DrTom gets an official warning from Facebook

(I thought the fine print on this warning would thank me for my contributions to Facebook, but no such luck.)

Today I opened my email to find the following warning from the administrators of Facebook:

Hello,

You made one or more wall posts that violated our Terms of Use. Among other things, posts that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down posts that attack an individual or group, or advertise a product or service. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in your account being disabled.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page at http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=wposts.

The Facebook Team

I admit that I have been pushing the envelope on FB lately.  I found over 200 Fan Pages that I thought were relevant to items I am trying to sell on this site, so I placed blurbs about my stuff on those sites incessantly for the past few weeks: airline pages, travel pages, sites about dogs and hotels and cruise lines, etc.  I couldn't resist the tens of thousands of eyeballs on those pages (to get the number of people, divide by two).  I joined Fan Pages like "I Love Hugs", "Life With Dogs", " i love you. you love me. then why can't we be together?", and "Once you live in NEW DELHI u cannot live anywhere else in the world !!".  I  spammed the Fan Pages of Ellen deGeneres, The Mentalist, The Colbert Report, and other tv shows.  I placed "ads" on the Walls of The Ohio State University, Oregon State University, and Cornell.  I invaded various food channels and the Walls of many cities and countries found around the world.  In short, I was an aggressive advertiser, ambitious, assertive, and confident in my product.

Alas, I can report that all of that effort on my part has resulted in a big fat nothing.  Zilch.  No sales.  Nada.  No profits.  I accomplished very little with all that spamming, except the receipt of a warning from FB that they might disable my account.  I guess that was a blessing, because now I will have more time for direct contact with all my FB friends---to convince them to buy flowers (see cheery ad below) or designer cookies for your mother or wife.  But what does an aspiring capitalist have to do to make a buck in this world?

I realize fully that I was not trained to make money in this life.  I was educated as a scientist, a biologist, an ecologist, a conservationist.  Those people don't make money; they give of their life to try to understand and save the world and to teach others about all that.  But no one really listens to that message, because they are all out there making money.  In fact, the public thinks that conservationists don't need money because they know how to live off the land--to find wild edibles for food, to erect primitive shelters from hemlock boughs to get out of the rain and snow, to kill and skin wild animals to make clothing.  So you see, when we want to buy a new toaster oven or pay our electric bill, all we have are some beaver pelts or deer livers or hallucinogenic shrooms for those products or services.  Most of us have only seen a $100 bill when we visited the money collection at the Smithsonian Institution .  When we renegotiate our university contracts, we end up settling for an extra pound of acorns per month instead of a real salary increase.  We are so naive.

Given my friendly notice from the management at FB, I spent the past couple of hours hitting the "Unlike" button on about 150 Fan Pages where I was pumping my wares.  After all, what could I possibly have to say on the "Memphis" page if I weren't trying to get readers there to buy Cafe Britt coffee (see tiny micro bar ad above) or cigars from my site?  "Hey, anyone here seen Elvis lately?"  What could I contribute on the "Copenhagen" site other than wanting those Danes to come to my blog?  "Hvordan har De det?"  And what do I have in common with readers of the "Princess Cruises" site, unless I can get them to book their cruise on DrTom's Travel Shoppe?  (To be honest, I am really prone to motion sickness, so the thought of taking a cruise (see simple blue and orange ad below) with 5,000 strangers wearing plaid shorts makes me vomit for a couple of reasons. But I would gladly sell a cruise to anyone else.)

So, I am left with using my own Profile page on FB to entice potential customers to this site.  Just watch over the next month how clever I can be in getting my FB friends here.  Expect to see the following messages on my Wall soon.  "Would you like to be admitted to Cornell University and receive reduced tuition?  Then come to Life at DrTom's."  "Are you lonely and in need of a free companion dog?  .......DrTom's."  "Like to get rich quick?  Come to DrTom's for a list of FB Fan Pages that you can spam.  Results guaranteed!"  I am only limited by my own imagination.  And because people really do want to get rich quick, or they need a dog, they will be like putty in my hands.  Yea, that's the ticket.  I will just lie outright and promise the moon.  Then, after I make a big pile of money, maybe I'll take a cruise.  BLECK!

On the importance of homemade strawberry jam

(Scotch and homemade strawberry jam.  A nearly complete diet for DrTom, leading to order and homeostasis.)

There are certain stabilizers in our lives that become absolutely essential to our feeling of order and homeostasis.  For some, it is finding the morning paper on the front porch by 7am every day.  For others, it is that hot cup of organically grown Cafe Britt coffee about mid-morning.  And for still others, it is watching the Yankees play on tv during the summer.  One of mine is having a single-malt scotch and a cigar in the evening, something I have discussed many times.  It is during that hour or so that I contemplate the day's activities and life's memories--of children and grandchildren, of gardens and plantings growing around my property, of former students who left an impression.  I am counting on having those memories until senescence and lack of eyesight completely take over and all I can do is pet the dog or the woodchuck, or whatever that furry thing is that is lying at my feet.

But there is one other stable element in my life-homemade strawberry jam. Most years, my wife and I visit a local farm where you pick your own strawberries.  We bring them home, clean them up a bit, and my wife makes jam.  That's right.  Women make the jam, men mow the lawn.  This division of labor has worked pretty well for centuries, so far be it from me to change it.  But this year, my wife couldn't pick berries because she had some eye surgery the day before and was instructed not to bend over.  So, I went to the berry patch alone, wearing my white head band to keep the sweat from rolling into my eyes and sporting an Aussie hat.  Bending over those raised beds of berries is tough on a "mature" body like mine, so I found that actually lying down in the narrow row next to the bed worked best, and then inching forward as I depleted the ripe fruit that was close at hand.  No one else in the field was using this technique, possibly because it looked like I was a Navy Seal crawling up the beach to surprise the enemy in Mogadishu.  I didn't care.  It was more comfortable than bending over, and this color-blind naturalist needs to be close to his work to find red berries easily.  I picked 20 pounds and went home.

When I got home, it became clear that my wife was busy preparing for guests who were arriving the next day, and the chore of making jam would pretty much fall on the now ex-Navy Seal.  Amazing how some men can lay aside their M-16 and grenade launcher after a successful mission in the berry patch to don an apron and to manipulate a canning jar in the kitchen.  But on this day, that is what I did.  

As my wife barked instructions, I snapped to attention.  Clean fruit, cut it up, and mash until you have 5 cups.  Put in pan on stove, add a pat of butter, and one box of Sure-Jell.  Bring to a boil.  Then, add 7 cups of sugar.  Bring to a rolling boil for 1 minute.  Remove from heat.  Skim off solids on top of liquid.  In the meantime, I had a very large pot on the stove containing boiling water and the jars, lids, and rings.  Steam everywhere.  Lots of heat in that part of the kitchen.  This is why old farmhouses used to have a summer kitchen to do this kind of work.  Remove the jars, fill with cooked jam, wipe off the rim of jar with a hot, wet paper towel, place lid on top, and screw on a ring.  Then place all the filled jars back into the water bath to boil for a few minutes.  Two fingers and 1 thumb now burned.  Remove from heat, set on table, and enjoy the sound of those lids snapping down into place as the vacuum inside the jar takes hold.  As one batch is finished, begin the assembly line for the next load of fruit.  Two more fingers burned.  Keep going.  Don't stop or slow down, or you will find something else to do.  It is hot, sweaty work, but someone has to do it.  It is essential work, because we are talkin homemade strawberry jam--nectar of the Gods, sweet memories, winter morning comfort.

I made 20 pints of jam, so this should last until next June.  But my wife has a tendency to give our jam away as gifts.  And our grandchildren are always asking for "Grandma's jam".  But not this year.  Because I labored over the brew, I now hold the keys to this year's supply.  I love my grandkids, but all that sugar is probably not good for them.  And little kids need to learn that life is not always fair.  And maybe they are allergic to red things.  That you don't always get what you want, when you want it.  And that "Grandma's jam" is sometimes "Grandpa's jam".  And Grandpas can be stingy.

So, toast with strawberry jam in the morning, and a single-malt scotch and a cigar in the evening.  Throw in a couple of vitamin pills, and I suppose this is a nearly complete diet leading to order and homeostasis.

The phoebe and the porch light

 (An Eastern Phoebe with an insect.  Is it the same bird nesting on my porch light year after year?)

Each year in late March, Eastern Phoebes (Sayornis phoebe) return to my property from having spent the winter as far south as Mexico.  Today, they returned.  I can always tell, because the male sings incessantly when he returns, and his favorite song perch seems to be at the corner of our house next to our bedroom.  The singing starts just before it is light, so spring phoebes and DrTom are on the same schedule, fortunately.  I love early morning.

Bird migration has always fascinated me.  I have been more interested in why birds migrate, than in how they do it.  The answers to the how question are truly astounding, and there are many good summaries of this.  Much of the early pioneering work on this topic was done at Cornell University by Bill Keeton, who used homing pigeons as his model.  And the Germans Kramer, Sauer, and Wiltschko are important.  Depending on the species, they might use visual landmarks like rivers during the day, or they use the sun’s location, or they navigate at night by orienting to the stars, or they use the earth’s magnetic field.  Bobolinks (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), for example, contain small deposits of an iron compound called magnetite in their skulls.  This is presumably used to detect the weak forces of the earth’s magnetic field to help them migrate between North and South America.

Eric Bollinger and I published a number of papers in the 1980s on Bobolinks and the behavior known as breeding site fidelity, or breeding site faithfulness.  This is the tendency of individuals to return to the exact location where they bred the year before.  It turns out that this is a common phenomenon in migratory songbirds: adults often return to the exact location where they bred the year before, but their babies rarely return to the place where they were born.  In Bobolinks and most songbirds where this has been studied, adults tend to return to the site where they bred the year before if they were successful in producing babies at that location.  If the nestlings had been eaten by a snake or a skunk, for example, or the nest was destroyed by farming equipment, then those adults tend not to return to the same location the following year.  It appears there is a simple Darwinian algorithm operating in those pea-sized brains: if I was successful in producing offspring, return; if I was unsuccessful, do not return.

So, every year since 1980 we have had a pair of Eastern Phoebes near our home.  But the observation is more remarkable than that.  Phoebes originally nested on ledges beneath an overhang, probably rocky cliffs.  Houses, however, are a great substitute, because of the overhanging eaves and the existence of some kind of platform beneath that overhead protection—like a window ledge.  At our home, phoebes almost always use the light fixture next to the front door.  (They also use a window ledge on the back of the house.) This is convenient for me, because every morning during the breeding season, I step outside, reach my hand up and into the nest, count the number of eggs or nestlings by feel, and then resume drinking my Cafe Britt coffee (which, by the way, you can buy on this site).  Although I have never formally studied phoebes, this would make for pretty easy field work.  The bottom line is that nearly every year, the nest over our light fixture successfully fledges 4-5 young.

Now, I have never banded the phoebes at my house, and this is unfortunate.  I am missing a lot of the biological story, because I do not know if these are the same individuals that return to my property each year.  But for 28 years, phoebes have nested on this light fixture and yet these birds probably live only a few years—they can not be the same individuals during all of that time.  This means that new birds sometimes settle near my house, start looking for a suitable nest site, see the light fixture under that overhang, and a “CFL light bulb” goes off in their little head.  (Research has proven that light bulbs in bird heads are fluorescent and not incandescent).  Each succeeding generation of phoebes spots that nest location and simply can not resist it, in spite of the fact that every time we enter or leave the front door, the attending adult is flushed off the nest.

As you can see, my original interest in site fidelity has blended with a fascination for this incredible innate focus by the bird on a suitable resource, in this case a nest site.  I am sure that exactly the same consistency and skill go into locating and capturing food—phoebes mainly eat flying insects like moths.  Many thousands of years of natural selection have honed these abilities into a razor-sharp performance, which ensures their survival and successful reproduction.  For me, spring has not really started until I hear that simple, yet distinctive song of the phoebe.  My coffee is ready, so all I need now is this year’s nest.

Coffee, candy bars, and Facebook

(They look really good, but DrTom has no clue what kind they are.  When he orders a coffee, he says "Give me a coffee.")

The Facebook (FB) phenomenon amazes me.  Of course, there are many aspects of it that we all marvel at and puzzle over.  It is really neat to be able to connect and reconnect with friends and family all over the world, and keep them up to date with our lives.  We would never write enough letters to do this, or even talk to them often enough on the phone to accomplish the same amount of information transfer.  My sons and I regularly insult each other in that public forum, for example, but I would never take the time to call them a "dickhead" in a hand-written letter, or call them up just to say "your mother wears combat boots". Whoa!  I guess that would be my wife.

In addition to our friendly "hellos" to one another, many FBers are obviously trying to sell something, or to inform us about a topic that is important to them---a social issue, like poverty or global climate change.  They want to tell us what is happening on these fronts and they hope to motivate us to some kind of action.  It is truly difficult to imagine a system that could alert more people in less time than a social networking site like FB, so it is tempting to use it to pass on messages, links, and photos that are near and dear to our hearts.  Alas, it is also not uncommon to read posts that are about as inane as one can get: "I'm bored", or "time to sleep", or "Guess what?", etc.  You know what I am talking about, and you know who you are.  But this just comes with the territory.



However, the most curious FB site I have found so far is Starbucks.  Many commercial enterprises have a page on FB, and the size of their fan base must be an indication of how popular that particular store or product is in the real world.  Target has 535,000 fans, Butterfinger has about 300,000, while the most popular Sears Group page I can find has only a couple of hundred fans.  (There is often more than one Group page for well-known names.)  Starbucks Group page has over 7 million fans!  Think of that.  A number that nearly equals the population of the New York City area bothered to find and join a FB site that is all about coffee.  What could all those people have to talk about, because at a site like Starbucks, no one knows anyone else?  What they have in common is that they apparently love Starbucks coffee, and they are willing to proclaim it to the world.

Please indulge me a moment as I go to the Starbucks site right now, where I will copy some of the posts there to paste here: "I love Starbucks.. BEST COFFEE EVER", "I'm a Cafe Mocha, Decaf, kind of gal!", "venti caramel frap", "Im loving it frappe mocha", "My new favorite. A grande quad skinny vanilla latte... Yum!", "caramel frappaccino w/ extra shot of caramel can get me through the worst day", "Mmmm - Peppermint mocha", "I LOVE Love Love Starbucks!! ♥", "Java Chip Frappchino Light.....YUM", etc., etc., etc.  At the Butterfinger page, posters simply tell everyone they just ate a candy bar.

Starbucks' management must absolutely love this self-perpetuating advertisement love-fest, and they must love FB for establishing this social network. (By the way, click on the title of this blog if you want to go to the Starbucks FB to which I am referring.  There are many of them, but this one is the biggie.)  Thousands of posts per day on that site, going on 24/7, telling perfect strangers either how much they love Starbucks products or which flavor is their favorite.

The question that intrigues a former student of behavioral ecology like me is why people post on a FB site like Starbucks.  My best explanation is that this is a format for being recognized, however insignificant it may be.  Facebook and other similar sites call what we do here "publishing".  When I am finished writing this post, I press a button, you can see what I wrote, and it is then considered "published", in internet jargon.  As a former academic, I think this is pretty amusing.  In academia, we work for years to collect data and analyze it, write a scientific paper based on those data, have our peers tear the paper apart, rewrite it a few times, submit it to a scholarly journal where it is torn apart some more and, if fortunate, it is eventually accepted for publication.  Good journals reject about 70% of the papers submitted to them.  If accepted, you are sent a bill for what is called "page charges".  These charges, which you pay for out of your research money, can be $125 per page of journal occupied.  That kind of publication takes a great deal of effort, and if you are lucky, maybe a few dozen other scientists will read what you wrote.  But here, anyone can be published in a millisecond, at no cost whatsoever.  And you can say anything you want, as long as it is relatively clean, even if you fabricated the idea out of thin air.  And that little publication, complete with name and photo, could be read by thousands.

Most people will go through their entire lives and never have their thoughts or written words heard by anyone outside of their immediate circle of friends and family.  The potential to have your voice heard far and wide is huge on the internet.  The fact that I may only be telling the world that I like mocha frappuccino is better than nothing and, I suppose in the case of the Starbucks example, there is a weird kind of camaraderie knowing that you are communicating with a group of 4 million people who like the same drink.

DrTom also has his motives for publishing on these FB sites.  I seek out FB sites regardless of their content that have lots of members because, to be perfectly honest, I am trolling for new readers of this blog.  A typical post of mine on the Starbucks site would be something like, "Get yourself a cup of Starbucks coffee, and then read about my black lab at http://lifeatdrtoms.blogspot.com/."  The more members the site has, the more likely I am to pick up a reader or two.  Why I want you to read my blog is the more interesting question, and I might explore that more in the future.  In the meantime, get yourself a nice hot cup of pumpkin mocha latte and reread this post.  Dig deeply, and tell me why you publish on FB.  If you don't publish there, the reason you don't could be even more interesting.

(Almost every cup of coffee that DrTom drinks is made at home with fair trade, organic French Roast beans ordered online from Cafe Britt. He makes it one cup at a time using an Italian Bialetti.  As they say on the FB Starbucks page, "Yummy".)