A Boat Rowed Around It

A fellow affiliated with the Delaware Museum of Natural History is about to start on an intriguing adventure. John Wik plans to row a small rowboat around the Delmarva Peninsula as an educational adventure and to raise awareness about the museum.

It is called A Delmarva Odyssey (WARNING: embedded and apparently unstoppable video).

Mr. Wik will leave from the City of New Castle this week and row down the Delaware River, through the Delaware Bay, around Cape Henlopen, down the Atlantic Coast, around Cape Charles, up the Chesapeake Bay, through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and back to New Castle.

Not all in one go. He plans to do a few days a week, stopping along the way to record video lessons about the region and its ecology for school children. The Delmarva Odyssey site already has a few videos up detailing plans for the trip, the equipment, and some basic information about the region.

I'm ashamed to say I missed Molly Murray's story on this trip from a few days ago (A Delmarva trek, from bay to bay). I learned about the Odyssey from the Delmarva blog Shore Things (which I only just discovered).

According to Molly's story, the trip was to have started tomorrow, Mother's Day. The Odyssey web site, however, gives Tuesday, May 15 as the starting date. I imagine it may have been changed for various logistical reasons in the nearly two weeks since Molly's story came out. I know the last thing I would want to do on Mother's Day is start a major me-centric adventure. Better to wait a few days.

I hope to track this trip. The News Journal appears poised to offer regular updates, and I will return to the Odyssey web site from time to time. It would be helpful if there were regular text updates from the Odyssey site, and not just the collections of videos that appear planned. An RSS feed would be helpful, as would a schedule of whens and wheres so those of us inclined to could go on-site for a look.

When, for example, will Mr. Wik be passing my town of Lewes?

Sometimes I Like to Join the Crowd

I joined in a worldwide "all take a photo at the same time" event today.

The project, ShutterClock, was the brainchild of Ronan Murphy, who is finishing his college career (I think somewhere in the UK).

That's Ronan on the left there, in his entry into his own project, which he describes fairly simply:

We want people to come together as a simple community divided only by distance to globally capture their world at an organised time. In return we will see galleries of images from all over the world, taken at the same moment but from their point of view.

I learned about this idea from the flickr blog this morning. It sounded like fun. All I really had to do was keep my camera by me at the end of the afternoon and keep an eye on the clock. The project was set for people to take their photos at 8:00 p.m. GMT (4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time).

As it turned out, my photo was of a prosaic "afternoon in the office" sort of moment.

That's my keyboard and screen, with the agenda for a meeting I'm hosting on Monday morning on the left.

I uploaded my photo to the ShutterClock group at flickr. Some folks sent pictures directly to the ShutterClock site, where there are a selection of the photos. There was even a phone number to facilitate submission directly from camera phones.

Sometimes it's fun to be a small part of something larger.

A Simple Rule

Two stories on the News Journal web site this morning crystallized a thought that's been taking shape in my mind for a while now: Don't be a Jackass.

In the first story, a group of University of Delaware students are in some trouble for dressing up in costumes for a Cinco de Mayo party that seem to have been inspired by the worst possible racist stereotypes of Latinos. Photographs ended up, as they tend to do, on-line. Local Latino groups were not amused.

To their credit, the students appear to realize that they were being jerks, and have apologized.

The second story is that of attorney Richard Abbott, who has been reprimanded by the Delaware Supreme Court for "undignified or discourteous conduct." He submitted a brief in one of his many lawsuits comparing a board of appointed citizens to a group of monkeys:

"A citizen board does not mean that its members are given license to ignore the legal standards which govern their decisions. Otherwise the county would be permitted to appoint a group of monkeys . . . and simply allow the [county] attorney to interpret the grunts and groans of the ape members." (This quote from Mr. Abbott's brief is from the excellent Delaware Grapevine coverage of this story)

Attorney Abbott is loudly complaining the reprimand is a product of political correctness and violates his free speech rights. He says he broke no laws.

That's true, but he was being a jerk and I think that the court is within its rights to reprimand a member of the bar for being a jerk.

My new golden rule comes from a novel I read recently. I read widely and shallowly, for sheer pleasure, and so can't recall what the novel was, nor who the author. But I do remember that the novel was set in a small town that a sheriff had successfully policed for decades by holding everyone to one simple rule: Don't be a Jackass.

We all have free speech rights. But we also have a responsibility to not be jerks about it. We're not five-year olds, though we often sound like it.

There are, as I write this, about 100 reader comments on the UD/Cinco de Mayo story on the News Journal web site. I sampled a few earlier in the day. Based on the comments left on the News Journal web site -- on this story and on others I've read lately -- the readers of that paper, at least on-line, are mean, racist, xenophobic, and largely anonymous.

And, being anonymous, they feel free to violate that first principle of civilized society: Don't be a Jackass.

Now, That's an Alumnus

John Miner turned 100 years old this past Sunday. The Calais, Maine, resident is a retired dentist. He graduated from Colby College in 1929, two years before my father was born and 55 years before I graduated from Colby.

Dr. Miner was already wicked old (as we used to say) when I was a student at the small college in central Maine. Think of the changes he's seen.

As a boy he played with the young Prince who would some day be the King of Siam. He knew Roy Rogers. He only ever bought General Motors cars, starting with one he bought from one of the first auto dealerships in the state of Maine.

Right now he owns his 63rd and 64th GM cars.

What is his secret to long life?

"I never ever went on a diet in my life. I eat anything. I joke about it that it has to stand still long enough for me to take a bite, and as far as exercise, the only kind of exercise was when I had to attend gym classes at Colby College."

Karen Was Right

When we're out on the road, and some other driver is being an aggressive jerk, Karen always warns me against going macho/testosteronial with the admonition "you don't know; he may have a gun."

As it turns out, she is right. An aggressive jerk driver was arrested by state police today.

A loaded handgun and prescription drugs were found in his car, according to police.

The drugs were Valium. If only he'd had a few, he might not have been so aggressive.

Another Delaware Blogger in the News

Justin Kates, who blogs from the University of Delaware and about his avocation -- combining amateur radio and homeland security work -- is a subject of a story in the News Journal this morning.

The story, 19-year-old heads state's ham radio emergency corps, is part of a News Journal investigative series on Delaware's use of federal Homeland Security grants.

I am interested in this series. I do a fair amount of work with the state's Homeland Security agencies. Geospatial data is a key element in the information systems that support crime prevention and investigation, emergency management and Homeland Security. And it is the case that some of the federal grant funding that Delaware receives is helping to support the maintenance of important geospatial data sets.

In my view not enough federal Homeland Security grant funding is being used for geospatial data, of course, but that will be the subject for another day.

I was also interested in the story because I know Justin, not only as a fellow blogger but as a skinny, bright kid several years ahead of my eldest in school. I used to see him at school events and I still see his sister, who is between my two girls in age.

The News Journal questions why we have a 19-year old in charge of the Delaware Communications Corps. That may be a fair question. It is true that Justin Cates is a mature young man, and I have no doubt about his passion and intelligence. But it does seem unusual.

On the other hand, we do have a tradition of organizing ourselves on an ad-hoc basis. Our fire protection is handled (and very well) by a large number of mostly volunteer fire companies who carefully guard their autonomy, but generally work well together to help protect our safety.

My own Delaware Geographic Data Committee owes its existence in part to legislation that enables it, but more to the fact that I say, and a sufficient number of GIS leaders in state and local agencies say, that it exists.

This isn't necessarily a bad way to do some things. An informal, collegial organization can be quite effective. There does come a point, however, where that organization must become more formal in order to continue to be effective.

The question is: what parts of the Homeland Security effort have reached that point?

A Road Runs Through It

There's a new study published in the journal Science that looks at roadless space in the continental United States. It finds the remarkable fact that no point in the continental US is more than 22 miles from some sort of road.

The Science magazine website is by subscription, but the abstract of the study, Roadless Space of the Conterminous United States, notes that the authors have created a new way to measure roadlessness:

We introduce a metric, roadless volume (RV), which is derived from the calculated distance to the nearest road. RV is useful and integrable over scales ranging from local to national. The 2.1 million cubic kilometers of RV in the conterminous United States are distributed with extreme inhomogeneity among its counties.

The map image above shows RV by County. The scale ranges from high RV areas, shown in blue, where there are more areas without roads, to low RV areas, in red, where there are more roads.

Discovery News presents a longer overview of the study (Roadless Space Uneven Across U.S.) which discusses the relationship between this new measure of roadlessness and habitat fragmentation, and notes that the study found that, in some areas, we seem to build roads in the wrong places:

And when the scientists compared the roadless space with the number of people in a given area, they sometimes found a mismatch: that is, too many roads for too few people.

The study's abstract, by the way, offers a lovely example of scientific obfuscation. That poetic phrase "distributed with extreme inhomogeneity" means, I think, "not in any regular way that this highly trained scientist can see."

Tom's Dark Epiphany

Shortly after inventing his Edison Recording Machine, Tom sat listening to a wax cylinder of music.

All of a sudden, the years opened before him. He heard generations of recorded music: symphonic, impressionist, minstrel singers and crooners, blues both country and urban, worksongs, jazz, rock and roll, country pop, jam-bands and hiphop.

He heard and saw a musical future enabled by his own inspiration and work.

Then he saw a singing contest, judged by a strange trio: a clownish bear, a trained seal, and a dyspeptic clergyman. He saw democracy harnessed to this contest; its voter participation outstripping any actual election.

A title appeared in his mind's eye: American Idol. And he wept.

The Title Should Be Ours....

There is a National Chicken Cooking Contest. Delaware's entry is the author of the Wilmington food blog The Shell Pot; she is also a part of the life of Richard Koehler, our own Honest Hypocrite.

Watch Rich's blog for regular updates.

It seems evident to me that, if there is a national contest around the cooking of chicken, Delaware should always win. Otherwise, why am I eating chicken at every statewide event I attend?

Statewide GIS Conference

We are hosting a statewide conference for the users of GIS tools and geospatial data in Delaware this week. It is called Delaware GIS 2007: Serving Communities.

I should probably take a moment to explain GIS. The acronym stands for Geographic Information System, the combination of the map and the database. We use information about where things are to create what we refer to as "geospatially intelligent" information.

My job is to encourage the use and sharing of geospatial information in Delaware. The annual GIS conference is a big part of that.

Most of the credit for putting on this show, this year and every year, is due to the other folks on the Conference Planning Committee; but I get to play EmCee each year to all the state, local, academic, and private sector GIS folks in Delaware. It's a job I love.

The Conference started today with a series of technical workshops. While those were going on, we were getting ready for the main day of the conference and helping our exhibitors get set up. This evening, we hosted a social as a way of getting our exhibitors a bit more face-time with local GIS users.

Tomorrow we'll have about 200 attendees at the Dover Sheraton Inn. We start with a main session featuring awards and a Keynote address. We'll have workshops and presentations, a big lunch, more workshops and presentations, time with our exhibitors, and a closing session featuring another keynote and door prizes.

It will be exhausting, but during a long, long day I'll have a chance to catch-up with lots of folks doing great work. I'll see some of them honored by their peers. We'll inspire each other. We'll laugh and have fun.

I love my job sometimes.