Bad Feather Day?

So, I took this picture of a common Song Sparrow the other day. When I uploaded and viewed it, I was... surprised. They're not supposed to have crests on the tops of their heads; a rare crested form would be newsworthy. What happened to cause that peak with the sharp vertical boundary? I first wondered whether there was a bug in jpeg encoding, but the raw image looked the same. The best interpretations I've received so far conclude that there was a wind blowing from the right (which is quite possible) and that it's pushing feathers upwards towards the middle of the head. Seems plausible (and also consistent with the fact that the back of the head seems to have been uncovered as if in an anatomy lesson), but I find it striking that the feather edge would line up as straight as it does. Always new things to see!

Intercontinental smash and grab

A couple of weeks ago, one of my credit card numbers was compromised. This is all too routine these days, and the credit card company detected and removed the suspicious transactions quickly. What I found notable, however, was the fact that multiple charges were attempted in different currencies in rapid succession – an Australian on-line merchant, German Amazon, and so on, alongside fast food vendors in New York, and that at least some of them hit almost simultaneously. As I spoke on an incoming call from the card vendor’s fraud department, I could see successive charge notifications overwriting one another on my cellphone’s display. I’d think that the fact of closely-spaced transaction attempts across numerous countries would be likely to raise risk flags – even though less definitively today than when cards were ordinarily presented across counters by hand – but perhaps fraudsters may still find that a dispersed attack improves the expected value that’s obtainable in the narrowing time window before countermeasures can respond. I don’t know if and where there may be variable delays for transactions to propagate through different payment systems, but maybe this is also a factor.

A rare example of bad electoral transparency

Observed at the Museum of the City of New York: a Tammany Hall era ballot receptacle of clear glass. Makes ballot stuffing visible, but also makes it easy to see the differently-colored ballot stubs and distinguish them when inserted!

I'm glad I don't believe in omens

I'm glad I don't believe in omens, and hope today that this disbelief will be justified. (Hey, Enlightenment, I like you.) This morning, I took a New Year's Day walk down some icy refuge trails, and went to see if I could find the Eastern Screech Owl that I'd seen several times in late 2016, always in the same hole at a bend in a tree:

As I approached the site, I ran into a couple also out for walking, exchanged observations about trail conditions, and guided them to the tree nearby in hopes that we'd all spot the owl. It looked promising to naked eyes in the distance, with a patch of similar color visible in the hole, so I mounted a telephoto lens on my camera to confirm and hopefully share the sighting. Well, er, not exactly:

Same hole, same perspective, but a distinctly non-owlish squirrel instead. Has a bird of wisdom been displaced by a rodent for 2017? More news if it happens...

Distant broadcast memories

I was considering some of my media memories that have persisted for decades. Along with common items like beer and cigarette jingles, firmly impressed into synapses during childhood, I have another that remains memorized in specific detail:

"This is the second network, 6WN, the regional and national station of the ABC, broadcasting from Perth." 

A broadcast program from Western Australia, not even one intentionally targeted at foreign audiences. I remember hearing this announcement on a vacuum tube shortwave radio, early in an Eastern US morning sometime around the upper regions of the 1970 sunspot cycle. It was thrilling and moving in a way that's hard to conceive today, just to be hearing a voice originating from about as far away as one could be on Earth (at least absent a shipboard transmitter closer to a precise antipode somewhere in the Indian Ocean). A signal bounced off the ionosphere a couple of times and made it around the world, back in a day where it was exotic and impressive to be "known internationally". The Internet's fiber strands across continents and oceans have certainly changed things.

At the end of a snowy day, the sun came out for "Golden Hour"

Nice way to end the day. Almost missed it, but happened to look out at a timely moment.

The photographer stands tall by casting a long shadow

The sun was quite low above the horizon in the Standard Time afternoon, shortly before sunset. It'd be a reasonable trigonometry problem to determine the exact time given my height, the shadow's length, and solar position data, but there's a good approximation in the picture's metadata and for now I'm concentrating on the perspective and how it appears. It's interesting to see how the legs, lower to the ground, cast very, very long shadows, while that of the head above appears relatively tiny.