A speculative mind

  (This is a continuation and conclusion of last week’s blog) So, why do northern spotted owls like old growth? They don’t “like” old growth; they are adapted to life in an old growth forest. Thousands of years of evolution have honed their bodies and their behavior to be successful in that habitat. Can spotted owls fly to a different kind of habitat? Of course. They are birds. They can fly wherever they want, and frequently do. It is possible to find one in a second growth forest or even in a clear-cut area. Just like it is possible to find me at the beach, or in a desert, or on a mountain, but I don’t live there. Spotted owls live in old growth forest. That is where their major prey types are to be found: mainly flying squirrels and red tree voles. They can eat other things but this is the diet that gets them the energy they need to be able to reproduce. It takes a lot more energy to nest, produce offspring, and raise those offspring, than it does merely to survive. Having lo...

  Many years ago, I had a job for the US Forest Service as part of the Spotted Owl Survey. This was before the spotted owl was listed as a threatened species under the endangered species act, but there were a lot of people betting that spotted owls would be listed. A number of years before, the Forest Service selected the spotted owl as an indicator species for old growth habitat. An indicator species is like the canary in the coal mine for habitat types. There are lots of different kinds of habitats, old growth forest being one of them. With all of the different organisms living in a given habitat it becomes very difficult to tell if your actions are harming the habitat as a whole.   The idea is that if your indicator species is doing well, then the rest of the organisms in the habitat should also be doing well. Personally, I think that is a bit simplistic to think that you can tell the health of the habitat by looking at one species. There could be tens of thousands of diffe...

  There are three plays by Shakespeare that are collectively referred to as the “problem plays.” They are not called problem plays because there is anything particularly wrong with them, or because they are problematic. ( To be fair, there are things in these as in other Shakespeare plays that a modern audience might take issue with, but that is not why they are called problem plays).  They are called problem plays because whether they are comedies or tragedies, they deal with societal problems. They have dark subject matter and they tend to be cynical. They juxtapose broad comedy with harsh dramatic situations (I suspect another reason they are called problem plays is because they are difficult to categorize). Resolutions tend not to be clear-cut. The good guy doesn’t necessarily get the girl, and the bad guy may not be punished. It was unusual for a playwright of the time to write plays like this. Comedies were supposed to be funny all the way through with a well-defined hap...

  Time for some classic science fiction. Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney shared the 1966 Nebula award for best science fiction novel with Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. Reading Delaney can often be a mind trip. He is at times poetic (the main character is a poet) and at times experimental (I remember I had trouble making it through his later novel Dahlgren ). In Babel-17 he delves deep into psychological mysteries and the nature of consciousness.  Despite all that, the story is very readable. The civilization we are following, “The Alliance,” is at war with the ambiguous and undescribed "Invaders.” The Alliance has discovered an invader code: Babel-17. This code gets broadcast right before  “accidents” that happen on military installations or to people or equipment that are important to the Alliance. The generals feel these accidents are not accidents. The Alliance have asked the brilliant Rydra Wong to break the code, but after a preliminary investigation, she...