Some video I took with my phone yesterday while hiking around in Rancho Monte Alegre for the Christmas bird count.
When I was 12 I lived with my grandparents in Florida for six months. I remember one day I spent bird watching at the Bok Tower Gardens, and how pretty it was when a light rain started falling and all the other visitors left.
I thought of that yesterday, when I drove past the locked gate into the private estate development of Rancho Monte Alegre in the hills above Carpinteria. It was raining off and on as I hiked around, and there was no one else there; just me, the birds, and the tree frogs I frightened into silence with my galumphing.
I’m pretty sure the world will still be here whether or not CBDRILONCWRC turns out to be anything more than a punchline. Human societies organized at their current scale and without a shared experience of recent collapse and megadeath: that’s more of an open question.
I’m not sure I’d want a real camera; I wouldn’t have it with me most of the time. But the phone is always there.
Things I’ve snapped lately just because I had it in my pocket: Sunrise while stumbling out to get the morning paper on December 4, the sun over Anacapa from the Franklin Trail with Carp orchards and greenhouses in the foreground, toyon berries in Rancho Monte Alegre, bark beetle galleries on the Franklin Trail, the shiny deserted road after the rain passed yesterday in Rancho Monte Alegre, sunset from my driveway a few minutes ago.
The close association between forensics and law enforcement is particularly controversial. According to Frederic Whitehurst, a chemist and former FBI investigator, forensic scientists can “run into a sledgehammer” when they contradict prosecutors’ theories. “What we seem to know in the world of science is that there are some real problems in the world of forensic science,” Whitehurst told a reporter from the journal Nature. “We’d rather work on something cleaner.” It is easy to see why a chemist might consider forensics “unclean”; criminal investigations regularly flout scientific safeguards against bias. Analysts often know the identity of the suspect, potentially biasing results in favor of police’s suspicions. Even more concerning, some crime labs are paid not by the case but by the conviction, creating a strong incentive to produce incriminating evidence.
Whitehurst’s comments echoed a major report in 2009 by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which painted a damning portrait of forensic practices. “Many forensic tests—such as those used to infer the source of tool marks or bite marks—have never been exposed to stringent scientific scrutiny,” the report concluded.
One serious problem with those tests is that they allow for high levels of subjectivity. The NAS authors wrote that fingerprint analysis, for example, is “deliberately” left to human interpretation, so that “the outcome of a friction ridge analysis is not necessarily repeatable from examiner to examiner.” I saw this up close while working at the public defender’s office in New Orleans. Explaining his procedure for determining a match, a fingerprint examiner said in court that he would look at one, look at the other, and see if they match. When asked how he knew the two prints definitely matched, the examiner merely repeated himself. That very logic leads the FBI to claim fingerprint matches are “100 percent accurate.” Of course they are, if the question of a match is settled entirely by the examiner’s opinion. Without any external standard against which to check the results, the examiner can never be wrong.
It’s getting close again! After IDEC and Spindrift spent a few hours gliding along at only 9/10 knots, they’re now spanking it at 35-40 knots! BPV’s Ghost is sitting around 16 and has hit the sticky patch that I thought would let IDEC and SD2 through. SD are 160 miles ahead of the record, IDEC 70 miles ahead, exciting!
Film Meme // (9/10) Films // The Iron Giant (1999, Brad Bird)
“Look, it’s none of my business, but who cares what these creeps think of you? They don’t make you what you are, you do. You are who you choose to be.”
hey tumblr, while you’re thinking up messaging features, how about one that you can click on to send a publicly-viewable message to that user about the post in question
