Mokka mit Schlag

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.

Art

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Get low.

Use a polarizing filter to get rich colors in landscape photography.

Biology

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.

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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:

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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 ℝⁿ based on open balls. What about an open box? I.e. all points in ℝⁿ such that a₁ < x₁ < b₁; a₂ < x₂ < b₂;…;a_n < x_n < b_n. 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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I’ve gotten completely addicted to eBooks this year. I now have a library of hundreds of ePubs and PDFs covering almost every category in the Dewey Decimal System. However I’m finding the available eReading software weak and inadequate for a lot of uses. The best I’ve found so far is Aldiko Premium ($4.99 at the Android App Store) combined with the open source Calibre on my desktop and laptop; but I want better. In particular here’s what I find missing in current options:
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My wife and I picked Bermuda for our July 4th vacation because it was reasonably close, had nice weather, spoke English, and we’d never been there. Oh, yes, it only had one possible life bird for me to find so I wouldn’t spend the entire trip looking for birds instead of sightseeing with her.

That bird is the White-tailed Tropicbird, locally known as the Longtail. The Bermuda Petrel or Cahow is out at sea at this time of year. However the White-tailed Tropicbird is common. You can also see these from East Coast pelagics in the United States, sometimes even from New York shores if there’s a hurricane; but they’re far easier to find here. They’re like looking for Laughing Gulls at Coney Island.

I’m reasonably sure I saw some from the cab from the airport, but I couldn’t be quite certain. However as we had lunch on the hotel veranda while waiting to check into our room, several definitive White-tailed Tropicbirds flew along the ocean parallel to the beach. #847! Now we can see sight-see at a leisurely pace for the rest of the trip. :-)
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