Playing Catch-Up

Eagles. Jeff at lilypoint.org says that the list of eagle nests is not publicly available (wisely) because eagles and their parts are in great demand on the black market, even though satisfying that demand is definitely illegal in almost all circumstances. He adds, ‘eagles are the most monitored animal in the world. WDFW has GPS locations on every single nest in the State, and the program has a 30 year history. That is why people like Stanton NW can't get away with just removing a nest and think that nobody will notice or be able to prove that a nest was there.’ The lilypoint.org site has extensive information about eagles and their nests, so that's the place to go for it.

Pandora. Someone mentioned this site and it occurred to me that people might not know about it or how it works. If you listen to internet radio, this is a wonderful resource. Pandora.com is a music site where you set up your own music ‘station.’ You do that by giving the site the name of someone whose music you like. In the commenter’s case, it was Bonnie Raitt. So, let’s say you, too, choose Bonnie Raitt for your first station. Pandora then plays Bonnie Raitt’s music for you, but also other performers who are similar in various ways to Raitt. If you disagree about the algorithm’s assessment, you can say, ‘NO,’ don’t play that song again, and if you disagree twice more about that performer's recordings, then the algorithm never again chooses that performer. You can have many different ‘stations’ based on different kinds of music/musicians, and you can also have something called ‘quick mix’ in which music from all your stations (or all the stations you choose at that moment) plays randomly. It is a wonderful way to hear music you know and love as well as music you might love if only you knew about it. No cost. The only downside I know of is that it is available to you only if you and your computer are both in the U.S.

A similar site that does work in Canada is jango.com. Its music algorithm, it seems to me, is not quite as good as Pandora’s, but when I’m in Canada, it’s plenty good enough.