Polish crew rescue dog from ice floe

Here’s a feel-good story to send you off into the weekend: the Polish crew of the Baltica, a ship doing oceanic research in the Baltic Sea, found and rescued a dog that had drifted out to sea on an ice floe.

The dog had been seen 60 miles inland when he floated through the city of Grudziadz, trapped on a thin sheet of ice in the Vistula River. Firefighters tried to reach him, but couldn’t get out to him. He floated all the way to the mouth of the river and then 15 miles out to sea before the Baltica came across him.

The rescue was difficult. As one researcher recounts,

“It was really a tough struggle. It kept slipping into the water and crawling back on top of the ice. At one point it vanished underwater, under the ship and we thought it was the end, but it emerged again and crawled on an ice sheet.”

The crew eventually rescued the dog by lowering an inflatable boat onto the shifting sheets of ice. A crew member in the inflatable (pictured above) managed to grab the dog by the scruff of the neck and haul him aboard.

They have named him Baltic. He is now a star in Poland.

So far two people have claimed him, but upon meeting them, Baltic didn’t show any tail-wagging action. Two other hopeful claimants are still on their way to see him. If Baltic’s owner isn’t found, the research team is prepared to adopt him.

The Guardian has video up of the rescue, complete with footage of a warm, dry dog contentedly resting with his new friends.

Let’s hear it for impracticality

One of the first rules you learn when you move overseas is, “Take as little as possible. Dump all the rest. Sell it, give it away, donate it, but get rid of it.”

When I moved to Portugal, I got rid of almost everything I owned. But there were a few things I simply could not live without, and one of them was my stereo system.

I know, it’s stupid. Stereo components are heavy and fragile, and then there are the speakers. Mine aren’t even sensible bookshelf speakers, but 4-foot-high Magneplanar speakers.

But a funny thing happens when you give up most of what you own or love: you seize upon the few things left with a previously unsuspected fervor. I was not giving up this system, even knowing I’d have to run it off a voltage converter.

Two months ago, the left channel of my 20-year-old amplifier began producing static. Loud static, the kind where you fear for the integrity of your speakers. I pulled it out of the system and took it to an electronics shop in town. I didn’t have a lot of hope — what shop is going to be able to repair a two-decade-old American amp?

I forgot for a moment — this is Portugal. People here fix things. And yes, it took two months to get the necessary part from the manufacturer, and the cost was 90 euros (about $125), and it probably would have been much more practical in the long run to trash the thing and buy a modern amp that can actually run sound for a television.

But I just got it back today, and hooked it back into my system…and after two months of silence, my living room is filled with the sweet, mellow sound of music filtered through a classic amp and a pair of speakers designed for clarity and a voluminous sound stage, not boom and sizzle.

It’s impractical to the extreme. And I love it.

Spring and cattle egrets

One of the most enjoyable adaptations I’ve had to living in southern Portugal is the fact that spring comes in January. Having lived at the very temperate Oregon coast, I was already used to early springs, but the Algarve puts my old haunt to shame.

Yesterday, while walking through the park by our house, I came upon a flock of twenty cattle egrets in the rugby field. These are small egrets that often hang out with livestock (hence the name), gobbling up insects and occasionally other creatures that are stirred up by the herd’s movements. With the advent of modern farming, cattle egrets have adapted quite handily and are delighted to follow tractors as well. They’re unusual among herons in that they’re not water oriented; in fact, they’re grasshopper specialists.

This flock was working the rugby field pretty hard, stabbing the ground with their bills as they walked a slow but steady search pattern from the bottom of the field to the top. Several of them were already molting into breeding plumage, and one in particular was fully converted into summer finery.

(photo by Kissimmee)

Males and females look alike, so I can’t be sure what gender this particular bird was, but the behavior gave me a clue. Puffing and strutting, making aggressive lunges at some birds while displaying a look-at-me behavior toward others — what could it be but a female?

Kidding.

But it really was a surprise to see breeding plumage and preliminary courtship behavior in January. That seems ridiculously early, which tells me that I still haven’t adapted to the seasons here. It also reminds me that I’d better start looking for the house martins — they should be returning from Africa in a few more weeks.

The iPad is born (and Amazon is nervous)

If you heard a rumbling sound, or detected a slight shaking of the earth at approximately 18:10 GMT (10:10 Apple time), that was the simultaneous nerdgasm felt ’round the world.

The iPad has been revealed, and it’s impressive. Looking like a scaled-up version of an iPhone, it’s half an inch thin, has a 9.7-inch screen (measured diagonally), and weighs 1.5 pounds. It sits squarely in the niche between the iPhone/iPod Touch realm, and that of a full laptop. It has a full QWERTY touch keyboard — almost as large as that of a small laptop — for typing when you need it, other keypads for other purposes (such as a numeric keypad for data entry), and generally looks like the perfect travel companion. I won’t go into the details here; you can head over to Apple’s site and see every detail in full blazing color.

What interests me right away are two things. First, the ebook reader. Barnes & Noble, with their failed Nook launch, must be having boardroom meltdowns right now. And Amazon is nervous. Here’s a book on an Amazon Kindle DX:

And here’s one on an iPad:

(photo from Endgadget’s live blog of the Great Revealment)

There is just no comparison of the viewing quality. This really is the closest digital equivalent to holding a book in your hand. And of course Apple being what it is, there’s an Apple ebook store ready to launch as soon as the first iPads are shipped out. The iBook Store already has five major partners in its pocket: Penguin, MacMillan, Hatchet, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster.

Nothing Amazon has on its Kindle, with its vaunted “16 shades of gray,” can compare with a bookshelf like this:

The iBook Store looks and operates just like the iTunes Store, which means that the zillion people out there who have ever bought a song from iTunes know exactly how to use it. And since the ereader app uses the free and open epub format, lots of folks out there can make their files look beautiful on it.

The second thing that really caught my attention was the fact that the New York Times had a representative at the Great Revealment. They’ve already designed an app for the iPad, which tells you that they’ve had a nice head start. And the app is beautiful. Just as the ereader app looks like reading a real book, the NYT app looks like reading the NYT. Here’s a photo from Endgadget:

It has dropdown menus for navigation within the paper, as well as embedded videos in the articles — click to play and the screen goes dark to set off the video. Turn the iPad to landscape mode to more easily read a single article, then turn it back to portrait mode to see the rest of the “page.” Very, very slick.

Couple this bit of data with the recent announcement that the NYT will soon begin charging for its online content, and we can come up with a new picture of the future. Yesterday I would have said that the NYT’s decision was, if not fatal, at least pretty damaging. Today I’m not so sure. Charging for online content has not worked in the past, but the past didn’t have a device and an application that really felt like reading a newspaper. This is the closest thing I’ve yet seen to a life preserver for the newspaper industry.

It bears close watching.

The Jesus Tablet

Yes, I’m one of the geeks, though I really hadn’t considered that as a name for Apple’s new tablet.

The rumor mill has seethed and frothed to an entirely new high these last few weeks. Tomorrow is the day we all find out what Apple has up its sleeve. It had better be something stupendous, or poor Steve Jobs and the Apple stock prices will be done in by all the crashed expectations…

“A Glorious Dawn”

This has been around for a few months, and become so popular that it’s spawned all sorts of follow-ups and imitations. But it’s still the best, and worth reposting for several reasons.

First, it’s just beautiful.

Second, it’s creative. (And catchy!)

And third, it’s an excellent example of one of my favorite themes: using modern, inventive ways to teach both children and adults that science is, in fact, cool.

Cosmos revolutionized the science education field when it first aired. Carl Sagan managed to make astronomy and physics not just understandable, but so interesting that regular families with no prior affinity for the “hard sciences” gathered around their television sets every week for another riveting episode. It is still the most widely watched PBS series in the world.

But it came out 30 years ago. An entire generation has grown up and had their own children since then. How would one interest a young person today in an old, stodgy PBS series and the concepts it presented?

By remixing it into a modern format. Give them 3:34 minutes of catchy music, interesting images and a currently popular method of computerizing voices, and let them take it from there. They’ll Google “Carl Sagan” and find out all sorts of intriguing things.

And those of us who watched Cosmos when it first came out can enjoy the reminder of just how fantastic it really was.

As a side note, I find it interesting that the comments on YouTube appear to have devolved into a debate on religion vs. science. That was never what Cosmos was about, but it does seem to be the first thought on many people’s minds these days whenever anything related to science emerges into the public consciousness.

Oregon Macs

I spent several years working with a research group at Oregon State University, and enjoyed it. But it’s now very clear that I was working at the wrong university. Because look at what its state rival, the University of Oregon, is giving away:

via Cult of Mac

Not just MacBook Pros — laser engraved MacBook Pros. Five hundred and fifty of them, with a perfect image of the university’s logo on both the laptop and the leather carrying case.

Unfortunately, the University of Oregon is not giving these gorgeous things to its faculty. They’re for student athletes, and are part of the benefit package recruiters can use to convince the best performers to sign on. They were a gift from Phil Knight, UO alumnus and co-founder of Nike — and they’re only the smallest part of the royal treatment athletes now receive at the University of Oregon.

Knight, whose name and largesse now mark three of the four corners of the U of O campus, also made possible a brand new Academic Center for Student Athletes.

photo by Randy L. Rasmussen, The Oregonian

Described by the executive director as “the Taj Mahal of academic services,” the new center just opened for business, and by all accounts it’s dazzling.

Inside the 12.5-foot front doors are stunning sights at each turn: A three-story atrium with a first-floor café warmed by stylish couches hugging an open-air gas fireplace. An auditorium paid for with a donation by former quarterback Joey Harrington with 113 blinding-yellow leather seats. And a room of bronze athlete-award statues commissioned by a Spanish artist whose sculptures are featured at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Most of one wall is consumed by a three-story etched-steel mosaic of Albert Einstein made up of thousands of photos of Oregon athletes taken by a photographer who followed them for a year.

And that’s just the first floor.

The university logo etched into all those beautiful laptops also appears in entry mats and locker doors, and other artistic touches adorn the whole building. The most bizarre feature is the art in the second- and third-floor women’s bathrooms, where mirrors facing the stalls are etched with Phil Knight’s image.

Knight may have made that building and a whole lot of other athletic facilities at the University of Oregon possible, but if I were a female athlete using the loo, Phil Knight’s mug is not the first thing I’d want to see upon emerging from my stall. (A gift of one of those etched MacBook Pros might change my opinion, though.)

The Cult of Mac interviewed the artist who engraved those laptops. He said it was for both aesthetics and security, and I can certainly see how the latter could be a selling point. Computers are a big-ticket theft item on college campuses, along with bicycles. But if a thief whips out his stolen “O” engraved MacBook Pro anywhere in western Oregon, he’d better look very athletic indeed.

Graffiti

How do you know when a wall or vertical surface in Portugal is either newly built, or newly painted?

When it doesn’t have graffiti on it.

I give this recently repaired wall by our city park another month, two at most, before it’s covered in graffiti. Most likely the only reason it isn’t already is because the weather has been too cold and rainy for gleeful spray painting.

If you look at this wall, and then turn in place to look at the wall on the other side of the road, here’s what you see:

Now this is more normal.

Graffiti is a common sight in even the smaller cities here. Loulé only has a population of 23,000 — not exactly a big city, but plenty big enough to have a graffiti problem. Though to be honest, I like the art on this wall. It’s colorful, eye-catching and creative. If all graffiti were like that, I’d consider it a cultural advantage.

Unfortunately, not all of our graffiti artists are artists. The majority are simply taggers, scrawling their names over every object in sight. Trash cans, recycling bins, road signs, statues, the sides of buildings…the only requirements seem to be a vertical surface and visibility.

It’s an interesting cultural phenomenon. In the US, I associated graffiti with gangs or large urban centers. Neither is a factor here in Loulé, or in the many, many other places I’ve seen graffiti around the country. Here, graffiti just seems to signal that there are kids in town.

News flash: Older people can love

Yesterday, while driving down the highway, I got my socks blown off by this billboard advertising fireplaces. So blown off, in fact, that I immediately pulled over and took a photograph:

Good lord! Older people can love! They can get naked, and wrap each other up in a passionate embrace, and share a torrid kiss in front of a crackling fire.

But I don’t think they do that in the US. It must be a Portuguese thing. Because I’ve never, but never seen a billboard advertising naked, passionate retirees in the US.

While I stood there in the rain with my camera, a man who was working in the nearby tile yard came up and asked what I was doing. I said, “Taking a photograph of this billboard.” He looked at me strangely and asked, “Why?”

I said, “I’m an American. We don’t have billboards like this. We like to think that we’re all young and will never get old.”

He just shook his head and went back to work. I’m not sure which he thought was more bizarre: a person getting excited over older people in an ad, or the idea of Americans not having such advertisements.

Let’s take a closer look:

Now, to be just a little cynical, I have to acknowledge that retirees are a formidable economic force in the south of Portugal, and this billboard is no doubt targeting those buyers. Perhaps I’d see ads featuring the over-60 demographic in retirement communities in Florida. But naked and kissing? I’m thinking not.

Really — it’s beautiful. And so is a culture that values passion and love, regardless of gray or silver hair.

Mexican crystal cave

In 2000, a group of Mexican silver miners broke through a rock wall and stumbled into something out of a science fiction film: a cave filled with giant white crystals as large as 10 meters (33 feet) long. They’re the largest known crystals on the planet.

It would be a ready-made tourist destination except for the extreme environment, which includes an air temperature of 50 degrees Celsius (122 F.) and almost 100 percent humidity. Humans can’t function long in those conditions, so anyone visiting must wear a special cooling suit and an oxygen mask.

Professor Iain Stewart suited up to visit the cave while recording for a new BBC series called “How the Earth Made Us.” If the video clip is any indication, it’s going to be a spectacular show.

BBC won’t allow its videos to be embedded, but the screenshot above shows Professor Stewart in the cave, dwarfed by the crystals. Click the image to go to the video, which is probably as close as any of us will ever get to seeing those crystals in person.

Professor Stewart’s description of filming in the cavern is worth a read, but be prepared to be jarred by the reality: the cave will probably be closed and allowed to flood.