My previously scheduled talk for tomorrow night, Thursday, November 1, on Birding Cuba for the Brooklyn Bird Club has been cancelled due to transit issues and the continuing closure of Prospect Park where we usually hold meetings. It will likely be rescheduled in early December.
Update: The new date is Thursday, December 6 at the Litchfield Villa in Prospect Park. See you there!
Despite watching this bird for about an hour last week, and taking many photos, it took me a really long time to decide what it was. I’m not going to name it because I’m still only 90% sure:
After realizing how much I was hearing this year I had heard last year in St. Louis and forgotten, I decided to write a few things down.
Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
Get low.
Use a polarizing filter to get rich colors in landscape photography.
Some ants have stingers, not just fangs.
Toads have been recategorized. There are no more Bufos left in North America!
Butterflies aren’t even a clade. They’re just different families of moths that have evolved along similar lines.
OK. This is the second to last day at Bugshot and a hurricane is coming. I’m staying at the Archbold Biological Station, home to one of the major, possibly the largest breeding colony of the endangered Florida Scrubjay. I’m told they come to the parking lot here but I still haven’t seen one. So this morning early I took off across the railroad tracks before breakfast and promised myself I wasn’t turning around until I found a scrub jay. And I was not disappointed:
Better-than-expected, in fact. I’m dictating this entire thing with dictation and Mac OS X mountain line.Compared to the various versions of Dragon dictate that I’ve used, it seems to work pretty well. I greatly accuracy about on par with Nuance naturally speaking 11.On the other hand, user interface leave something to be desired. In particular, I can’t just dictate continuously. I have to keep pressing the function key for each sentence I want to dictate and then click done.That’s probably because the recognition doesn’t happen directly on my own computer.Instead, it sent to Apple for recognition on Apple servers.
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A quick proof of something that bothered me in basic topology. Assume the standard topology on â„n based on open balls. What about an open box? I.e. all points in â„n such that a1 < x1 < b1; a2 < x2 < b2;…;an < xn < bn. Is this an open set? I.e. can you build it up out of a union of open balls? Or, more colloquially, can you pack a square hole with round pegs without leaving any gaps?
Short answer: yes, if the balls can overlap and you have infinitely many of them. Long answer:
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