a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I walked by the section of Pine Street between 10th Ave & 11the Ave today, called the Capitol Hill ‘Autonomous Zone’ by the protesters. (How long it will remain ‘autonomous’ — occupying the city streets, unchallenged by the Seattle Police Department— is unclear).
Three intersections on Pine street are blocked off, and a little ‘protest village’ of sorts have sprung up all around it. There are tents, stalls that sell water and food, and other trinkets to protesters.
ge·ra·ni·um
/jəˈrānēəm/
noun
a herbaceous plant or small shrub of a genus that comprises the cranesbills and their relatives. Geraniums bear a long, narrow fruit that is said to be shaped like the bill of a crane.
ger·ma·ni·um
/ˌjərˈmānēəm/
noun
The chemical element of atomic number 32, a shiny gray semi-metal. Germanium was important in the making of transistors and other semiconductor devices, but has been largely replaced by silicon.
I found some geranium (cranesbill) flowers on my walk around the block tonight (had to do an image search on Google).
Just for fun, below is a picture of a chunk of germanium.
‘Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!’ – Radio message from David Johnston (30), United States Geological Survey (USGS) volcanologist who was killed by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State, May 18, 1980 at 8:32 AM
It’s 40 years on, and Mount St Helens is still an active volcano and under constant surveillance. From the USGS website: The 1980 eruption jump-started interest in the study of explosive eruptions and monitoring efforts to improve warning systems that help mitigate hazards. The eruption underscored the importance of using as many monitoring tools as possible to track unrest and eruption activity.
The last supermoon of 2020 is out tonight, and its color was a rich cheesy yellow, from my vantage point here.
Here is a pair of pictures that I found on Twitter, of the International Space Station transiting against the Sun, and against the Moon.
The scales of the pictures are the same! .. our Sun is gargantuan, of course — its diameter roughly 400 times that of the moon —but it is also 400 times further away from Earth, than the moon.
Here’s my blurry photo of the full moon. It’s the pink moon, and it’s a supermoon*.
*A full moon closer than usual to Earth, so it looks a little larger. It’s called pink, because of the bloom of ground phlox this time of year (a pink flower common in North America).
Gov. Jay Inslee expanded school closures and prohibited large gatherings across all of Washington State on Friday, in an effort to slow the spread of the new coronavirus. Health officials reported at least five new deaths, and more than 560 people have now tested positive.
– Associated Press
Trump finally announced today — some 30 minutes before Wall Street closed for the week— that he declares a National Emergency* over the coronavirus. He shook hands with at least three Fortune 500 executives (a bad example in the time of coronavirus), and proceeded to exchange barbs with the press. ‘Such a nasty question’ he said, without answering, when asked why he disbanded the pandemic response team when he took office.
Panic buying erupted on Wall Street, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other indexes up almost 10%.
Okaayy .. but there is going to be a recession. How can there not be? The world is grinding to a halt. The three largest cruise ship lines have announced a suspension in cruising for 30 days. Delta Airlines says the drop-off in business is worse than after 9/11. If any number of states is like Washington State or the State of New York, the national economic impact will be significant.
*The Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1987 is activated. When the Stafford Act is activated to deal with a pandemic, the federal government can begin providing direct emergency medical care to citizens throughout the country. This could include the establishment of temporary hospitals, for example, to ease the nation’s projected shortage of intensive care beds. The government could also use the act to provide food, water, medicine and other supplies to Americans. [Source: USA Today].
Researchers from the University of California Irvine discovered that during landing, toads’ muscles adapt to the varying intensity of impact. As the creatures hop over longer distances, their landing muscles increasingly shorten in anticipation of larger impacts. UC Irvine biologist Emanuel Azizi says that toads are ideal for studying jumping and landing because they’re so good at it, and that studying them provides the basic science on how muscles respond during high-impact behaviors like landing or falling. [Video clip by University of California @uofcalifornia on giphy.com].
P.S. Also: it’s Saturday, so the stock market cannot go down.
There was sun and blue sky all day here in the Emerald City.
Even so, it was only 47 °F (8° C).
As I walked down to the Capitol Hill Library today, though, bright sunlight would bounce off windows from the buildings nearby and onto me, and I instantly felt the radiated heat on my face.
It’s the first day of the Lunar New Year, the Year of the Rat, and a new start to rotating through the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac.
The coronavirus outbreak, and the lockdowns in place in multiple cities in China, are dampening the celebrations in the country’s Mainland badly, though.
It was 50 years ago, to the day, that the first remote login from one terminal to another was done, on what was then called Arpanet. And so the internet was born, say the pundits.
Research papers into the late 70’s referred to these linked terminals as the ‘catenet model’ (concatenated terminals). It was only in the early 80’s with the arrival of the Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol that the term ‘internet’ was settled on.
And it would be until the mid-90’s, before the public-at-large would get drawn into the internet — by the likes of America Online and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Amazon (1997*), Netflix (2002), Google (2004), Facebook (2012) and Twitter (2013) would follow.
*The years the companies went public.
It seems it will take a combination of hardening PG&E’s electric grid (example: metal powerline poles instead of wood), aggressive cutting of trees & shrubs near power lines, and designating high-risk areas as out-of-bounds for new development or even for rebuilding. The last few years, Governor Gavin Newsom and his predecessor have already poured an extra $1.2 billion into new planes, helicopters, more firetrucks and vegetation thinning.
Hurricane-strength winds (more than 80 mph), had made several of the fires spread rapidly, making them into blow torches that light up the tinder-dry vegetation.
Wow .. the new Pike Motorworks Building looks quite nice, I thought as I walked by on Tuesday.
‘We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are’.
– from Seduction of the Minotaur, by Anais Nin (1961)
The entire Sept. issue of Scientific American is dedicated to the topic on the front page in bold letters: Truth, Lies & Uncertainty: Searching for Reality in Unreal Times. The articles are heavy on science and general philosophies about what is real and what is virtual. For example: to this day, philosophers cannot agree on whether mathematical objects (say, the number ‘7’) exist, or are pure fictions.
A summary of the article by Prof. Anil K. Seth that goes with the picture below, goes like this:
‘The reality we perceive is not a direct reflection of the external objective world. Instead it is the product of the brain’s predictions about the causes of incoming sensory signals. The property of realness that accompanies our perceptions may serve to guide our behavior so that we respond appropriately to the sources of sensory signals’.
So throw in Presidents that lie every day, greedy corporations with profit incentives, and worldwide social media networks — and holy cow: it’s more important than ever before to try to verify if something uncertain or new that we come across, is ‘true’.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969.
Here’s the retro packaging of Elysian Brewing Company’s Space Dust brand of beer, to commemorate the anniversary.
I played a little social tennis tonight on the Woodland Park tennis courts. We rained out on both Tuesday and Thursday of last week, so it was great to finally get out and play.
And hey! the muscle memory from many years of playing tennis is still there, sending signals to the old muscles and creaky bones— to run down that incoming shot, and strike it, so it goes back over the net.
When I was a kid, we would build a cozy wood fire in the living room fireplace in winter time. On top would go a layer of anthracite (hard black coal, with a metallic luster on its surface), to make the fire glow a long, long time.
But then I would go to school the next morning, and the neighborhood’s chilly winter air would be blanketed by a layer of thick smoke. Man! I thought .. this is not good.
Now here we are, 50 years later, and I read about the Australian elections, and the saga of the contentious Carmichael coal mine in Queensland. The mine will be ‘hugely beneficial’ to Australia and ‘global climate change’, says Adani CEO Jeyakumar Janakraj. Really? Yes, your $16.5 billion project will create a few thousand jobs, but pump up to 12 billion litres of water a year from the Suttor River. It will gouge out 60 million tonnes of low-grade coal every year from the Galilee basin right across the Great Barrier Reef. The coal will get burned in India and push up the 415 parts per million CO2 concentration we already have in the atmosphere.
What you seek is but a shadow.
– the motto on the University of Washington sundial.
With all the sunshine we had this week, I thought it was high time for me to understand how the sundial on the Physics building at the University of Washington works!
In the picture below, the shadow of the gnomon (ball) moves from left to right as the day progresses. The sun crosses lower in the sky in winter time, and then the path on the wall is higher. The sun crosses higher in summer time, and then the path on the wall is lower. The equinox was in March, so we have already crossed to below the line marked EQUINOX on the sundial.
The only other thing that seemed out of whack, was that the dial seemed a little off: it showed 12.30 pm PDT on the nose, when it was already 12.39 pm when I took the picture. Should the gnomon ball shadow not have moved at least a little bit off the 12.30 pm line, towards the 1.00 pm line?
We in Seattle, and all others in the Pacific Standard Time zone, keep a clock time based on the solar time at the arbitrary longitude of 120° W (which happens to pass through the town of Chelan). However, in Seattle we are located some 2° 19′ to the west of this longitude, and the sundial in Seattle indicates a time 9.2 minutes earlier than the sun would in Chelan. Here is the full explanation from the UW Dept. of Physics.
P.S. Look for the slender figure-eight-shaped curve in the sundial’s center by the 12, called the analemma. It is a plot of the location on each day at noon, throughout the year, of the gnomon ball’s shadow.
I was at the eye doctor today for my 
biannual check-up (all good). Since part of the test was a retina scan, I thought I’d refresh my knowledge of rods and cones in the retina. The human retina contains about 120 million rod cells, and 6 million cone cells. Check out the diagram below for a primer on how the retina works.
Biologists are still learning about all the cells and proteins and chemistry involved in vision. For example, in 2008 a team of Japanese researchers discovered a lightning-fast protein involved in the precise interactions between what is called the photoreceptor ribbon synapse and the bipolar dendrites. They promptly named the protein Pikachurin, after Pikachu, the lightning-fast Pokémon creature.
Google made a great doodle of the first-ever image of a black hole ●. This black hole is in Messier 87 (abbreviated as M87), a giant galaxy in the constellation Virgo. The black hole is several billion times more massive than our Sun. Lucky for us, it is about 53 million light years from Earth.
What will happen to a human falling into a black hole? Based on the mathematics in Einstein’s general theory of relativity of 1915, you would fall through the event horizon unscathed, then the force of gravity would pull you into a very long noodle and ultimately cram you into singularity, the black hole’s infinitely dense core. Ouch?
