Counting pikas

Aug. 27th, 2025 09:16 am
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[personal profile] rimrunner
A few Mondays ago I woke up way too early in the Longmire Stewardship Campground at Mount Rainier, in order to meet the lead researcher for a pika counting project. The object of this research was in fact to test a protocol that could be taught to non-specialists. If it worked, volunteer citizen scientists could be deployed to pika habitats, in order to gain a clearer count of the actual numbers of this species. As a tracker who does not have an academic scientific background, I’m in somewhat of a gray area where specialization is concerned.

I do know what pikas look like, though: imagine a rabbit with mouse ears, and you’re pretty close. The first time I saw them, I was on a hike with a friend near Artist Point, near Mount Baker in the North Cascades. We were on a section of trail that ran along a talus slope, with the wide bowl of a high valley spread out below us. As we moved along the trail, a raptor soared across the valley, swooping low over the valley floor.

Cue a chorus of alarm calls, erupting from all over the talus slope: the characteristic, high-pitched “Eee!” of pikas. Before long we saw them, perching on rocks to give their alarms, then scurrying into the shelter of the rocks. Pikas are a species specialized in terms of habitat: the rocks provide shelter and passage out of sight and reach of predators, and they forage in the vegetation that grows around the talus’s edges. At the right time of day you can observe them hurrying back and forth with harvested greens bunching in their mouths, carrying the forage to their haypile larders. Pikas don’t hibernate; they store up food for the winter, when forage is scarce. Perhaps paradoxically, they also don’t function well at higher temperatures, which is why they’re endangered.

When I first heard about Pokémon I thought that Pikachu was a pika. I mean, it’s right there in the name. But the character’s design was inspired by squirrels and mice, not pikas, and the name is a combination of two Japanese words.

Pikas also aren’t rodents. Neither are rabbits, to whom they are closely related; pikas really do look like rabbits that someone stuck mouse ears on. A fairly readily perceptible distinguishing characteristic is their front teeth. Rodent teeth have high iron content, giving them a yellowish or orange appearance. While lagomorphs also have prominent front incisors, they lack this hue. They also have a somewhat different way of moving, though since pikas mostly inhabit rocky slopes, finding their actual tracks is fairly difficult.

Spotting pikas themselves, though, is pretty easy, if there are any to be found in your particular location. Youtube has plenty of videos of pikas moving about and making their distinctive vocalizations. Many of these were made at Mount Rainier, even. So if this research protocol I’m helping to test proves out, visitors to the park might have an opportunity to observe these beings for themselves, but advance research into the species and its conservation.

WorldCon 2025

Aug. 26th, 2025 10:17 pm
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[personal profile] rimrunner
Weekend before last I attended my first WorldCon in ten years. It was fulfilling and exhausting in about equal measure, with some notes of grace and frustration.

Probably like most cons, but since I go to very few—this was only my third WorldCon ever—my experience in this respect is limited. I chose to go to this one because it was held in Seattle, and I live here. While I haven’t been to hometown cons much (SakuraCon, Norwescon, and Emerald City Comic Con are all held here), this one seemed like an opportunity to give them another try. As a recovering Shy Person I often had a hard time interacting with people much at conventions if I didn’t already know them, and since I never went to many I didn’t know very many of the people who tend to go to conventions.

The Internet’s made a big difference in this respect. While I’ve been online for a long time (over 30 years), the growth of online spaces for both fannish conversations and professional networking has been really helpful. I also intentionally went to events where I would have to talk to people, like designated networking events, table talks, and the like. (I spent most of the hour with Ellen Datlow trying and failing to come up with something brilliant to ask her, but at least I was there!) I managed to collect quite a few business cards (the digital alternatives that exist now are nice, but I’ve gotta say, there’s really nothing like a physical object that I can look at later, and that will remind me that I meant to through the physical fact of its presence) and contact details for people I might connect with further. I ran into friends I hadn’t seen in years (and also failed to run into friends and colleagues I’d hoped to encounter—WorldCon isn’t that big, but it’s big enough) and may have made a few new ones. I got to hear Ada Palmer read from yet to be published work, and a city planner from Walla Walla explain why bureaucracy will continue to be important in the future—even if it turns out that nobody really knows what future jobs will look like.

I was reminded yet again of my guideline for convention panels, which is to select on the basis of who’s on them, and only secondarily on the topic.

I also pretty much skipped the parties. This had more to do with having become an early-morning person with a new kitten at home than anything else, though I did take my husband to the Weird Al Yankovic concert at White River Amphitheater on Friday night. (We left during the encore. If you’re familiar with this venue, you know why.) So perhaps I could’ve been a little more social. Then again, given the COVID spike we’re having here right now, maybe it’s just as well that I wasn’t.

I also skipped the Hugos, because I was exhausted by the start time and figured I could watch them on stream at home. When I got home I went to bed instead, and only heard how the ceremony went the next day when I had coffee with a friend who’d been nominated and won. People who were actually there and have a far better sense of how awards ceremonies go have pretty much said what needs to be said on that score; myself, I only wish that the awards could be done right consistently.

I know that fan-run cons are struggling; the commercially ones are much larger, at least appear to be more professional, and can attract guests from across a wider range of media. There seem to be a lot of potential problems with the way WorldCon runs specifically, as much as I like the idea of its moving around and being hosted by different people and a different locale every year. Whether there’s still a place for that and whether the myriad challenges of programming, accessibility, and administering the awards can be addressed to any kind of consistent level of success…I honestly don’t know. There’s something to be said for something community run, though. I hope WorldCon figures it out.

August 24

Aug. 24th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
We are enjoying Voyager. Yes, it's a bit simplistic with the Moral Of The Story sometimes, but it's not really much different from other Treks in that respect.

August 23

Aug. 23rd, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Watched an old episode of Marple with a bunch of names - Samantha Bond, Natalie Dormer, Rik Mayall, Sean Biggerstaff and more - followed by an old episode of Midsomer Murders with a bunch of names including a Star Trek villian (Alice Krige) and a Doctor (Peter Davison).

August 22

Aug. 22nd, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Foundation is trundling along. I'm not sure I actually care about any of these characters any more.

August 21

Aug. 21st, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Network connectivity to the jump box was broken, for some reason, and remained so until I added and removed a port forward.

August 20

Aug. 20th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Scrubbing through the filesystem to clean up random files left behind by failed attempts to rip discs.

August 19

Aug. 19th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Work not dissimilar to last night's error: spent time fixing up a broken test which kept failing no matter what I tried, and it turns out it was two tests which were interacting such that fixing one broke the other and I didn't notice that it wasn't the same test that was breaking.

Also I discovered past me had already thought of the data regeneration problem and dealt with it. Clever past me. Shame you didn't leave me any notes so I had to find out again.

August 18

Aug. 18th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Implement a thing that regenerates a missing hashkey, then spend a bit of time tinkering with it before realising it's missing some critical input to generate the right hashkey. Duh.

August 17

Aug. 17th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Discovery: the creaky old Mac Mini running macOS 10.13.6 does not like PKCS#12 files generated by whatever version of openssl homebrew offers it; I need to use the system openssl if i want to generate a PKCS#12 file I can import into the Server Manager.

Swapped my toy database from running on t3.micro instances to t4g.micro instances. Curious to see if there's any noticable difference in cost, since that's the only actual vector that matters to me (and it's trifling so it doesn't even matter that much).

August 16

Aug. 16th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
We watched Hackers. It's an odd movie in a lot of ways: made in 1995, referencing some fairly legendary dialup-modem-era hacks, with a character fairly reminiscent of (my mental image of) Karl Koch aka Hagbard of CCC, it has some references to the then just-starting-to-pop world wide web while still wallowing pretty firmly in the Wargames style of computer hacking. Lots of laughable talk of "Gibsons" and "using all your best viruses" and whatnot. The visuals are spectacular, moreso because the signature ones - the mainframe system the plot revolves around - are actually physical motion-control shots. And all the pretty cast and their outlandish clothing somewhat anticipating The Fifth Element. Oh, and that good old plot of scraping a few cents of every transaction and dumping them into an account because sooner or later that adds up to real money. But it's also an ensemble-cast movie where the protagonists include a woman and people of colour; there's some in-world (diegetic, if you will) commentary on this, with Our Hero unaware that the hacker who burned him is a woman, and Our Hero being challenged with, "I thought you were Black!" (which turns out to have been an ad lib that the director loved and kept, rather than a scripted line, which lends it even more value). It's not wholly on a pedestal; the mock personals advert they create for Agent Gill is punching down quite a bit and everyone in-world laughs at it, and Lorraine Braco's character is laughable, but still. Oh, and that band in the club? Urban Dance Squad? Go look 'em up. Totally worth it if you enjoyed that one track you caught a slice of in the movie.

August 15

Aug. 15th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Foundation continues to wallow its way along; hopefully this will get resolved. Meanwhile, Voyager gives us a timey-wimey episode where they dispense with a causality paradox simply by saying, "causality is weird when the plot demands it". Simples!

August 14

Aug. 14th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Clever. I managed to delete part 2 of episode 1 from the DVR before we'd watched it because it was indistinguishably labelled from Part 1 and I thought we'd somehow managed to record episode 1 twice. A quick short-term sub to Paramount+ allowed us to watch it, wherein we discovered that the DVR'd version was actually missing a scene (possibly more than one) for some inexplicable reason.

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