June 14th, 2006 nick
The summer reading pile started small. A trip to Mercer Street Books (at Bleecker and Broadway, smack dab between the east and the west Village) around midnight on Saturday night left me with a very do-able three titles. But my hope of how many pages I can read a day inflated like a housing market riding a bubble with my visit to the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore City on Monday (eight books, 2200 pages). Here is the annotated list as it stands now (notice the few math books thrown in here in case any of the faculty find my blog — gotta make it look like I’m doing me some math this summer!):
(in rough order of priority)
Old School by Tobias Wolff
His story “Bullet in the Brain” has stuck with me ever since I read it five or so years ago. This is his a novel (maybe his only one). I’ve started it. It’s okay so far. Set at a east-coast prep school in the 60s. Nothing earth-shaking.
About A Boy by Nick Hornby
People have been telling me I need to read some of his stuff, and I liked High Fidelity (the movie) quite a bit. That’s all it took to get me to drop $8 on this puppy at Mercer St.
Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
When I was at Harpers in ‘01 we rejected the title story for this collection. I thought it was a mistake, but the fiction-picking editorial sessions saw some serious pissing contests between the editors, especially when they had an opportunity to show how edgy they were by rejecting a story by one of the hippest writers around.
“The Mayflower Moment: Reading Whitman during the Vietnam War” by Patricia Hampl (found in I Could Tell You Stories)
Recommended by my friend Josh. He’s political. He studies American Lit at Penn. He said I should read this for a nice treatment of nationalism and a folksy, populist notion of America. Or something like that.
Classification and Regression Trees by Breiman et al.
Mmmmm, math….. Looks like I’m going to be doing some work on these kinds of predictive models this summer, and this seems to be the definitive book.
Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaassen
Recommended by gribley as a good anti-corporate page-turner.
Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws by Manfred Schroeder
Couldn’t resist this as I used to do some research on chaos theory (as an undergrad) and I’ve been intruiged by power laws since I’ve been doing more stats and reading some Malcolm Gladwell…
Geralds Party by Robert Coover
Enjoyed The Universal Baseball association over spring break, figured I’d try another.
Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell
I’m feeling like never having read any Russell is a glaring gap in my mathematical/philosophical history.
Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner
Recommended by musician, sage, mystic, all-round-crazy guy John Kruth.
Essays in Analysis by Bertrand Russell
see above.
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
People have been telling me to read this for a long time. It’s very long.
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Also long, but I think I might have a better chance of getting into it now than when I started it as a over-earnest high school senior.
The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) by Robert Coover
It’s short (maybe 30 pages) and by Coover.
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June 13th, 2006 nick
I took a walk down to the herons’ nests again this afternoon (see here for my previous talk of these large local birds) and saw a few cool things. First, the light in the middle of the day is much better than in the morning. Next midday trip will be with the camera and hopefully some more photos with some more light will be up at the online Hampden Heron gallery before long.
Also, I scouted out the third nest a little more pointedly today, bush-whacking my way along the creek until I had a good gander at the nest. It looks like there are at least two, if not three, chicks in this nest. While I was watching them, something big flitted across the field of view. And sure enough, one of the babies from the populous nest (the larger one of the other two nests) was flapping around. This was the first sighting of any of the young airborne. Won’t be long until they’re gone…
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June 9th, 2006 nick
Inspired by gribley (who is visiting this weekend and who takes some sweet pictures up in Boston), I spent my first morning of post-first-year-of-grad-school freedom attaching a pair of binoculars (bungee cord) and my digital camera (1/4″ bolt) to a wooden plank and venturing into Wyman Park.
For the last few months, we’ve been keeping tabs on a few Yellow-Crowned Night Herons that have set up camp high in some locust trees in Wyman Park (formal info on the birds available at whatbird.com and Audubon). We first noticed a few of them in mid-April (the 18th, as some archived emails suggest) on an evening stroll — they were busy pulling twigs off of neighboring trees and bringing them back to where they were building the nests. Over the next few days we got to watch nest-building activities and flapping, breeding fun every night that we went down. One evening we saw five birds working on three separate nests, but we have not seen more than 5 adults at any one time since. There are now three nests within 100 meters of each other along the path that runs along the western side of the creek. In the first week or so there seemed to be a lot of activity — the nests went up pretty quickly and each time we went down we’d see three or four adults hanging out on nearby branches. It got boring for a few weeks as they incubated the eggs and each time we’d come down it’d just be the mom sitting on the nest.
But a few weeks ago (around the 13th or so of May), we noticed that the mothers had stopped sitting on the nests all the time. Although we couldn’t get a good angle to see into the nests, we were hoping for some baby herons to start poking their heads over. Indeed, over the past few weeks, the chicks have emerged and grown like crazy to the point where they are now taking over the nests. One nest has at least five and maybe six chicks in it (I call them chicks, but really, they’re about 2/3 or even 3/4 of the adult size now). The other nest that we can see into has two chicks. The last nest has been mostly obscured by foliage since the first weeks of sighting.
In the last few days we’ve been lucky enough to catch some feeding times (the first sighting of a second adult at the populous nest in a while — bringing food for all), and the little guys are clearly getting restless and wondering what these large feathered appendages are for. And this morning was the first time I’d been there when there was no adult watching over the populous nest — the teenagers were home alone. It probably won’t be long until they’re gone, so I got inspired today to snap some photos. Hence the Rube Goldberg camera contraption. And actually, it managed to take some decent pictures. Some are more fuzzy than others, but I think you’ll get the idea…
As an addendum — a google on “wyman park herons” turned up documented sightings of YCNHs nesting on the western side of Wyman Park in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. The 2001 report said that no offspring were produced in 2000, so it looks like this has been a good year. Hopefully they’ll be back next spring too!
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