Stumbled upon this interesting talk about animal movements

Some amazing stories.  I was put off by the fish made of pills, as it seemed a "chart duck" (per Tufte), but glad I persisted.  Remarkable.

http://spatial.ly/2017/10/google-talks-where-the-animals-go/

At whales it had me.

A

This is personal: New direction for the unread blog: Tides

I'm going to become more self-centered about this blog.  Cookie crumbs for my own amazement and learning.  I am planning to start a new blog devoted to all matters relating to tides.  Such websites and articles abound.  Yet another one.  In the time being (a phrase that means "for now"), I will incorporate these posts into this all purpose blog.

My fascination for the Tides is inexplicable to even me.  My Mother used to take us to Hendry's Beach where we would play in the sand at the shoreline, sure; but a quantum jump for me was a field trip for my Kindergarten class to Devereaux Point (also known as Coal Oil Point, because of random tar blobs from offshore seeps, scattered around the beach.)  But on that early morning, as the morning light began to wax, it was the denizens of the tide pools that caught my fancy.

And catch my fancy they did, and more.  I will never forget the squishing of the sea anemones under my feet.  I don't remember, but it seems I might have been bare-footed that morning.  I don't remember my teacher's name---though I might be able to dig it out one day.  She taught me some lessons, on several levels, beginning on that morning.

After the field trip, we had at least one direct lesson about Coelenterata.  That was a lesson I will not forget.  But the greater lesson for me, as a teacher, is that we often---no, usually---underestimate kids.  Our teacher actually showed us diagrams of the internal anatomy of polyps, and made it clear there are three layers of the body wall.  She also opened out eyes to alternation of generation in the Coelenterata, which stuck with me even though sea anemones do not exhibit this characteristic.  Looking back, the sophistication of the background she gave us was remarkable; and at the University, the lessons she taught us gave me a leg up.  I was totally at ease with these concepts.

That anemone, I was later to learn, was Anthopleura elegantissima, the first object of my life-long love affair with the Coelenterates.  Beyond the anemones, the Cnidaria (as the Coelenterates have now been renamed) have held my fascination through the years.  Of this much more could might be said, but most importantly, I came to study at the University of Guam as a graduate student, where I studied the Hydrozoan coral, Millepora platyphylla, Fire Corals, a most remarkable species.

But for now, this is about my wonderment with tides, and how and where my fascination with tides took root.  No matter where, the tides have held an important hold on me, in many aspects.  The Intertidal Zone, and   "minus tides" grew to a special place of prominence in my mind.

There are many personal stories to be told, some more compelling than others, certainly.  Recently I have come to  a closer examination of the science of the tides.

For starters, I have found the following link to be amazing.  

[This web site is no longer available.]
http://volkov.oce.orst.edu/tides/

 

[This site is available (3 August 2022)]

OSU Tide Model Daily global tides animation.

Usually, the first time I have visited this URL, it works for a few minutes (the animation) but stops after awhile, and cannot be resumed.  I was then able to either visit it in a different browser for awhile, or restart my browser and visit again.

I am not sure I understand it correctly.  I believe it is a global prediction of the tidal wave, generated by astronomical forces, sloshing around the oceans. Here is the reference:

Egbert, Gary D., and Svetlana Y. Erofeeva. "Efficient inverse modeling of barotropic ocean tides." Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology 19.2 (2002): 183-204.

Chrome vs Firefox IMHO and

The browser wars.  I've been conflicted ever since...   When?  I don't remember.  I do know that Mozilla started Firefox as a fork of Netscape.  There have also been search engine wars for as long.  They started, in my mind, with choices to Micro$oft's crappy browsers, and one of the earliest efforts to wall users in to a corporate overlord's products, and maximize that overlord's profits---do I need to mention the same overlords were magnanimously donating free copies to primary schools, to start the long addiction cycle.

That's a subject I intend to get back to later---because the browser wars in conjunction with the search engine wars ended up, by some extraterrestrial calculus, to the hegemony of Google.  Google was the good guy, from the very start.  As a happy user of Altavista, with awesome search capabilities, I was overjoyed to learn about Google, a new search engine that had two important things going for it: it was GNU/Linux-centric, as a project of graduate students at Stanford University (like Gimp, developed at Berkeley); and it represented a quantum leap in search capability. 

Along the way, I have stayed with Google, partly out of blind loyalty to Free Software approaches, but mostly because its awesomeness as a browser had never been superceded.  Also, Google was doing amazing things, leaps and bounds beyond anyone else.  M$ could only try to copy, to keep it's loyal base onboard.  I stayed ,even while I watched the Google become a corporate behemoth, and assume the eye of Sauron.

On Slashdot.org, is this article that answers some questions for me: in particular, concerning the war between Google Chrome vs Mozilla Firefox.  I say "war."  I hadn't thought of this much as a war, but it is, at least, a moral vs commercial basis for taking sides between the two: that is, the difference  between a surveillance based business model Google), and Mozilla's 

"nonprofit organization that advocates for a "healthy" internet. Its mission is to help build an internet in an open-source manner that's accessible to everyone -- and where privacy and security are built in."

That says alot.  It nudges me closer to abandonment of Chrome, and possibly changing  my email addresses (why I don't is something I will take under advisement).  But it doesn't get at, in my mind the most villainous aspects of Google's Infrastructure: the draconian confinement of my files behind a complex wall, where Google selects what applications (now called "apps") may be used to operate on these files.  Well, actually, that's a little unfair, b/c I can usually eventually find a way to export those files from Google Drive to where I can treat MY OWN FILES as I wish to.

I have recently abandoned the worst Cell Phone OS---Apple's iOS---for Android.  It was a long time coming, and I'm glad I made the decision.  Still, while sharing is much, much easier---I mean sharing a file with myself and using it in various ways---than the iPhone.  Mostly, I can now move photos and other files easily from phone to GNU/Linux and back much more easily.   Did I say "more easily?"  Perhaps I ought to have said "At all."   Well, that isn't fair, because it is possible, through an elaborate suite of kludges, to attach an iPhone to a GNU/Linux computer.  Bluetooth is non standard on Apple infrastructure, obviously for commercial reasons, and will not connect to non-Apple bluetooth appliances and devices.  Another way Apple is being uncooperative.

I had, BTW, an interesting conversation (email) with the developer of the amazing "Amazing Slow Downer" apps for iOS and Android.  He states that it is much more difficult and more boring to program for Android, and that for music, iOS is the standard among professionals.   I get that.  I doubt it will last.  The reference to ease and comfort in programming is interesting.  Still I have notices that some sophisticated apps like Peterson's Strobo Tune are better on iPhones, and some scientific data collection software seems (as I have read) to work better on iPhone, or not at all on Android phones.  One reason may be the broad array of hardware running Android.  Is it really so that these sophisticatecd programs are hobbled on Android?

I will be using Android, until Ubuntu or someone else develops a full on phone implementation of GNU/Linux or some other open source (or preferrably Free) OS.  The freedom is palpable.

One more irony of Google.  How could you supercede Google Earth, Earth Engine, and Google Scholar.  It's a terrible irony.





 
 

Just saying: English lacks a grammatical category for Evidentiality

In Nettle and Romaine's book _Vanishing Voices_, a point is made about  Tuyuca, a language in Brazil and Colombia with fewer than 1000 speakers: five degrees of distinction of evidentiality are evidenced, such that the source of information is required to be specified.

1. I saw this ...
2. I (heard) but did not see this ...
3. I have seen evidence of this ...
4. I got the information from someone else about this ...
5. It is reasonable to assume that ...

From WikiPedia:

Some languages have a distinct grammatical category of evidentiality that is required to be expressed at all times. The elements in European languages indicating the information source are optional and usually do not indicate evidentiality as their primary function — thus they do not form a grammatical category. The obligatory elements of grammatical evidentiality systems may be translated into English, variously, as I hear that, I see that, I think that, as I hear, as I can see, as far as I understand, they say, it is said, it seems, it seems to me that, it looks like, it appears that, it turns out that, alleged, stated, allegedly, reportedly, obviously, etc.

Again from Nettle and Romaine:

 Languages like Turkish, Kwakiutl, Navajo, and Hopi have different conjugations of the verb which distinguish heasay from what is the speaker's own knowledge.

Nettle and Romaine  quote the following by "a European explorer" about the languages of Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea.

Any that we heard were scarcely like human speech in sound, and were evidently very poor and restricted in expression.  Noises like sneezes, snarls and the preliminary stages of choking---impossible to reproduce on paper---represented the names of villages, people, and things. 

Does one need to explain the point of view expressed here?

Japanese in Micronesia implemented education of native peoples in the Japanese Language.  My son's grandparents were proud of their knowledge of Japanese.  The apparent prevailing point of view was that the natives, not being Japanese, could not be human, but by learning the Japanese language to some rudimentary level some level of humanity could be bestowed upon them.

Nettle and Romaine point out that the Aztec term Nahuatl, referring to their language means "pleasant sounding".  The word "barbarian" derives from Greek barbarus, "one who babbles".

The point of evidentiality would be lost on many Americans in 2018.  One would hope that globalization might engender not only tolerance, but mutual understanding and Love.  Nettle and Romaine also emphasize the signficant similarities among European languages, a fact pressed upon me by learning two languages with only slight taint of colonizers' influence.

This book came to my view because of the discussion of fish names and marine lore among Pacific Islanders.

For further reflection.

North American languages at the time of colonization.

This map on Wikimedia is incomplete:

From Wikipedia:

Chumashan (meaning "Santa Cruz Islander") is a family of languages that were spoken on the southern California coast by Native American Chumash people, from the Coastal plains and valleys of San Luis Obispo to Malibu, neighboring inland and Transverse Ranges valleys and canyons east to bordering the San Joaquin Valley, to three adjacent Channel Islands: San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz.[2]

The Chumashan languages may be, along with Yukian and perhaps languages of southern Baja such as Waikuri, one of the oldest language families established in California, before the arrival of speakers of Penutian, Uto-Aztecan, and perhaps even Hokan languages. Chumashan, Yukian, and southern Baja languages are spoken in areas with long-established populations of a distinct physical type. The population in the core Chumashan area has been stable for the past 10,000 years. However, the attested range of Chumashan is recent (within a couple thousand years). There is internal evidence that Obispeño replaced a Hokan language and that Island Chumash mixed with a language very different from Chumashan; the islands were not in contact with the mainland until the introduction of plank canoes in the first millennium AD.[3]

I was born and came of age in Chumash country.  I was 20 years of age before I knowingly met a Chumash American.  It was not under auspicious circumstances.

Corrected map of distribution of Chumash at colonization:

Japanese Meteorological Corporation Cherry Blossom Forecasts for 2018

 From a report on the starting of the Tokyo cherry blossom season on March 21, 2017:

                    Although the JMA still officially declares the start of cherry blossom blooming, it stopped its forecasts in 2010, due in part to the increased accuracy of the private companies.

                 One of those companies, Tokyo-based Weather Map Co., has updated its forecasts twice a week in March, based on an analysis of the official somei-yoshino cherry trees used by the JMA at 53 locations around Japan.

 

 

Charles Darwin and earlier observers noticed "red water"

 March 18th. — We sailed from Bahia. A few days afterwards, when not far distant from the Abrolhos Islets, my attention was called to a reddish-brown appearance in the sea. The whole surface of the water, as it appeared under a weak lens, seemed as if covered by chopped bits of hay, with their ends jagged.
—Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle

 He credited a number of observers with earlier reports.  In his notes he mentions:

M. Lesson (Voyage de la Coquille, tom. i., p. 255) mentions red water off Lima, apparently produced by the same cause. Peron, the distinguished naturalist, in the Voyage aux Terres Australes, gives no less than twelve references to voyagers who have alluded to the discoloured waters of the sea (vol. ii. p. 239). To the references given by Peron may be added, Humboldt's Pers. Narr., vol. vi. p. 804; Flinder's Voyage, vol. i. p. 92; Labillardiere, vol. i. p. 287; Ulloa's Voyage; Voyage of the Astrolabe and of the Coquille; Captain King's Survey of Australia, etc.

In January 1915,  "Sea Sawdust" was reported by Earth Observatory:

Another image from Landsat 8, taken on 11 September 2017 is featured here:

From that site:

The blooms are likely to be Trichodesmium spp., a microscopic, photosynthetic cyanobacteria that aggregates into long strands on the sea surface. They are ubiquitous around the world, and they tend to bloom off the coast of Queensland between August and December as the water warms. Some evidence suggests that Trichodesmium blooms here are happening earlier and more often in recent years.

From a ship or the shoreline, these blooms look like dirty brown or green stripes on the water and like an oil slick when they hit the beach. Such blooms off the Australian coast were reported two centuries ago by Captain James Cook and by Charles Darwin.

Up Close and In Person 

It was not possible to easily link the following site, with photos of Trichodesmium sp.  

 See the University of New Hampshire Phycokey.  

Behavior of Tides of San Francisco Bay

I'm not going to not write much about these graphs.  I had assumed that as one moves into the Bay, tide range would be attenuated.  So I was surprized to read the following bit from An Introduction to the San Francisco Estuary by Andrew Cohen and Jack Laws:

In the northern reach the tidal range (the difference in height between high water and low water) drops with distance from the ocean, from a mean range of about five-and-a-half feet at the Golden Gate to only three feet at Sacramento.    In contrast, in the southern reach’s more enclosed basin the tides cause the water to slosh back and forth like water in a bathtub, amplifying the range at the southern end to eight-and-one-half feet.

I wanted to explore this, so I graphed several sites in the Northern Reach, and five in the Southern Reach.  These are a work in progress.

The predictions that are graphed here are from Xtide: www.flaterco.com



In the legend, stations are listed  in order from the Entrance  to the most distant. 

"San Francisco" is the Fort Point station.