Kingsbury Associates

Ever since our visit to Costa Rica two years ago, I have been much more interested in the animal kingdom and the birds in our backyard.  First, thanks to incredible naturalist and sis-in-law Sherry, we got a book called Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rain Forests of Central and South America, by Adrian Forsyth & Ken Miyata.  https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tropical_Nature/_EW9CLmu54QC Among many others, it told the story of cowbirds, who put their eggs in other birds nests so the other birds will have the burden of raising the young.  The cowbird eggs hatch sooner and the young are aggressive so they survive well in this arrangement. Well, on our feeder out back, we noticed unusual behavior.  A juvenile looking bird fluttered its wings repeatedly to get its mother to feed it, and the mother did, although was smaller and looked nothing like the young bird asking to be fed.  Our bird book finally helped us identify the young one...

Coming home from the Pi meeting at GMU on Saturday, the very outer wind and rain of Hurricane Irene was hitting us as we exited 64 to take the Beltway north to Silver Spring.  Much construction in the area, with a circuitous entrance ramp that wound around, and at a low point, the road was covered by 3-4" of water.  We saw and slowed but concerned about this condition early in the day's weather travails, I found VDOT on my smartphone, they had a phone number on the home page, and in the short voice tree, choosing Northern Virginia, was amazed at getting a person in no time flat.  Explained the danger, and a few minutes later was called by a roads guy who recognized the location and thanked me greatly for reporting it. Much press about smartphone folks taking pictures to be helpful so this is just one more illustration of the little effort it takes to help but the big benefit of doing so.

Food for thought in NYT Sunday review - provocative piece http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-idea.html?scp=1&sq=The%20elusive%20big%20idea&st=cse riffing from an Atlantic piece that we prize information more than ideas that synthesize or make sense out of information and have been game changing in the past.  While not the end of the debate by any means because there is much to the criticism, I was heartened reading Tom Friedman's p. 6 piece http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/Friedman-a-theory-of-everyting-sort-of.html?ref=thomaslfriedman that in his trademark fashion tried to synthesize the tea party emergence here, the Arab Spring, and London's disorder in a world trade theme.  Tom Friedman's success as a synthesizer is to me a sign that there is hope on this score.

Check out "An Apple Update with Aaron Davis" at the next Monthly Meeting of Washington Apple Pi,   http://t.co/ud3Yxsm  via  @ eventbrite More info on the Pi website:   http://wap.org/events/aug2011/default.html

I like Lion's Full Screen (and 4 finger gesture to browse among full screen apps).  To enable full screen, just hit the resize arrow at top right. Unfort, Google Chrome has not yet fully adjusted to it. With most apps that use full screen ESC key is the easy out.  In Chrome, ESC doesn't work; instead to exit Full Screen use Command/Shift/f http://www.simplehelp.net/2011/07/20/how-to-exit-the-full-screen-mode-of-google-chrome-in-os-x-lion/