Finding the Bats in Los Angeles

Ever try to find something that is dark, at night, that flies fast and in anything but a straight line?

I can think of a dozen ways to find them - the way just described does not top the list.

This evening after sunset I went looking for bats. I installed a bit of software on my cell phone called "Physics Toolbox Apps" by Vieyra Software (Disclaimer: I have no ties to these folks, no vested interest, and no contact). It reads data from the sensors built into the phone and presents it (as well as saves data files conveniently in ".csv" format) graphically.

One of its tricks is to process inputs from the microphone and perform what I presume is a Fast Fourier Transform. This takes the signal and transforms it into the frequency-intensity plane (among other things). The result is a picture of the soundscape showing the audio spectrogram over time.

Bats often echolocate with very fast chirps at 18kHz and above. You can see a bunch of fast, faint pulses from a distant bat at the top of this plot, around 22kHz (they are faint and about ten per second, horizontal dashes on the right edge of the picture):

Another species of bat came by at a slightly different time, producing chirps lasting tens of milliseconds every half second or so, with broad intensity between 20kHz and 24kHz (the upper limit is the upper limit of my sensor). These are the horizontal dashes on the right side of this image:

While these may not be National Geographic cover material, they do beat my best photo using visible light of a bat (I cannot find it myself - it was near center of the frame, but likely was moving too fast for this exposure):

My son was with me when these were taken, and he didn't need the phone spectrogram to find bats - he could hear the chirps and got fairly good at pointing at the bat, which would occasionally become visible when backlit by the twilight sky. "Sometimes one was a clicking sound almost, and the other was like a high-pitched squeak sound".

Edit: Turns out this obvious approach has been used for quite some time and has been reduced to a science. I have no ties to these sites, and find them very helpful.

The USGS (United States Geological Survey)has a great document called "Identifying Bats by Sound" at https://www.usgs.gov/news/identifying-bats-sound.

The USGS has a great document on how to establish workflows to process acoustical data on bats called "A Guide to Processing Bat Acoustic Data for the North American Bat Monitoring Program" at https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2018/1068/ofr20181068.pdf 

If you want to identify the bats to species, there are several online resources

Victory Garden on a Balcony: Starting Nasturtiums

We happen to have a balcony or two. One of them has a south-west exposure and one a less well illuminated exposure. We've been gardening on them since they are "easy access" in essentially all weather conditions.

While this means some plants never reach full size due to being eaten by some family member when they are tiny (all Peas, for example, appear to be isomorphic with Snowpeas to certain family members and get eaten as soon as the pods are bigger than the flower they came from...).

Back to Nasturtiums!

For Easter one of the items our son found in his basket was a packet of Nasturtium seeds. These are awesome - they are widely tolerant of growing conditions, fast growing, pretty, and tasty.

Additionally, the seedlings look wild (at least if you start them in moist vermiculite in a plastic humidity chamber):

Right after germination the seeds can still be seen.

My son tells me "You need to mist them a lot and give them a good home."

To plant them, we got some sandpaper and sanded a smooth spot on each seed (just until the white shows a little). Then we soaked the seeds for an hour in cool water. Then we dumped the water into the sink and spread them out on moist vermiculite (you can use almost any sort of starting material) in a plastic tub that takeout came in (after a brief wash...). We put an inch of so of moist (not sopping) vermiculite and closed the lid.

The container was placed on the kitchen counter away from sunlight for about a week. The seeds we sanded to expose a bit of the white part inside the seed are the ones that germinated. The ones we did not sand but soaked and planted at the same time we are still waiting on.

Sweet Hawaiian Rolls - baking our way out of cabin fever

Today is another "remain at home" day, along with pretty steady rain - not even getting a walk today. What to do? Bake!

Here is the recipe, which is a merging of several different recipes we found online (I lost my notes - apologies!).

We used a bread machine to do the kneading of the dough.

Into the tub we placed:

• 0.5 cup orange juice (pasteurized)
• 1 tablespoon of instant dry yeast
• 1/4 cup light brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp Stevoside (the really, really strong powdered Stevia)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla paste
• 2 large eggs
• 1 extra egg yolk (set the white aside - you need it later to brush the rolls before baking them)
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 teaspoon of freshly grated ginger root (peel, then grate the peeled ginger)
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter - ok to drop a part of a stick in so long as it is not frozen, it does not need melted if using a bread machine to knead the dough

Mix this up and let it sit until the yeast has woken up (some bubbles start to form, often takes 15 minutes at 68 degrees Fahrenheit).

Add 3 cups of all-purpose flour and 1 teaspoon salt. Turn on the bread machine to mix it. Eventually the dough will be sticky but not stick to the container that it is mixing in. If too wet, add flour two tablespoons at a time (roughly) and reknead.

Allow it to rise till doubled, then turn the oven to 350 F and put a sheet of parchment paper on a cookie sheet.

Knead the dough again.

I spray oil on the cutting board (polypropylene slab) and turn the dough out. I then oil my hands with canola oil and form the dough into a long even log. Cut it in half. Repeat with each half. Repeat with each quarter. Repeat with each eighth. Now you should have 16 evenly sized balls of dough.

Arrange the balls of dough on the parchment paper, then whisk the egg white and about the same amount of water.  Paint the top of each roll with some of the egg white mix.

Now wait. Wait a bit more. When the rolls are doubled in size, put them into the oven for 20 to 22 minutes - keep an eye on them, ovens can vary quite a bit.

When the color of the photo, pull them out and put on a cooling rack.

Enjoy!

Moving Honeybees on the move!

My son and I were walking in a California city recently to get some exercise while social distancing, only to have a very helpful security guard intercept us to tell us not to use this sidewalk - a hive of bees had fallen out of a tree onto the sidewalk and the path was not safe.

It is the start of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, so the warming weather is motivating overwintering hives to split, with part of the hive going off to find a new home.

As part of that process, a hive on the move may need to make several overnight clusters while looking for a new home. At night the bees cluster together for warmth and safety. They surround and protect the queen, and hold onto each other tightly to make the mass of bees difficult to dislodge.

These fell in the late afternoon on a cold day (around 50 degrees Fahrenheit). The bees are trying to pile over the queen and form a protective ball. Unfortunately, they are on a hard, cold, flat surface where people walk.

So we moved them.

The security guard was something between horrified and amused when we walked up to the cluster of bees and began moving them out of the walkway.

If you are allergic to bee stings, don't do this without a bee suit! Otherwise, the rules are pretty simple: move slowly and handle the bees gently. Do not swat anything - even if they land on you, you are unlikely to be stung (not a guarantee, gently brush any bees off if they land where you don't want them). The key is to locate the queen bee. In the picture below, she is the one with a different color right in the middle of the picture.

Carefully, moving slowly and being careful to not crush any bees, move the queen with as many other bees as easily possible with the first scoop. Find a protected place to put the hive, and gently set down the scoop. The bees will likely remain on the scoop - stiff leaves, lightweight trash, and paper can all be used.

Reassemble the hive. Try to leave as few bees as possible on the ground where the hive was found - they may be confused or too cold to fly. Some will be flying around the whole time - move slowly and do not swat them! When we were done, the hive was not a thing of beauty, but the bees had a solid chance of surviving the night.

"There's the bees," says my son. "The bees gave me high-fives. They just put their heads up and flew into my hand as a high-five, so I did more high-fives with them."

N-Scale Train Thermography (7-14 micron infrared bolometry)

After Christmas the track is laid out and power applied. Viola! Then the questions begin: is it running too hot? Why won't it levitate? Can I leave it plugged in but off?

In the old days, experience would guide my answers.

Today, we can collect quantitative data. I have a thermographic camera that plugs into my phone which allows real time quantitative thermal imaging.

The train engine is the colored blob left of my son. The wall transformer is in the image center. Both are about 12 degrees above background.

Neither is as warm as a person...

The trains can run!

Above is a closeup of the N-Scale engine after about an hour of intermittent use - it has hot spots, nothing hotter than is safe however.

Chicken One-sided Noodle Soup for Boxing Day

Mobius Noodles!

Our family has a tradition of making Chicken Noodle Soup from scratch, starting with raw chicken and making our own broth and noodles. The basic recipe is very simple:

Noodles (see below)

1 Carrot

1 Roasting Chicken

3 Stalks Celery

1 Medium Yellow Onion

Canola or Walnut Oil

Chicken Noodle Soup Spices (Trader Joe's 21 Seasoning Salute will do in a pinch)

Salt

Black Pepper

Broth:

Separate the chicken meat from the bones, skin, and other less edible portions. Put them into a large pot and cover with a few inches of water. Bring to a boil, cover, and reduce heat to maintain a simmer. Cook for at least an hour, generally we let it run overnight.

Turn off heat and allow to cool to handling temperature. Do nothing else just yet to this pot, instead start making the noodles.

Noodles:

In a large steel mixing bowl mix 3 cups of all-purpose flour, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and two tablespoons of Walnut Oil (or oil of your preference). Carefully crack three eggs into a container and confirm there are no shell fragments in the eggs. Pour the eggs into the flour-salt-oil mix and begin stirring with a strong spatula. Eventually you will have a mixture of crumbly bits with too much flour. At this point start adding water about a tablespoon or less at a time - resume stirring until all the fine bits are collected but a proper dough has not yet formed. Now stop adding water! Collect all the crumbly bits and mash them into a dough ball. If the ball does not hold together, consider adding a small amount of water and trying again. Start to knead and fold the dough ball, flattening it then folding it in half on itself, then flattening it again. Do at least 20 cycles, the more the better. The dough should not be sticky at all.

Let the dough rest for 30 minutes. Flatten it into a sheet about an inch thick. Cut the dough into thin ribbons, about 1/8" thick. These can be rolled thinner with a rolling pin or a pasta machine. In a pinch, we've used washed wine bottles as rolling pins. If the dough sticks to things, dust the dough thoroughly with flour before rolling. Shake as much of the flour as is easily possible to remove from the dough before putting it into the soup, or pre-boil them in water, strain out, and put the cooked noodles into the soup.

Once flattened and rolled to the desired thickness, the noodles can be cut into whatever shapes you desire. My son made a bunch of "Christmas Noodles", mostly versions of various Bird's Nest Cup Fungi, and I took a few entire strips and did half a twist then joined the ends to construct a Mobius Strip - hence the noodle with only one side.

These need cooked in boiling water for about five minutes, though we tend to drop them directly into the soup once it has begun to boil, at least if we didn't need to flour the noodles to prevent sticking.

Soup:

In a Second large pot (large enough for the entire batch of soup) add enough oil to just cover the bottom thinly. Dice the onion finely, and place the onion into the pot. At high heat, carmelize the onion. Remove from heat. 

Place a strainer over the large pot containing the onion and pour the broth through the strainer until the pot is sufficiently full for the soup. If in doubt, add more broth. Return the onion-broth pot to the stove and heat to a boil. This is the soup pot.

Chop the chicken meat into 1/8" (3mm) thick slices and add to the soup. Add the noodles in small groups, being careful to separate them from each other before adding to the soup, once the soup has begun to boil.

Cut the carrot into thin slices and dice. Repeat with Celery. Add to the boiling soup. Season to taste. Enjoy!

Cthulhu Fruit! Happy Yule!

Ever want to grow food to apease an Eldritch Horror? Now you can feed the Old Ones in your life.

Actually, meet Amorphophallus konjac, a tuber that grows in tropical rainforests and is cultivated. As food, it is known as Konjac.

They are dormant in the Winter and must be kept dry until growth resumes in Spring.

This one is just about a pound. They get up to ten pounds, at which point they flower.... which is a 5 foot tall black calla-lily sort of thing. It is fly pollinated, so probably not florist material...

To celebrate  the longest night of the year,  we thought of Konjac (we also are repotting ours...).

Happy Yule!