Middagmaal in Amsterdam: Murmuration

Friday, January 1, 2021

New Year's, normally a time of fireworks, was this year rung in, more or less, by a murmuration of starlings instead. If you're in the Bay Area, go see them, it's truly unmissable: 4:30 PM, anywhere with a view of Mt. Olivet Cemetery (their current roost). And if the cemetery is open, go inside and listen:

Cornmaze · Murmuration Murmuring

Breakfast Reading

Experience of the way of all flesh might lead you to think that hard rocks, high mountains and broad continents would be stable and lasting, while the tiny molecules of life were fleeting: biology brevis, geology longa. In fact, over the history of the planet, the reverse is true. Mountains are worn down to seabeds, continents pulled asunder and ground together; oceans open and close. As a result, only a tiny fraction of the earth’s early crust is still available for inspection today. There is for example only one rock formation yet discovered that dates from the Hadean—the Acasta gneiss, in Canada. In the rest of the world the only samples of the Hadean are fragments incorporated in rocks of a younger age. The biggest are the size of small pebbles. Yet molecules from those shattered days are all around us today, in the form of DNA sequences. Many of our genes are billions of years old; some date back to the universal ancestor of life itself. While the winds and waves of entropy erode earth’s heights, life maintains its inner order across cosmic spans of time. - Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet

Friday, January 1, 2021

Murmuration

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