a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Our favorite Capitol Hill brewpub – the Elysian Brewery – will reopen on Monday after renovations that had taken more than four months. We were able to get in and get treated to a special pre-opening beer tasting event on Saturday. There is a lot to like about the changes they had made to the inside, and we had a lot of fun tasting the new beers on offer. Cheers!
Here’s a camellia flower from the bush in my front yard. They are so beautiful, these flowers .. but so messy when they turn brown and plop to the ground!
It’s been dry here for the Pacific Northwest, with the snowpack in the Olympic Mountains reported to be only about half of what it should be.
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.
It was a gorgeous, sunny May Day today. A helicopter hovered overhead downtown all afternoon. It kept an eye on the Seattle May Day parade for workers’ rights and immigrants’ rights.
As I put the trash out for pick-up tonight, I saw a pair of woodpeckers in the back alley by my house. I’m sure they are the same ones that sometimes come and sit in the tall Douglas fir tree in my yard. I ran to get my camera for a few pictures.
Necessity is the mother of invention, goes the saying, and I needed a light box to look at a shoe box full of old 35mm film negatives that I have. So I made a light box with a shoe box and a glass plate.
The other little problem: it is no longer possible to run down to the pharmacy on the corner, and get prints made in an hour from 35mm film*. Besides, one would want to have scans made directly from the film, instead of prints that would have to be scanned. It seems to me the options are to use an online service for film scanning, or to invest in a film scanner that will do the trick.
*Digital photography took over film some 15 years ago (in 2003, digital cameras outsold film cameras for the first time). So I’d have to ponder whether I want to buy a film scanner to bring some of these pictures back to life.
It was sunny today, but it’s still not very warm (58°F/ 14°C). The grass is green, the leaves are out, and the blossoms are fading away, though.
The large crane on the almost-completed Google office building in South Lake Union collapsed today, and fell onto cars in the street below.
Four people were killed: two were ironworkers working on the crane, and the other two were inside cars on the street below. Three more injured people were taken to the hospital and they will be OK.
My new Adidas tennis shoes landed on the porch on Friday, shipped all the way from Sharonville, Ohio. (I’m going to play a little social tennis this summer). Sporting goods stores seem to carry very few tennis shoes nowadays. Running shoes and basketball shoes take up all the shelf space, instead.
I guess one can play some tennis in a pinch with any athletic shoe, but proper tennis shoes have a sturdy base, and support for the player’s forefoot and toes that get dragged across the tennis court.
It’s tulip season and the tulips are blooming up north in Skagit Valley here in Washington State, and also far away in the Netherlands.
I read in the Dutch newspaper that tulip tourists these days, tend to trample on the tulips, though — as they position themselves for the perfect selfie with a field of tulips as a backdrop. (Sigh).
We were at a pub called Stout on 11th Avenue, for our beers tonight. I like the artwork behind the main counter. (It seems to me to have some communist propaganda poster undertones. Maybe if it had a slogan or a message, it would have said ‘Work hard, drink beer!’).
Oh man! I thought – is this your bus? How would you know this is your bus? .. and we’re going to leave you behind, if it is!
Just then, he produced a big rolodex out of his jacket that showed the digits 0 4 8 — a sign to arriving No 48 bus drivers, I’m sure. They would know to look for blind passengers, spot him, and assist him to get onto the bus. Luckily today, an alert bystander on the sidewalk saw what was happening, and knocked on the door to get the driver’s attention. Another person helped the him to get onto the bus. We were on our way, leaving no one behind. It made me very happy. It made my day.
Happy Earth Day, every one!
Humans are assaulting Mother Earth in many ways, and single-use plastics is a killer. It can take up to one thousand years to decompose in landfills. Or it ends up in the environment or the ocean, killing animals and fish.
So please: say no to plastic. If you absolutely must use a plastic bag or bottle, be sure to do your best to reuse and then recycle it.
What a terrible Easter Sunday for Sri Lanka (pop. 21 million) – a relatively small, poor country, with tropical rainforests and tropical savannah, and mountain slopes that produce the cleanest tea in the world.
From the New York Times: ‘Sri Lanka endured a decades-long civil war that killed tens of thousands of civilians before it ended in 2009. Five years earlier, some 30,000 Sri Lankans had died in the Indian Ocean tsunami’.
The government shut down Facebook and WhatsApp afterwards (to prevent the spread of misinformation). So far no one has publicly claimed responsibility. It seems the attackers were mostly locals, but an international terrorist organization was probably behind all of it.
Wow! A shiny quarter, I thought, spotting a coin on the floor in the grocery store.
Oh! It’s not a quarter, I realized when I picked it up.
It was 20 cent coin, all the way across the globe from New Zealand.
Easter is late this year, but here it is. (It is also Passover).
In Western Christianity, Easter Sunday must always follow the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Here in Seattle there has been a drizzle all day.
We call it motreën in Afrikaans: a ‘moth rain’.
The redacted Mueller report is out, and .. it confirms what we already know, with more details. Trump stonewalled and ultimately refused to be interviewed by Mueller. Trump lied to the public. His campaign staff lied to Mueller. Mueller could not get to all the key evidence to prove obstruction of justice, and a conspiracy with the Russians. It was unavailable, encrypted or probably deleted or shredded (so much for the Presidential Records Act).
It’s now clear that Attorney-General Barr from the Dept of Justice is acting as Trump’s personal lawyer (he is not, and he should not).
It also looks as if the calculus of the Democrats to not call for impeachment until they know they will succeed in the Senate, is unchanged. Trump should be impeached, let’s just be clear about that – but maybe the Trumpkins (that used to be Republicans) deserve him as an albatross around their neck, all the way to the 2020 elections.
I remembered another unresolved issue with my iTunes music collection: the bitrate of the .mp3 version of the songs I had originally transferred into iTunes from CD, was as low as 160 kbps. This was oh, some ten years ago.
Nowadays, there is an ‘Apple Lossless’ option which will replicate the original CD in iTunes (bit rates of 900 kbps or more). The enormous storage capacity available on smartphones these days makes it possible to transfer and carry all of one’s CDs as-is in iTunes .. but is it worth it? The files would be up to 6 times larger than the original 160 kbps ones.
So my strategy is to upgrade only my very favorite CDs, say up to 30 out of the 300, that I now have in iTunes.
I make full use of the Seattle public libraries at my disposal, but I don’t always get to all the books that I had taken out, before they are due back.
There is a Japanese word for buying or acquiring books that go unread: tsundoku (Japanese: 積ん読). The word is composed from tsunde (to stack things), oku (to leave it for a while), and doku (to read).
Heartbreaking to see Notre Dame cathedral stand in flames. This must be what the end of the world will look like.
