In Flight

At one point in the last few days I found myself under the eaves of an old barn. and looked outside into the field at these birds that were diving at me and then retreating only to come around for another pass. I was apparently too close to their nests and they were probably trying to warn me away. I took several shots of them in flight but this was difficult as they were very fast. So I ended up having to set the camera's focus and aperture and then take the shot before the birds snapped around. Here they are -

The bird on the lower right above has his tail twisted in mid-turn. It's fascinating to think how these things actually fly, and what air must feel like to them as opposed to how we sense it. They probably think of it as we think of water. It's interesting to think how organisms of different size and sense perceive their environment and develop abilities within it. 

When I was in college I wrote a paper called 'Honey I Shrunk the Kids is Bullshit'. Perhaps you remember that movie - It was Rick Moranis (whose best role, I think, was in a movie he did with Steve Martin about a mobster relocated to suburbia via the witness protection program [My Blue Heaven].)  who shrunk his kids to about an inch tall (we will say for sake of argument, though they may have been much smaller).

In their tiny state, they were suddenly quite fearful of falling any small distance (from a tabletop for example). My paper stated, in no uncertain terms and holding back no polemic attack on my detractors, that those kids at an inch tall could easily have jumped off that table and landed with no different consequence than they would have experienced if they were their previous size. A simple argument - That gravity affects all beings the same, and that the speed at which they would have hit the ground would have been the same as it was before, and if their normal bones could have sustained such an impact then certainly their scaled down bones could too - was enough to begin a 3 hour long conversation with my physics professor (who still gave me a C in his class regardless of my ability to actually make him think). It turns out to be a more complicated problem [Factors including how mass scales down faster than bone strength does, muscle strength increases w/r/t mass as well, and even how not only would they have been able to jump off the table, but could easily have jumped back up to it - add in the wind resistance (so happily left out in high school, and most of college, physics) and you have some interesting stuff going on)], and leads to fascinating conclusions about how  small and big things go about the world. At the end of it we agreed that you wouldn't get hurt, the convesation was how much of a little super-human you would actually be (Basically all the best parts of spiderman and superman). We may be advanced yet our textbooks have trouble explaining the flight of a bumblebee. 

Anyway - Talking about winged insects - the pre-emptive defensive strike against mosquitoes continues. Not only am I cultivating bats (update later), but am reinforcing my house to repel their bloodthirsty onslaught -

It doesn't look like much, but that black ribbon was 2 days in the thinking and 2 in the making. It is not unlike the wrist seal of a drysuit and it takes the irregular surface where the lattice meets the floor and seals it completely from any invader. Now it's a simpler problem to seal the lower part of the wall to this and I should be pest-free*.

Here's a tree where the first Tree Structure will be built -

It's a big Beech tree and has the greenest, broadest leaves. I say structure because it will not be a house, but rather a place to sit or read while in the tree and have ample light and breeze. I would also think it to be a great place to sleep if the weather's right. I have a design in mind, basically a covered swing/wooden hammock, that will work perfectly here and will let the tree grow without harming it. More later...

THE GARDEN -

Basically 3 Big piles of dirt with weeds growing on them - Now to spread it all out, organize it in some way, protect it from deer, cow and the occasional horse, and transplant all the seedlings to their new domain. I will plant 5 times more than I will need so I don't have to sleep by the garden with a shotgun to protect the last vestige of veggies from animal mastication.

I'm stumped -

*While this now seems simple and obvious, I must say that when first faced with the problem it did not come to mind and when it did, it was so elegant it was obvious. It reminds me of my math professor in college who would always say 'Math is beautiful, if your answer is ugly, it's probably wrong.". It is folly to look for a beautiful solution however, but rather to come upon it through right process and perception. The beauty then is a confirmation, or even a reward.