Avian Ecologist

Brule Glacial Spillway State Natural Area

Today, my naturalist boyfriend suggested we check out Stone Chimney Rd. It was amazing for butterflies! There were too many to focus on, and several lifers for me. So, the linked list is only those I could get close enough to identify. There’s no room for e.g. entering a record to genus. To add onto […]

Working in Linux, in a Windows World

If you’re interested in making the switch, there are several things you should know. I use the most popular flavor of Linux: Ubuntu (currently 16.04 Xenial Xerus) so my advice will be tailored to that distribution, though there will be some degree of generality among distributions. Interestingly, nowadays it seems all the popular OS have […]

Aurora Borealis: Corona & Purple N on Curtain!

May 20-23 Earth was within a CHHSS that disturbed the magnetosphere. On May 23 there was a weak CME but headed straight for us. It appears that the magnetosphere had been “cracked” enough for this to cause an amazing show! I spent the 1st 4 hours of the day gawking at the best aurora show […]

Planning a Birding Route in Seattle

Lake Hills Greenbelt red-breasted sapsucker Marymoor Park (this is the only 1 that has a monthly sightings table, so all listed species are those found in Sept.) California quail black swift Vaux’s swift red-breasted sapsucker California scrub-jay Totem Lake California quail Vaux’s swift black swift red-breasted sapsucker Juanita Bay Park black swift Vaux’s swift Bob […]

rk4 vs. lsoda Solver Specified in Method

It turns out that the solver really was the issue. Running an ODE w/default “lsoda” produces nothing, whereas running w/rk4 at least produces…something. I’m sure it’s not correct, though, at the very least because the delays aren’t properly defined. Now to try to simplify the model a little to better understand what’s going on.

Classical Runge-Kutta 4th Order Integration

I’ve been using the “rk4” solver, with luck, to solve the system of ODE’s translated from Stella. The original authors of the translation script used this setting, though I’m not entirely sure what it does. Is this the same type of solver that Stella uses? Looking back at the doc, I have flashbacks to my […]

Using dede() from the deSolve package in R

The problem is, it seems the delay slows things down a lot. I found out the reason is because the lag variables calculated in dede() during integration indeed are calculating the lags of all the state variables, and there’s no way around it. I’m curious if the lag() R function would work while it was […]

Tracking Down This Great Horned Owl

I’ve gone back to the spot I first found the great horned owl now several times, at the same time of the evening, and birded around there in the evening many more times to no avail. I did talk to someone down at the Loon’s Foot Landing ore dock who claims an owl comes around […]

Google Earth Engine: GIS of the Future!

This is so nuts to me: one of my supervisors introduced me to Google Earth Engine, and we’ve been playing with it for our spatial analyses. It’s imagery/spatial analysis in the cloud, with the tagline “letting scientists focus on science instead of downloading and managing data.” Well, Google, you have my attention. The intro video […]

Stack Overflow Digest: deSolve Posts

Look at page 44 of the vignette in deSolve for error message handling from lsoda. You need to specify a parms argument, but it can be NULL.