Shallow Thoughts : : May

Tiger Salamander Larvae

I got a tip that there were tiger salamanders with gills swimming around below Los Alamos reservoir, so I had to go see for myself.

They're fabulous! Four to five inch salamanders with flattened tails and huge frilly gills behind their heads -- dozens of them, so many the pond is thick with them. Plenty of them are hanging out in the shallows or just below the surface of the water, obligingly posing for photos.

I had stupidly brought only the pocket camera, not the DSLR -- and then the camera's battery turned out to be low -- so I was sparing with camera, but even so I was pleased at how well they came out, with the camera mostly managing to focus on the salamanders rather than (as I had feared) the surface of the murky water. I may go back soon with the DSLR. It's an easy, pleasant hike.

Photos: Tiger Salamander larvae.

Tags: nature, salamander
[ 20:31 May 31, 2017    More nature | permalink to this entry | ]

Python help from the shell -- greppable and saveable

I'm working on a project involving PyQt5 (on which, more later). One of the problems is that there's not much online documentation, and it's hard to find out details like what signals (events) each widget offers.

Like most Python packages, there is inline help in the source, which means that in the Python console you can say something like

>>> from PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets import QWebEngineView
>>> help(QWebEngineView)

The problem is that it's ordered alphabetically; if you want a list of signals, you need to read through all the objects and methods the class offers to look for a few one-liners that include "unbound PYQT_SIGNAL".

If only there was a way to take help(CLASSNAME) and pipe it through grep!

A web search revealed that plenty of other people have wished for this, but I didn't see any solutions. But when I tried running python -c "help(list)" it worked fine -- help isn't dependent on the console.

That means that you should be able to do something like

python -c "from sys import exit; help(exit)"

Sure enough, that worked too.

From there it was only a matter of setting up a zsh function to save on complicated typing. I set up separate aliases for python2, python3 and whatever the default python is. You can get help on builtins (pythonhelp list) or on objects in modules (pythonhelp sys.exit). The zsh suffixes :r (remove extension) and :e (extension) came in handy for separating the module name, before the last dot, and the class name, after the dot.

#############################################################
# Python help functions. Get help on a Python class in a
# format that can be piped through grep, redirected to a file, etc.
# Usage: pythonhelp [module.]class [module.]class ...
pythonXhelp() {
    python=$1
    shift
    for f in $*; do
        if [[ $f =~ '.*\..*' ]]; then
            module=$f:r
            obj=$f:e
            s="from ${module} import ${obj}; help($obj)"
        else
            module=''
            obj=$f
            s="help($obj)"
        fi
        $python -c $s
    done
}
alias pythonhelp="pythonXhelp python"
alias python2help="pythonXhelp python2"
alias python3help="pythonXhelp python3"

So now I can type

python3help PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets.QWebEngineView | grep PYQT_SIGNAL

and get that list of signals I wanted.

Tags: cmdline, zsh, python
[ 14:12 May 23, 2017    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]

Pot Sherd

Wandering the yard chasing invasive weeds, Dave noticed an area that had been disturbed recently by some animal -- probably a deer, but there were no clear prints so we couldn't be sure.

But among the churned soil, he noticed something that looked different from the other rocks.

A pot sherd, with quite a nice pattern on it!

(I'm informed that fragments of ancient pots are properly called "sherds"; a "shard" is a fragment of anything other than a pot.)

Our sherd fairly large as such things go: the longest dimension is about two inches.

Of course, we wanted to know how old it was, and whether it was "real". We've done a lot of "archaeology" in our yard since we moved in, digging up artifacts ranging from bits of 1970s ceramic and plastic dinnerware to old tent pegs to hundreds of feet of old rotting irrigation tubing and black plastic sheeting. We even found a small fragment of obsidian that looked like it had been worked (and had clearly been brought here: we're on basalt, with the nearest obsidian source at least fifteen miles away). We've also eyed some of the rock rings and other formations in the yard with some suspicion, though there's no way to prove how long ago rocks were moved. But we never thought we'd find anything older than the 1970s when the house was built, or possibly the 1940s when White Rock was a construction camp for the young Los Alamos lab.

So we asked a friend who's an expert in such matters. She tells us it's a Santa Fe black-on-white, probably dated somewhere between 1200-1300 AD. Santa Fe black-on-white comes in many different designs, and is apparently the most common type of pottery found in the Los Alamos/Santa Fe area. We're not disappointed by that; we're excited to find that our pot sherd is "real", and that we could find something that old in the yard of a house that's been occupied since 1975.

It's not entirely a surprise that the area was used 700 years ago, or even earlier. We live in a community called La Senda, meaning "The Path". A longtime resident told us the name came from a traditional route that used to wind down Pajarito Canyon to the site of the current Red Dot trail, which descends to the Rio Grande passing many ancient petroglyphs along the way. So perhaps we live on a path that was commonly used when migrating between the farmland along the Rio and the cliff houses higher up in the canyons.

What fun! Of course we'll be keeping our eyes open for more sherds and other artifacts.

Tags: archaeology
[ 20:16 May 18, 2017    More misc | permalink to this entry | ]

Moon Talk at PEEC tonight

Late notice, but Dave and I are giving a talk on the moon tonight at PEEC. It's called Moonlight Sonata, and starts at 7pm. Admission: $6/adult, $4/child (we both prefer giving free talks, but PEEC likes to charge for their Friday planetarium shows, and it all goes to support PEEC, a good cause).

We'll bring a small telescope in case anyone wants to do any actual lunar observing outside afterward, though usually planetarium audiences don't seem very interested in that.

If you're local but can't make it this time, don't worry; the moon isn't a one-time event, so I'm sure we'll give the moon show again at some point.

Tags: speaking, science, astronomy
[ 15:26 May 05, 2017    More speaking | permalink to this entry | ]