Wild Spiders I Have Known

Today's blog title is taken from a book by Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals I Have Known.  You can read it online here.  Being a famous Canadian and a founder of Boy Scouts, he was required reading for young Canadian boys. ET Seton has a very interesting life story and you can read about him on Wikipedia. 

The spider pictured on the left here is the Spined Micrathena.  Spiders are commonly classified for the webs they build and this one is what you call an "orb-weaver".  That's a very classical sort of spider web, a wheel shaped web with a spiral holding it together. 

Their web is the way the catch their meals.  Every evening, they eat whatever's in their web and the web itself and then they build a new one.  It's a good way to keep their webs clean.

The Spined Micrathena is very common in MD.  Early Saturday morning, at about 6 am, while MDW was sleeping, I set out on my mountain bike to ride a path nearby in search of a fabled shortcut to the Great Seneca bike path.  The path I chose was only about a mile but all the micrathena love this trail and had build many webs across it.  By the time I reached the end of the trail, I was covered in spiderwebs, especially my face and head. They don't bite and usually drop when their webs are broken but it's unnerving being covered by spiderwebs, especially with the spiders and the shell of their earlier meal still in them.  I think I'm ready for the Haunted Forest come Halloween.

I had high hopes for this shortcut.  It was along the path of some high voltage power lines and they had just mowed the field, making it fairly easy to ride through.  But, there were two stream crossings with steep banks I couldn't see when I first scouted this shortcut and that pretty much killed the idea.  While climbing up one of the sides of the stream, I came across an entirely different sort of web.

These sort of webs are made by grass spiders.  They are related to funnels spiders that build a web in the shape of a funnel and wait at the bottom to devour their prey.  Fortunately the MD species are pretty harmless, just like the micrathena.  We do have the brown recluse and black widows here but I rarely have encountered them.

Windows 8 - Another Sign of Microsoft's Continued Decline

Big companies, especially those who introduce the first of a new product to market, rule for a long time until they fall into complacency and are over taken by their competition.  In the 70's and 80's, IBM's near-monopoly on everything computer related was unassailable.  People feared or envied IBM for their total dominance of a wide range of computers from desktops to sprawling mainframes that required their own building.  But, oh how they have fallen!  Is fallen, even a son of the morning!

How did it happen?  A series of poor decisions and a failed strategy.  If there's any one event, it was when Microsoft and IBM disagreed so significantly on the direction of the next generation operating system (OS/2), that they split and Microsoft implemented their vision as the Windows operating system.  Since that moment, Microsoft's star has ascended while IBM's has declined.

Well, it's about to happen again.  I'm talking about Windows 8.  The beginning of the end for Microsoft.  They're about to be eclipsed by Google and Apple, and this time they're not likely to recover. 

The current situation is that MS pretty much owns most of what you'd call the "enterprise"  space. Businesses that rely on the Windows support and infrastructure to execute their daily operations.  They're the new IBM!  They own the data center and business desktop.  The "consumer" space they share with Google and Apple. For their own personal computing needs, people are increasingly using their smart phones and tablets/iPads .  Apple and Google don't yet own the consumer space but they have a big chunk of it and that percentage is increasing.

In response, MS decided to come up with Windows Phone, a program that originally appeared on the ill-fated Zune music player.  And they adapted it for a smart phone.  It's hasn't sold very well, probably because people are happy with the phones they have.  Here's where it get surreal.  Microsoft decides to use the Windows Phone software and fit it onto to their desktop OS, replacing the desktop that has "just worked" for at least 25 years.  It's an unholy mix of keyboard, mouse and touch and an abandoned desktop metaphor.  I wish I could go into details of how awful it really is but that would be too much.  I'll just include some favorite links:

A deep dive into Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Microsoft Is In Serious Danger Of Flying Straight Into A Mountain With Windows 8
Why Windows 8 could be the next Vista
8 Things We Hate About Windows 8
The Seven Things I Hate About Windows 8

I use a 27" monitor and find Metro (MS' name for their new desktop) annoying.  It insists on displaying every application in full screen mode (there are no windows under this version of Windows) which is overwhelming.  The start button is gone, replaced with "tiles".  A tile is sort of like a desktop icon but less flexible.  Not everyone is going to like Metro is all I can say.  But the real deal killer is that now MS is asking all the people who write applications for Windows to write Metro style apps.  To support touch as well as mouse and keyboard.  If you don't, you'll be forced to use the somewhat broken desktop mode, something similar to the current Windows 7 desktop but without a Start button.  And all the annoying screen hot spots that is part of Windows 8.

Apple took the right approach and keeps their phone and desktop version of iOS separate.  You can't run a pixel-twiddling program like Photoshop without the accuracy of a mouse.  Which is why there are a lot of programs that will never appear on a tablet.  Not without a radical re-write.  In other words, MS is asking everyone (living or dead) who ever wrote a program for the PC, to re-write it for touch and Metro, a unimaginably huge task.  And application support is what makes MS king.  Why break everything you ever worked for?  So everything that's been before is either broken or hurting.

The other deal breaker is the training issue.  Nothing in Metro is intuitive, it's difficult to learn.  One thing that always riles me about a new release of Windows is how all the settings are moved around.  Every new version puts the network settings, the security settings, all those little twiddly things in different places.  I wouldn't mind if there were some reason for it but I can seldom see it.  Windows 8 takes this obfuscation of settings to a whole new level.  People are going to puke on Metro not because it doesn't work but because they can't figure it out. 

All of this this could have been avoided if they kept the traditional desktop and let you launch the Metro environment from there.  But they want to be done with it forever, just like the old DOS command line.  Just so they could chase after the tablet and smart phone market.  It's a textbook case of if it ain't broken, don't fix it.  The only thing that was broken was their market share.  Nobody was asking for this!

MS's lack of judgement is also revealed in another, smaller aspect of Windows 8.  Starting with Office 2007, MS replaced a huge mashed up confusion of command bars, drop down lists, menus and icons with the infamous ribbon.  The ribbon is a huge but better organized mash up of tabs, command bars, drop down lists, menus and icons.  Because they hate us, they dropped the old interface and forced everyone to use the ribbon.  It was met with mixed success but people have finally stopped complaining about it.  So now they're adding it to a lot of Windows utilities like Notepad and Explorer.  Maybe that's why they think forcing everyone to use Metro out of the box will be a great idea too.  But do you see anyone else using the ribbon?  I don't and MS has been promoting and supporting it vigorously. 

Windows 8 is going to be a hard one to recover from.  Much worse than Vista.  The performance and compatibility problems the new security model introduced gradually got better over time.  People will learn the Metro interface over time but rewriting every application to support touch is probably never going to happen.  I'd like to say that over time, MS will improve the Metro interface but I'm loosing confidence in their judgement and fear they might double down on their mistake instead.

Windows 8 is a solution in need of a problem.  Zune failed, Windows Phone is loosing millions and I see the same thing ahead for Windows tablets.  There wasn't anything wrong with Zune or Windows Phone, it just wasn't better than anyone else's.  MS withstood years of losses on the XBox but even if they are prepared to do that for their phones and tablets, success is not guaranteed and they have formidable competition.  Even if they survive all that, ruining their enterprise business to chase after a misbegotten vision they will not survive.  IBM had to abandon OS/2 for much smaller mistakes.

Maybe my children will see IBM buy out the shell of what's left of Microsoft in the years to come.  But the irony of that will probably escape them.

Update: It's 12/2012 and Win 8 has been out for awhile now.  Here's a few more links:

Microsoft Has Failed
Microsoft's Problems

Invasive Species

I spend a lot of time outdoors in Maryland hiking through the many bike trails and footpaths that crisscross the county.  After a while, you start recognizing the plants and trees and flowers.  Having an Audobon or Peterson guide to WildFlowers or Trees is also very helpful. 

I have a sister who studied Forestry at the University of Toronto back in our younger days.  In order to graduate, you need to pass Dendrology 101.  Dendrology is the identification of trees.  For the final exam, your professor takes you out to Earnest Thomas Seaton Park in the wintertime and you must identify 100 different species of trees.  No leaves, you may only use the tree bark and general shape for identification.  If you flunk, you have to keep taking it year after year until you finally pass or wash out. 

So my sister was highly motivated for a time to identify trees.  I would occasionally visit her and we couldn't walk far down the street without her going over to a tree and asking me to identify it.  Especially if it was something unusual, like a doubly compound Kentucky Coffee Bean tree.  Or an elm tree with an asymmetrical leaf base.  Most of the elm trees in Canada were wiped out years ago by the Dutch Elm Disease so seeing an live elm tree there is a rare treat.  As a result I gained an appreciation for dendrology and actually learned something too.  Thanks, Patty!

Most identification systems depend on a "key", simply a set of rules, things to look for to narrow down the choices.  You go from general to specific until you reach the level you want.  It works for trees, ducks, insects, whatever you have.  And there's no Master Key, you can make your own key, whatever you find that works for you.

When I moved from Canada to Maryland, I made an effort to familiarize myself with all the different trees and flowers mushrooms and insects.  In comparison to Maryland, Canada is a bleak wasteland of monotony and it was great to see all the new species of ...well, everything!

It wasn't too long before I came across a curious sort of...attitude...I guess is the word.  Some species of plants and insects and animals are unloved and branded as dreaded "Invasive Species".  Species that didn't come over on the Mayflower but instead are breaking down our borders and starting gang wars in our forests and meadows.  And the Invasive Species are strong and aggressive and just destroying the fine and dainty balance that has maintained for so long.

The picture above features the horrendous Japanese Stilt Grass, another "Bio-Bully" that's pushing around the native species, beating them down and taking their lunch money.  But, the thing is, I love Japanese Stiltgrass and look forward to this time of year when it spreads it lush, deep green blades over the otherwise barren forest floor.  And it's fun to walk through.

See all those delicate green vines wrapped around the tree (and almost everything else)?  The one with the triangular leaves?  That's called mile-a-minute weed.  Botanists call it Persicaria perfoliata.  Calling it a weed is actually very unkind, and "a mile a minute" is a gross exaggeration.  It can grow maybe 6 inches on a hot summer day.   It's quite prolific, kind of like the stilt grass.  But see how beautiful and green it looks?

Awhile ago, the head of NASA was being interviewed and on the subject of global warming he said that nobody really knows what the proper temperature of the earth should be and he wasn't so sure why people were worrying if it went up or down.  Likewise, I don't think people should presume to know what the proper balance of life in the world ought to be.  I say, let the strong survive and everything will balance out.

Empty Nest

Today's the day our youngest son Dennis leaves for Baxter State Park in Millinocket, Maine.  That's the home of Mount Katahdin, one of the end points of the 2,200 mile Appalachian Trail.  He's taking a hiking buddy and they drive up this afternoon.  Me and MDW (my darling wife) are responsible for getting him and Michael from the other end of the trail, Springer Mountain in Georgia back to home when that happens much later this year.  God willing!

They will be part of the Southbound Hikers that every year attempt the trail.  About 80% of the people who make the attempt are Northbound Hikers: they start in Georgia around March and finish in the fall at Mount Katahdin.  I think part of the reason for that is because just before Mount Katahdin is the dreaded 100 Mile Woods, a 100 mile stretch so remote you must pack 10 days of food to make it between resupply points.  Better to tackle that after you're an experienced hiker/camper with a few hundred miles behind you.  Plus Mount Katahdin is a real killer, you ought to take a look at it on Google Earth!  It's 5,268 feet, an amazing height for an East Coast peak.  And there are a lot of blood crazed black flies on that section of the trail.  But for whatever reason, they've decided to start here.  Good luck, Dennis and Michael!

Part of the reason for them choosing the Southbound option has to do with the time of year they are starting.  It takes about six months to finish and you don't want to finish on the Northern part after the cold weather sets in.  But they both had to finish high school and Michael was also waiting for his Eagle Board of Review.  He's now an Eagle Scout but through a combination of procrastination and a busy school schedule, wasn't able to complete his Eagle project and write up until now.  So they're leaving the end of June.

MDW and I spent much of this week preparing for the big day.  Mostly, MDW dotes on Dennis and I try to call her off.  And I do spend some time reassuring her that Dennis is an experienced backpacker and will be able to handle most situations.  And that we are only starting him off, not responsible for his successful completion and every contingency imaginable.  But I also ran the dehydrator, making a mountain of beef jerky. 

Maybe one of the most useful things I did was Tuesday night's AT prep hike at the Ed Garvey shelter.  This is the time of year most of the Northbound hikers come through Maryland so we packed our packs and headed up the mountain to the nearest AT shelter, the Ed Garvey shelter near Harpers Ferry, WV.  The idea, as in most prep hikes, is to carry the same equipment you plan to take on the real expedition ahead and see if you're missing anything.  And there was no problem there.  The fun part was meeting and talking with all the other through-hikers we encountered.  Michael and Dennis were able to talk about important things like what to take, resupply points, cell phones (everyone on the trail now takes one) and of course they offered a lot of unsolicited advice which is great because some questions you just don't know enough to ask. 

One of the through-hikers offered that nobody ever leaves with too little equipment and that everybody ends up mailing stuff home or leaving it in one of the hiker boxes at a shelter or town.  A hiker box is just a box where people who left the trail or misjudged their needs abandon equipment for others to use.  Another offered that the black fly season in Maine was early and now mostly over, a cause for celebration.  Another sang the praises of Body Glide, a balm that eases chaffage, a common trail hardship.  Another advised hanging up all your equipment to dry every day when you get to camp, especially if you have a down sleeping bag.

One of the through-hikers I passed on the trail was named DreamCatcher.  They all have trail names, like some secret faternity might.  He had just finished from Georgia to Maryland and had taken off a month to scuba dive in Mexico.  It was his first day back on the trail and he had lost a lot of his conditioning, which he bemoaned.  He was carrying an iPod and playing music through its (modest) speakers while he hiked.  We met him again at the shelter.  He had brought a backpacker's hammock to sleep in and looked pretty comfortable slung between a pair of trees.  Most people stayed in the shelter, choosing to sleep in their bag with a pad underneath.  Some stayed in tents.  A few guys built a fire and cooked foil packs.  I played cards in the shelter for awhile, until it got dark and then wandered off to a hammock of my own.  I always like sleeping outdoors and it was pretty fun (and educational!) talking with all the through-hikers.

The next morning we went into Harpers Ferry where the AT Headquarters is.  It's the halfway point on the AT.  We picked up some maps there and did a little sight seeing.  And we kept running into through-hikers, everywhere!  We ran into an older guy who was on his third through-hike. He did one when he was twenty, one at forty years old and he was now fifty and halfway through his third. When I asked him why he did it, he simply replied, "To get away from my wife!" 

So we've done what we can so far.  MDW will be sending him packages of food in the Post Office at regular intervals.  I'll be visiting www.onepanwonders.com for ideas and keep the food dehydrator running.  It'll be summer soon and we can send dried peaches and apples and pears and--who know what else?

One of the through-hikers said it takes two things to finish the trail: #1 is the desire, #2 is the intelligence to adapt.  Between Michael and Dennis, I think they've got a real solid combination.

Outside Looking In

Mary Chapin Carpenter is a singer/songwriter who is sometimes put in the Country category.  I don't think she's very country, I think she's closer to be a folk singer.  She sings a lot of deliciously sad songs about broken hearts and being lonely.
Although she's had a few hits, even a few Grammy awards, my favorite song of hers is Outside Looking In.  For a long time, she was an older single gal and in this song she writes about the pain of it and longing for marriage.  It's strikingly personal and honest and frankly a little bit like singing about the elephant in the room.  Here's a verse:

I see them walking hand in hand, and my eyes just want to linger
On those golden wedding bands, wrapped around their fingers
By the time I turn away, I feel it once again
I'm back in this familiar place, outside looking in

You can hear the entire song on youtube, but remember it's a heart breaker--you'll have to be strong!  It's even eerier after having heard her sing even more sad songs about remembering her parents fighting while she was a young child.

The good news is she did get married (at age 44) and is still married.  She recently had to cancel a tour because of a serious health problem--a pulmonary embolism.  It took her awhile to recover from that and was difficult for her emotionally.  That's when she discovered what she calls "the learning curve of gratitude":

---

The Learning Curve of Gratitude

by Mary Chapin Carpenter

I believe in what I learned at the grocery store.

Eight weeks ago, I was released from the hospital after suffering a pulmonary embolism. I had just finished a tour and a week after returning home, severe chest pain and terrible breathlessness landed me in the ER. A scan revealed blood clots in my lungs.

Everyone told me how lucky I was. A pulmonary embolism can take your life in an instant. I was familiar enough with the medical term, but not familiar with the pain, the fear and the depression that followed.

Everything I had been looking forward to came to a screeching halt. I had to cancel my upcoming tour. I had to let my musicians and crew members go. The record company, the booking agency: I felt that I had let everyone down.

But there was nothing to do but get out of the hospital, go home and get well.

I tried hard to see my unexpected time off as a gift, but I would open a novel and couldn't concentrate. I would turn on the radio, then shut if off. Familiar clouds gathered above my head, and I couldn't make them go away with a pill or a movie or a walk. This unexpected time was becoming a curse, filling me with anxiety, fear and self-loathing — all of the ingredients of the darkness that is depression.

Sometimes, it's the smile of a stranger that helps. Sometimes it's a phone call from a long absent friend, checking on you. I found my lifeline at the grocery store.

One morning, the young man who rang up my groceries and asked me if I wanted paper or plastic also told me to enjoy the rest of my day. I looked at him and I knew he meant it. It stopped me in my tracks. I went out and I sat in my car and cried.

What I want more than ever is to appreciate that I have this day, and tomorrow and hopefully days beyond that. I am experiencing the learning curve of gratitude.

I don't want to say "have a nice day" like a robot. I don't want to get mad at the elderly driver in front of me. I don't want to go crazy when my Internet access is messed up. I don't want to be jealous of someone else's success. You could say that this litany of sins indicates that I don't want to be human.

The learning curve of gratitude, however, is showing me exactly how human I am.
I don't know if my doctors will ever be able to give me the precise reason why I had a life-threatening illness. I do know that the young man in the grocery store reminded me that every day is all there is, and that is my belief.

Tonight I will cook dinner, tell my husband how much I love him, curl up with the dogs, watch the sun go down over the mountains and climb into bed. I will think about how uncomplicated it all is. I will wonder at how it took me my entire life to appreciate just one day.

The Necessity of Moral Strength

There's a lot been said about the compatibility of science and religion and I think that's because people who have rejected religion see it as some kind of superstition or as something made up to help a primitive society to deal with its fears.  I find this most unscientific.  I speak personally but I think of religion as the science for happiness and peace.  The only social science I subscribe to.

The problem with most moral laws, unlike physical laws, is there there are rarely immediate consequences.  It's difficult to explain to your teenagers the importance of saving themselves for marriage without pointing out the importance of the things they already take for granted like a stable family life.  It's even harder if they don't have one.  You need to convince them of the glory that could be theirs all the while not being sure if they'll ever attain it.  A tricky sell indeed.  But that does not undermine or negate in the least the happiness of a secure home and family.  Of peace at home.

The studies pitting children from single parent homes versus traditional nuclear families always end up the same.  No need going over the results.  They help prove the gospel is true but are usually couched in terms sociologists use.

What's true for individuals and families is true of society in general.  The oft-quoted British statesman Edmund Burke made the following observation regarding society and goverment:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.

Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

We've forgotten a lot of this kind of writing.  Alexis de Tocqueville also said

Liberty cannot be established without morality nor morality without faith.

Finally, the father of our country, George Washington, from his farewell address:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports...And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

Nobody knows why there's gravity but we're aware of how it works.  Isaac Newton figured out the gravitational law, F = Gm₁m₂/r2 and it was a big breakthrough.  Nobody ignores the physical law.  Religious truth is revealed by prophets instead of scientists.  But its laws are as immutable even if the consequences are not immediate.  Historians disagree on the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire but Moroni never blamed the fall of the Nephites on their political system, their military, their economy or foreign invaders:

Yea, woe shall come unto you because of that pride which ye have suffered to enter your hearts, which has lifted you up beyond that which is good because of your exceedingly great riches!  Yea, wo be unto you because of your wickedness and abominations!  And except ye repent ye shall perish; yea, even your lands shall be taken from you, and ye shall be destroyed from off the face of the earth.

 In order for any individual, family or people to succeed, they must "build on the rock" of virtue.  It catches up with you if you won't.

the machine stops

Back in high school, as part of our English curriculum, we read a number of short sci-fi stories, one of which was the amazingly prophetic The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.  Instead of living in cities, everyone lived in the machine, in rooms where they were all interconnected via Skype and they never went outside.  Never.  You can read it here.  You can download a custom copy and see people's comments here.

I think just turning you on to this story would be good enough but I feel compelled to make at least some kind of comment.  When I was a kid, the new technology was tv.  My parents grew up without it and saw it come of age and I think the general feeling about tv was very good.  In some sense, it was very educational and informative.  Back then, you got your news from the newspaper and you could only find out what happened in the world once a day.  So tv was in every way better than the newspapers or radio.  As a family, we'd spend most of our evening (once my homework was done) from about 7 to 9 watching prime time.  Most people did.  And Saturday morning we'd watch cartoons until they went off the air.  In our innocence, we never wondered if watching all that tv was good for us.  And I think our parents agreed in general all the while noting we didn't go outside to play much on Saturday mornings any more.

I don't want to belabor the comparison here but pretty much the same thing happened to me as a parent.  There was no internet or computer gaming when I was a kid and so when the Mozilla web browser and Commander Keen came out, we were all thrilled to enjoy their delights.  Back in the 56K modem days, the internet was mostly a promise waiting to be fulfilled but it was not too many years before that promise came through.  And simple side scrolling sprite-driven games blossomed into gorgeous and seductive 3D renditions of beautiful and fantastic landscapes.  All the while my kids were going from toddlers to teens.  I also noticed that Saturday morning (the time my kids didn't want to play outside) had extended itself as well.

What can I say?  Tv and the internet and video games are all good things and there's no going back.  No one wants to go back anyway.  We have to learn to live with these innovations and control them.  But everything makes using our time wisely harder and harder.

So I want to close with another classic work:  the movie Brainstorm.  I think most of what needs to be said have been said by these two works.  In Brainstorm, a scientist (Christopher Walken) discovered a way to record people's experiences on something like videotape.  Their sight, hearing, balance, emotional state, taste, smell--everything, the total experience.  And at first everyone is delighted and it makes Christopher Walken fabulously wealthy and respected overnight.  And for awhile everything's cool but as time progresses, a lot of real unhealthy things start to grow out of it.  The ending is rather unusual and it does not resolve any of the issues, it just reminds us of the judgement day coming.  Recommended.