Day 2 - Desert Museum

I've gotta say, it sucks being sick on a trip. I've been managing just fine, but being constantly coughing is just irritating. Still, I wasn't sneezing blood like yesterday, so things are getting better. (Just in time to get everyone else sick when we get on the mountain, no doubt.)

The wellness issue aside, today saw us visiting the Desert Museum. We had to cross a small mountain to get there and traveled up the requisite winding mountain road to do so. We stopped at an observation point along the way, and I started to discover how much a different viewpoint I have from the rest of the physics team. Many of them were amazed at the view and commented on how people take such things for granted. I was also appreciative of the view of the landscape, but I have family out in California and I am no stranger to mountain roads. I enjoy the view, but it's just a road. To comment on how its sad that people take such things for granted would be analogus to someone from Arizona coming to WI and commenting on how people take the foliage or lake or autumn colors for granted. Both are impressive in their own ways, but both are also taken for granted by the people who live near them. To assign one a greater value than the other is merely a result of perspective.

Secondly, Arion asked a question at the lookout - he challenged us to estimate the number of cacti we could see down in the valley. The team was largely lost on how to approach it. We started with the idea of treating it as a density problem - we'd determine the density of cacti in a given area and then determine the area we were looking at and extrapolate from there. However, we quickly hit a problem of having no reasonable way to get a cactus density value and no way to determine the amount of land we were looking at. In the end, no one was able to answer. After doing some thinking in the car though, I have a method that I wish I'd thought about sooner. The method would entail extending my arm in front of me and spreading my pointer and index finger in order to make a "v" shape. Then, going from the ground before me to the horizon, I would raise my arm and count all the cacti that fall between my two fingers. It would probably take awhile, but it would be easily doable. From there, I need only estimate the degree of the angle created by traveling from my index finger to my eye and then to my pointer finger. The angle would probably be around 5 degrees or so. I then need only estimate the field of view that we can see from the lookout, as we had mountains on 3 sides of us. Armed with these 3 approximations, an estimate would be easy to make. Unfortunately, the question was not revisited on the return trip. I can also see an underlying parallel with astronomy in his question. Namely, counting stars. Although the number of cacti pales in comparison to the number of stars, within our field of view both are far too numerous to try counting alone. However, if we want to study them, we still need to find some way to define each star.

As for the desert museum, it was very fun. The museum was largely outdoor. There were walking paths criss-crossing the 21 acres of desert the museum occupied, allowing you to travel from exhibit to exhibit. I also found myself a bit out of place from those in my group, as I'm a biology major rather than physics. Where we encountered animals and animal exhibits, I stopped to ask questions and lingered longer than most of my group mates. In the cactus garden exhibit, for instance, I found myself examining the many related cactuses and wondering about phylogeny and the particular characteristics that differentiated each species. I also got into a wonderful discussion with a handler who was showing off a barn owl, moving from basic biology to the amusing question of how many barn owls would it take to lift me off the ground if I made a vest and covered it with lines attached to owls. While I did enjoy the exhibits, it was clear that my enjoyment and perspective were different from my groupmates. I do not intend to imply any positive or negative connotation, merely that the difference existed and was much more notable than I'd expected.

I'd also do a disservice if I did not mention the flying hawk show. At 2pm in the back of the park, we were treated to an open flight of a family unit of Harris Hawks. We started with two adult males who were later joined by a juvenile male and finally be an adult female hawk. The hawks divided their time between soaring, perching on the cacti, and diving (usually just over the heads of the audience to the waiting handlers). The announcer had an interesting style - she had a number of key points she stressed and points of information she wanted to get across, but rather than talk a in scripted pattern it was obvious that she was shaping the presentation based on what the birds were doing. The birds weren't reacting to her, but the other way around. I find it interesting that the Harris Hawks are one of a handful of raptors that hunt using teamwork.

I also found it interesting that she mentioned that Harris Hawks weren't in AZ 150 years ago. They require a reasonable amount of water, which wasn't available in the desert until after humans came and started irrigating. Today, they are a normal and accepted part of the ecosystem of the area. This doesn't seem unreasonable. In todays terminology, however, they be considered an Invasive Species. Most of us have heard the term before and it is almost universally associated with a negative connotation and a desire to remove "invasives". To me, it raises questions about where the line should be drawn in the great debate about invasive species.