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Text of the page (random words):
ask doctor vector ask doctor vector monday december 21 2009 sacked out male red kangaroo la zoo labels animals i took this posts mainly for my own amusement zoo posted by dr vector at 7 14 pm 4 comments thursday december 10 2009 walter the squirrel we have this squirrel that lives around our house he s kind of a doofus it s a good thing this is a predator free environment sometimes he makes enough racket in the trees that you d think a couple of sasquatchi were getting it on i call him walter in honor of walter sobchak he s fat noisy but basically harmless and if that isn t enough to earn the name check this out he s also curious and if i m out and about sometimes he ll just plunk down and watch me which affords me the opportunity to practice digiscoping if the birds aren t cooperating which lately they ain t been last sunday afternoon he was up on top of the telephone pole next to the driveway chittering away at me in between breaks to groom his fur and i am not making this up scratch his pits i hauled out my little scope and started snapping the lowest useful magnification my scope will do is 30x to get this last shot i had to open the gate to the back yard and go all the way to the end of the property just to get a wide enough field of view that s a good problem to have labels animals digiscoping i took this posted by dr vector at 12 35 am 2 comments monday november 02 2009 rocket man london is totally into rockets and space right now like he knows more about the us manned space program than i did two months ago for halloween he wanted to be a rocket and not just any rocket but specifically the mercury redstone and he was _adamant_ i admit to trying to deflect him onto a path that would be simpler for me but he stuck to his guns thank goodness for posterboard and black duct tape labels i built this rockets and space stuff posted by dr vector at 9 54 am 2 comments wednesday june 03 2009 oklahoma tetrapods this one s for darren the poor guy is working on at least two books several technical papers and keeping up two blogs not to mention being a husband and father with an infant to take care of so here are some tetrapods for ya darren from my recent vacation to oklahoma i think we ve seen that my skillz at identifying non sauropods are definitely sub 1337 but i will do my manful best everything is arranged in accordance with the great chain of being of course i reckon given the brown coloration the light spot on the eardrum and the north central oklahoma locality that this is a plains leopard frog rana blairi i can say for certain that it was too fast for me to catch bullfrog rana catesbeiana we saw this dude sunning himself every day the same or at least a very similar frog on a different day a juvenile watersnake in the genus nerodia but no tellin what species note cow poop for scale shed skin of an unidentified serpent my brother and i were walking along the creek near the house when we spotted this subadult raccoon procyon lotor moving upstream it didn t seem unduly exercised by our presence so we tailed it for thirty yards or so until it disappeared into some brush nearby we found this skeletonized paw from a nine banded armadillo dasypus novemcinctus also this mostly skeletonized bobcat lynx rufus i boiled and peroxided the skull and it is now sitting on my desk at work distracting people who come by to give me more work one of the ribs was broken and healed at last we come to the pinnacle of evolution the saurischians a common grackle quiscalus quiscula this one was in the top of a tree at my in laws place in oklahoma city interesting bird to watch but irritating to listen to it sounded as if it had eaten a squeaky wheel and dying cat and was trying to vomit them both out at the same time a red winged blackbird agelaius phoeniceus the wheat fields around my parents place were full of these things arf i saved the best and worst for last best because this was the toughest photo of the bunch and therefore the most satisfying worst because i am probably going to choke on the id but here goes anyway at first i was thinking that that the beak was too thick for it to be anything other than a finch but further reflection i e randomly thumbing through sibley s suggests another more likely alternative a dickcissel spiza americana that s all i got coming soon selected tetrapods from the la zoo labels animals birds i took this posted by dr vector at 3 47 pm 1 comments monday april 27 2009 the ratite clearing house post darren s post on my emu dissection pictures inspired me to bring all of my ratite blogging together in one place for the convenience and edification of all there s the original emu dissection post and and the immediately subsequent rhea dissection posts two links note the striking difference between the comparatively large normally folding wings of the smaller rhea below and the silly twig wings of the much larger emu above emus use their inflatable throat pouches to make booming calls i was fortunate enough to witness this and engage in a bout of reciprocal burping with an emu at the merced zoo which i covered here later on i posted briefly about kiwis also people loved the gross photos enough that i felt compelled to share pix from dissecting a hyena which is not a ratite but also flightless and still pretty cool finally i bought together my biological and then nascent astronomical obsessions and turned some of the emu gore into a planet if you find anything dead or get to cut something up or have some other cool interaction with the natural world post it and tell the world labels animals birds dissections rockets and space stuff posted by dr vector at 11 18 am 2 comments thursday april 23 2009 theropods of claremont or learning ornithology in front of a live audience every day between about 5 30 and 6 30 pm i have no scheduled obligations my driveway is out of direct sunlight and there are lots of birds about and as luck would have it i have a small maksutov cassegrain which functions as telescope by night and a spotting scope by day so i started photographing birds i won t lie to you this started out as basically onanism with a telescope you know i couldn t get what i wanted moon planets etc but i could still get something but against all odds i started to get interested in who s around i finally knocked the dust off my copy of the sibley field guide to birds of western north america which until the past couple of weeks had gotten about as much use as my copy of the complete works of william shakespeare i e it looked nice on the shelf and implied erudition i don t actually possess this evening was particularly good in an hour i saw and photographed five species that s nothing by the standards of real birders but for me it was a record all were perched at one time or another in the top branches of a tree three houses down or on the power lines at the end of the block the tree is 70 yards from my driveway and the power lines are a bit farther i took all the photos with an orion apex 90 scope orion sirius plossl 25mm eyepiece yeilding 50x and a handheld nikon coolpix 4500 digital camera many thanks to alan shabel for help with the identifications here they are a northern mockingbird mimus polyglottos one of several in the neighborhood i see them mainly when they come perch in the top of the target tree and scare off my intended quarry see below a band tailed pigeon columba fasciata i didn t know this was anything other than a feral eurasian rock dove i e regular pigeon until i checked sibley s a strikingly beautiful animal for a pigeon i ve seen these before and just didn t know what i was seeing an acorn woodpecker melanerpes formicivorus today was the first time i d actually seen one of these things around here or ever identified a woodpecker to species he spent quite a while tearing up our municipal infrastructure maybe i can score some stimulus bling for something called woodpecker monitoring oh now this little fartskin was a whole nuther kettle of fish didn t even sit still long enough for me to get the scope properly focused wham bam what the hell was that i think based on the reddish throat and face and black and white striped breast that this is a red throated pipit anthus cervinus house finch carpodacus mexicanus thanks to neil for the save and for making my secondary title even more appropriate but for all i know it might be a rosy bummed sky kiwi or a uruguayan yaksucker neither of which are covered by sibley s perhaps i got the expurgated edition those are all great birds but the one that got me into this crazy pursuit is this little fellow this particular individual a male anna s hummingbird calypte anna whom i spotted a couple of weeks ago buzzing about like a tiny helicopter or a slightly larger than average bumblebee belying his clade s reputation he does sit still from time to time almost always on this exact spot on this exact branch of the same exact tree three houses down you d think that regularity of habit would make him easy to photograph but he has a couple of traits that i d never read about which make him a frustrating target first he s psychic if i raise the camera to the eyepiece or heaven forfend call someone over for a look he s gone sometimes for the rest of the day second he s happy to show me his iridescent green back all day but only rarely will he turn around and flash the iridescent red feathers that cover his face and neck finally finally today i got this shot this is the same bird as in the shot above about two minutes later when the sunlight catches those feathers the effect is unbelievable one look at that and you might start to understand why a grown man would spend an hour every evening looking through a thermos sized telescope at a thumb sized bird half a block away but when he turns around away from the late afternoon sun the effect is lost and the feathers are a flat dark red a bit like dried blood and like that poof he s gone labels badgering around with telescopes birds digiscoping posted by dr vector at 12 00 am 5 comments sunday april 12 2009 starscaping hoo boy you are ska rooood because it s either the morning and you need to get to work or you re at work or it s the evening and you need to do chores spend time with your family stalk people online and here i am pointing you toward the star formation game which in its addictiveness makes the infamous falling sand game look like eating your boogers in public i e pathetically easy to kick not that that s an actual habit anyone would ever need to break no sirree just trying to turn a humble phrase here they could have called this herding hydrogen theoretically you set off supernovae to compress clouds of interstellar gas so that they become gravitationally bound and collapse into massive short lived stars which themselves go supernova basically though you nuke stuff until it glows and then it goes boom and nukes other stuff and the eternal cycle of blowing stuff up rolls on i submit that this is scientific evidence that the creator exists and that he is a dude in not completely unrelated news last night i got curious about what would happen if i held my camcorder literally the cheapest commercially available model up to the eyepiece of my thermos sized telescope the answer is that i got something that is pretty crap on any objective scale but at least recognizable and therefore a smashing success personally i m posting this not to brag oh hay ull no but as a reminder that the night sky is accessible even to those of modest means clear skies labels amateur astronomy explosions not quite science nukes rockets and space stuff posted by dr vector at 10 31 pm 2 comments about me name dr vector location somewhere in california young married male seeks giant undescribed dinosaur for long term relationship incompleteness not a problem pneumaticity a must send quarry photos or hand samples view my complete profile useful stuff pandora rhapsody free pdf converter another possibly better one librivox public domain audio books moviefone recent quakes nomenclator zoologicus jcalc previous posts sacked out walter the squirrel rocket man oklahoma tetrapods the ratite clearing house post theropods of claremont or learning ornithology i starscaping messier a and b live blogging the 100 hours of astronomy phases for earthlings archives march 2005 april 2005 may 2005 august 2005 october 2005 december 2005 february 2006 march 2006 april 2006 may 2006 june 2006 july 2006 august 2006 september 2006 october 2006 november 2006 december 2006 january 2007 february 2007 march 2007 april 2007 may 2007 june 2007 july 2007 september 2007 october 2007 november 2007 december 2007 january 2008 february 2008 march 2008 april 2008 may 2008 june 2008 july 2008 august 2008 november 2008 december 2008 january 2009 february 2009 march 2009 april 2009 june 2009 november 2009 december 2009