…at about 1100 feet in the tongue mountain range and you heard that coming from above, loud and then every bird in the vicinity took wing, all achatter, then you heard it again? If you were me you’d find that your instincts took over and you would immediately flee the vicinity. This happened about 2 weeks ago. I was making my way down to 5th point (although I thought I was heading to 5 mile peak, but that’s another story – time to really learn how the GPS actually works!) when I heard this, and the moment I heard it the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my flee instinct took over – I started heading right back towards the trailhead.

At the time I thought it must have been a bear, despite the late date. The winter’s been very mild so far so I figured it just hadn’t begun hibernating yet. It didn’t sound like any bear I had ever heard, but what else could it be? Many chats with friends later and I’ve concluded it was probably an ultra-rare mountain lion, mostly because of the page of audio recordings I’ve linked to – nothing else sounded as close to what I heard as the link I posted above – and because of conversations with a biologist at Skidmore and a colleague at Bowdoin. I saw absolutely nothing. The sound was coming from a ridgeline up above me by at least 100 feet, and aside from the growl like noises repeating twice I heard nothing either. But man, it was a spooky thing to hear out in the woods by yourself, whether it was a mountain lion or not.

The biologist here at Skidmore reported it to a friend of his who works in the fish and game department. They’re not unheard of in this region, they’re just exceedingly rare and as far as I am aware there have been only a couple of actual sightings, so in a sense I was lucky even if I didn’t actually see it. I’d really rather not run into one though, at least not until my dog is old enough to help me fend it off. Meantime I’m buying a can of pepper spray to bring with me on my hikes.

Everyone knows the story of the printing press and how its invention led to an explosion of human creativity and the rapid advancement of civilization. The modern day equivalent, the internet, is being strangled by copyright. I’ve ranted and ranted about this and I’m going to do it again. We have the potential at this moment in time to embrace another great leap forward – the sum of human knowledge can be at everyone’s fingertips. Except. Except that the western notion of copyright, less than a hundred years old, is stifling the ability of companies like Google to get this material online for us. I don’t know what the path out of this dilemma is. Of course publishers and authors need to be compensated for their work (though as longtime readers know, just like with music and video, I question the contributions publishers will have to the process of creation and distribution going forward). But if I had to choose between compensation and freedom of information, right this moment, I would choose freedom of information. The money flow will sort itself out – it always does – and the freedom of information will inexorably lead us to the info-nirvana I’m obsessed with.

End rant. The only thing I can think to suggest to folks, aside from making your representatives aware of these issues, is to give money to the EFF.

I’m not actually obsessed by google, it’s just that they’re doing so much cool stuff. Today’s mention is about something I’ve touched on in the past – the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. Everyone’s getting used to the notion of google as one’s adjunct brain – who starred in casablanca opposite Bogart? How many home runs did Reggie Jackson hit in ’79? What’s the population of Saratoga Springs, NY? – all of these answers are yours in about the amount of time it takes to type the question. What we need is more content, specifically the content that’s locked away in books (we’ll get to the content in movies and other multimedia later). Anyway google announced today that they’ve signed a deal with the University of Michigan to put the full text of every book in the University’s library online. 7 million books, fully searchable. On the one hand this is just the tip of the iceberg – 7 million books sounds like a lot but it’s really not in the scheme of things. On the other hand this is huge in terms of precedent. I hope this leads to a cascade of follow up projects – surely Microsoft will want to get into the game and they’ve got deep enough pockets to do it.

The downside of this is that it will take years to achieve, but it’s a start, a very auspicious one at that. Go google!

I worked with a lot of cool people when I was at Bowdoin College. One of them was Mike Kolster, who has a website that he posts images to daily. This image is just a great shot. I love his site, I just wish he had larger dimension images available so I could use them as desktop backdrops, and attaching the site to a print making service, or just selling prints of his images, would be great. I’d buy them for sure. He and I talked a little about such things when I was there, I should drop him an email and remind him. Oh, and Mike is also featured on Bowdoin’s homepage at the moment, cool kudos for him.

Google continues to produce cool stuff. We’re all familiar by now with our browsers trying to autocomplete URLs for us – start typing ‘www.eb’ and the browser will suggest a set of possibilities, including say ‘www.ebay.com.’ While it can occasionally be annoying, generally this is useful feature. Now imagine if your search engine did it for you. Or don’t bother trying to imagine, just go try it for yourself. I am amazed at how quickly this is streaming data down to my browser. I’m also convinced at this point that the world’s cleverest programmers work for Google.