Scratching Surfaces » Israel

Ancient stones and new bills

Micha Silver — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:29:03 +0000

Last week the Bank of Israel published drafts of the set of new currency to be put into circulation soon. For this print cycle it was decided to showcase Israeli poets, instead of the usual political figures. What’s more, a stanza from each poet’s work will be printed on the new bills. The four writers that will appear on the 20, 50, 100, and 200 shekel bills include Rachel (Bluwstein) the poet, Shaul Tchernehovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Natan Alterman. Nice touch bringing a wiff of culture into the markets and fast food stands.

However the move raised a public controversy. All four of the poets are Ashkenazi, from Eastern European decent. Why no Sephardic poets? Silvan Shalom asked where are Yehuda Halevi, Shabazi or Ibn Gvirol? And other MP’s of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi backgrounds voiced similar objections. Of course the debate also brought on a flurry of parodies and satirical designs for the new notes with portraits of anything from pop singers to ninja turtles…

One talk show hosted Professor Roni Reich from the Archaeology department of Hebrew University. He was a leading member of the committee appointed by the Bank of Israel, and responsible for initiating the idea of depicting well know cultural figures rather than politicians. He explained what led him and the rest of the committee to their decision. As to the question of cultural figures from North African decent, he thought that the opinions were legitimate, and in 10 or 12 years time, when the next set of bills will be designed, careful attention should be placed on the backgrounds of the people chosen to decorate the currency. The current designs were made public months ago, and no objections were voiced. Now with the bills ready to go to print, it’s too late for changes.

As soon as I saw Professor Reich’s face, I recognized him from 40 years ago, when he was just beginning his academic career, and heading the excavations at Tel Ashdod. With his bushy hair and sharp features, he would bound from wall to pit, giving us volunteer diggers instructions where to shovel and when to brush. He always had a joke or good word to keep our spirits up through the hot summer days. Most of his professional career he dedicated to digs in and around Jerusalem. Now, after decades of sorting through pottery shards and ancient coins, writing books, and bringing archaeology to the “masses” he found himself helping design our new currency.

Storks over the Arava

Micha Silver — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:26:17 +0000

This week’s morning bike ride took me west of the Arava highway along the trail called the “springs route”. I came across a small flock of storks – maybe 50-75 – still resting on a knoll, getting organized for today’s leg of their migration to Africa. As I approached, they lifted off and resettled further from the trail. Later in the morning, as I came out of one of the canyons, I was surprised by one of those impressive sites we get only in the fall: those few storks were part of a huge flock circling overhead, looking for thermals to gain some free altitude before their day’s flight south. Hundreds, maybe more than a thousand of these majestic birds, moving around in chorus.
It’s early September, a bit soon for large migrations. The Bedouins say that when the storks fly across earlier than usual, then Europe will be experiencing a severe winter.

Are acacias really dying out?

Micha Silver — Fri, 06 May 2011 13:04:06 +0000

The Acacia is one of the few indigenous trees that survives in the harsh conditions of the Arava region of southern Israel. With global warming accelerating, some environmentalists have voiced concern that acacia stands are drying up. However almost no research is being done on natural regrowth.

Two species of acacia grow naturally in the Arava wadis: the Acacia tortilis and Acacia raddiana. A third, the Acacia negevensis grows only in the higher altitudes of the Negev mountains. Typically these trees will grow along the edges or on the banks of small wadis, where they won’t be disturbed by flash floods. And we often see groves of trees that seem to be about the same age. Acacias are photo-synthetically active all year, do not loose their leaves, and thus there is no banding in the trunk. So it’s hard to determine the actual age of a particular tree. But from roughly estimating the uniformity of the trees’ heights, diameter of the trunks, number of main branches, it seems that stands of acacia appear as a result of a particular climatic event which most likely included a suitable combination of rainfall and temperature to allow many new seedlings to sprout at the same time and survive.

The questions that come to my mind are “What are those ideal conditions for natural regrowth?” and “Where can we find new generations of acacias?”. As for the required conditions, I don’t know, yet, but I have found some spots where new seedlings have sprouted and are surviving. In fact, in one such spot I located three new seedlings within a 100 m. stretch of a small wadi. And, interestingly, one was growing right at the feet of a grand-daddy tree that had fallen victim to old age. An unusual, but perhaps encouraging happenstance…

My acacia seedling

I chose one of the new seedlings as our “Family acacia” and I’ll try to follow its growth over the years. So here’s our start:

Acacia status

Date	Canopy Diameter	Height	Trunk diameter	Longitude	Latitude	Elevation
22/04/2011	0.58 m	0.22 m	0.014 m	35d10'18.533"E	30d47'33.321"N	-40 m

The Jerusalem monster and the dragons of Rishon

Micha Silver — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:33:09 +0000

Rishon L’Tzion, a modern satellite city of Tel Aviv, sprawls from Rehovot on the south east, almost to the Mediterranean coast. Most of the western side of the city is an expansive industrial and commercial area. It’s there, at the heart of this modern city’s commerce district, that shoppers find the Hazahav Mall. At the front entrance to the mall, a section of the parking area was set aside for an exhibit of life-sized models of dinosaurs, with bared teeth, and leathery looking skin. Among the fearsome creatures are also mock ups of some modern animals like lions and giraffes. A pterodactyl, strung up on wires, soars above. And the tyrannosaur’s head extends right over the fence.

Ah, yes, the fence. Families hurrying on their way to some fashion boutique inside the mall lose every child to the magnetic attraction of this exhibit. But the kids get as far as the fence, and grip the chain links with the excitement of boundless curiosity that forces them to overcome their trepidation. But the fence, hung with signs warning that the area is under video surveillance, cuts them out. The whole impressive exhibition is off limits, untouchable. A few more moments of gazing, and, one after another, the youngsters give in to disappointment and to their parents tugging.

In the Jerusalem neighborhood of Kiryat Yovel, in stark contrast, stands the “Mons

The Jerusalem "Monster"

ter”, a huge colorful cement structure with bulging eyes, and three red tongues, each a long sliding board. This playground has for over 40 years been the center of afternoon activities for young mothers and grandmothers with dozens of cheering kids in tote. They run around behind the monster to race up the spiral stairs, crawl thru the inside, then position themselves for the flight down to the sand below.

So while parents in Rishon are chatting over paper cups full of some brown foamy hot drink with an Italian name, the kids in Jerusalem are pressing a finger over the water fountain squirting their friends, to everybody’s shrieks of delight.

Creating isohyetal lines in QGIS

Micha Silver — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:01:24 +0000

We had a pretty extraordinary rain storm in our region some weeks ago. Accumulated rainfall over a 24 hr period was between 20-100 mm in a region where the total annual precipitation is about 50 mm.! I got rain gauge data for the event and made isohyetal lines using only tools available in Quantum GIS.

First I imported the data table including XY locations and the precipitation with the Delimited Text plugin. Then, in order to limit the analysis more or less to the area covered by the rain gauges, I made a “convex hull”, the minimum polygon enclosing all points, and buffered that polygon by 10 km. (allowing that the interpolation algorithm will give approximate values outside the area covered by the gauges). Both of these operations are available in the Vector->Geoprocessing menu.

Now I fired up the GRASS plugin to do the interpolation. Using the v.in.ogr.qgis module, I loaded both the rain gauge point vector and the buffer polygon vector into a suitable GRASS Location/Mapset. First I converted the buffer polygon to a raster so that I could use it as a mask with v.to.rast. After adding the two GRASS layers to the map – the rain gauges, and the mask raster, I pulled up the r.mask module to force the next action to be limited to the buffer region. Then I ran v.surf.rst to produce an interpolated rainfall grid. I chose, of course, the precipitation column as the attribute field for doing the interpolation. The new precipitation grid was created in a few moments, and I closed the GRASS toolbox.

Now I activated the new GDALTools Raster plugin. Among the tools there is “Contours”. I ran this tool, choosing the GRASS precipitation raster as input. I left the default levels value at 10, and chose an output directory where the contours shapefile will be saved. I also checked “Attribute Name” and typed in “Precip”. The contours were created and here’s my resulting map:

Precipitation map - january 2010

: Precipitation map – Jan 2010