Watching Our Water Ways

When I lived in Kansas as a child, I would sometimes see flocks of starlings swarming around, each bird moving in concert with the others until they landed in trees, where they would carry on in loud raucus voices, all talking at once.

Yes, I’ve seen starlings, but I’ve never seen anything like the huge mass of swirling birds captured in this video by two young women on the River Shannon in Ireland.

The two, Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, have established an independent film company they call Islands & Rivers. According to their website, the women “find inspiration from bike rides, being by water, making things and meeting people.”

A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, which is the title to the accompanying music by Nomad Soul.

What makes these birds fly in such a coordinator manner? The question is the subject of some scientific study — not just for an understanding of natural behavior but also for improving the efficiency of human activities.

An article by Peter Miller in National Geographic discusses “swam theory,” covering why animals act as they do and how people are learning from such behavior. Check out the photo gallery that shows other kinds of swarming behavior.

Miller describes a computer graphics expert, Craig Reynolds, who wanted to realistically simulate a flock of birds for movies and video games. He created a program in 1986 that consisted of birdlike objects he called boids. The program required them to follow three simple rules: 1) avoid crowding nearby boids, 2) fly in the average direction of nearby boids, and 3) stay close to nearby boids.

“The result, when set in motion on a computer screen, was a convincing simulation of flocking, including lifelike and unpredictable movements,” Miller wrote.

For the history of this mathematical discovery, see the online article called “Boids,” written Reynolds himself, who describes the program’s first commercial use in the 1992 film “Batman Returns.”

Thanks to Chuck Hower of South Kitsap for sending me the starling video.

I don’t know if this next video has anything to do with flocking or swarm theory, but it’s an impressive display of duck behavior.

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We have a plain and simple bird bath in our yard. The birds don’t seem to need a fancy place to take a bath, but I got to wondering if anyone has produced an amusing bird bath. I found a few, which I’ll share with you here.

Frogs seem to be a common theme for bird baths, but it is interesting that cats — of course enemies of birds — are sometimes willing to help them take a bath or even to feed them (bird feeder).

If you would like to take a closer look or get purchase information about these bird baths, click on any of the photos.

At the very bottom, you’ll find an animation, based on a true story of a sneaky cat trying to share a bird bath for his own advantage. That’s followed by a video of a parrot who has plenty to say while taking a spray bath on his perch.

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Seth Casteel is a pet photographer who does not believe in sitting your pet down in a studio for a formal portrait. Instead, he always looks for an element of surprise.

During one photo shoot, Casteel was shooting pictures of a dog jumping into a swimming pool. Looking for a better vantage point, he purchased an underwater point-and-shoot camera and gained a surprising new underwater angle on the dog — a Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Buster.

That was the beginning of a series of underwater dog shoots, according to a report by Eve Becker in “Tails,” magazine, a publication focused on pets.

In February, Seth’s collection of photographs went viral on the Internet, where it was picked up on all kinds of blogs and email lists. Overnight, his website, LittleFriendsPhoto.com, jumped from 200 to 30,000 hits, causing the server to crash.

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Some of us are delighted when we see a rainbow. If we are lucky enough to see a double rainbow, we are doubly delighted.

But one man, who calls himself Yosemite Bear, was driven to ecstasy by the sight of a double rainbow. Click on the video player (at right) now, and then read on for more background.

If you’re like me, you laughed out loud at this man’s excitement. “Double rainbow all the way! What does it mean? Oh, my God!” And then you wonder. Is this guy nuts or is there something we should know about him?

Well, it turns out that a lot of people have watched this video since Yosemite Bear made it two years ago. Many have mocked him. (Just search for “double rainbow” on YouTube.) But others have appreciated the pure joy he expressed.

On the side of appreciation, I believe, is the brilliant autotune version “Double Rainbow Song” by The Gregory Brothers.

Now, the simple explanation for Bear’s excitement is that he had been seeing a lot of rainbows at the time he made the video. And he took the double rainbow as a personal sign from the spirits of the universe. No sex, no drugs were involved. Just the pure joy of connecting with God. It would be nice to leave the story there.

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When it comes to science, it takes only a little confusion by young students to produce some amusing answers when test time comes around.

Making the rounds on the Internet are lists of funny answers that young students reportedly provided while trying to answer scientific questions. Maybe you’ve heard these responses before, but they are always good for a smile.

Here are my favorites:

• Water is composed of two gins, oxygin and hydrogin. Oxygin is pure gin. Hydrogin is gin and water.
• When you breathe, you inspire. When you do not breathe, you expire.
• When you smell an odorless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide.
• Nitrogen is not found in Ireland because it is not found in a free state.
• The pistol of a flower is its only protection against insects.
• A fossil is an extinct animal. The older it is, the more extinct it is.
• Germinate: to become a naturalized German.
• Rhubarb: a kind of celery gone bloodshot.
• The skeleton is what is left after the insides have been taken out and the outsides have been taken off. The purpose of the skeleton is so that there is something to hitch the meat to.
• To prevent contraception, wear a condominium.
• The body consists of three parts the brainium, the borax and the abominable cavity. The brainium contains the brain. The borax contains the heart and lungs, and the abominable cavity contains the bowls, of which there are five A, E, I, O and U.
• For fainting: Rub the person’s chest, or, if it’s a lady, rub her arm above the hand. Or put her head between the knees of the nearest medical doctor.

I was able to find a reference to the above list in an Ann Landers column published in numerous newspapers on June 9, 1996. See, for example, New York Daily News. The writer said he was enclosing the list, which was contained in an article he clipped from Popular Science, He said students actuallly said these things.

It appears that people have added to the list through the years. I cannot verify the source or validity of these other “answers,” but many are funny:

From Lawrence University, Appleton, Wis.

• “H2O is hot water, and CO2 is cold water”
• “Dew is formed on leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them perspire.”
• “Artifical insemination is when the farmer does it to the cow instead of the bull.”
• “A super-saturated solution is one that holds more than it can hold.”
• “The tides are a fight between the Earth and moon. All water tends towards the moon, because there is no water in the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.”
• “For asphyxiation: Apply artificial respiration until the patient is dead.”
• “For a nosebleed: Put the nose much lower then the body until the heart stops.”
• “For dog bite: put the dog away for sevral days. If he has not recovered, then kill it.”
• “To keep milk from turning sour: Keep it in the cow.”

Lots of websites provide this list in one form or another, but the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences provides some “facts” to help straighten out the answers.

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“No matter how you spell it or how you pronounce it, H2O is a wonder: a beautifully simple, simply beautiful element that, when all is said and done, means nothing less than life.”

Eleanor Chittenden with a prized steelhead on the Elwha River in 1907 during an expedition with The Mountaineers.
Photo by Asahel Curtis, courtesy of Washington State Historical Society

Thus begins the introduction to a collection of historical photographs titled “In Praise of Water,” which includes mostly amusing pictures from 1936 to 1968. The collection was put together by Life magazine in recognition of World Water Day last month, but I just stumbled on it last week. Please click on the link to take a look. (For the chemists among us, we’ll have to forgive the term “element,” because water is actually a compound.)

To bring the wonder of historical photos back home to Washington state, I pulled this fabulous photo of Eleanor Chittenden fishing on the Elwha River in 1907. It’s from a collection managed by the Washington State Historical Society.

Eleanor, 15 in this picture, was the daughter of famed engineer Hiram Chittenden, who worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in connection with the Port of Seattle. The photo, by Asahel Curtis, was taken during an expedition to the Olympic Peninsula with The Mountaineers. Eleanor was no doubt proud of her catch, a very nice steelhead. Of course, this was many years before a dam was built on the Elwha.

Bob Royer wrote a nice piece about “The Girl and the Fish” in the Cascadia Courier, a blog that relates history to present-day events.

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Parahawking is a relatively new sport combining falconry with paragliding.

Birds of prey tend to understand updrafts like no human ever could. It’s part of their instinctual nature to conserve energy while flying.

Paraglider pilots have always paid attention to where these birds are soaring. But now some of the rehabilitated birds are being trained as majestic aerial companions, coming and going from the glider to take a bite of food and then lead the way to more adventure.

The stunning two-minute video provides a glimpse of a training session with a Harris’s Hawk. (Be sure to click to full screen.) Lite Touch Films, which produced the piece, plans to introduce the sport to the U.S. I’m attempting to get more particulars about this video, which includes music by Asche & Spencer. Thanks to Chuck Hower of South Kitsap for bringing this video to my attention.

Parahawking reportedly got its start in 2001, when Scott Mason, a British bird trainer and conservationist, traveled to Nepal to go paragliding with a wide variety of raptors in the Himalayan Mountains. He hooked up with a paragliding company to create a commercial enterprise, which donates a portion of its income to bird conservation groups. Check out his story in the newspaper Gulf Times.

The 20-minute video below was produced by Mason to show some of the trips taken in Nepal during the 2010-2011 season of parahawking. For details, check out Parahawking and Himalayan Raptor Rescue.

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Every so often, a group of people will get a photo idea and jump on a ride called Splash Mountain. Remember Splash Mountain, the popular log-flume attraction at Disneyland and other Disney parks?

How about a game of Monopoly just before you drop over a cliff and into the water with a big splash? Is there a better time to read a newspaper? Or shave? Or offer a marriage proposal to your loved one?

These staged events have been captured on the ride’s camera near the end of the trip. If you are in the photo, apparently the ride’s staff is willing to sell you the picture. Some people, as we can see here, have gone to some lengths to get a funny picture.

It appears the identity of these people is lost, and I’m not sure how these photos were collected. But these same pictures can be found on many websites with a few variations. One site is Imgur. A few additional photos are added in Heavy, with slight changes in Twisted Sifter.

Even for those who don’t wish to take a crazy photo, Splash Mountain remains popular at Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland and Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. The ride has an interesting history, because many of the characters are from the 1946 Disney movie “Song of the South.” The Audio-Animatronics figures originally were pulled from a ride called American Sings, which came closer to the movie but was not attracting much of a crowd. That ride was shut down and dismembered to help hold down the cost of Splash Mountain, which was over budget during construction in 1988.

That’s how Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear became part of the Splash Mountain experience. By the way, “Song of the South,” which is based on Uncle Remus stories, has never been fully released on home video, apparently because of racial sensitivities, according to Wikipedia.

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Momentary confusion about the periodic table of elements led to an unusual endeavor for Theodore Gray, a columnist for “Popular Science” and founder of the software development company Wolfram Research.

As Gray tells it, he was reading the memoirs of neurologist Oliver Sacks when he came to a passage describing a periodic table display in London’s Kensington Science Museum.

“In misreading the paragraph, I thought it was a table, not the wall display it actually is,” Gray writes in telling how he came to craft a wooden table shaped like the periodic table.

Gray’s periodic table table contains built-in boxes that hold samples of every element known to man, though he actually keeps some elements — notably gold, silver and platinum — in a safe.

The story about the construction of the periodic table table is quite personal. His craftsmanship relies in large part on the tools and materials he had available when he made the table. See the pictorial “construction history” on his website.

I like the thoughtful touches Gray has included, such as using different woods for groups of elements: red oak for the rare earths, white oak for the transition elements, birch for the alkali earths, teak for the alkali metals and cherry for the main metals. Being so unique, Gabon ebony was the only reasonable choice for hydrogen, Gray says, detailing his reasoning for each choice.

When all was done, he created a website that not only provides answers about the table he built but also talks about all the elements and even instills a vision of science as a kind of personal, hands-on search for fulfillment.

If you visit the home page of the periodic table table, you will see a picture as if you’re looking down on the table top. Click on any of the elements and you will gain access to a tremendous amount of information about that particular element, including links to other sources.

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We’ve talked about unusual friendships, but you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen the videos showing Gilberto “Chito” Sheeden, a Costa Rican man, wrestling with and even cuddling with Pocho, a 15-foot crocodile.

A story in the London Daily Mail (with some great still photos) quoted Chito in 2009, when he was 52:

“This is a very dangerous routine, but Pocho is my friend and we have a good relationship. He will look me in the eye, and he does not attack me. It is too dangerous for anyone else to come in the water. It is only ever the two of us.”

The pictures of Chito and Pocho tell you more than anyone can describe, but the question remains how such a friendship could ever develop.

As Chito tells it, he found the crocodile close to death about 20 years ago on the shore of a river, where he had been shot in the eye by a farmer who said the crocodile had been feasting on his cattle.

Chito brought the crocodile home, fed him and nursed him back to health, even sleeping at his side. Later, he began to play with him, cautiously at first and then more vigorously over time.

Chito and Pocho became somewhat famous around the world, although I never saw these videos until recently, when Chuck Hower of South Kitsap sent me some still photos showing the pair. Since then, I’ve learned from the Tico Times that the crocodile died in October of natural causes. His age was estimated to be about 50.

Despite reports of the friendship, a story published by “Inside Costa Rica” says crocodiles cannot be tamed, because their brains are too primitive to react other than instinctively — which often means attack.

So why didn’t Pocho attack Chito? Experts at Costa Rica’s inBio Parque, say the bullet that blinded the animal could have affected his brain, eliminating his aggressive tendencies. If Chito had not taken care of Pocho until his final days, the animal surely would have died, because he was unable to fend for himself, the experts said.

I found two other good videos about the friendship on YouTube, one by bTV, the other by Aicirta. I believe the three videos I picked out are among the best, but I was unable to review all of the dozens of videos on YouTube that feature the pair.

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