The talk is open to the public for anyone in Seattle who is interested.

—Jim Dodge

***

The American Fisheries Society annual meeting starts in Seattle in a couple of days. I will be in attendance, and am bracing myself for an onslaught of these stories. I worry that “I once saw an echo with a target strength of almost -12 dB re. 1 μPa at 1 m!” is not actually that impressive to most people. I suppose I will just have to fall back on my natural modesty.

Winter in Hell from Enrique Pacheco on Vimeo.

Shot by Enrique Pacheco, and brought to my attention by Julia Whitty. Iceland is one of the strangest and most awesome places I’ve been, and getting to travel there this spring for a conference was an amazing privilege. This video almost makes me wish I had been there during the Eyafjallajökull eruption last year. From the photographer’s description on Vimeo:

This is a 8 minutes short film, not a quick youtube video, please be patient or watch it later.

I shot this film over the course of a year. It then took me few months to edit and color grade it.
…
Winter 2010, the stunning landscape of Iceland succumbs to the Arctic cold. Beaches and lakes get frozen, but something unexpected is going to happen… the earth shakes, warms up, and suddenly a big crack opens up at the top of the glacier Eyjafjallajokull. Lava, smoke, ash and fire come up from the depth of the earth, melting everything in its path.

The original is from here. Maybe now you understand why posting has been slow. At least I’m almost at the last line by now…

H/T to my friend Arielle for sending this.

Near Buðir, Snæfellsness, Iceland

Okay, so I haven’t actually been in Iceland for the past seven weeks, and it wasn’t actually that icy or snowy. I spent a week and a half there, attending the annual meeting of the ICES Fisheries Acoustics Working Group, and then doing some sightseeing. Followed by a few days at home for my little bro’s college graduation, followed by the Acoustical Society of America’s conference here in Seattle, followed by a week of frantic revisions to a paper I’m trying to wrap up, followed by a brief trip into the field on Puget Sound…

Anyway, I’m back, life has more or less stabilized for now, and I’ve got a couple of posts in the works. I’m looking at the beginnings of summer in Seattle, spent working on my thesis, and, keneh horeh, spending some time in the sun. The weather is starting to get legitimately summery, and people here are a little giddy. For now, here’s an ode to the sun gods from Cinémetropolis, the new album by local hip-hop wizards Blue Scholars.

Like I said, a little giddy.

Anna is moving soon from Seattle to Ithaca, New York. Google Analytics tells me I have at least a few loyal readers upstate. So let me make a recommendation to you folks—keep your eyes peeled for upcoming performances, and when you see them, run, don’t walk, to the door. For those in Seattle, she’ll be at the Northwest Folklife Festival May 28.

I’ll be traveling the next couple of weeks, first to Iceland (!) for a meeting of the ICES fisheries acoustics working group, and then home to the East Coast for my little bro’s college graduation, so posting may be sparse. I’ll sign off with a question: if I’m offered hákarl in Iceland…do I eat it?

These short surveys are part of a larger project, run by the Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, called eBird. Birdwatchers from all over the country do their own short surveys and send in their sightings electronically. What good are a motley assortment of observations, neither fully random nor systematic in design, made by a bunch of amateurs? Turns out, when done on a continental scale and stitched together with some geostatistical wizardry, a whole lot. Sightings made by eBird’s network of citizen scientists, coupled with geographical and climatological knowledge, allow the scientists at Cornell to produce truly spectacular maps of bird migrations across the United States.

The map above shows the peregrinations of the wood thrush, Hylocichla mustelina, during 2008. The brightness of the colors indicates the probability a wood thrush occurs in a given county. Thrushes move up the Mississippi Valley in the spring, spread out to cover the entire Eastern U.S, and then quickly file south again along the Appalachians in late summer, headed to their wintering grounds in Central America.

This is just one of a long and growing list of migration maps the Lab of Ornithology has produced; all can be viewed here. These maps are a truly spectacular use of the eBird data, but the models behind them are hindered by a lack of data in some regions—in particular, the great plains and the inland Northwest. If you’re in Montana and reading this, consider heading outside and adding a few data points.

On Friday, after sandwiches at Paseo in Ballard, we went to Discovery Park, overlooking Puget Sound at the west end of the city. The day was shifting from clouds to rain, and in the two hours we spent there, the sky went through several transformations that seemed subtle only if you weren’t paying attention to them.

We beat those dark grey nimbostratus crawling over the Olympics home, and made soup while the rain started to fall.

[You can see all the photos I took here.]

I wish I could be enjoying the products of some Sacharomyces cerevisiae right now. Instead, I’m writing a class paper. Oh well.