Longest Running Thread EVER

[L. Marcus]

... Sonora and the northern rain forest? That's a pretty big range.

[Old Man]

Not big enough.  There are no hummingbirds here, of any species.

[L. Marcus]

Too big a distance, too burminating a metabolism. That'd be my hypothesis. 

[Cancer]

I have the impression that most native Hawaiian land birds are descendants of birds that got there from the Old World, perhaps via Polynesia.  The nene is a spectacular exception (its closest relative is the North American Canada goose).  Hummingbirds seem to have started in tropical America, and the distance between the Hawaiian mantle plume (and the islands it has made) and tropical Americas has been decreasing with time ... so it was harder back in the past than it is now for hummingbirds to get there (without human intervention) than it is now.

[Cancer]

In what might be a case of budding commensalism, the crows seem perfectly happy to let the flicker do the hard work of banging chips off the suet feeder as it grabs chunks for itself, while they pick up the fallen chips underneath.

[L. Marcus]

Damn moochers. 

[Cancer]

They prefer the term opportunists.

[L. Marcus]

... Capitalists?

[Cancer]

... no; I haven't seen them write up a wholly predatory contract and take everything someone owns.

[Cancer]

Supposed to snow here tonight.  I wonder if the stores are out of bread and milk yet.

 

Wussies.

[Cancer]

W00t!  Liga MX is on TV!

[L. Marcus]

It's mid-January, and we're having temperatures above freezing. This is certainly cause for concern.

[Cancer]

We have rain sort of all over west of the Cascades, and supposedly arctic air will come down the Fraser River from northern British Columbia this evening which will bring the snow level down to sea level.

 

 

Pumas score versus Pachuca in the 25th minute.  Defense gave him too much room working to the top corner of the box from wide.

[Cancer]

Pachuca has another complete defensive breakdown and it's 2-0 for Pumas in the 70th minute.  Melee breaks out 3 minutes later.

[Pariah]

Meteorologist yesterday said we could expect snow 6 out of the next 7 days. It's a little unusual for here

[Pariah]

1 hour ago, Cancer said:

Supposed to snow here tonight.  I wonder if the stores are out of bread and milk yet.

 

Wussies.

 

 

[L. Marcus]

... Amazing.

[Cancer]

This also explains why the tire store was so full yesterday (my sister-in-law had a flat and needed a new tire; had to wait 7 hours for it).  Everyone getting their snow tires on.

[Cancer]

Weird.  My alarm clock (which is digital but low tech, red LED display) seems to be running fast suddenly.  It's gained about 7 minutes in the last five hours or so.  Not sure I've seen that failure mode before.

[Cancer]

Huh.  I wonder what a negative parallax means for GAIA data.  -3.91 +/- 0.25 milliarcseconds ... the parallax is 15 times its uncertainty, but a negative parallax is impossible.

 

I know what that kind of thing meant with old photographic plate parallax measures, from the first 85 years or so of the Twentieth Century, but that same explanation I didn't think was a possibility with how GAIA works.

 

... Hmm, looks like I have much more reading to do to figure this out.

 

Ah.  The Gaia results have a distinctly different proper motion than earlier results, which says there is something goofy in the correlation matrix in the Gaia solution.  Still doesn't tell me what the problem is, but it strongly suggests one situation described in a paper I just read.  Unfortunately it means prying a bigger data set out and looking carefully at it, and I don't have the means or knowledge to do that yet.

[Cancer]

On January 12, 2020 at 8:51 PM, Cancer said:

Weird.  My alarm clock (which is digital but low tech, red LED display) seems to be running fast suddenly.  It's gained about 7 minutes in the last five hours or so.  Not sure I've seen that failure mode before.

 

Just short of 24 hours later, that clock is now 50 minutes ahead of correct time, so it has gained 43 minutes (approx) in 24 hours.  If it has done do at a uniform rate (which is by no means certain) that means it gains 1 minute every 33.5 minutes or so.

 

 

[Old Man]

What’s the future like?

[Bazza]

Exciting. You should come to Oz and live int he future. We have cake. 

[Cancer]

So will the bushfires help with the cane toad situation?

[Cancer]

On January 10, 2020 at 3:24 PM, L. Marcus said:

... Sonora and the northern rain forest? That's a pretty big range.

 

Just a clarification.  Anna's hummingbird is mostly migratory.  The areas around the big cities up here in the northern part of the range generally get abandoned in the winter.  The southern Arizona stretch represents the southern limit of their winter range.

 

The urban centers are islands of year-round residency.  The lowlands are warmer in the first place than the wooded foothills and mountains, and cities are a couple degrees warmer still.  Add other human effects: direct hummingbird feeders, as well as flowering (mostly but not entirely non-native) shrubs that bloom very late or very early, and the occasional flowering plants hard against heated buildings so they almost bloom year round.  The hummers have extended their range northward over the last century or so; rather like the American Crow extended its range westward in the 19th Century as humans expanded into the Great Plains.