A quick down and back put me in Southern Nevada for ten days. On the day I arrived it was topping out somewhere in the 90’s. On the day we left it was 106, had just been 112, and was going to be bouncing around in that difficult 106 to 112 range for the foreseeable future. That kind of hot is painful, exhausting, a little bit scary, and it has to said, sort of beautiful. It is the desert making it very clear who is in charge. And even with all of our air conditioning and other contrivances to optimize comfort, we are always one small event away from an existential situation in that kind of heat.
It is a standard trip for me now after our having owned the place there for eight-and-a-half years. It is mandatory two or three times each Summer. Often for longer stretches. It provides a unique lifestyle that takes a little getting used to. The temperatures are much more conducive to everyday stuff early in the mornings, from about four to just after eight. So the early morning is when folks are out and about, jogging and walking dogs and that sort of thing. Later in the day and even until well after midnight it stays hot and the streets are pretty much empty except around the bars and shops downtown and even there folks are a bit of a scarcity for big parts of the day. Although down by lake Mead it is a little cooler, the water certainly is. We didn’t make it down there on this trip.
I find a lot of beauty in my backyard when it gets so hot. The small animals come in close because there is access to both food and water. This time around it was the standard characters, antelope ground squirrels, who look just like chipmunks, always jittery quail, desert cottontails, jackrabbits, finches, sparrows and mockingbirds. Five types of sparrows. Three types of finches. All of them very young. And, I think because of the long cool and wet Spring and early Summer plus a dearth of coyotes, no roadrunner, and a resident hawk that is both undersized and clueless, they were much more abundant than usual. Much more abundant. And all flitting about from trees and bushes to the pond and back again or scurrying across the hot gravel and pebbles.
Birds pant like dogs do when it is very hot. And so they land on various things like the stems of plants that bow beneath their tiny weight or the backs of chairs and pause for a long while and rest and pant. During the hottest part of the day they stay in the shadows. When our current incompetent hawk arrives they dart out as they always do. But their darting is a little lackluster. Probably both because of the heat and their lessened concern over this particular hawk.
We’ve had the poor fellow for around six months now. I’m curious as to how hawks carve up their territory and how this hawk ended up in our ash tree. It is sluggish and often misses what it is going after. I’ve seen it slip and fall into the pond a couple of times. But it appears to be getting by just fine because of the abundance of prey. I worry that a lousy hawk could invite rattlesnakes, something that so far has not been an issue for us.
As to the coyotes, it is hard to say. Normally during the really hot stretches they are very common at the pond when their luck at finding food and water out in the desert is diminished. I remember the first July, we were moving things into the house, having driven a U-Haul down from Park City, and at some point we noticed there was a large black coyote submerged to his neck in the pond. We looked at him. He looked at us. He weighed the consequences and decided to stay. We decided to continue about our business as well. At some point later in the evening he was gone.
The coyotes have a rough life. People on atv’s chase them down and shoot them out in the desert behind the house. We’ve heard the atv’s and seen the spotlights and heard and seen the flashes of the rifle shots. We haven’t experienced that recently. They also are poisoned, or eat other things that have been poisoned, and are hit by cars and generally have to get by in a difficult environment. So their current absence could be for all sorts of reasons. It could also be that they are getting along out and about. We see them often on security cameras. Sometimes as many as six at a time. We’ve only seen a few so far this Summer.
I had a favorite coyote. I called her pretty girl. She was an exceptional animal. Beautiful. So much so that she was mentioned by others in the local paper. She came back often and then she came back pregnant. She would return several times with just one pup. I called him Nelson. Nelson grew up. Pretty girl disappeared. Now Nelson comes by every now and then. I’m not a big fan of Nelson. He gnaws the tiny hoses that are part of the watering emitter system that spot-water all of the plants. After a visit from Nelson sometimes we have little problems here and there whenever the watering system goes off. Oh well such is life at 110°f.
I am starting to take a lot of video of life in the Southern Nevada backyard during these hottest months and hope to pull it all together at some point.
So, I’m watching the world of social media from the outside and only rarely looking in. I do check Facebook about once a month, activating and deactivating. It is, I think, the proper way to go about it. So far, I’m pretty sure that no one has died. But I guess I wouldn’t know for sure. I don’t miss it very much.
I do scan through Twitter on a regular basis but never for long or with much enthusiasm. So I was surprised to see that Elon Musk has issued an edict as to the number of tweets I can see without my paying for the service. A bold move indeed. I’m curious to see how it works out for him.
According to this morning’s New York Times, the Instagram-branded Twitter impersonator called Thread has emerged. So, yep, another one. And there are two out there that I had not heard of, in addition to Truth Social and Mastodon. Not to mention all of the Reddits, 4chan’s, 8kun’s, and Quora’s and so forth. The impact of any one of these has to be inversely proportional to the total number of all of them, I suppose. Unless one takes over and dominates all of the rest. My guess is that, like cable news, social media will be fractured with each company maintaining its audience along political lines.
Some more thoughts on artificial intelligence.
The first is, the hype is getting to be a bit much. The chatter is clearly becoming artifice. PR to boost the markets and what had been the flagging tech companies. This has a very year-2000 feel. Time will tell.
The second is that Adobe has incorporated much of their coolest Firefly stuff into Adobe Express Beta. I mentioned before that I was a little disappointed with the generative fill functionality in Photoshop Beta. I’ve since also tried the generative vector coloring functionality now incorporated in Illustrator. I found that worked really well but wasn’t all that much different from the old way of recoloring vector illustrations where you simply shuffled through random but internally aestheticly pleasing groups of colors. And you could guide the selected palettes.
The really cool stuff that was in the Firefly preview can be found in Adobe Express Beta. And it all fits very well with the other aspects of that application. You make a generative illustration and then you can add all sorts of stuff like text or logos or whatever to it. The functionality of creating the generative image as an illustration of a certain type is what makes the Adobe stuff cool in my opinion. I’m pretty sure I didn’t find that in the Photoshop Beta.
Adobe Express under the name Adobe Spark was very promising in Beta and then, when formally released as Express, wasn’t included in the Creative Cloud. Later it was included but I think it had lost much of it’s momentum because of the exclusion. I hope that history doesn’t repeat itself.
With regard to AI text generation I’m pretty sure that I can often spot it. There is a certain style. Impeccable smooth grammar. Not minimalist. If anything trying too hard to be always correct. I’ve noticed it most in ad copy and some sports blogs. Now the PR folks can do away with the bloggers entirely. Or not. I continue to enjoy the irony of the push back against really creative writing running into the problem of not-so-creative but efficiently-read writing being the most easily replaced with computer generated stuff. Hah hah.
It does remind me a little of the myriad quirky one-off book stores and hardware shops and so forth being beaten down by the coming of the big box stores in the name of efficiency. Only to have the big box stores turn around a few years later to see Amazon coming after them, also with efficiency and therefore cost as it’s hammer.