Author: David Faden
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Itadakimasu
We were in Japan between February 9th and 20th, first visiting some people dear to us in Ibusuki (指宿市), then exploring Kyoto (京都) on our own. (A somewhat random selection of photos. I might follow up with a more organized set later.) This is my second time visiting Japan. The first was for a pretty…
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California County Seats
I had some fun today getting the location of each county seat in California. You can see the code here if you’re curious: https://github.com/fadend/county_seat_coords. The data are pulled from Wikipedia’s List of counties in California. I plotted them going through the tutorial here: https://eriqande.github.io/rep-res-eeb-2017/map-making-in-R.html. (Very nice!) Here’s my ugly R code for doing that, shamelessly…
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Kagi puts greg.app at top for [yerba buena cat safety] also
Seeing A Three Month Review of Kagi Search on Hacker News got me curious about Kagi again. My first search, following up on a previous post looking at Google’s results for the same, was [yerba buena cat safety]. I was a little disappointed to see this: You can take a look at the Reddit post…
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AI eating AI?
I recently gave a yerba buena (Clinopodium douglasii) plant to a neighbor. I think this is the 5th yerba buena plant I’ve given away so far in the past year? This is one of my favorite California native plants. The neighbor asked me whether it’s safe for cats so I did some research online. Reiterating…
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Google Scholar Sort By Date Broken?
If we search for [“Noam Shazeer”] on Google Scholar, we get “about 66,000 results.” I’m not sure how much we can trust that count, but anyway, it’s a lot — pages and pages: Dropping the quotes, searching for [Noam Shazeer], we get “about 43,900 results.” Pretty weird that the result count dropped removing the quotes…
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Mr. Los Altos
Passing by the Chamber of Commerce on the way to Shoup Park, I’ve sometimes wondered about the statue with the big glasses near there. Reading Robin Chapman’s wonderful “The Valley of Heart’s Delight: True Tales from Around the Bay”, I found the answer. The chapter on Walter Singer begins: Walter Singer died in 1992, which…
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Failed replication and a germination mystery
In “The Nature of Oaks”, Doug Tallamy suggests an experiment: To be fair to worm catchers, many of the inhabitants of oak leaf litter are barely visible to the naked eye even though they are everywhere you look. But there is an easy way to observe some of the larger arthropods in the litter beneath…
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What the heck, Preview?
Occasionally, Preview gets persnickety about saving changes to images: Turning on streaming of log messages in Console, I finally got some details on it: Text from that: Other people seem to be complaining about a similar Preview issue here as well: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255194116?sortBy=rank. From that discussion, it sounds like certain images trigger the behavior. Hovering over…
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Caterpillars overwinter outside
One fact from Doug Tallamy‘s The Nature of Oaks that surprised me especially: Some caterpillars in colder climates overwinter outside! Bernd [Heinrich] decided to dissect golden-crowned kinglets that had been killed during the winter by window strikes in Maine. To his surprise and my amazement, their tiny crops were jam-packed with caterpillars — caterpillars the…
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Chrome crashing
I’m unsure what triggered it — updating Mac OS, updating Chrome, or something else — but Chrome has started crashing for me consistently within seconds of starting up. I haven’t figured out a fix yet so I’m back to my old friend Firefox, but I did learn a few things. Crash logs go in ~/Library/Application…