Yesterday my wife and I drove up to the mountains, and we cut up some firewood from the trees I chopped down last year. We hadn’t been there since then, so, unusually, no one but some sheep (and judging from the droppings under the outdoor table, some geese) had been tramping down the different grasses that grow there. They were quite wonderful to see, as were the moss and lichen.
I had brought the camera, but I’d forgotten to charge its batteries. Luckily my wife had her iphone, so (and thank you, Steve Jobs) she was still able to make a record of it.
It was perhaps one of the last days of the year that it will be like this. The leaves had already fallen from the trees, and last night snow was expected for the first time this season.
Not having snow tyres on our car, and fearful of skidding on the steep mountain road, we scurried home again at dusk.
It’s a four-hour drive. While we were enjoying a caffe latte at McDonald’s in Lillehammer, I was thinking, why don’t they sell duck coated in batter? McDonald’s Duck, like Chicken McNuggets etc. Would there be a legal conflict with Walt Disney over the name? Why?
A Bad Guide 
I’ve always heard that curiosity killed the cat. In China I imagine you could recycle the results as McDonald Peking Tom.
Artur,
You were not exaggerating about those greens.
(I have now recommended that Dr. Johnson conduct Walter Benjamin upon a proper therapeutic roll down your slope of lichens, mosses and grasses. They have of course been instructed to “roll discreetly”.)
Would there be a legal conflict with Walt Disney over the name? Why?
There is no case. Donald’s duck belongs to Donald, not to Disney.
¡¡You’ve change the original title!! (gmail can prove it)
“Muchas gracias” jajajaja. That’s right: thank you, Steve Job and your wife’s Iphone.
I love moss and those lichens remind me of Tierra del Fuego and the Patagonia.
It’s good to think of lichen and moss extending all the way from Tierra del Fuego to here and my wife’s photographs going half-way back again.
I sometimes change titles when the first one is especially feeble. I don’t use any of those things like gmail, so I don’t ever see the discrepancy. Thank you for seeing my little joke, though. You never know with this kind of thing, sometimes my Norwegian puns meet with blank stoney looks, sometimes not. Who knows why?
The human body cannot produce color. It does relate to it not creatively but receptively: through the shimmering colors of vision… In short, pure color is the medium of fantasy, a home among clouds for the spoiled child, not the strict canon of the constructive artist.
Tom, I found W.Benjamin’s argument hard to follow, though it may have been explained within those three dots.
By the way Tom, I’ve received my copy of Keat’s Letters, edited by Robert Gittings, with an interesting forward by Jon Mee, mostly on Keats’s relation to Leigh Hunt & Walter Hazlitt. I’ve just embarked on reading the actual letters. Thanks very much for the recommendation.
Donald’s duck belongs to Donald, not to Disney.
Stu, I just hope you’re right. I had to deal with the Disney people in connection with cruise-ship design, and I remember they’re all obsessed with protecting Disney’s sole connection and rights to Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck etc. Any idea you suggest, whether they use it or not, any thought that crosses your mind, automatically become legally Disney’s. They treat the subject of copyright as if it were metaphysics. I’m probably breaking a law even writing their name here. The Luftwaffe drew Mickey, but (if not in world domination, at least in firepower) they were a bigger organisation than the burger chains. I can’t see them letting the McDonald Corp. or Donald Trump get away with invoking the duck’s name.
Another data point: Disney got control of the voice of Snow White and never let go. And I am suddenly struck by the parallel between this real-life swindle and the bad deal that the fictional Ariel made with the horrible power-hungry octopus-like sea witch in Disney’s Little Mermaid.
Yes, that’s a horrible story. Poor woman.
I had an argument with another major US multinational which put a clause in my contract saying, in effect, that any idea I ever had thereafter was their property. I refused to sign and offered a clause saying every idea I had connected with the product I was working on was theirs, which I was happy with, and eventually they backed down and accepted that. Gotta face these stupid lawyers down sometimes ….
Well done.
Recently I have had to take a greater interest in mosses and lichens in order to help a botanist with transcribing and analyzing the names of some of them in an indigenous language of Northern BC. Some of the mosses look the same as on your photos, for instance the ones looking like little miniature conifers rather than generic moss (the name in that language means “like spruce”). As for lichens, all the ones I had seen growing up in France looked like thin crusts over rocks or branches, so I had been very surprised to read that lichen was a main food for reindeer (“caribou” in Canada), but many northern lichens look like lettuce leaves, as in the last photograph. They look thicker and drier than lettuce, but are probably OK for a reindeer’s strong stomach, especially after a rain. (I think lichens also survive under the snow and therefore provide winter food).
Goodness, what interesting and esoteric work linguists get up to. Yes, there are thick growths of spongy lichen on many of the rocks, so I expect it’s food for the reindeer and for the sheep that graze here in the summer. It seems to my inexperienced eye that there are very many kinds, some of the lettuce-leaf type but, as I say, also a more spongy kind that’s very prolific. Sometimes I’m not sure which are moss and which lichen.
Architects often use lichen to represent trees and undergrowth in models. It’s quite expensive at model shops, I feel like mailing bunches to my architect friends in New York.
Yes, the leaf-type lichen is far from being the only one, it is just that when thinking about lichen as animal food, this type looks like the most promising, probably because it is green as well as leaf-like. I don’t know whether there is more variety in lichens and mosses in Northern climates, or just that we notice them more because there are fewer other plants. I know the spongy type too (there is more than one species). And I think you have to be a specialist to know some mosses and lichens from each other, and even to tell some of them from more ordinary plants.
I have seen lichen in those models, without realizing that that was what it was. Dried lichen is very light, so it should not be too expensive to mail, but the US authorities probably would not be too happy to get a shipment of plant material (besides, they could get all they needed from Alaska).
Disney have taken on Daffy Duck and Howard the Duck, but the courts don’t give them all the metaphysical absolutism they would surely care to have.
I for one would probably enjoy a Disney vs. McDonalds’ claymation deathmatch, but so far as I know even the McNuggets don’t have a cartoon figurehead? (The children, being children, adore McDonalds. And now that their coffee is drinkable and they have free wifi, I can’t find it in my heart to mind very much.)
There’s nothing you can do, Des. I did my time at McDonalds when my daughter was young. There’s no food I like there, not even the salt and pepper. The ketchup’s ok.
“The ketchup’s ok.” Ketchup counts as one of your five-a-day.
Really. One of my five whats?
The only thing I have five times a day is cups of tea.
vegetables, I’m sure.
Or is it scotch?
Americans are entitled to three square meals a day, Mohammedans are required to pray five times daily. I just calculated that 3 times the area of a square is more like 4 times the area of the inscribed circle, rather than 5. So there seems to be a numerological discrepancy, but it will not be apparent if everything is smothered in ketchup.
Five vegetables a day seems like an awful lot, even counting ketchup. Why is it called a “square meal”?
Don’t you have five-a-day in Norway? It’s the govt propaganda that says we’ll not die of cancer, heart attack, stroke or ingrowing toenails if only we eat 5 fruit or veg per day. Naturally tatties, rice etc don’t count; nor, more mysteriously, nuts. I take the line that peanuts do count, since they are legumes not nuts. But since the whole business is based on no evidence at all, such logical arguments scacely matter.
The reason ketchup counts is that tomatoes are not only Good For You, but cooked tomatoes are even better.
Oh, well, I do eat five if it’s fruit + veg. And come to think of it I don’t have ingrowing toenails. Sure, peanuts are a veg; so five peanuts a day, then. Does tea count as vegetable juice?
You’re an architect, Crown. What would you charge for sticking up a garden shed?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/8859735/Make-your-home-work-harder.html
I always billed hourly, up to a max. of 16% of the construction cost. That’s for residential projects that have a general contractor. It covers design, working drawings & specs and coming round during the construction and making sure it gets built right. I’m not sure if that’s standard in the UK, though it must be roughly like that.
I don’t like this current thing in Britain of building in plywood and pressure-treated timber in people’s gardens: sheds and decks and whatnot. They always look shoddy and slightly damp to me. My mother just bought a little house. She tossed out the wood decking that covered the tiny back garden, and replaced it with a border for flowers and put down some traditional (for London) York stone paving. It looks so much better (all beautifully done by Poles). I think a shed – I expect it’s called a studio – ought to be made of stone or brick to match the house. I think this wooden one is hideous, it reminds me of the green slime that will no doubt be covering it by next April. When I was looking at houses for my mother there were several that had these rooms at the bottom of the garden. In principle it’s not a bad idea: because they face each other it makes the outdoor space in between the buildings a bit like a courtyard, and that’s better than the traditional rectangle of grass that peters out and you’re left staring blankly at your neighbour’s wooden fence.
However, I feel very sorry for the couple who built it, I bet they are desperate for work at the moment. These depressions or downturns are frightening for small architectural firms, and this couple has two kids and presumably no other source of income – maybe some teaching.
I suppose it’s unfortunate but true that plywood with green slime isn’t cozy like a dear old sofa.
I don’t understand the sofa link, unless it’s a reference to Matisse (and then I still don’t understand), but wooden structures seem completely ok in the United States, Australia or Norway where they are traditional, and – at least in the US & Australia – turn a lovely shade of grey.
“These depressions or downturns are frightening for small architectural firms..”: when I was a boy I considered becoming a Civil Engineer (private ambition: irrigate the Sahara). My father put me off it with a frightening account of the ups and downs of the construction trade.
I think civil engineers have more public sector work than architects do: roads, reservoirs and bridges as well as buildings; it may not be quite so synched to sudden downturns in the economy. But if not for your father the Sahara would now be jungle and we wouldn’t have to worry about the rain forest. Where were you going to put the sand? I suppose it’s not really all sand.
You compared the moss on the old maple tree to your mother’s old sofa.
Thanks. I’d forgotten that. Green slime is only acceptable when it’s far enough away that you’re not smelling it, whereas moss is pleasant to the touch.
Dearie and Jesús, since you’re both professors of something to do with liquids, I just saw a BBC programme that mentioned cavitation. I hadn’t heard of it before, but it looked awfully interesting.
>A. J. P. Crown
I’ve just read your com and I haven’t seen the BBC programme yet but yes, I knew a bit about that; for example, I teach my students how we can homogenize the milk using the cavitation to break and, obviously, to reduce the size of the fat drops.
On the other hand, nowadays this phenomenon is being used to take the fat out of the human bodies but I don’t know if it’s effective and, above all, healthy.
>A. J. P. Crown
As for the program, it’s not available here.
Speaking about teaching of liquids I might tell that now I’m teaching Petrochemistry to a student Turk (Erasmus grant) in English! Fortunately to me, she knows less Chemistry and English than me. Anyway, if I had a good command of these subjects I’d be an example of Renaissance’s teacher.
Cavitation isn’t healthy if you are a pump: destructive, it is.
The studio that those people built seems awfully expensive, and they did most of the work themselves so they avoided a lot of labour costs! but it is a small house (with kitchen and bathroom), not a glorified garden shed.
Years ago, friends of mine built a small “guesthouse” in their backyard, designed by an architect friend. It looked like two cubes next to each other, staggered by a couple of feet vertically and horizontally They were forbidden by local regulations to have water installed, this was so that nobody could actually live in it on a permanent basis and defeat zoning rules about single-family housing. I used it myself when I was working on a thesis and needed some alone time to do so, and I still miss it.
This guesthouse was built of wood, like most Canadian house-size (and below) constructions. The wood that turns a lovely shade of grey is “red cedar”, which looks nice both raw and aged, and splits lengthwise ery cleanly and easily. It smells good too when new, but insects don’t like the smell and therefore don’t eat the wood.
Jesús, there’s nothing wrong with your English.
m-l, I’ve kind of lost track what’s expensive these days. When I was building things it was always out of my own price range.
We have the same no-water-or-sewer-line rule here.
Dearie & Jesús, on that BBC programme about cavitation they showed a ship’s propeller blade that had corroded all down one side during its one-and-only trip across the Atlantic. I don’t suppose this energy could be harnessed?
>A. J. P. Crown
Thank you! Anyway my teacher doesn’t think the same (LOL). Well, I’ll try to teach this student. Fortunately she’s my only student of that subject so there isn’t any witness.
I believe that when water is just beginning to boil in a kettle you have bubbles forming at the bottom where heat is being applied and then collapsing before they reach the surface. Is that a kind of cavitation?
I saw that program too. It’s quite frustrating when they tell you just enough that you understand that they don’t really tell you anything.
I don’t think it’s worth harvesting the energy. Since the effect is made by the rotation of the propeller, the energy has to come from the ship’s engine in the first place. The energy used to create cavitation would show up as inefficiency in the system, as increase in engine power not being followed by an increase in output. (With the cavity that I’m a structural engineer, and in my world anything moving is a threat at best.)
>Empty
I don’t know exactly but I think these bubbles are, pretty much, at 1 atm like the liquid water so there isn’t an implosion because the bubbles don’t go toward a zone with higher pressure, the event that happen in cavitation
As for size of bubbles actually you can see that the most of these ones grow when they ascend because of fall of hydrostatics pressure. That can see better in a good tankard of beer.
It doesn’t seem your Turkish student is in any danger of not being able to understand your English, Jesús. Later I remembered you also know French and Latin, and probably Portuguese, as well as English and Spanish, so I think you’re just very modest.
Trond, I’m glad it wasn’t just me who saw the programme. I wasn’t thinking about using the propeller cavitation, nor really the shrimp cavitation, although they could probably take over the seabed if they wanted to, I was just wondering if cavitation could be used for a job like (I don’t know) sandblasting, for example. It seems very clean.
Speaking of Bernoulli, as it happens I’ve just listen on the radio something curious about a mistake related with a spiral in the uncle’s Daniel epitaph: http://www.w-volk.de/museum/grave45.htm
>A. J. P. Crown
I’d like speak all these languages to can work as a pope or as a president of EU, for example. I studied French in my primary and secondary education and then at language school. However I only studied Latin for one year because I chose sciences at secondary school; although I must say I love Latin. As far Portuguese I understand a bit because it’s similar to Spanish and, above all, similar to the language/dialect that is used for everybody in my parents’ villages where I went always in holidays so I learnt it listening to people. Besides I’m still learning English at language school. I confess I never thought to be able to write one word in English except yes, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Pink Floyd…
Therefore all that glitters is not gold.
I think that, many years ago, there was an advertisement on German TV for a product to clean teeth by some sort of cavitating process. The product was withdrawn later because people overused it, thus blasting their tooth enamel away. When you think about it, what else would one expect cavitation to do if not create cavities ?
>A. J. P. Crown
As regards sandblasting with cavitation I don’t know if it’s possible but you know water jet at high pressure is used to cut and also polish rocks. Likely cavitation is more expensive. Do you have surf the web to see how taking out the fat of bodies?
We’ve talked before about the mantis shrimp, with its remarkable color vision. I may have also mentioned the fact that the first time I ever heard of them was when I surprised one in its lair and then went home and looked in a book to see what the hell that was that had cut my finger.
I’d forgotten that their super-fast strike leads to cavitation, and that this lends a second punch to the strike. I didn’t know until now that there is also a kind of true shrimp that strikes by cavitation alone.
A pistol shrimp would be useful for my bathtub drain, which is clogging up. I could remove the drain cover, put the plug in and fill the bath – then put the shrimp on a leash, place it in the water, remove the plug and let physics take its course.
The leash demonstrates my concern for animal welfare. Once my drain is free, I will recover the shrimp and take it for walks in Cologne.
Cologne – a thoughtful switch from your usual language there, G. I’ve noticed that plumbers have no qualms about sticking their arm in and fishing out all sorts of unpleasant germy-looking stuff from blocked up drains; they must take a class in staying cool. But why only one shrimp? Most creatures enjoy company of their own kind, and I’m sure two shrimp can live as cheaply as one.
Ø: then went home and looked in a book to see what the hell that was that had cut my finger.
That must have been a few years ago; the days of having an actual book to look up shrimp in are over this house, if there ever were any. I suppose it depends on your location. We still have mushroom books, for example. I would love to go to Cape Cod again, sometime. Maybe I’d buy a shrimp book.
“The shrimp are considered to be a major source of noise in the ocean.”
Haha. If he weren’t dead, I’d bet that Wikipedia article had been written by my school headmaster. That’s just how he would have put it.
This wasn’t on Cape Cod, but near there. The same place, of course, where an osprey once got into the screen porch and needed help getting out, and where squirrels came down the chimney and we thought they couldn’t get back up but we were wrong. That house has field guides the way other houses have mice, or dust balls, or knickknacks. (Oh, it has its share of all of those too.) I think I found the mantis shrimp in this.
Stu, for all I know the pistol shrimp might make holes in your pipes while having little effect on what is blocking them. You might want to look for a pet that eats hair.
Birds sometimes use hair for binding together a nest. So a small duck, perhaps.
Having implied I don’t need it, I may still get that Audubon book. We live near the sea (fjord).
empty, for reasons that shall remain undisclosed I am certain that the drain is not clogged with my hairs.
Crown, I don’t know how I’m going to find even one pet that eats hair. But your suggestion that I keep two of them makes it clear that I should restrict my search to hairless species.
By the way, I just posted a blog about that Pinker book at my renamed site.
Would you like to give us a clue… oh I see, it’s called concertnotes.