Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Baby snapping turtles surf very small waves, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Frank and I found eight baby snapping turtles, over the course of a long sunny afternoon, being bounced by some very mild waves against the glacial sand beach of our local lake. This probably relates to a story we heard in July about a very large snapping turtle who unexpectedly hung out on the very same beach for a couple of days. This surprised all the locals because the sand beach is much too clean a part of the lake to harbor much food for turtles of any size.

So Frank and I gently moved our new turtle colonists, one by one, into a murkier backpond with a lot more algae and plantlife and algae, where snapping turtles have lots more to eat. And where snapping turtles abound, and have done so, all of the many years we have seen turtles around here.

To say that the turtles did not appreciate our interest would be a very big understatement. But no fingers or toes were bitten off during this rescue, to their disappointment and our satisfaction.

Racoons, a photo by nickhull on Flickr.

Just one, not this many, but still an adventure. When I got back today from lunch with Frank, I noticed that the lid had come off our big garbage can. I picked it up out of the driveway and casually replaced it, and was greeted by a hideous angry very long-echoing growl.

Something was in garbage can, and not happy about it.

I went in the house, grabbed a big broomstick, and bamboozled Frank to come help me to rescue … whatever it was. There is a vantage point over our driveway, behind a big fence, where one can poke garbage cans until they fall over without being eaten up by any monsters that might be inside them.

I successfully knocked off the lid and the growls re-began. We could peek into the garbage can. A young raccoon was down in there. A young raccoon with very deep baritone growl: “Rrrrrowwwwrrr. Don’t even think about making me angrier than I already angrily am.” Tipping the garbage can over was harder than I expected. Push–teeter–push–teeter–rhythmic push–teeter–totter–topple.

The raccoon did not even spare us a dirty look as he angrily stomped away from the scene of the crime. Hey look, pal, we did not ask you to rob our garbage!

Two men and a great big chainsaw, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

That’s what it took to clear up all the trees that Hurricane Irene dumped back and forth across the road that leads to our house. So now we could leave if we wanted to, but we don’t.

We charged up all our hardware before we lost power, so I sit here posting the photos from my iPhone into my Flickr account via my little Sprint wifi hotspot, by the light of a fireplace fire and one wax candle.

We’ve go plenty of food and water but come tomorrow we will probably venture out to get some more electricity.

The Northwood NH Fire and Rescue team are super people, in the best sense of the word. These men made their way down the long dirt road to our house, chopping up great big trees as they went along.

The man with the chainsaw remembered the last time they came out, after the microburst storm in 2006, when he helped to remove a truly enormous tree from my neighbor’s house. Compared to that, Hurricane Irene was not so bad.

We have no lights or fridge until (probably) tomorrow but big wooden matches will still light the propane stove. So we had hot dinner, with toasted marshmallows to follow.

And we had to eat up every bit of the ice cream melting in the freezer. I blame it all on Hurricane Irene!

Dave Winer playacting in front of huge snowpile, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Another reminder of why we read Dave Winer’s blog Scripting News: this spirit-lifting quote from a recent post Indirect business models FTW.

One of the really amazing things about New York City is the extent to which the city anticipated its own growth. It built elevated rail systems to neighborhoods that didn’t exist. A grid that went into the Bronx when the city barely made it to 14th St. A huge city park in the middle of nowhere. Tech guys have to think like that. So few do. Seriously.

Liquid galaxy coming soon from Google, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Hallway display at Google. Big screens, big VR-panorama scrollable city images that look 3D but sides of buildings etc. are based on projections from Google Earth data, not on street view. If you look closely you see cars are very flat.

I asked if I could take a picture and was told ok. I think they set it up Sunday morning while we were in the 10 a.m. Sci Foo session, because I surely would have noticed seeing this before. The name of this wonderful toy is Liquid Galaxy.

I miss Sci Foo already. Thank you, O’Reilly team, Google team, Timo Hannay team, and everybody I met there for being amazing. I told Cat Allman the best part was introducing wonderful people to other wonderful people they needed to meet. She said, “I love that too.” Of course she does, that’s what Sci Foo is really about.

Here’s looking at you, squid!, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

“May I photograph your squid?” One of those things heard at SciFoo, rarely heard in other places.

William Gilly was showing the insides of a Humboldt squid to interested folks.

Data Visualization Show and Tell, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Session I’m organizing, for which I should be finishing up my own talk. Bye!

Chris Lintott gave a great talk about Galaxy Zoo at last year’s session but had a schedule conflict with this week’s slot.

Who’s who on the poster:
* Rick Cavallaro of Sportvision.com
* Debra Lieberman of HealthGamesResearch.org
* Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik neuroscience and magic
* Bradley Voytek Brainscanr.com
* David Rothenberg NJIT musician showing sonograms
* Adam Nieman Futurelab, concrete imagery
* Aaron Koblin Google Data Arts team
* Yossi Matias also of Google who will talk about really massive data sets is
not on this poster but also recruited to speak.

Tags: scifoo2011, scifoo, #scifoo, #scifoo2011, #amitaggingthisright?

Mountains from above, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

I love the yin and yang balance in this photo. Earth below, sky above. Snow below, clouds above. The future below and the present just … riding in an airplane to get there, waiting.

Too red or not red enough?, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Fourteen people are coming to lunch today. The entire half-salmon has already finished grilling, now it’s the turn of a marinated flank steak to join our really, truly enormous sausage.

Plenty of good things for the vegetarians too.

But I love the primordial look of this family grill. Half a big metal drum rests on NH lake rocks. Rocks and bricks inside it hold up the actual charcoal. The grid is two overlapped shelves from some long-ago stove. The chefs are people who, as children, were themselves fed food from this very grill.

I love NH.

In praise of Folly, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

This mountain laurel bush blooms every year in early July. Mickey planted it in memory of her cat Folly, who arrived in our family one similar but long-past summer.

Folly was an orphaned kitten, very small, a tigery-tabbyish caramel and white boy kitty whose malnourished hipbones felt very, very fragile through his baby fur. He loved food, he loved to play, and he loved people. He was the most dog-like cat I’ve ever known.

Something, we later found out, was wrong with his heart. The vet said it would be dangerous to give him the tiny dose of antihistamine other cats often receive as long-trip tranquilizers. Folly, she told us, would have to get valium. She wrote us a prescription with kitty-sized doses, and the pill bottle lived on a shelf of our medicine chest. “Valium … Folly” it said on the bottle of pills.

One morning, ten years ago maybe, I telephoned Mickey in Somerville from a NH Burger King parking lot (we have no phone up here and this was before we had cellphones). “How’s it going?” I rather inanely began.

“Not very well,” said Mickey, very softly. “Folly just died.” She woke up and he had just … died. He was still a young kitty but now he would never wake up. Oh, how sad we all were, to lose Folly. Beautiful dancing Folly, who loved to chase Mickey upstairs and down, Folly who loved to be patted and held, Folly who had even learned to turn a doorknob.

Now his body is here, and it will always be here, under the mountain laurel. And every July, it will bloom again, just to remind us.