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Birdus Migratorius
(31 May 2016 at 23:23) |
Sorry team, not much new to lay forth for May. As usual, the gears turn, the projects mature or go into cold storage, the TODO list continues to demonstrate its asymptotic superiority to my work output. I have a brief story about a bird,
At the start of the month this bird showed up and started trying to build a nest in a pretty silly spot, right in the corner of a window near my front door. However, its nesting was totally ineffective; all the straws just fell to the ground and accumulated on my porch:
It got a lot worse than this, the pile I mean, and while I'm pretty cool with a bird building a nest on my house, it just seemed sad and useless for it to be trying all day to build a nest and making no progress. And why doesn't it just get the scraps that fell on the porch and try again with them? I mean rather than root around the neighborhood for new bird sticks to drop on my porch? To deter the bird from returning in a humane and brand-appropriate way, I put this sculpey monster on the window sill right next to where she was trying to make nest:
Which, kind of amazingly, worked:
And I didn't see her for a few weeks. BUT THEN a few weeks later, that bird learned how to make nests, or a different bird who already knew, came back and was not scared by the tiny motionless monster any more, and set up shop for real. Since she is not so easily spooked, I put my Nest camera (née Dropcam) up there instead of the monster, so that I can check on her antics and make the pun "Hot Nest-on-nest action" (the camera does really get pretty hot; someone should check on that). Example:
I've since cleaned up the mud on the window and inched it much closer when she's away eating worms. If I get any good nature on camera that's not too heart-breaking, I'll post pictures or video. We've already got some eggs which I'm pretty sure is the first step in nature:
These eggs remind me of the color of a song.
And don't worry, I'm not in danger of becoming a bird-man. But I did learn one funny fact; the scientific name of the American Robin is... Turdus Migratorius. |  |
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| The birdy's name is Birdo, of course. |
Great, now your old SIGBOVIK article is cited in a serious article.
Erik D. Demaine, Giovanni Viglietta, and Aaron Williams, "Super Mario Bros. is Harder/Easier than We Thought", (2016), in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms (FUN 2016), http://erikdemaine.org/papers/Mario_FUN2016/
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| That's cool! I hope the eggs hatch! I recently learned about a wren whose scientific name is Troglodyte troglodyte, which seems like a pretty heavy name for such a little bird. |
| I think you'll find that eggs are the *second* step in nature, following, of course, chicken. |
Is that Berk from "Trapdoor"? http://bogleech.com/trapdoor/td-berk2.jpg
(also http://media.spelpappan.se/2013/09/The_Trapdoor.png ) |
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