Freshly back from my annual pilgrimage to TED, I’m taking stock of the brain-fizzing input that came my way all week in Vancouver. Each year has its own balance of technology, entertainment and design, and this year all three had a distinctly artificial intelligence flavor. The conference is built on ‘ideas worth spreading’, but the one that seems to be sticking with me now is not one of the talks, per se, but an idea for a future TED talk: one delivered by an animal.
You see, TED used to have an annual prize of a million dollars given to one person – Bill Clinton, say, for his health infrastructure project in Rwanda. This year, they gave away one billion dollars to ten people, each a leader of what it dubs an Audacious Project. It’s money donated by the usual suspects, the Gates Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, and others. And one of those Audacious Projects is, I kid you not, honest-to-goodness translating whales.
I talked to the leader of Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), a marine biologist who described to me his sperm whale subjects. They spend a few minutes at the surface before they dive down to the depths of the ocean and break all of his listening equipment for hours. Through natural language processing (yes, more AI) his team has been able to decipher the phonetic alphabet of these whales’ combinatorial language – something only humans had been thought to possess. A few minutes into their time at the surface, he says, these whale pods start chatting amongst themselves about diving. That’s the first concept his analysis was able to identify in the language. And then, after a distinctive series of clicks, they all dive together.
It would be great to hear a whale’s ideas on the TED stage one day soon, even if there are ethical questions around whether we should be acting like Amy Adams in Arrival, communicating back to animals in their own languages and disrupting them in yet another way. But a TED friend pointed out that it would actually be a lot easier to train an AI model to converse with those animals directly, in the same way GPT-4 interacts with us. Except that we would then understand neither the AI nor the whales. And that, to me, would feel like a more fitting gift.
I was in Borneo last fall, in a very wild place called Gunung Palung National Park, following orangutans and macaques and leaf monkeys, oh my. Being around primates is always very exciting, and nobody threw poop, which was a nice change from some primate-viewing experiences I’ve had.
And yet, even considering the droopy-cheeked orange apes, this frog might have been my favorite thing. I mean, look at her! [I’m guessing she was a she because the shes are bigger than the hes and she was pretty big.] Such a giant frog in the hand feels amazing. Check out her webbed feet and those front toes with the knobs on the end! And get this: She could fly.
Locals told me she was a Wallace’s flying frog (named for biologist Alfred Russell Wallace, who is said to have collected the first specimen, though apparently a Chinese laborer actually found the frog so really that laborer should get all the credit, but that’s not how these things go). I sat on a log for quite a while waiting for her to fling herself from one tree to another, legs spread and wacky feet splayed. When she finally obliged, it was a glorious sight, though it was less flight than a sort of awkward gliding or parachuting, with a gentle but still downward trajectory. Gravity and everything.
Then, poked by a student, she flew again, this time landing FULLY ON MY FACE. A perfect cartoon SPLAT, that was. Unfortunately, nobody got a picture, and I wasn’t quick enough for a selfie. Such a missed opportunity.
There’s an illustration of this kind of frog that’s really great, but I don’t know if I need permission to include it here. So, here’s a link to it. Revel in its adorableness before the paywall pops up.
Happily, these particular rainforest frogs seem to be hanging in there; they’re considered “of least concern” by the IUCN, whose list of endangered and threatened species tends toward bad news.
There were other incredibly lovable frogs in the park, and I might share them in another post later. For now, here’s my girl once again.
My neighbor’s shrub looks nothing like this random vegetation in England
The other night I was on a walk and a shrub attacked me. Not an attack, really. We were on the sidewalk and it was claiming part of the airspace above. Of the two of us humans on the walk, I was on the shrub’s side, and the shrub and I had a temporary encounter in the same space. Its leafy branch tips plucked at my hair and my sleeve.
My companion commented on its aggression. I expressed surprise that the shrubs had gotten so big. I’ve been by them many times over the years, in multiple directions; walking by on the sidewalk in both directions, and also passing through the gap in the middle to pick figs or drop off baked goods or attend an art class. The shrubs used to be small. Now they’re taller than me.
I had a similar thought the other day, walking down the street toward the local grocery store, seeing a woman carrying her toddler, and thinking – the kids who were that size when I moved here, who I used to see being carried by their moms – how old are they now? They are seniors in high school. They’re driving. They’re making decisions about what college to go to.
When I was walking by those kids, at that age, my current age minus 15, I was working at a job that I hated and I was probably singing in way too many choirs and I still owned a car. In fact, I probably wasn’t even walking by those kids most of the time; I was probably driving.
I only sing in one or two choirs now and my job is ok, and I walk way more than I drive.
This post ran a few springs ago, in appreciation and imitation of Craig’s ‘penspective’ series, but with less effective photography.Spring seems like a wonderful time for cloud-spotting here. Last week, there was an amazing lenticular cloud in the shape of a cigar. I didn’t have my pen with me, but I can still remember it floating there, the edges turning pink as the sun began to set.
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I saw these clouds in November and it has taken me six months to figure out how to upload the photo. But I’m glad, in a way, because I have a new perspective on clouds. (I am not sure that I have a new perspective on pens: the Pilot Precise V5 is still my favorite.)
Earlier this spring, I found out about The Cloud Collector’s Handbook, a guide to cloud types that also includes points for spotting various clouds and a scorecard. The book is delightful—it has approachable descriptions of the science behind how different cloud types form, and it also gives you 20 bonus points for a Brocken spectre and explains the rainbow-ringed mountaintop glory like this: “The perspective can make the legs of your shadow flare out so, what with the multicolored halo, it looks like a ghost from the 1970s.”
I looked around for more information about the book’s author, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, and found an excellent story about him and the Cloud Appreciation Society, which he founded somewhat by accident in 2004. (If you are tired of reading things online and need to go do the dishes, there’s also an audio version of the story.)
Now, using this book, I think I can figure out what kinds of clouds these are. Because the clouds make that small, wave-like pattern, they’re called undulatus and created by interacting air currents. And even though it’s not a very good photo, the pen helps. It can be difficult to tell the more common Altocumulus (mid-level clouds) from the higher Cirrocumulus, which are made primarily of ice crystals. Pretor-Pinney says that you can distinguish the two by holding out a finger (or, in my case, a pen) at arm’s length—if the cloudlets are no larger than a finger width, they are likely Cirrocumulus.
The “rare and fleeting” Cirrocumulus is worth 40 points, while the Altocumulus is 30. Points are at stake here, my friends. The wavy variety of either cloud, the undulatus, is 20 points. So I could have 70 points worth of clouds in this very small collection!
I know, I know, the points don’t really mean anything, it’s the remembering to look up. As Pretor-Pinney writes about the undulatus, “Their presence is a reminder, to any who might forget, that the atmosphere around us is just as much an ocean as is the sea below.”
How could it happen? Was it the wrath of God or the malice of Poland? Was the crew drunk or was the Vasa wrongly built? The town was alive with rumours.
I’ll bet it was. On August 10, 1628, the warship Vasa—the pride of Sweden, the talk of Stockholm—set sail on its maiden voyage. It didn’t even get out of the harbor. The Vasa plugged along for 1300 yards, or about 4/5 of a mile, and then ran smack into a viciously gentle breeze, after which it toppled over and sank.
Divers managed to salvage some cannons, but otherwise the Vasa lay at the bottom of the harbor until it was rediscovered in the 1950s and raised in 1961. To say that today it is the centerpiece of the Vasamuseet, a museum on the harbor in Stockholm, is an understatement. The ship—226 feet in length, 38 feet at its maximum width—certainly does dominate the vast modernist structure. But as I made my way around the museum this past August, I couldn’t help thinking that something was odd here. The experience was unlike any I’ve had in a museum. And then, as I stood before a life-size sculpture of two women talking, and as I read in the explanatory plaque on a nearby wall that the “town was alive with rumours,” I realized what distinguishes the museum.
It’s not that its subject is a ship. It’s that its subject is a thing.
I used to think there was something wrong with ponderosa pines.
As a kid, their wild, asymmetrical growth bothered me. I wished they would just be conical, and be Christmas tree shaped, like the evergreen trees inside the stores. I wished they were more like the Colorado blue spruce, the state tree I learned about in school. I didn’t know the Christmas trees I liked were themselves spruce trees; this was something I learned when I was a little older. Maybe 10 or 11.
But these trees were the most common trees in the area where I grew up, so I decided I would try to like the scraggly ponderosas. The spruce trees were transplants, like I was when I was little, but ponderosas and cottonwoods grew wild and free, like they were right where they belonged.
Even as a kid, I was the kind of person that would grow to like something the more I learned about it. My parents took the family to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, where I first saw these words attributed to Jacques Cousteau, and I took them very seriously: “We only protect what we love, we only love what we understand, and we only understand what we are taught.”
So I learned more about ponderosa pines. I remember this vividly: I learned about their vanilla scent, which was especially sweet after a rain or after you scratched the bark and maybe lifted a bit of it. So I became the kid who sniffed trees. I read about the way bears scratch ponderosas to mark territory, and that these bear-scrapes create gashes that expose soft golden wood and fragrant sap. I think I learned, at some point, that the Lewis and Clark expedition used ponderosas for canoes. (Why does every kid learn about Lewis and Clark?) According to the Arbor Day Foundation, the Scottish botanist David Douglas named the tree for its heavy, “ponderous” wood. I don’t remember if this was something I knew as a kid, but it definitely sounds like the sort of Ponderosa Fact™ I would have been glad to toss out in mixed company, and now you know a bit about why I am the way I am.
I came to know a lot of these Ponderosa Facts™. But I could not get over their weird growth. They look like Seuss trees when they’re babies, all thin spindly trunk and ridiculously big puffball needle clusters going in every direction, jutting around in their groups of three. An adolescent ponderosa is also a mess, with branches all akimbo and an asymmetrical pyramidal shape to its crown. They’re not neat trees.
A mature ponderosa — which is a tree that is older than 350 years — is the kind that looks nice and stately, relatively speaking. These have a flatter crown and no lower branches, with dark brown or russet bark that is full of deep wrinkles and fissures that resemble parched soil. These were harder to find as a kid, but I knew the forests an hour away held these more mature, trim, and orderly trees. I live among them now.
Ponderosa at left, firs and junipers all around.
But when I was young, I didn’t see ponderosas of any age as stately. I saw them as disorderly, and as dry, and as something not quite right, and as too wild. And then I left for the Midwest, where I learned what a truly stately tree looks like. The first house I called home in St. Louis was on a leafy street bordered by maples, elms, sycamores, black walnuts, and all kinds of midwestern native trees. They were a riot of color in the fall, and they burst forth on the first of March every year as spring’s heralds. I appreciated their shade, and I grew to love a certain few of these trees. But they were not the same as the good pines back home.
Remember Mitt Romney? He said a lot of dumb things on the campaign trail in 2012, but one thing he said has always stuck with me. Visiting Michigan, where he grew up, he said, “the trees are the right height.”
It was one awkwardly phrased comment among a whole season of malapropisms, but I knew what he meant. I understand it more deeply now, writing from my house in the middle of a ponderosa forest.
Romney’s just-right trees weren’t better than your trees or my trees, and he didn’t mean to imply that they were. They were his ur-trees. They were his coming-of-age trees. They were his childhood trees, the trees that felt like home when he became a man, or at least a younger version of the man he is now. They were his memory trees, the ones that now give him nostalgia and hiraeth: one of the greatest words in any language, which means something like “the longing to be where your spirit dwells.”
The ponderosas are my Romney trees. They are my ur-trees and the hiraeth trees of my heart’s home. They are wild and unassimilated and free, and they’re the trees that make me think of home, and where I was when I became me, and where I longed to be when I was stuck among the stately sycamores.
These are going to be the ur-trees of my children, too. This matters more to me than I ever imagined it would. It is one of the best things about my house and its view of ponderosa on ponderosa. You can keep the tall straight-trunked, smooth-barked deciduous trees. Eight-year-old me was not sure about the crazed vanilla-scented pine trees, but they imprinted on me all the same. The ponderosa is just right.
The dunlin (Calidris alpina) is a small shorebird about seven or eight inches long, with a graceful downcurved bill. When breeding, its plumage is a study of delicate russet over an oil-black breast and belly. The rest of the year it is a drab gray, like it has rolled in ash. As such, when dunlin gather during the winter months on the sloughs around Padilla Bay, in northern Washington, the flocks can look from a distance like an undifferentiated gray smear.
I am staring through my binoculars at just such a smear, tasked this cold morning with counting dunlin on a slender crescent of shore. The standard method is to start at the flock’s front and work back from there, batching the birds in groups of increasing quantity, like so:
Things go smoothly until somewhere between nine hundred and a thousand, when the flock starts to stir. The effect is subtle at first, as single birds take off and move from back to front, perhaps so they don’t have to forage in mud their flock-mates have picked clean. But then more dunlin follow, and before long the entire flock is rolling over itself as if on a great conveyer. Since I don’t want to double-count birds, I start again.
By now the flock is a chaos of motion. A fuse blows somewhere behind my eyes and I put down my binoculars. Keeping track of the birds is impossible. I have lost count.
