Without a doubt the star of this fine meeting has been GeoPigeon, who I’m sure most of you have seen popping in and out of various sessions. The heck with TigerGate, inquiring minds crave to know who is this bird and why is he attracted to geophysics? @purplecrowlidar sits down for 5 good minutes with GeoPigeon.
Me: Dude, thanks for taking some time off feeding to talk to me. So what about AGU09 interests you?
GP: For a pigeon-centric point of few, and let me say right off, that is what matters to me and in fact to most other pigeons, I’m worried about what humans are doing to the environment. Not the climate. We can handle that. The magnetic enviroment.
Me: How’s that?
GP: You humans are visual and essentially tuned out otherwise. We’re visual but also very tuned into magnetic fields. We got this little “box” in our heads that is like a serious antenna for detecting fields. It’s a whole different world for us. I mean when we’re young you learn to fly and like right away you’ll get lead miles from your nest and your Dad will just say lead and you find yourself heading right back to wear you started, unconsciously. Wow.
So as you get older you realize this orientation thing you’ve got going on. And for me, I’m worried about the changes I hear. From what I’m gathering the magnetic field can change violently, catostropically. What would that mean for us?
Me: Yeah, but time scales, you’d adapt as the field changed, right?
GP: Probably, but then what about change and space weather? I mean I’ve flown through a few magnetosphere/ionosphere sessions and I’m grateful for what a low solar minimum we’ve just had. But what happens if we come out of this minimum into a big maximum. You leave home one day then bam, you fly back to another country. This blows my mind man.
Me: Did you catch some of the nonlinear sessions talks on the magnetosphere?
GP: Yeah, that network stuff you’re starting to compute, we’ve done for a long time. We minimize long-range correlations in our magnetic phase space all the time, its an effective homing technique, especially if you’re hammered.
Me: Gotta ask. You really a seperate bird species related to Dodos?
GP: (sighing) always haunts us. Yes, but you’re not a monkey and I’m not flightless. Nuff said?
Me: Why’d are you basing out of Moscone South rather than West?
GP: Oh, come on. The Expo. The Donor Lounge. And mostly the posters. I’m a bit slow and didn’t go to University so I like taking my time and studying the posters. I get a different angle on them then you do, what with my eye placement.
Me: Yeah, head on a swivel, eh? One last question, who you got tonight, Penguins/Flyers?
GP: You kidding? Flyers are still trying to define themselves under Laviolette, and what’s this Richards, I mean the Captain sayin’ "We're not playing with enough heart right now to win”. He’s calling ‘em out, it’s a home game and it won’t matter that Sid is healthy. The Pens are going down tonight.
Me: Alright then, peace bro. Hey they hassled you at the Donor Lounge the other day, sorry about that, mention you’re my guest and we’ll chill later.
GP: I’m down. See ya’.