Philip Sugg | Blog

“Altostratus may look more extensive toward the horizon than overhead, but the apparent compression of cloud cover toward the horizon may be more a function of perspective than of a real increase in clouds” (David Ludlum, Field Guide to North American Weather, 456). Chicago, mid-October 2021. Winter isn’t here yet, but the weather in Chicago is showing real signs of its existence. Nights below freezing; unforeseen bursts of snow; and the most characteristic of all: dull, uniform overcast skies, which appear featureless from the ground. Looking at clouds is usually associated with boredom, but I would argue that one’s boredom is better assessed by what kind of clouds you are looking at. One of the things I miss during the colder months are the complex cloudscapes. Not that these can’t appear in winter; if you see something like the picture above in January, you should pay attention and savor it, for it’s less likely to happen the next day. This is because there is simply less heat thrown into the atmosphere in winter, and heat is the scarce ingredient that churns with the more plentiful cool air. These thermal fault lines in the sky are the cause of the most interesting clouds. And clouds, in keeping with their reputation for the ephemeral, are at their most interesting when the air is moving, and when their formations are short-lived, a transitional state. “Altocumulus clouds produce the most dramatic and beautiful cloudscapes, especially in the rays of a low sun. Read more →

I live in a very walkable neighborhood in Chicago, and have walked almost everywhere I need to go daily for more than a decade. I’ve been thinking more about the meaning of all this walking in the last few years, mostly by building a reading list on the topic and informally going through it. One of the best I’ve read is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. The book came out more than twenty years ago, in 2000, but I see no evidence that advances in technology or changes in society have dated it. Walking has had the status of a gratuitously simple, stubbornly un-innovative way of getting around for at least 100 years. Because it is so obvious that walking is behind the times, whenever there is a desire to return to basics, or a burst of nostalgia for simple things–at that point the topic of walking will be due for a revival. I think we had one last year, during the pandemic. What I have taken from Solnit’s book is that walking is one of those subtle, mostly deniable ways in which people express a disdain for hierarchy, routine and structure. The authorities that offer an alternative to walking–businesses, governments–do it because they think everyone wants to eliminate downtime between the appointed parts of that day; people insist on that time. The walker is neither here nor there, in a liminal state (51), dropped off the official record. Walking remains one of the best ways to disguise doing nothing (5). Read more →

Before Halloween recedes even further, one recommendation I have to cram in: The collaboration between the artist Leonard Baskin and the poet Richard Michelson. I never paid much attention to Baskin’s work, until I came across it while searching out Halloween books for my son. Many people have seen the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C., where Baskin contributed a bronze bas-relief sculpture of the president’s coffin being carried by a horse-drawn carriage. Baskin and Michelson were friends and co-authors on several books for children, and Michelson helped promote Baskin’s work in an important art gallery he still owns and runs in Northampton, Massachusetts. Baskin died in 2000. The tribute Michelson wrote at the top of his gallery page for Baskin is worth reading. Their books are written with a sense of humor, and illustrated in a style that walks right up to being inappropriately scary for kids. Still, they remain whimsical, sometimes even ridiculous: Copyright Leonard Baskin My son and I read Baskin and Michelson’s Animals that Ought to Be Copyright Leonard Baskin and Richard Michelson and Did You Say Ghosts? Copyright Leonard Baskin and Richard Michelson And we checked out a third, Imps, Demons, Hobgoblins, Witches, Fairies & Elves, by Baskin alone: Copyright Leonard Baskin Baskin was mostly an artist for grownups, but his style is a natural fit for the lighthearted scares of Halloween. Many of the illustrations in these books are just samples from Baskin\’s longer-running projects. For example, the “ghoul” in Did You Say Ghosts? Read more →

The Honey Locusts outside my front window are turning yellow. These trees can be found on many city streets in Chicago. And they are hardy: lines of them thrive a few feet from the lakefront on the South Side. For most of the year I find them less than attractive; something about their long rows of small leaves give me the impression of a tree-sized weed. And some have thorns. W.J. Bean was more enthusiastic about the species, Gleditsia triacanthos. It’s native to North America, and the Englishman wrote approvingly of the prospect of importing it to the U.K. It has “beautiful fern-like foliage,” he noted, “which turns a clear bright yellow in autumn. (291, Trees and Shrubs, Volume II)” On this I can agree. The tree is more beautiful when it’s shutting down for the season, cycling through a predictable, cascading bright yellow phase for a final few weeks. Sources W.J. Bean and George Taylor, Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, 8th Edition, Volume II. J. Murray, 1970-1980

I was riveted by this long-form article in the New York Times about the rise of white sharks (aka great white sharks) off the coast of Cape Cod. It may seem like a sensational topic, but that wasn’t how I took it. One has to understand that white sharks were basically unknown in the area until 15-20 years ago. Now they are so numerous during the warm season that, if you know where and how to look, they are everywhere. So the piece is really about how dread creeps onto the surface of a beautiful place, changing how people experience it. Chivers writes that Risk of attack remains low. But the quantity of large sharks, and fears that have accompanied them, have caused a cultural trauma, reshaping how people experience the ocean and forcing coastal communities into a period of reckoning and adaptation. I think about fear every day while out in public during this pandemic that is rapidly sliding into status quo. The article discusses what scientists call “fear ecology, a “concept describing the effects predators have on members of a prey species that do not get eaten but whose predator-avoidance strategies carry costs.” That mindset of avoidance, says a doctor who tried unsuccessfully to save a Cape Cod shark attack victim, “hovers over the region: the fear that sharks are going to ruin this idyllic place.” I don’t avoid some places, people, or situations–bars, for example–because I fear them. It’s more simple than that: I just don’t go to those places. Read more →

John Murphey, "The Perilous Situation of Major Mony, 23 July 1785," Source: Rijksmuseum. Original (Public Domain). Craig Whitlock’s new book, The Afganistan Papers, is based on a trove of formerly unreleased interviews with hundreds of U.S. officials who participated in the War in Afghanistan. What makes Whitlock’s book so great are its minutia, produced by interview subjects who were thinking on the fly in spontaneous conversation, and who didn’t necessarily know that their thoughts would be made public. Many of these details will likely never find a home in more synoptic accounts, but they add a fascinating texture to the broadest accounts so far of the U.S. occupation. Given recent events, the book couldn’t have been better-timed. The early sections cover important questions about the motivation to stay in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. From the first chapter: In the war’s first months, the U.S. troop presence was kept so small and provisional that there were almost no facilities of any kind. Whitlock writes that “soldiers who wanted fresh clothes had to fly their dirty laundry by helicopter to a temporary support base in neighboring Uzbekistan,” and there were no showers until around Thanksgiving 2001: Some of the guys had been there for up to thirty days, so they needed a bath,” Maj. Jeremy Smith, the quartermaster who oversaw the laundry unit in Uzbekistan, said in an Army oral-history interview. His superiors didn’t want to send any extra personnel or equipment to Bagram but finally relented. Read more →

On Sunday night (August 22nd, 2021), this was the view from the Chicago South Side, looking southeast over the lake, of the four Galilean moons. They are easily visible through 10x30 binoculars. From a sketch I made around midnight: Colors black/white inverted What attracted my attention about Callisto’s position is that lies well outside the apparent plane of the other three moons. I usually see the visible Galilean lined up with one another, like we are looking at them edge-on from Earth, in the same orbital plane. A quick illustration shows how the configuration in the sketch can occur. None of the four moons orbits in the exact same plane, although their inclinations are very close to one another. And the orbital plane of Jupiter is slightly tilted toward Earth. These factors mean that we see the orbits of the Gallilean moons at a slight angle to us, like we are looking at very narrow ellipse rather than single-dimension lines: Orbital paths of Gallilean moons. Apparent tilt of moons' orbit relative to Earth is exaggerated for illustration. Actual tilt is between one and two degrees. Callisto, the outermost moon, has a much larger orbit than the other three moons, meaning it travels up and down across the largest distance in both dimensions (see arrow in illustration), and giving it more latitude to reach an apparent position “above” or “below” the other moons, as we see it from Earth.

Berenice Abbott and Pierre Mac-Orlan. Atget, Photographe de Paris (Paris: H. Jonquières, 1930), pl. 4. Public Domain. Getty Museum. The story about the library book returned 100 years overdue is one those lighthearted newspaper pieces that still gets written up. Sometimes these overdue books come with an explanation that makes for a human interest story, but just as often they are returned anonymously, left on a doorstep or mailed back without return address or explanation. When we do find out the reason for the return, it’s usually because because someone is clearing out belongings, and has sentimental attachments that lead them to send the old book back. The library is still there after all these years, and returning the book connects a dusty past to a living present. If the book was in the possession of a dead person, the return might be a kind of act on their behalf. An article about the old, returned library book gives the public an occasion to reflect on a private possession. Still, for the most part, millions of objects, however interesting and worthy of attention in the distracted present, will never get that much recognition before they are sold as junk, stored until they rot, or tossed in the trash. But as long as those artifacts are on still on paper, they have a claim on existence, awaiting notice by some later passerby. It’s possible to return century-old books to the library because they are durable and resilient in storage. Read more →

This article in the New York Times summarizes the recent scientific research on a problem I wondered about a few months ago: what happens to animals that navigate by starlight, when the stars are washed out by the city? As it turns out, there are many other animals that rely on celestial phenomena to move about. Dung beetles may walk a straight line by looking at the trail of the Milky Way. Seals appear to swim with consistency toward bright star-like objects in the sky. They also mention the study I discussed previously, about Indigo Buntings. The birds were taught in artificial conditions to treat the bright star Betelgeuse as the pole star instead of the current north star, Polaris. Stephen Emlen, the scientist responsible for the study, is quoted interpreting the results this way: This suggested that the bird’s stargazing skills were learned, not derived from some star map encoded in their genes…In the glittering dark, each young bunting had apparently spent some time looking up, studying, as the stars traced circles in the night sky. If we accept his theory, it suggests that the birds may be clever enough to deal with the perpetual, gradual change in alignment of the night sky. They did not evolve with some fixed blueprint of specific stars. Even better, they were born with a rudimentary awareness of how celestial rotation works. 26,000 years, the period over which the Earth’s axis wobbles to point at different stars across the sky, is enough time for evolution to change an organism, but not that long a period when compared to the one hundred and fifty million years or more over which modern birds evolved from dinosaurs. Read more →

No one decides who gets to be a naturalist. There are no degrees or governing bodies. The term is distinctive, in that it describes an activity that is very demanding and absorptive, yet inclusive. A person is on the way to becoming a naturalist when he, for example, takes pictures of biological samples in the field and contributes them to an open population database like iNaturalist. And the “New Naturalist Library” series has for 75 years published detailed surveys by top scientists, who study the natural world, from climate and weather to butterflies. These scientists, specialized and rigorous as they are–they call themselves naturalists, too. The plant biologist Oliver Rackham writes in the preface to his book Woodlands: I was brought up on such classic New Naturalist books as London’s Natural History by R.S.R. Fitter, Mushrooms and Toadstools by John Ramsbottom and The Sea Shore by C.M. Yonge. In that tradition I deal mainly in observations that do not call for specialised equipment and that any well-motivated observer can make. In this field amateurs can still do things that professionals, locked into their own ethos and culture, find difficult. I hope to inspire young readers to lay down the basis for long-term observations to be repeated in future decades. Rackham makes no attempt to wall off the naturalist’s calling from the ordinary public. Quite the opposite, he suggests that the amateur can do more than participate in naturalistic activities. The amateur can, in fact, contribute to an activity defined by “observation,” provided that he is willing to keep at it over the long term. Read more →