Good morning,

The forecast for Whitewater calls for a chance of thunderstorms with a high of eighty-six degrees.

I know of no public, municipal meetings of the City of Whitewater today. The coast is clear for private endeavors and accomplishments.

On this day in 1926, Miles Davis was born. Sixty-five years later, upon his death, the New York Times wrote of Davis’s many accomplishments:

Mr. Davis’s unmistakable, voicelike, nearly vibratoless tone — at times distant and melancholy, at others assertive yet luminous — has been imitated around the world.

His solos, whether ruminating on a whispered ballad melody or jabbing against a beat, have been models for generations of jazz musicians. Other trumpeters play faster and higher, but more than in any technical feats Mr. Davis’s influence lay in his phrasing and sense of space. “I always listen to what I can leave out,” he would say.

Equally important, Mr. Davis never settled into one style; every few years he created a new lineup and format for his groups. Each phase brought denunciations from critics; each, except for the most recent one, has set off repercussions throughout modern jazz. “I have to change,” he once said. “It’s like a curse.”

Here’s a tribute to one of Davis’s most popular works, Kind of Blue:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBpLKm8vw4M more >>

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a mostly sunny day with a high of eighty-nine degrees.

There’s a meeting of Whitewater’s Community Development Authority today, beginning at 4:30 p.m. The agenda is available online.

Over at Wisconsin Builder, there’s an article entitled, “Top Projects of 2009.” Our campus’s Hyland Hall is one of those top projects. The listing is noteworthy for two reasons: first, it shows the accomplishment Hyland Hall represents; second, it shows that the crowing over the Innovation Center is just a lot of exaggeration. There’s no comparison between the completed Hyland Hall and the planned Innovation Center. Hyland Hall is a truly large project, and in every respect it dwarfs the much smaller, conventional office building that will be the Innovation Center. Note 5-24-10 afternoon: That’s Hyland. I’ll take the misspelling if the city will concede that the Innovation Center is slight by comparison. 🙂

I’ve always thought that organic food, without chemicals, was to be prized (even at the risk of spoiling). Perhaps that’s not true. Over at Ars Technica, there’s a post entitled, “Birds turn their beaks up at organic food.”

Here’s the finding of the recent study:

Is organic food everything its advocates claim to be? A new study published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture describes an experiment in which the subjects were free from human biases. The authors found that wild birds preferred ‘normal’ bird food to the organic option.

To study this burning issue, the researchers set up pairs of identical bird feeders in over 30 locations around northern England. The feeders contained two types of the same variety of wheat seeds, one organic and one conventional. The researchers then monitored the rate at which each seed was eaten over the course of a few weeks.

It was found that the birds preferentially ate the conventional seeds. To make sure that there wasn’t something about the relative placement of the feeders, the researchers switched each pair, and found that the birds learned the new location of the conventional seeds and continued to prefer eating from that feeder.

The experiment was repeated over a subsequent winter with a different type of seed, but produced the same results. More controlled laboratory trials with canaries found similar preferences for conventional over organic. In an attempt to explain this disparity, the researchers analyzed the seeds and found that the conventional seed contained upwards of 10 percent more protein per seed, most likely due to the use of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers used in conventional farming techniques.

So the birds went for more protein, available through added chemicals — Better living through chemistry.

Good morning,

The forecast for Whitewater calls for a day of likely showers, and a high of sixty-seven degrees.

It’s Coffee with the Principal in our schools today, from 8:30 – 9:30 a.m.

Sometimes even the most impressive designs fail to account for actual behavior and ordinary conditions. There’s a story at Wired that illustrates this contention, entitled, “Video: An Artificial Butterfly Takes Flight.” Scientists at Harvard and the University of Tokyo designed an artificial butterfly, and it’s unquestionably impressive.

Here is a video of their project in flight:

Link: http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid46203255001?bclid=46205328001&bctid=86641640001.

There’s just one problem, as Wired‘s accompanying story notes:

Engineers Hiroto Tanaka and Isao Shimoyama of Harvard University and University of Tokyo, respectively, created the tiny butterfly to try to understand the biomechanics of butterfly flight.

But the tiny machine may not teach us too much about how butterflies actually row through the air, said Robert Dudley, a physiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, co-author of the research to be published May 20 in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

“As a technical accomplishment, this work is impressive, but there are a number of aerodynamic and biological issues that need further attention,” Dudley wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com.

Butterfly flight is somewhat mysterious because it’s roughly the opposite of “as the crow flies.” Butterflies flit about rather than flying in a straight line. That actually costs them more energy, Dudley said, so scientists assume their looping flying serves some evolutionary purpose.

“The advantage is that it’s thought to be an anti-predator behavior,” Dudley said. “The claim is that irregular flight paths are a permanent signal of prey unprofitability.”

Would-be predators presumably take one look at the chaotic, loopy butterfly flight and decide to go after easier to predict snacks.

The Japanese researchers somewhat capture this oscillating type of flight with their plastic-winged flyer, but Dudley argued that the differences between the bot and a real butterfly are so great as to invalidate the biological lessons the researchers try to draw.

“There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach but it severely limits any claims to the biology,” Dudley said.

The original is not so easily matched… more >>