Posted 8:32 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: The Satellite that Swings!

In honor of [classified information redacted], I bring you the launch of the Swift gamma ray satellite:


Swift Launch, Nov. 20, 2004
See here for my gripping tale of the launch.

Most of the photos I'll post here were scanned from prints on our home scanner. I'd love to have a dedicated film scanner, but can't afford it. It works OK with some photos, but has trouble with photos with large monochrome areas. It adds badly-colored lines to those: purple in very dark areas, greenish in large expanses of sky. Sometimes I can edit those out, but it's time-consuming and not always successful. My efforts to scan the prints of the Swift launch didn't work out too well.

But yesterday I was looking through some digital photos we had, and it turns out that we had scans done of some of our pictures at processing time, and I hadn't remembered! I had fiddled and fiddled with some pictures of Mt. Rainier to get them clean enough for wallpaper, and it turns out we had clean professional scans all the time! Grrr!

Anyhow, the Swift photos were among those that got scanned to CD, so I'm able to post one after all. This is still not the best scan in the world. Don't know why.

Now, wasn't that fascinating?

Sekrit message: Good luck!

Labels: Florida, Foto Friday

Posted 1:48 PM by Angie Schultz

Nurse, Order Up Another Gross of Butterfly Nets

Ye gods and little fishes. What's with all the public nuttiness these days. Is it the heat? Whatever it is, I blame Bush.

First, Chris Matthews (who is he again?) gibbers and drools in a manner I haven't seen since the days of my youth, when crazy old neighbors would rant about how the Commies put fluoride in the water to prevent the Birchers from discovering that aliens had ordered the Kennedy assassination. I'm still not quite clear on why Imus was OK with it all until Matthews started in on Joe Lieberman. Then, suddenly, he was embarrassed.

Secondly, I was going to post an oh-so-amusing little morsel about the Gordian Sock Puppet knot that Seixon stumbled over (Allah admitted that he couldn't keep the players straight all the way to the end, and I was going to post a fun little logic puzzle to help everyone out), but then Seixon started getting death threats and creepy email (allegedly!) from ex-CIA moonbats.

Said moonbat has a history of nasty emails to people who mention his sacred name. Kinda like the devil was supposed to do.

So I chickened out, not so much in genuine fear for my safety as a desire to avoid hassle. Mostly, though, it was because Niles would get mad at me if we started getting calls in the middle of the night. We get enough communiques from outer space as it is. (Haw haw! A little in-joke there for Niles. Pay it no mind.)

Finally, Deb "Nutty Professor" Frisch has started hassling Jeff Goldstein again. Now it's Jeff who made sexual remarks about his son, according to her. She also posted a (brief, mild) taunt in the comments, which I saw with my own two eyes before Jeff wished it into the cornfield.

UPDATE: Yeesh. See here, if you dare. Scroll down for more. No longer mild. Not safe for work, small children, or the sane.

Back in when I was reading Usenet, in the Late Cretaceous, I realized that it was harder than you might think to know who was really crazy.

For example, if I guy posts "I AM DOCTOR GOD AND I OWN THE USENETS AND YOU MUST OBTAIN MY PERMISSION TO POST!!11", well, it might be amusing once, depending on context. Depending on your temperament, it might even amuse you for hours. But when someone posts stuff like that hour after hour, day after day -- I'm talking hand-crafted posts, now, not automated spam -- for months, then you just gotta wonder if he's crazy. Because he must be spending eight hours a day just writing loopy posts. When does he eat, sleep, work?

My interest, at that time, was in identifying the crazies so that I wouldn't mocking those who were genuinely mentally ill. But where does jackassery leave off, and truly sick begin?

The person in that case was a woman who continually posted crap about Bill Gates and Microsoft. See here for example, and here and (alleged) details of her suit against Gates here. Those incidents were from a decade ago, and more, but she's still at it! See here.

That's the google cache for her site. I didn't want to link directly, because I didn't want to end up in her referrer logs and get deranged email from her. Is she just, colloquially, a nut? Or really, truly mentally ill? And should the mentally ill be allowed internet access?

Anyway, if the world's richest man can't keep a loony off his back for fifteen years, what hope do Goldstein and Seixon have?

Posted 10:29 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Beach Break

It's hot. Are you hot? I'm hot. Let's go to the beach:


Kepuhi Beach, Molokai, Jan. 2002
This beach is on the west side of Molokai (in Hawaii, for those who came in late). It's not one of your carefree, laze-about-and-bake beaches. This is a serious, moody beach, thinking deep thoughts as it stares off in the direction of Oahu, full of amused contempt for the happy tourist-filled beaches there, and never, ever jealous.

I like it a lot.

I have about a dozen shots of this scene, taken while I was waiting for the sun to come out. It never did, really. Before the sun set I managed to get this shot, where most of the landscape is lit.

Here's a swell photo from a German tourist site, taken from the other end of the beach. If you google around a bit, you find photos suggesting that there's a tourist-friendly sandy beach over yonder, but I cannot confirm this.

The day we were there it was very windy, as you can see -- not very amenable to lazing. There was some sort of resort there, comprised of dozens of nice little buildings. It was completely deserted. Niles remembers reading that people were thinking of running a commuter ferry between Oahu and Molokai, and there was housing built in anticipation of that. But then they decided (wisely, I think) that the sea was too rough too often to reliably run a ferry.

Molokai is beautiful, but it's not what you'd call jam-packed with attractions. It has two towns: Kaunakakai and Maunaloa. I seem to remember that Kaunakakai was the main town but Maunaloa was newer; it was filled with people who worked for some corporation, probably involving sugar. It had a Pizza Hut, or maybe it was a KFC, or possibly one of those creepy hybrids. Then there's the leper colony on the Kalaupapa peninsula in the north, and Hawala Bay (a nice beach) on the east side. If you don't mind roughing it you can hike the beautiful mountains north of it. After that, though, Molokai is pretty much a spent force.

If you go to Molokai, consider taking the turboprop. Jets can't land when the winds are high. We lost a day off our trip because of that.

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 6:14 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Tufa Towers

David Fleck says I offended their old pond by calling it "stinky". So here I offer a stinky California lake:

Sunrise on Mono Lake, California, Aug. 1995

Mono Lake is on the eastern side of the Sierras, near the town of Lee Vining. It's fed by internal springs and local rivers, but it has no outlet, so the water leaves only by evaporation. Because of this, Mono Lake is much saltier than the ocean. Decades ago, the city of Los Angeles (which is 300 miles to the south) started diverting water from those rivers, and the lake level dropped. Eventually environmentalists got them to cut it out, and the lake level has risen about ten feet since then.

The weird formations you see there are made of "tufa", aka calcium carbonate. The calcium carbonate is dissolved in the hot underwater springs, but precipitates out in the cool lake water and builds up around the spring source. You could think of them as sort of lake stalagmites (well, as far as I'm concerned you can). I'm not sure whether any tufa towers were protruding when Los Angeles began diverting the water. If not, the rising lake level may eventually cover them completely.

Here are some other people's photos:
Dan Heller
Gerald and Buff Corsi
Andre Gunther

A lot of these are better than mine, of course, but I don't think I did too badly. I was inspired to go to Mono Lake by an article I read in the travel section of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, years and years ago. It was accompanied by a picture of the tufa towers in golden light, looking like something from another world (not unlike the Corsi photo). I was obsessed with getting pictures in this light. I made grumpy old Niles get out before sunrise to go with me, and shot like a fiend while the light lasted. We went out again later in full sun and went on a nature tour. I took more pictures there without trying for Art. I should've, because even in full sun the towers are beautiful, white against the blue lake water. (I don't have any of these scanned in.)

Here's some information about the lake:
Living Lakes
State Park page
Tufa Truths

This was from one of our rare "dedicated" vacations. Usually we go on vacation because one of us has a business trip in the area. I was living in Silicon Valley, then. We drove to Yosemite, over Tioga Pass to Lee Vining, down Hwy 395 past Mt. Whitney to Death Valley. We'd tried to make the trip in June, but the pass was closed. Eventually I'll inflict other photos from this trip on you.

I'm so jazzed about being able to post images that I'm finding it hard to limit myself to one photo a week. But I only have 300M of free space, and at this size that's only about 5000 photos, or 100 years' worth, so I have to restrain myself.

(Actually, I'm thinking of posting some of my more interesting postcards and banknotes, too. Exciting, eh?)

UPDATE: I hate this guy. Look at all those beautiful pictures, many of Mono Lake. I particularly commend this one to your attention. Here are more photos by him. Nice rugged, er, landscape there.

Labels: California, Foto Friday

Posted 10:29 AM by Angie Schultz

Genius Stumped

Stephen Hawking has found a question so vexing that even he cannot answer it, and so has turned to Yahoo answers:

"In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"

This has netted seventeen thousand answers, so there's no use my responding there. So I'll have to do it here.

It takes enormous study and concentration to reach the level of expertise that Hawking has, even when you're not fighting a debilitating illness that ought to have killed you decades ago. And the British educational system requires you to start concentrating on your major field at sixteen, which means you can drop all that boring history and literature for interesting subjects.

Still, you'd think a genius would have at least a nodding acquaintance with history, and realize that politically, socially, and environmentally, things are just not all that chaotic.

I'm not sure what he thinks is "chaotic" about the environment, unless he means that weather is, technically speaking, a chaotic system. That's something we can't do anything about. A major asteroid strike would sure induce environmental chaos, but short of that I don't see it looming. And no, even global warming doesn't count as chaotic, given that the Earth has been a lot warmer in the past, as any ten-year-old interested in dinosaurs could tell you. (Granted, there weren't any humans then, but we're a lot better equipped to deal with changing climate than the dinosaurs were.)

As for social and political chaos, I just don't see it. Socially, the 1960s were much more chaotic, and yet all us old folk lived through them. Political "chaos" is a very vague notion as well, and it isn't always bad. Things were less chaotic during the Cold War, when you knew who the bad guys were and where they lived, but I wouldn't want to return to those days.

The possibility of a world-wide exchange of nuclear weapons (talk about your environmental chaos) is much lower now than it was fifty years ago. Put yourself in the place of a public savant in the Fifties, professor. "How can this possibly go on?" he might've asked. The answer was: it didn't. And yet we're still here.

It's instructive to review secular apocalypta (have I just made up a word?) from bygone eras. I remember watching a film in sociology class showing a playground full of happy children in which the narrator wrung his metaphoric hands about what the future would be like if these were test tube babies! Aieeee! How would your child feel knowing she was conceived in a glass tube? How would the other children treat her, knowing she was this inhuman horror?

As you might expect, the film was from the Sixties[*]. I could've been one of the playground children; I was the right age for it. And test tube babies? A total non issue. No one cares, except people grateful to be able to have children.

(If there's not an entire academic subfield built around past episodes of future anxiety, and predictions of DOOM, there oughta be.)

So the answer, genius, is to rest on your physics laurels for a few minutes and read more widely in history and paleontology. Then relax and take up physics again, secure in the knowledge that your legacy will survive you.

And try not to think of yourself as a public savant, because those guys always end up looking like idiots.

NOTE: Niles says that Hawking's not looking for answers, but only trying to stir people up, which makes him a giant troll.

Troll-fest noted by smart guy Tim Blair.

[*]Hmm. It occurs to me that Louise Brooks, the world's first test tube baby, wasn't born until 1978, by which time I was in high school, and no longer frequented playgrounds. So the film must have been addressing some other horrible scary medical possibility that, by the time I saw it (c. 1982), nobody gave a damn about.

This badly formatted site says that IVF was first performed on rabbits in 1959, so the film could just have been anticipating the specter of the Brave New World of evil robotic test tube babies.

Posted 2:16 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday:Calm

I see that David Fleck is appealing for calm, and reinforcing his plea with a soothing picture. An excellent idea. I've been thinking of posting some of my pictures, and this gives me a good excuse.

And I can do better than any stinky old Iowa pond. Ha ha!

As my first experimental Friday Foto, I offer this serene, calming image: a smoldering volcano.

Mt. St. Helens, Sep. 2005

I started out using Flickr for this, but now I see that you can host photos on BlogSpot. And the template's easier to use.

"Free! Photos in blog posts for free! Go nuts people!" Well, all righty then!

But not too nuts. Remember: caaaaaalm.

UPDATE: By the way, that picture was taken while we were fleeing the cyclone tyranny. Start here, scroll up for more.

Labels: Foto Friday, Washington

Posted 8:54 PM by Angie Schultz

You Say It's Your Birthday...

This happened to me once. For the techno-have-nots among you, that's Bush getting birthday greetings from the White House press corps. A reporter mentions that it's his birthday, too, and Bush invites him to come up on the podium. And then another, and another reporter claims to have a birthday, and pretty soon all the reporters are up there on the podium, and there's no one in the audience. What are the odds??

Ha ha, no. They stopped at three reporters. I was at a conference once where it was announced that one of the mucky-mucks was having a birthday. Someone else said, "Why, it's my birthday, too!" That got the people at our table asking, "What are the odds?" (quite good, really) and "What are the odds of there being three in the group with the same birthday?" I told them they better get calculating, because I was the third person. This prompted my boss to embarrass me by announcing it to the room at large.

The moral is: always keep your mouth shut about your birthday, lest you wind up shaking hands with the President on national TV.

Posted 10:35 PM by Angie Schultz

The Sound of News

Write this down: Circling choppers mean pretty much the same thing as circling buzzards.

I woke today to the sound of circling helicopters[*]. When the first one went by I thought, "Huh, that's unusual. We never get helicopters around here." And then when they came back again I figured I'd better get up to see what was going on. I looked out the front window and -- holy cow! -- there was a Biblical-model pillar of cloud over yonder. We turned on the TV and saw that it was a massive apartment fire a few blocks away.

Latest news says 14 units were destroyed. Usually, in an apartment fire, you lose one unit and maybe damage several more. It's hard to see how the fire could've spread that quickly. At least some of them shared a roof, but still, that's darned quick.

So far as they know, everyone has been accounted for, which I guess is pretty good for an early morning fire of this size.

[*] Actually, what woke me was the lion. My mother (who was lying down on a hospital bed) and I were being stalked by a mountain lion. I woke up just as it sprung. And then I heard the helicopters.

UPDATE: I saved this as a draft and then forgot to post it. This fire, which had BREAKING NEWS/buzzing chopper coverage on several news channels Monday morning, rated not a single mention in the dead trees edition of Tuesday's paper. I guess there was a disappointing lack of deaths.