Mokka mit Schlag » 2009 » January

I finished 2008 with 156 BGBY species, well behind the 200+ Neil Gilbert racked up in the same county, and he’s not as well situated as I am. In my defense I didn’t start until February, and was also dealing with a move to a new state. I didn’t even get my bike repaired from damage the movers did to it until April, and I lost a couple of weeks in the middle of Spring migration on a trip to China. With some effort, this year I might be able to crack 200.

However doing that is going to take some work. In particular:
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This confused me a little until I grokked it. In Haskell, an item is not the same as a list containing the one item. (Obvious, I know, but some languages like XQuery take the opposite view).

The : operator prepends an item to the beginning of a list. It can only be used to insert an item at the beginning of a list. It cannot be used to append an item to the end of a list. Thus x:xs is correct but xs:x is a syntax error. (Haskell’s design seems stuck with assumptions going all the way back to Lisp and 1950s era processors including that the singly linked list is a good implementation for the list abstract data type. This has other consequences. For instance, length is an O(n) operation. And now that I look for it, insert into the middle of the list also seems to be missing.)

Lists are concatenated with the ++ operator, not :.

So, to sum up:

• Use : to insert an item at the beginning of a list.
• Use ++ to join two lists together.
• To append an item to a list, insert the item into an empty list, and then concatenate the two lists together.
• More generally, to insert an item into a list at any position other than the first:
  1. Split the list into two sublists at the insertion point with splitAt.
  2. Use : to prepend the new item to the second list.
  3. Concatenate the two lists back together with ++

Am I missing something obvious here?

Off Dana Point, 2009-01-10

Saturday, January 10, I got up bright and early to catch the Ocean Institute’s Sea Explorer out of Dana Point that the Sea & Sage Audubon Society had chartered for a six-hour cruise starting at 8:00 A.M. The goal was just to see what we could find in Orange County Waters. January is a good month for pelagic birding in Orange County waters. Black-vented Shearwater is a lock, and lots of others are possible. According to the trip announcement, we might find “Rhinoceros Auklet, Xantus’ Murrelet, Cassin’s Auklet, Ancient Murrelet, Common Murre, Black-vented Shearwater, Pink-footed Shearwater, Sooty Shearwater, Northern Fulmar”. In fact, we got all but three of those. Weather wise alol you really hyave to worry about is fog, and it sure beats the hell out of January off Long Island.

The route was out a triangle. Steam from Dana Point about 14 miles out to the Sea Knoll, then north and inland to a point five miles out from Fashion Island where the sewer outflow pipe spews, then back to Dana Point.

Before we even got on the boat, the parking lot produced Rock Pigeon, American Crow, Red-tailed Hawk, Brewer’s Blackbird, House Finch, Allen’s Hummingbird, and Rock Pigeon. Before we left the harbor we had Double-crested Cormorant, Hermann’s Gull, Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, Great Egret, Western Gull, and Ring-billed Gull. On the ocean side of the jetty we found four Black Oystercatchers and some peeps we never did identify. (Sanderlings? Western Sandpipers?)

(Yes, I know the photos are even worse than usual. You try taking pictures of fast moving birds far away from a rocking boat with a point-and-shoot camera.)

At first we mostly just saw more gulls and pelicans, but once we got a little ways offshore we picked up our first real pelagic bird: a Black-vented Shearwater, and my first life bird. Or it would have been if I hadn’t missed it completely. However a few minutes later three more flew by, and these I did get on. We would see many more throughout the day, and got much better looks at them.
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Put an illegible CAPTCHA on the support page:

Yes, spammers are so going to write bots to automate warranty checking, and this just has to be stopped.

In fact, it’s even worse than that. On the very next page, I have to type in the model and part number again, and solve another CAPTCHA.

Doesn’t really matter, I suppose. After the failure of the Maxtor OneTouch 4 I just bought a couple of months ago, it’s not like I was going to buy another Maxtor drive anyway.

Fox Squirrel, Sciurus niger
Huntington Central Park, 2009-01-03