Moscow, Idaho Farmer's Market and Main Street

A Butterfly in Ellensburg

Mountainside Above Salt Lake

Palouse Pictures

A couple of lessons learned: when photographing landscapes of fields of grain, bring a tripod. Between the crops waving gently in the soft breeze and the slight movement of holding the camera by hand, the sharpness just isn't there. Also, I maybe should've used a shorter focal length lens with a smaller aperture to maximize depth of field. Anyway, they mostly turned out kind of muddy and fuzzy, but I made a few of them look fairly presentable. Mostly, I'm just glad to have some pics of the landscape I call home.

How Seahorse Women Prevent Deadbeat Dads

Just the other day, I was talking with a friend about the phenomenon of men sowing their seeds everywhere they go and moving on to the next exciting option, or the deadbeat dad syndrome. Well, a National Geographic article in honor of Father's Day has sparked in my mind what may be a solution. One solution might be a practice that is, as of yet, not so socially accepted: stay-at-home dads. Of course, this would require keeping "dad" around through the long pregnancy until there's a little one to stay home for. But seahorse women have found an ingenious solution. They say, "Hey baby, you wanna mate? Yeah, I'm feelin' ya. Come on over, sugar," at which point they do their dance, get their flirt on, then promptly stuff their man full of eggs and shout, "Alright, chump, you got your action, now let's see you 'deal with the consequences' of your decisions, eh?" For some reason, they then stick around for the duration of the breeding season, or possibly future breeding seasons.

Of course, "mom's" parental role is finished as soon as she has dumped her eggs off. After "dad" goes through labor and pumps out a dozen to several hundred youngsters, he's done, too. But he sticks around with the wicked woman who did this to him. Maybe he's thinking, "Shoot, I saw my fish buddy have sex the other day, and he had a whirl and was scot-free to go find another chick to have fun with. If seahorse women are gonna be pulling this crap, I might as well at least stick around with the one who seems to like me..."

Male pregnancy. Clever, wicked seahorse babes.



Note: for more unusual parenting, read this article published for Mother's Day.

Birdbrain Statistics

I'm reading Alex & Me by Irene Pepperberg, which I originally blogged about here, chronicling her research with Alex, the African Grey Parrot who won the hearts of many bird- and research-lovers worldwide over the years. I love reading about her research methods and Alex's antics. He was smart but a difficult student at times.

One recent passage amused and interested me:

I found myself having to prove over and over that Alex had more going on in his bird brain than some mechanical trickery or other. One such challenge was, "Oh, he can produce labels all right, and he sounds convincing, but does he really understand what he's saying? Does he comprehend the noises coming from his beak?"

It seemed quite clear to me from my hundreds and hundreds of hours watching and listening to Alex that he did indeed know what he was saying. A simple example: if Alex said "Want grape" and you gave him a banana, he'd spit it right back at you and repeat insistently, "Want grape." He wouldn't stop until you gave him a grape. If you were dealing with a child, you would accept without question that he or she really wanted a grape, and that banana simply wouldn't do. But that's not science. Science needs numbers. Science needs tests to be done over and over again--actually, sometimes sixty times or more--before the answer has statistical legitimacy, and before scientists will take you seriously. Poor Alex.

On a sidenote, earlier in the book, she talked about how she was trying to teach Alex to say "apple", but after two weeks of training and struggling to make the "puh" sound in "apple", he had other plans in mind. She describes it:

...he looked at the apple quite intently, looked at me, and said, "Banerry...I want banerry." He snatched a bite of the apple and ate it happily. He looked as if he had suddenly achieved something he had been searching for.

I had no idea what he was talking about. So I said, "No, Alex, apple."

"Banerry," Alex replied, quickly but quite patiently.

"Apple," I said again."

"Banerry," Alex said again.

OK, buddy, I thought. I'll make it a bit easier for you. "Ap-ple," I said, emphasizing the second syllable.

Alex paused a second or two, looked at me more intently, and said, "Ban-erry," exactly mimicking my cadence.

We went through this double act several times: "Ap-ple." "Ban-erry." "Ap-ple." "Ban-erry." I was a little ticked off. I thought Alex was being deliberately obtuse. In retrospect, it was quite hysterical. When I told one of my students, Jennifer Newton, about it later, she literally fell off her chair laughing. But Alex hadn't quite finished with me just yet. At the end of that session he said, very slowly and deliberately, "Ban-err-eeee," just as I might do with him when I was trying to teach him a new label. Maybe he was thinking, Listen carefully, lady. I'm trying to make this easy for you.

...No matter how hard we worked to get him to say "apple," he stuck with his label. As far as Alex was concerned, "banerry" it was and "banerry" it was going to stay.

A few days later I was talking to a linguist friend about all this. He said, "It sounds like lexical elision." It's a fancy term for putting parts of two different words together to form a new word. Alex might have thought the apple tasted a bit like a banana. Certainly it looked like a very large cherry (it was a red apple). "Banana" + "cherry" = "banerry."

That passage had me laughing so much my eyes were watering. I've experienced the personality of greys, so I could easily picture the interaction, and it brings me joy.

This relates to the first section I quoted because it illustrates Alex's stubbornness and their general relationship. When it came to repeating the tests enough to gather the statistics necessary for scientific reporting, there were other challenges:

The tests involved putting various of his "toys" on a tray and asking questions such as "What object is green?" "What matter is blue and three-corner?" "What shape is purple?" "How many four-corner wood?" At first, Alex answered correctly most of the time: "key" or "wood" or "wool" or "three," et cetera. But before too long, he started to act up. He would say "green" and then pull at the green felt lining of the tray, hard enough that all the objects would fall off. Or he would say "tray" and bite the tray. Sometimes he'd say nothing and suddenly start preening. Or he'd turn around and lift his butt in my direction, a gesture too obvious to need translation. Once he grabbed the tray out of my hand and flund it on the floor, saying, "Wanna go back," which meant, I'm done with this. Take me back to my cage.

Who can blame him? None of the objects were new to him. He'd answered these kinds of questions dozens of times, and yet we still kept asking them, because we needed our statistical sample. You could imagine him thinking, I've already told you that, stupid, or simply, This is getting very boring. He was like the bright little kid at school who finds none of the work challenging and so passes the time by making trouble.

Sometimes, however, Alex chose to show his opinion of the boring task at hand by playing with our heads. For instance, we would ask him, "What color key?" and he would give every color in his repertoire, skipping only the correct color. Eventually, he became quite ingenious with this game, having more fun getting us agitated rather than giving us the answers we wanted and he surely knew. We were pretty certain he wasn't making mistakes, because it was statistically near to impossible that he could list all but the correct answer. These observations are not science, but they tell you a lot about how sophisticated his cognitive processes really were. Whether you would describe what he did as something to amuse himself or as making a joke at our expense, I cannot say. But he was definitely doing something other than routinely answering questions.

This, of course, led me to wonder how you report, statistically, the responses of an animal which seems to be deliberately refusing to give you the responses you need to support your research. Obstinate little cuss. I love it. I'm enjoying the book muchly.





Alex showing Alan Alda what he can do:


ABC News report when Alex passed away:


A longer video on Dr. Pepperberg's research with Alex and other parrots:

Utah Is No Zion

One heart? Bah. One mind? Only if people withhold what they're really thinking, which they do. But truth be told, the things I dislike about the state I've lived in for over two years have little to do with "being mormon" and more to do with a culture that seems to incestuously breed the worst parts of itself.

There are plenty of people here who share my distaste and endeavor to change it from within because they have some reason to stay or care about making it better. I get tired of people harping as much as the next guy, particularly when they're doing nothing to change the things they're whining about or act like they're trapped (though occasionally they truly are). So I generally avoid complaining for complaining's sake. ...yet I'm going to enumerate some of the things I find unpalatable about this place to explain why it's not just about it being populated by a bunch of mormons, and it's not just about it being the reddest state in the republic (yes, I listen to Glenn Beck even though I don't always agree with him), and it's not just about wanting more diversity for diversity's sake.

So what is it about? It's about various problems and symptoms indicating some very sick or imbalanced aspects of society here:

• truly ugly sprawl,
  
• unhealthily myopic cultural/political perspective,
  
• high teen suicide attempt rate (yes, that's part of a larger regional incidence),
  
• high use of antidepressants,
  
• excessive focus on image (e.g. lots of unnecessary boob jobs),
  
• too many girls feeling they must have orange skin, streaky hair, straight A's, and zero independent personality to compete for a husband (mainly a BYU thing),
  
• overly hierarchical, robotic business culture,
  
• people afraid that being genuine or authentic would make them unfit for the Stepford society or the anti-Stepford society or would reflect poorly on their celestial candidacy or countercultural elitism,
  
• lakes, streams, and parks ruined by trash and total environmental disregard,

...I could continue, but I think that covers most of my main complaints. There are others that are common throughout our society and the world, of course, and there are many issues which stem from these (or maybe from which these stem), but this list includes the ones I notice as being more uniquely "Utah"-ish everyday problems when I compare it to other places I've lived in.

But yes, there are positive aspects to Utah as well. Utah's great for people not bothered by the above. I would like to see those things change, maybe because I do see potential for Utah and also wish I liked it more so I could be more excited about the idea of staying.

So a few things I like about Utah include:

• access to beautiful national parks,
  
• pockets of international flare, including some really good, really affordable restaurants you might be surprised to find in smaller suburbs,
  
• family orientation keeps things real and makes for wholesome-feeling community with some positive values,
  
• a relatively high concentration of people with basic values and backgrounds similar to my own, some of whom actually are open-minded and authentic,
  
• if there were a war on our turf, Utah would not go down without a major and extremely well-organized fight *grin*,
  
• relatively resilient-seeming economy,
  
• I can shop at the stores I like with 45 minutes and be sliding down a waterfall in the mountains in another 45, and
  
• there's an airport nearby that is affordable and can get me to most family and friends within 4 hours,
  
• really good health care (in the rare occasion I should need it),
  
• I have good friends here and within just a few hours' drive,
  
• I like the weather here a lot, with plenty of sun and four seasons,

...OK, I'm done. So Utah's not some heaven on earth, in my opinion, but it's not all bad. There are certainly worse places to live, but it's just not the haven of all that is good and holy that some seem to believe it to be.

Math Over Recess

When I was a kid, particularly in early elementary school, I would stay inside and work on math problems rather than go out to recess. It wasn't that I didn't want to go to recess. It's just that I was a perfectionist, and priorities came from that. For example, if we had taken a math speed test, and I hadn't done it as quickly as I thought I should or as quickly as I had previously, it was more important to me to practice than to go out to recess. Perhaps part of it was avoidance of unpleasant playground social dynamics, such as bullying, but I remember it more as a desire to work on what mattered most to me. I could run around outside at home, where I could be alone or play with the friends I wanted to play with, but going out to the Lord of the Flies playground didn't hold as much appeal as perfecting my math or spelling skills.

While my interest seems to have shifted away from math and towards other things like understanding relationships and social interaction, I still do that in a way. I stay inside and work on perfecting or organizing my thoughts, writing, editing photos, etc, and it often takes effort on my friends' part to get me outside to play with the other kids. I don't care to change myself to fit a social mold, and I certainly don't want to give up polishing the skills, hobbies, and understanding I want to work on (most of which are primarily solitary endeavors), but I do like to remind myself of this once in a while to remember balance.

Accordingly, I'm going to go take a shower and get out of the house for a while. :-)

More Recent Pics

More photos I've snapped here and there over the past 2-3 months.