Loud bugs

Today I did a bit of cicada hunting. Brood X has emerged and, once their flurry of mating is done, won’t reemerge for another 17 years. I’m also getting up in years so I expect to be around for one more emergence and I may not be in great shape to be walking in the woods. So I want to experience them this year. There aren’t cyclical cicadas in the Detroit area, but they are around (I don’t know about in) nearby Ann Arbor. Since I had an appointment near Ann Arbor today, this was a day to experience cicadas. I first went to Scio Woods Preserve on the west side of Ann Arbor, near my appointment. I didn’t have long before that appointment, so chose to walk the half-mile loop. I could hear the droning sound when I opened my car door and it got louder as I walked into the woods, though it didn’t get close to the level of “deafening” as this bug can get. Along the path were were lots of cicada shells. After my appointment I went to the Matthaei Botanical Gardens on the east side of Ann Arbor. Once out of the car I could again hear the drone. Alas, here was a problem. There are two loop trails, one on either side of a small river. The near loop goes along the edge of the woods and into grassland, the far loop goes through the woods. And the first bridge to the far loop was closed. I walked close to a mile to get to the second bridge, but then I didn’t have time to do any of the far loop before having to get back to my car and the end of the time I paid for parking. The noisy bugs are around for another few weeks, so I should be able to visit Ann Arbor area again in that time. Or maybe go to the nature areas west of Chelsea. There was an occasion where I did hear the cicadas at full volume. This was back in 1986 in Nagasaki, Japan. I don’t know whether these cicadas were on a 17 year cycle (and whether that cycle is the same as in America), or were on some other schedule. This trip was my first International Handbell Symposium. The Symposium itself was held at a camp (dormitories, not tents) not far from Mt. Fuji and our excursion during our stay was to board buses that would take us up onto the mountain as far as vehicles were allowed to go. After the Symposium several of the choirs toured together, including the American choir I was a part of (rehearsal at a hotel in Waikiki). Our first tour concert was in Tokyo. I don’t remember how many concerts we did and where they were. The last was in Nagasaki on the night before the 41st anniversary of when the city was hit by an atomic bomb at the end of World War II. The next day we went to the Peace Park where we visited the museum and could see events marking the occasion were being held (in Japanese, of course). I remember little of the day other than the cicadas were loud. A cartogram is a map where the various regions of the map are adjusted in size to reflect the size of a particular value. I’ve written about cartograms where the size of each county is colored by the ratio of Democrats to Republicans, then resized according to population. An equal area map will be mostly red because most counties are rural and conservative. But a cartogram of the same data will be equally red and blue because the blue counties have so many more people. Here are regular maps and cartograms based on the 2008 election. Now the website Go Cart allows people to create cartograms of their own data. So Michael Gastner of Yale-NUS College, Division of Science did. His data is senators per million people. Since each state has two senators, the big factor is population or, more accurately, the inverse of population. California, with 0.05 senators per million is shown as a sliver, as are Texas, Florida, and New York. Wyoming, with 3.44 senators per million (the state has less than 600,000 residents), and Vermont, 3.21 per million, are drawn the largest, with North Dakota (2.6), South Dakota (2.23). and Delaware (2.02) also drawn large. The place I first saw this map linked to a post written back on May 1, 2021 by Brad Kirk of the Daily Kos Community. He wrote that the Senate could fix the situation shown by this map, and could do it with a simple majority vote, by adopting a rule of population weighted voting. It’s as simple as it sounds – the more residents in a senator’s state the more their vote counts.