A white-breasted nuthatch, doing the nuthatch pose at Glacier Point in Yosemite (Flickr)
We spent this June more on the road than otherwise. C drove down from Seattle over Memorial Day weekend, and after I spent a workweek packing for an extended stay on Puget Sound, we road-tripped north. We only had a three-day weekend, but we strung together some sightseeing stops along the way.
We had an overnight stay in Yosemite National Park, where I finally saw the Yosemite Valley — and not one but two new-to-my-camera lupine species, and a very cooperative nuthatch, the headline image for this post.
Joshua trees on Ryan Mountain, overlooking the Joshua tree woodlands in the heart of Joshua Tree National Park (jby)
I have a new op-ed at LNC|LancasterOnline, making the case for the “curiosity-driven” science that the National Science Foundation has supported through much of my adult life — and which is under dire threat from cuts proposed by the Trump Administration and the budget bill under consideration in Congress right now. In it, I discuss some of the possible long-term applications of my lab’s research on Joshua trees, which seem at first like they might be too weird to tell us anything helpful in daily life:
Joshua trees’ pollination by a single species of moths serves as an informative contrast to plant and pollinator interactions that play out in more common, more complicated situations, such as pollination of fruit and nut trees by wild insects and domestic honeybees. By studying Joshua trees’ simplified system, my graduate mentor learned how cooperative relationships like pollination stay cooperative, with two different species trading resources and services, even when they have incentives to cheat.
My lab has also studied how weather influences Joshua trees’ very sporadic annual flowering. Most years, they either flower prolifically, or not at all — and until recently we didn’t know what made the difference between bloom or bust. For that project, we developed software to use machine learning models trained with easy-to-collect data, which may work well for many other species of plants. That could be helpful in agriculture, or in planning to protect rare plant species, or even in understanding how the environment limits where different species can live.
But — and this is the important part — work with Joshua trees and hundreds of other peculiar creatures in distant habitats is important even if it doesn’t pan out into applied discoveries.
Of course, none of these applications of Joshua tree research may pan out. For every Thermus aquaticus [the hot-spring bacterium whose chance discovery enabled modern genetic research] there are hundreds of scientific projects that end in nothing more than a peer-reviewed research article and some fond memories of fieldwork. But we need those hundreds of curiosity-driven studies to find that one lucky, world-changing discovery.
Selfie at the starting corralIn the pack (MarathonFoto)Still moving (MarathonFoto)
Monday, I ran the 129th Boston Marathon. It’s something like 15 and a half years after my first marathon, and it’s taken me that entire time to get to Boston.
I ran my first marathon back in October 2009, in Portland. I’d tried a spring half marathon and survived it, and found a simple enough training plan to work my way up to a 26.2 mile (42km) distance, running through the rolling Palouse hills beyond the University of Idaho campus in Moscow, Idaho. Portland went well enough that I signed up for another the next year, and another the year after that.
The first step towards making the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte is to remember that you can make the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte. Say, midway through Sunday brunch, when you remember that you’ve accepted a dinner invitation for that evening and really should bring something, but nothing too complicated. You think of the recipe as the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte even though it was first published in The New York Times because you cancelled your Times subscription when they hired Bret Stephens.
For all the good that seems to have done.
Anyway the Smitten Kitchen Purple Plum Torte is perfect for a last-minute dessert because its ingredient list is so simple, you can run it down almost in your head and compare against what you know you have back in the kitchen at home. You’ll just have to make a detour on the way back from brunch to pick up some plums.
Here’s a new one for my publications list: the Op-Ed pages of my hometown newspaper. I’ve spent the last weeks calling my congressional reps, and hassling other people to do the same, over the Trump administration’s vandalism of research funding (alongside its vandalism of just about every other function of the federal government), but it’s hardly felt like enough. One new option presented when I happened across Science Homecoming, a project to recruit scientists to speak out in support of federal research agencies in the newspapers of towns where they grew up. As Science Homecoming points out, local newspapers continue to have a huge audience across the country, and that’s an opportunity to reach people where they live, with stories that show how the current crisis impacts their local communities.
So I looked up the opinion section editor at LNP/LancasterOnline, the modern incarnation of the paper my parents have subscribed to since I was old enough to read it, which serves central Pennsylvania. I emailed her a pitch that I’d put together following Science Homecoming’s suggestions, and she wrote back to ask for a full column almost immediately. (The topic was already very much on the editorial staff’s radar.) A bit more than a week later, my column is online and in print, alongside a parallel piece from two geoscientists with local roots, on the front page of the Sunday Perspectives section.
Canada Jay taking flight on Rattlesnake Ledge, Seattle (jby)
Occurred to me this morning that I haven’t done a retrospective of the past year’s Flickr photostream as I did last year for plants, and birds, and mammals, and landmarks — and while I’m not going to manage that for 2024, at this point, I can and should still post my favorites. I’m getting a bit more comfortable with the camera, and the processing options in Adobe Lightroom, and I think I got some mighty nice results.
When I planned out the schedule for my fall semester graduate statistics course back in August, I remember pausing, for a moment, over today’s date. Did I want to plan for a regular meeting the day after this election? In many of the best-case scenarios, the students and I would be thinking more about an ongoing vote count than whatever topic I slotted in for the day. But I had hope, and only so many days for the class, and I figured I could always make a call based on what actually happened.
It turns out my hope was misplaced, and we knew it before I finally went to bed last night.
So this morning, before I could bring myself to eat breakfast, I composed an email to the class. It’s turned out to be most of what I have to say this morning, so I’m posting it here for posterity, or maybe for other faculty who are still trying to figure out how to say some of this:
May, here in the Upper Midwest, is when spring finally starts. The trees are budding out all over Median Lake, crocuses are poking up from flowerbeds, and that pile of snow in the parking lot behind City Hall is melted down to its stubborn, pyramidal core of gravel and ice. Gardeners have been putting in all the tomatoes they started on their kitchen windowsills back in April — Mother’s Day weekend, that’s the date to get them in the ground, and spend the next two months dreaming of big, juicy slices of heirloom beefsteaks for caprese and BLTs, brilliant red Romas to can for sauce.
It’s also time for Median Lake Pride, second to last weekend of May. Yes, Pride is traditionally in June. But when you’re planning Pride in a town midway between Des Moines and Minneapolis, and within road-trip distance of Milwaukee and Chicago, you have to make some accommodation. We know better than to try to compete with the big cities, even if we do know how to put on a show in Median Lake.
And, honey, it has not been a quiet Pride Week in Median Lake.
Median Lake got another foot of snow this week. The sun came out and warmed us up above freezing for maybe an hour, at high noon on Tuesday. That mostly served to re-establish the glaze of ice on the sidewalks — best we can do in February, on the prairie.
In weather like this, I expect you think we spend all our time huddled indoors. And you’d be right! But diners are indoors. Church fellowship halls are indoors. Coffee shops are indoors. The Rainbow Garland Tavern, the only gay bar between Des Moines and the Twin Cities, just a block off of Main Street on Third Avenue, by the Larsson Brothers Hardware? That’s as indoors as you get. And whatever else you might say about folks getting together in diners and fellowship halls and coffee shops and bars, it usually doesn’t make for a quiet week.
Steven Kramer, who tends bar at the Garland most nights? Well, he’s more or less the only person in town you might call an events promoter, and he’s been running ragged.
C in the waves at Second Beach, Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge, Washington. (jby)
To bring this photographic retrospective to a close, we come to images I took of the landscapes in which I found birds, plants, mammals, and other critters. These include lots of mountains and forest trails, but the most dramatic ones might be views from Second Beach at Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge. The beach is shadowed by rocky prominences that loom dramatically out of the tidal spray, some big enough to host patches of coastal forest.
