From Word Blogging to STEM Blogging!

 I haven't been here in a long time!

After totally uphauling my life (when my aunt gossips about me, she calls it "going through life changes" LOL),  I've decided to start coding. 

Now, about six months after the decision to leave my Project Management position with a local security company, I've decided to record some of the interesting bits of coding. I believe I only just now have the confidence to start talking about it. It's a slow, grueling journey, but other coders are as supportive as their jobs alot them time to be. 

The older I get the more precious (and easily forgotten) all the details become. So why not b l o g?

I'll still be writing about alligators and crocs (duh, I just went to the Everglades y'all) but I'll also be dropping in to actively blog about my coding journey. I've been doing this programming stuff in a box for about six months and didn't realize I'd get serious enough to need to blog about this, but that's how life goes, isn't it?

More soon. "Stay alive, till then."

>'

Disney Gator, When I'm Human

Got nobody checking up on me now.

I had a a one-day $10,000+ party.

They call it a wedding. Worth it, maybe?

Here's to you, Louis.




>' omnomnom

Renewable Energies

Ah, the final entry for nature writing. It's been truly eye-opening.

It seems as though we've finally found a couple of sources of renewable energy that respect nature. The windspire at the Pittsburgh Zoo collects energy to power the front gate. Made in the United States from recyclable materials, the windspire is eco-friendly, rotating at a lower safer speed. On top of that, the zoo, like many other places, uses luminescent solar poles to light the pathways. The poles capture sunlight during the day and use that harvested energy to show light throw the LED bulbs when it gets dark. Of course, I can't help but be a little cynical about all of it. Who would I be if I weren't cyncial, right? While the street light luminescent poles seem to be a perfect alternative, how much energy does a slow turning windspire produce if it's only powering the marquee for the Pittsburgh Zoo? Can we afford to have that many spires, and what would the world be like if it were a land of windspires? 100 years from now, will human beings regret the invention of the windspire and the windmills that generate electricity because we've run out of wind? Probably not, because we understand science now. Look, I'm being sarcastic again.

People fight age; people fight wisdom. A teenager feels much smarter than a child, a young adult wiser than a teen. In middle age a lot of people reflect upon their foolish decisions for all those years because now it seems they've reached stability. But if the middle aged person or older person understands everything, they're only pretending.

Do we pretend that we understand nature as our species gets older?

Or are we finally understanding sustainability now?

Otis the alligator and the baby alligator haven't come back in time for the class to end. I could despair over this fact or I could think of it in terms of writing. Sometimes when a writer begins a piece, it's not headed in a certain direction. Just like letting the narrative take the route it has found by surprise, I've let this blog do the same. And believe me, this is not the end for writing about nature. Along with my classmates, I've been going well over the minimum word count from week to week. It's evident this assignment excites many of us. So for now, I'll end this short. Brevity, short and sweet at 514 words.

I understand now that I have to start nature essays with a topic of interest rather than start with the memoir mentality. This is my defined process, which I've learned not everyone has. I admire those who can write otherwise, and I think that I've met some of the most amazing and beautiful writers (or gotten to know them better). They teach me so much, whether in class, over Pamela's pancakes, over Ritter's pancakes, or at a future visit to the zoo together- they just really get me, and I'm fortunate to have met these people. By researching, interviewing, and writing about things that interest me, the metaphors and similes come naturally rather than forced. Researching is my source of renewable energy.



(I dig when Ryan posts a song, so here's what's going through my head right now. Dawes wrote this song thinking of the lack of life experience and having not really that much to sing about- being so young and lacking life experience. Looking to the future works well, I'd say.)

 

"Summer" Xia, Red Panda

(Probably making a sound effect somewhere along the lines of "nyum nyum nyum.")

Remember this stuff from a couple entries ago?

I listed nearly a hundred grasses I knew were NOT this plant.

Since people are walking around, since Pittsburgh is waking up to spring and at the zoo some more people are interested again, or at least about the twenty folks I've seen today are, I ended up asking someone, an old man dressed in a black sweatsuit, what the "funeral flower" was. I hold one stereotype very strong- that old people are so much smarter about the natural world. Maybe because my other stereotype is people my age grew up with too much televisions and video-games or whatever, but that's an aside. How silly now, of me to think it was a funeral flower or some kind of grass. I never realized this: bamboo grows in two forms.

There are of course the woody bamboos I know about. This is the kind I imagine the pandas and red pandas and those weird lemurs are munching on. Animals like rats will eat the fruits that come out of bamboos and mountain gorillas, chimps and elephants will eat it as well, and receive an effect from the fermented sap as a sort of animal alcohol. Drink up, fellers. Also bug larvae will eat this and the caterpillars which eat the sap are considered a local delicacy in Thailand and some parts of China. This further supports my argument that bugs are delicious and should be eaten with a smile.

Anyway, the smaller, softer "harbaceous bamboos" are known as "olyreae." This is what the plant is and it is strange that the more popular wood-like bamboo has been the only bamboo in my mind. At least the red panda knows better.

The first time I ever saw a red panda I thought for sure it must be a red-headed relative to the raccoon. They wear a white bandit mask of fur and use their long bushy striped tails to balance. They've got claws and look a little bit like cats in the face, with their whiskers and sharp teeth. And if they got the chance, they'd probably eat garbage, too. 

However, these animals are not raccoons. They have been classified as ailuridae, a complicated and debated species classification only given to these special animals, all of the like-species ailuridae extinct. For a small summation of the information I've found about the species, check out this wiki.

As you can see, Xia, delivered to Pittsburgh, PA from a zoo in North Dakota, paces without stopping, at least for the twenty minutes we watched her. Even watching her movement made us a little dizzy. I immediately thought of earlier in this blog project, when I caught a polar bear pacing back and forth, shaking her head to and fro and wiggling to a silent samba. I thought of the tigers pacing back and forth, a roller coaster of grunts and groans over the same mounds of land they'd seen for all of their captive life. For as long as I can remember, I've seen animals pacing at zoos. I've assumed it meant the same thing it does in human beings: boredom, anxiety, unhappiness.  So I took a step further and searched online to figure out the pacing.

Blogs on pacing:

"Abnormal behaviour such as a stereotypic movement is very much a concern when it occurs in relation to animals held in captivity. From a behavioural standpoint, the behavioural and spatial requirements of nondomestic animals in captivity greatly depends on the species."

"Despite this, red pandas do adapt well in captivity, and they are found in zoos worldwide. Many Carnivores (order Carnivora, not ‘things that eat meat’) traditionally do very poorly in zoos; just think of a polar bear pacing back and forth repetitively in its enclosure. Red pandas, however seem to do just fine, which is a good thing for them because captive breeding programs can go a long way to restoring and maintaining the native population."
(Refer to my video in rebuttal to the second excerpt)

And I also found this, from the website of the Born Free Foundation, a wildlife charity dedicated to protecting animals:

"If the captive environment does not cater for the species-specific needs of the animal, there can be a deterioration in both physical and mental health such as the development of abnormal behaviour, disease and even early mortality...
Pacing and Circling:

Continuous walking back and forth or in a circle, following the same path. Signs of regular pacing include definite paths worn in the ground. Seen in many captive animals, especially big cats and canids (eg wolves)."

It's not the scientific proof I was hoping to find, but it reinforces that pacing is pacing, regardless of which mammal we are. I knew the pacing of human beings and I knew that this was a bad thing, just by the human experience and relating that to the animal experience. I knew this from realizing we are the same. Pacing is sometimes like searching for understanding- it can be really frustrating and lead to nowhere. And yet, we keep moving forward, trying the same path to notice something that might not have been so lucid the first couple of rounds. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes I find my wallet after looking in the same spots for hours. Sometimes it doesn't help. But let's try to figure out how Xia came to be "Xia."

Xia is the red panda's name given by the zoo in North Dakota. She is almost three years old now. Sun, my friend from Handan, China, has taught me a lot about understanding the way Chinese names and symbols are formed.

夏[Xià] is a mixture of radicals. The two radicals are:

𦣻 [Shǒu] from the archaic symbol    for "head." To me, it looks like the head of a dog.

and
夂 [Zhǐ] for the archaic symbol   for "a man who makes an effort." They look like axes or clubs, some sort of tool.

Chinese mythology tells the story that there were ten suns in the sky, rambunctious brothers who made the world too hot with all their antics. Nothing could grow with all that hot air. So Hou Yi, a Robin Hood-like hero, shot down nine of the ten brothers, therein allowing the Earth to grow plants and survive with the heat of the surviving brother. To add to the mysteries of the sun, an eclipse was explained with stories of a magical dog of heaven biting a piece of the sun. So of course, as I continue to learn we've always been this way, human beings would yell and holler, making lots of noise to scare the magical dog away and end the eclipse.

We always think we're the heroes. That we're solving problems. That we can solve the problems. That the red panda's population is down to 250,000 in the wild so we should keep them and make them safe, safe from the destruction most likely we have caused. We label things. We make it so. And maybe it does make a difference. I'm not an expert and have no plans to be. 

Working together with the meanings of a "head" to ward away and the "hard work of man," the Chinese, through years of history, came to the meaning for Xia, or 夏, as the character for "summer." The red panda's name in English is "Summer," or Chinese for summer/great/grand/or big. 

The weather feels like it's restless, much in the way that Xia is. Pacing. The weather goes back and forth, cold and hot, undecided on whether the plants will live. One day the weather is 30°, the next it's 70°. Hou Yi has done his work to make sure it doesn't get too hot down here, but the weather is still restless, so do something humans. The weather is restless, like the insomniac battle I work through during the week, sleeping for only a handful of hours during the week. Almost every Friday is spent in sleep debt remittance, usually snoozing from 4pm to 9am the next morning. It'd be nice to find a balance, to figure out how spring will wake up from the sheets of snow and bring life into the bamboo for Summer to eat. I want this eclipse of bad weather to be over with, to be another thing of memory, to not seem so bad after all, in retrospect.

So what, in the end, should we do to fix everything?

Maybe make some noise for summer, everyone.

In A Whipray Name

More people come to the zoo in warmer weather. As the ice thaws, as molecules begin to move, people begin to move. In fluid motions, they drip along the sidewalk, they find their way through the zoo to the opening exhibits.

At the visitor's center

They've told me

Otis will be free

In a couple weeks

As I was researching for today's topic, I found the creepier side of the zoo:

http://blog.pittsburghzoo.org/

Webcams. The invasion of privacy. Animals are being watched not only in person, but through technology. Big Brother. The age of surveillance and numbers.

When I was flying and being screwed over for even thinking of flying this past week, I kept thinking about what an awful experience it is. How it feels so unnatural. How the air is stale and while flying I feel a cold dry sweat on the plane. My right ear is slow to pop and I can barely hear anyone out of that side for a day after the flight. But really, what is flying and what makes it such a pain?

1. Flying is a form of checking for citizenship.

Why do we accept spending money on something so expensive? Why is flying rather than taking a bus, or should I say, why is high speed travel any different from an automobile? It is a chance for someone to look at your ID, it is a chance to filter illegal immigrants. Border control. Air control. Controlling everything. Why are we okay with being rubbed down, patted down, and asked if we like to take things from strangers?

2. If your flight leaves without you, it is very often your fault.

Two minutes to run to the terminal in a connecting flight? A physically impossible feat to breach? Your fault. A flight leaving early for a reason unprovided by your air carrier? Your fault. "You'll be able to get a hotel voucher when you arrive in Salt Lake City." Upon arrival to Salt Lake City, the terminal is closed. No one to ask to get a hotel voucher, no promised accommodations given. Your fault. So stubborn you sleep in the airport anyway. I person waxing the floor asks you to sit up so he can wax underneath your feet.

3. Being identified as a number.

This one's pretty familiar to me. Undergraduate college, for one. Nearly everything. As well as when I wrote prisoners at the Appalachian Prison Book Project. I always felt deep regret at the inmates who didn't write their ID number when requesting a book. Their name is nothing to our society within those walls. They are accounted for by their number, and while I personally only have to think of being a number lately in terms of air-flight, I feel a remnant of that feeling of insignificance.


Flying is a demeaning, abusive thing, and I'm late in starting to understand what fresh air really means. What sea salt and the smell of an aquarium, that salty, algae, green smell, can do for me. I feel alive. I feel happy. I feel like nobody can keep me from walking around, from trapping anyone just as they did every time we landed.

I'm looking at the hands-on exhibit of the white-blotched River Stingray and a Leopard Whipray.

This animal is another favorite of mine, and I'm not sure why. I remember these animals being feared after the 2006 death of Steve Irwin, and while I do think that it's so sad for a man who respected the research and discovery animals so much to die at the stinger of one, (as if I need to remind you of what I think) there's nothing malicious in an animal defending itself.

The de-stingered animal is soft, slimy. A little "nasty" to touch, as my friend says. As visitors touch this beautiful animal, as this is a thing the zoo has allowed, I wonder how it really feels to the animal (and I will return when I have some more time and ask an attendant what this happens). I wonder why this is a thing at all, to be rubbed down in front of an audience. To be patted down. Is it invasive or welcomed?

***

A little kid climbs under the built-in tunnel and pops his head through the looking glass. The human as a stingray. To be pet as a stingray. Is the whipray watching us or are we watching it? The leopard print it beautiful, meaningful, like every little spot is a center to another universe. It doesn't have a name posted anywhere. There is nothing posted on the internet about either animal's name, nothing that I can find even as I am internet-technology-born.

Have they simply become numbers?

He Who

     Has every piece of this earth been recorded, stepped on? By "we" I mean human beings and animals, all the mammals together, so I wonder if we as a collective being have touched every millimeter over the millions of years, over the trillions of days. I'd hike over every mountain, wade through every lake, and trudge through every desert- I'd make my life with the earth a way of life, my purpose. A step would land on every inch of earth... but I question the practical worth, and that keeps me from even trying this.

     So as I'm looking at these lizards, in their five by ten foot tank, and I'm wondering, what's the point of all my thoughts? These lizards have certainly slid across every millimeter of  their man-made fifty square feet, and now there's no land left to explore. Maybe we were given so much land because we weren't meant to see it all. We were meant to be able to still wonder, to imagine.

     The Mexican bearded lizard, known for it's colorful, bumpy and beaded skin, was formerly found through the Southwestern U.S., but now it is only found from Mexico to Northern Guatemala. The lizard has glands in its lower jaw which release venom by capillary action along its grooved lower teeth, in effect, chewing venom into its prey. There is no anti-venom for the bite of this lizard, though human death is rare.

     They no longer appear through the Southwestern U.S. It is a CITES protected animal, protected under the same Animal Welfare Act, as it is endangered by its collection and habitat loss and careless murder. The bearded lizard has a plethora of superstition and myth. It is incorrectly believed to be the most venomous animal, and that it can create lightning strikes with its tail. Stranger still, the lizard is believed to be able to make a pregnant woman miscarry at it's gaze, as many things with scales in myths cause harm just by eye contact.

     For this reason, locals have killed the lizard

on the spot.

Also, the rare lizard is poached through animal trade. We kill the animal and sell its corpse for our own profit, for pieces of paper which make us richer. The animal does not reproduce well in captivity, so it very likely doesn't reproduce well in the zoo either. It's scarcity means a very high price for collectors. Though it is too late for the United States, this lizard is protected in Mexico by law of category A (very endangered) and it lives within several dedicated protected areas.

As I look into the face of this beaded "monster" it's incredible to me to imagine the men and women who believed and still believe it to be able to terminate pregnancies and cause bad weather. I'm busy being curious about the steps, about the land, because I want to know. Nothing more. Why didn't anyone want to really know this animal before they kill it? I have no reason to think stepping and walking is an injustice to the earth. I have no reason to think a calamity will fall from the stars if I pick a plant. I'm not inclined to get behind the philosophy of how we sometimes believe we own things simply by touching or living alongside them, but sometimes it's fun to pretend. My curiosity's nature is that of physical evidence and matter. Of mattering and the physical matter. Somehow a footprint in the sand is a solidifying action to me, as silly as that seems, even if it is blown away in a sandstorm, melted in the snow, the print is still there. I'm sorry, science, but this is what I believe. A mammal's steps are somehow deeper than the first and second layers of the earth, the crust, deeper than magma in the core, and I have no science to back that up, I have no reason to feel a certain way, and I have no scientific reason to feel sad about what we've done to these lizards, but this is the science of emotion.

We've headed to Seattle, and while I'd love to reflect on the awful flight experience or coming to terms with my interpersonal relationships, I can only reflect in this way:

He who journeyed through the airport.

He who arrives two hours and thirty minutes early- he feels only on time.

He who realizes his expectations don't frequent reality.

He who journeys and feels so sad about the beauty in this world. Of people and animals and their expressions alone which could reduce him to tears.

     Why tears?

     Why sadness?

     Why is it that he who speaks freely of ills and ignorance of this world can feel so restricted?

He who notices strong hair follicles, the strong tissues or scales holding a skeleton covering, a woman

     SH

         SH

             SH

                Sh

                   Sh

                      sh

                         h

                            her crying infant as he can only

                                                            B

                                               Ba

                                   Bac

            Back away.

He who journeys the world in such small ways.

He who loves this world so much he hates it.

He who refuses to enjoy himself for fear of seeming strange.

He who notices all the beauty until it turns ugly.

Justice For All

The Pittsburgh Zoo has been open to the public since 1898 thanks to the generous donation of $125,000.00. I'm sure real Pittsburgh buffs know or at least might have heard the name Christopher Magee, the founder of the zoo. A refresher for the yinzers who haven't caught up and we foreigners:

One man halves the debt of an entire Pittsburgh. 

One man generates thousands of jobs. 

One man then controls a city with his partner. 

One man takes piles of human being currency and ravages entire plots of land, uses materials from the earth to construct automobiles and building sites. 

How does one single man or one woman ever have such a giant impact on this earth? 

How do we consider what is "earned" and "fought for" when the question of ownership is so one-sided? 

A little boy named Maddox was mauled and eaten by a pack of African dogs in 2012 at the Pittsburgh Zoo. He was leaning over the rails, his mother trying to help him get a better view of the dogs. In terms of ownership, and devoid of our moralities, the dogs had this piece of meat fall into their hands. They had chance fall into their laps, just like luck falls into the hands of a human being. Just as a bloody medium rare steak splats onto our plates when we have enough money to order it. Who is to say what property is and what ownership is?

Obviously, we are.

And we've since removed those dogs from the settlement, only to replace them with cheetahs. It's just another motion we've got for handling iffy situations. The parents sued the zoo, which I truly don't understand, given the liability of holding your child over a banister. And the zoo just reached another part of a settlement last week, in which the zoo will pay the U. S. Department of Agriculture $4,550.00. 

Why?

Under the Animal Welfare Act, the only Federal law to protect the treatment of animals, we have decided that the USDA is due these finances. Statute §2157 section (d) states: "Any person, including any research facility, injured in its business or property by reason of a violation of this section may recover all actual and consequential damages sustained by such person and the cost of the suit including a reasonable attorney's fee." As my class has learned from our Eden Hall adventure, what the attorneys do with this lawsuit money in terms of agriculture is really up in the air.

What exactly does all this legislation do for the animals? I'm not entirely sure, though I'd like to think that the rationale behind this decision is: human beings fear losing money. And the fear of that loss prevents (most) people from harming animals, if not for just common human decency. Hurting an animal means losing money, simple.

I wonder then, if the animals would like more. They don't exactly see any part of this settlement, do they? Sometimes they get relocated rather than executed, so I guess that can be considered a small victory. 

I see Otis the alligator in his best tux, ready for court over being put in such a small bathtub of an exhibit for so many years. He's adorned with black shimmery satin on the lapels, a stripe of the same material sewn into a stripe on the pants, should he choose to be so decent to wear pants, too. He's holding an Alligator Welfare Act 2013 copyright LexisNexis in his right arm. A Venti cup of Starbucks caramel machiatto and a yellow legal pad in his right.

But that is probably not at all what any animal would like to see.

They're not into all the pageantry of the human world.

All this snow, do I even want to talk about it right now? There are stronger minds who have already written pages and books on it. I can't stomach it to consider snow again this week. I'm standing on a snowy bridge, nobody's bridge, and considering the legality, not the morality, of my previous blog thoughts of throwing a kid over the ropes to Otis. I have very unpopular opinions sometimes, but I think neither I nor the Animal Welfare Act have it right when it comes to justice for the animals. If that's even what we're really after.