will find The Hidden Life of Trees interesting.  So much is going on in the world that we have no idea about.............  Highly recommended.

Frost predicted, on Oct. 15, so I brought in most of the remaining tomatoes.

Running errands.  Sky from a strip mall............

Love the collage-y illustrations in this book.

I've never seen the library pushing people to vote (just vote, there are no library proposals on the ballot this time).

Good on ya, library.  Vote, Vote, VOTE, people................

Walking.  Trees starting to turn on Oct 15.

Here's that puffball we've had our eye on, with some festive companions.

Writing, writing, writing.  EVERY VOTE MATTERS.  Democrat all up and down the ballot, and YES on proposals -- all but A, on which I am conflicted.............  Bagenstos and Cavenaugh for Supreme court, and Simpson for the District Court race that is contested.

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new book -- What Can a Citizen Do?

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identifying flowers

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I love the internet...........

I can very often (but not always) identify flowers by starting with a google search and then looking at the images.

In this case I was trying to identify the sort of black-eyed-Susan looking ones with the sticking-up middle and the drooping petals (from my previous post).

I asked google for black-eyed susan drooping petals.  I looked through a bunch of pictures.

Eventually I found an image from this book:  Flowers of Mountain and Plain, by Edith Clements.

I love project Gutenberg.  They scan out-of-copyright books that were originally printed in the USA, and make them available to anyone in the USA, for any purpose.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47339/47339-h/47339-h.htm

Look at number 1.  That looks like what I'm thinking about, don't you think? 

It seems to be a coneflower, not a black-eyed Susan.  (Ratibida, not Rudbeckia) 

Once I have a potential name, I can google that name, and find a whole bunch more images, which will either be like, or not like, the plant I have photographed. In this case, I think the flowers in the park are likely to be Ratibida columnaris (or a near relative).

You never know what you will learn when you go looking................  :-)

All from the comfort of your own study.  No need to remember what your question was, the next time you go to the library.........


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June 12, 2018

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This book is about using what we've learned from games and gaming to help people live real life.

People learn and develop a lot of skills from playing games.  (The author has been a designer of computer games, so that's a big part of the focus.)  Gaming skills can be used to help us be better at things we want to do in real life.  I'm listening to the audiobook.  This is available in a hard copy book, and also as a (free) game on your phone. 

It's full of interesting ideas, and seems plausible.  (Research has been done on "the SuperBetter method" and it seems to help people tackle all sorts of problems that have been bothering them, from healing after a concussion -- the author -- to dealing with health issues, finding a job, getting out of debt, etc, etc, etc....)

My beautiful farmers' market peonies.

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Julian is a Mermaid

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I am completely charmed by this book.

Julian's caring and accepting grandmother supports his dreams.  Lovely story and gorgeous illustrations. 

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April 20, 2018

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If you love knitting and/or ingenuity and/or perseverance and/or paying it forward and/or good strong female characters, I bet you will like this sweet book.

A Hat for Mrs. Goldman -- strongly recommended.  :-)
 

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March 18, 2018

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Hooray for YELLOW in springtime!  Crocus.

I am a very picky reader.  I bring home novels allll the time that I close after a few pages and send back to the library.

I had been beginning to wonder if it was just me.  But no, it's not.  I still love the writing of many women from "the golden age of mysteries."  This is a good one.  Recommended.

Not a surprise that one of our first errands after we got home was the library..........

The next image is sunlight through the perforated side of a metal bookshelf, falling on one of the shelves.

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February 12, 2018

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Mid February.  The sun is moving north..... 

Sunrise in a snowy Tree Town.

There was a significant amount of snow on the ground on February 12, 2018.

How Emotions are Made is a really interesting book. 

The more I read, the more convinced I am that pretty much everything that goes on in our heads is constructed.  Constructed partly of input from the outside world, partly of what we believe about our past experience, partly of how our body feels at the moment (contented?  queasy?  calm?  aggitated?)...............

For example, I have bodily sensations when I am working up to having a hot flash that I have experienced as "anxiety."  My brain notices that my body is having those sensations, and immediately hunts for a reason Team Me might be feeling anxious.  (There is ALWAYS something to be anxious about, if we hunt for it..........)

The more I can notice those sensations, and regard them as being unrelated to the outside world ("I must be about to have a hot flash.  If I wait a a few minutes, I won't feel this way." rather than "What's wrong???  What evasive action should I look for???"), the less anxious I feel.

I believe we would all do well to continually check what we think is right against data, if we actually want to maximize reasonable confidence that what we think is true lines up with what is likely to really be true............

I recommend this book.  I don't agree with every word, but I think there is a lot of useful info here.

Now here's something to be, well, not anxious, but annoyed! about..................

Ann Arbor would like to be a good place to live.  We pat ourselves on the back about "quality of life."  There's a lot of BS from city hall about how Ann Arbor is good for non-motorized traffic.

Here's Exhibit A for the prosecution.

Street all plowed.  INTO THE CURB CUTS.  (And, I add, into everyone's driveways!)  How does this benefit anyone but cars?  (And, on my street, *PLENTY* of cars just passing through [NOT neighbors....].)

The poor people who own corner lots are expected to keep the curb cuts clear.  It is often the case that they have shoveled out the curb cuts, only to have the plows come by and do this........  Oddly enough, those home-owners rarely feel compelled to shovel this mess out of the curb cuts, having already moved the original snow.

(I note that the plowed mess is much harder to shovel than the original snow.  These piles are hard heavy chunks, and if you don't move the mess immediately after the plow puts it somewhere, it freezes into a solid mass that must be chopped up before it can be moved.............)

The result is this.  A hazard for more-or-less able-bodied pedestrians, and an impassable obstacle for anyone else.

A closer view.  The pink is where my foot will be in the next image, to give some scale to this.

This mess is well over 2 feet tall.

Having successfully navigated this hazard, we look back at it from the middle of the street.  You can see the home-owner has shoveled out the walk, AND the curb cut ... up to the place where the plows filled the curb cut.........

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October 30, 2017

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Virginia creeper.  I did not do anything to increase the saturation.  This is just as the phone camera and I recall it.  Wow, eh?

If you love animals, wild and tame, I think you will like this story (and pics).  A hawk (who was injured badly enough that she could not be released into the wild after rehab) laid eggs every year (which didn't hatch because they were infertile).  The hawk's human care-taker put fertile chicken eggs in the hawk's nest, and the hawk successfully raised chicks many times (and never ended up eating the chickens!).

Nice story of a human care-taker empathizing with a hawk, and nice pics.

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September 6, 2017

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Aster.

Bees on the "Autumn Joy" -- honey, and bumble.

Closer look at the honeybee.

I have no idea what this is.

I realized I was confused about which are coreopsis and which are cosmos.  I looked it up, and the differences are subtle and involve part names I didn't recognize.  So this is one or the other..........

Rose hip.  With spikes.

Black-eyed Susan.

I think this is a chrysanthemum.

Gallardia

Cosmos, or coreopsis.

Spent cup plant flower.

This cup plant has kindly provided one flower with petals, to remind us what they look like at that stage.

Phlox.

Lily of the valley seed pods.

I haven't recommended a book for a while.  This one is really interesting and well written.

It's been long enough that I can't remember the numbers.  But I remember concepts.....

Our bodies are formed from a LOT of cells.  The estimates are in flux, as we learn more and more about our bodies.  Let's say the number is something like 37 trillion.  The number of microbes on us, and in us, is larger.  That number is even more iffy (and surely varies with the individual person), but it is likely that each of us includes more microbial cells than human cells.

This is relatively new knowledge, because we can't see our microbes with our naked eyes.  There are lots of them that are hard to see with microscopes.  Many of them can't live in petri dishes.  Some cannot live where there is oxygen.  Some of them require each other to produce proteins they need to live and/or thrive.  Studying them is complicated.

Such study is in its infancy.  We don't know who they they all might be, at this point, and we only have the foggiest of a beginning of understanding how they interact with each other and with us.........

Current understanding is that the vast majority of our microbes are benign to us, and most of them are essential to our health and well-being.  We evolved in a soup of microbes, and some of them have partnered with us over billions of years, just as algae and fungi partner to become lichens.

We depend on them to help digest our food, to make vitamins for us, to protect our skin, and hundreds (and thousands?) of other services that we are only scratching the surface of learning about.  We know that microbes in our guts communicate with our brains, and can affect our sense of well-being.  We know that they affect us in dozens of ways that we are only beginning to try to comprehend.


All of the things I've learned about what goes on within our skulls have led me to think of myself as a team rather than an individual.  All of the things I've learned about microbial teamwork with our human cells has amplified that thinking.

We ARE comprised of multitudes........................


All of this makes me very leery of antibiotics.  At this point we have NO IDEA how we are messing ourselves up when we take broad-spectrum antibiotics.  For decades antibiotics have been thought of as basically benign to humans.  If they didn't know why you had a fever, it was easiest to throw antibiotics at you, and see if you got better.  And, mostly, you did, so it was all good.  Or so we thought.

We are learning that (surprise, surprise) "good" and "bad" are not a binary condition.  For one microbic example, while Helicobacter pylori is known to have a role in causing ulcers and other gastric illnesses, Wikipedia says "Mounting evidence suggests H. pylori has an important role in protection from some diseases.^[95]" including asthma, esophageal reflux, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.

At this point we do not know who our friends are, or our "frenemies" may be. We don't know who hurts us, or helps us, or under which circumstances is help or hurt  likely to happen.

Killing off our microbiota with broad-spectrum antibiotics is like nuking the country to get rid of mosquitoes.  We *might* get rid of mosquitoes, and the malaria they may be transmitting, but we also lose the trees, the forests, the bunnies and bears............  Some of it may recover and come back, but what have we lost that we didn't even know was there?  (We have learned in the last couple of decades that we have had no idea what all is going on beneath the soil surface in a forest.  A forest is much more of a community than we knew.  Those trees are communicating chemically, and helping their friends, and feeding their children.........  And of course there are hosts of microbes as part of the process.)

Humans have taken a very "what could possibly go wrong?" stance for much of our history.  That stance has pretty much worked out for us, but I suspect we are now beginning to get a glimpse of the catastrophes we've set in motion..............................

Scary.

In the microbial realm, we are causing (and have been causing, for decades) the extinction of microbes we don't even know existed.  Microbes which might have been protecting us against all sorts of things..................


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