Sheering time: Let's go hyper-local Arizona

Original post from 2010. The 2026 update follows below. 

It's that time of year again. In September, Navajo sheep herders will start coming down from the mountains north of Valley of the Sun. No doubt they're psychologically well-prepared for news of the big city:

• a broken dam due to burst bladders at Tempe Town Lake;
• $1,000,000 price on the head of Maricopa County's Sheriff Joe by the usual Mexican cartels/drug lords;
• the ever popular (no, not really, except to me and Sheriff Joe Arpaio!) AZ Senate Bill 1070 also known as Arizona Immigration Reform.

To commemorate sheep-shearing season, I have an extravaganza of gentle sheepy imagery, from a variety of sources. Well, I admit, from two sources: a Zazzle merchant and Amazon.com. The images are so nice, I thought you might enjoy looking at them too. Hmmm... I need to find a better illustration source than re-purposed advertisement images. Until such time arrives, well, if you'd be so kind and not breathe a word of this.

Cute sheep sticker

Consider this a follow-up to my earlier post about the floatingsheep blog.

Coda and update

I was young and foolish in 2010. Those Amazon links broke long ago! Today is July 9, 2026. I shall replace the Amazon ads with the delightful ruminant-themed activity of Matthew Zook. He's webmaster of the floatingsheep blog. 

Professor Zook held a class competition for Best Map featuring sheep in New York City. Very challenging, as there probably weren't any sheep, not even in Sheepshead Bay, in 2010. (Maybe a few can still be found in the most remote and exotic of New York City's five boroughs: Staten Island.)

The contest winner was Team Mutton, for their work, "Sheep of Dreams", depicting:

... the locations of seven deadly plagues affecting sheep according to an ancient prophecy. The map uses kernel density estimation, a type of spatial analysis, to show where high densities of each plague occurred in the past. These indicate the most dangerous areas for sheep! They must try to avoid them in order to survive the same plagues, as foretold, prior to the second appearance of The MUTTON.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (their motto is "Know the World, Show the Way, From Seabed to Space") could probably keep Professor Zook and his students occupied with many exciting GIS projects.

Sheep of Dreams

This slideshow about the winning map will make the substance of my prior and rather insubstantial blog post match its title about going hyperlocal... although the sheep story that follows is set in New York State, not Arizona. Sorry. It was the best I could do.

Although there haven't been portents of imminent return, don't take any chances: Stay away from sheep-interdicted geolocations, as you don't want to be tangling with The MUTTON.

Team Mutton: Sheep of Dreams via Slideshare

If this is appealing, I highly recommend a visit to Professor Zook's Slideshare profile. Among other things, there is a brief illustrated narrative of the professor's first encounter with the floating sheep:

"It is a playful entity, which engages in various comedic activities, manipulating the landscape and critiquing human materiality."

The playful entity was revealed as a "powerful yet humorous force in the natural and urban environment of Missoula, Montana." Keep an eye out for Iron Sheep too.

Do not tarry!

Something even worse than tangling with The MUTTON might be on the horizon: Scribd acquired Slideshare in 2022 or so. Both sites are intended as repositories of user-created content. Instead, they have morphed into garbage heaps of purloined internal corporate presentations, illegally reproduced chapters of engineering textbooks, partially redacted CIA Reading Room releases, sample test questions for every sort of minor accreditation exam, job seeker resumes, old securities offering prospectuses, and conspiracy theories about Atlantis, the Federal Reserve, Jews, aliens (extra-terrestrial, not undocumented), 9-11, etc.

The Scribd and Slideshare interfaces are slightly different, but despite warnings everywhere that copyrighted material is not allowed, both sites are piled high with copyvios. I'm unsure what their past or current business plans are, but I doubt that Scribd or Slideshare are long for this world. Possible vestiges of what I have been gloomily describing as the demise of Web 2.0 maybe? I am not the only one with such concerns: see this 2020 post, Where Have All the Bloggers Gone? by another former IBMer although he was a much more glorious one than I was at GPD San Jose, using queueing theory to model storage products performance!