Monthly Archives: August 2020

August 21, 2020 · 22:18

No Context For You – August 21st

I thought one of the advantages of renting (which I hate) instead of owning (which I hate less) is not having to fix things.

So, yet another lie.

The happy subject to talk about is noting that it was three years ago today that we were in a gas station parking lot at an intersection of two state highways in the middle of a gazillion square miles of corn and soybean fields in Nebraska, praying for at least a little thinning to the clouds.

We got it, sort of. (Photos here and here.)

And our next shot is coming up on April 8, 2024. I’m thinking Indianapolis or Ohio, with a maximum totality of over four minutes.

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography

August 20, 2020 · 23:49

Today Was Wednesday – No, Thursday

Getting to the point where a couple times a day I literally have to check my phone or watch to remember.

As we’re discovering, “working from home” can be much more like “living at work.”

The good news is that thanks to some heroic efforts by a couple of San Luis Obispo fire crews last night, while the fires got very, VERY close to the domes at Lick Observatory and did destroy one currently unused dorm building, none of the telescopes or other primary buildings appear to have been damaged.

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Filed under Disasters, Paul

August 19, 2020 · 23:20

Hazy Here – Infernos In NorCal

Here we had a bit of haze, a bit of smoke, enough to make the sunset orange-ish.

There are still three major fires in Southern California and a handful of smaller ones. The closest and biggest is about fifty miles to our northeast. All of them are still less than 20% contained, but burning off into some extremely steep, rugged, and empty terrain with few structures, homes, or power lines which would need protecting. Given how thinly stretched the air resources and ground troops and equipment are, they may just have to burn for a few days or few weeks.

Up north, in the Bay Area and over toward Davis and Sacramento, a series of large storms went through a few days ago with thousands upon thousands of lightning strikes into tinder dry terrain. It seems like everything is burning up there. The only county anywhere from San Jose to San Francisco to Oakland to Sacramento to Reno that doesn’t have out of control brush fires is San Francisco County, because it’s about 99% urban.

Elsewhere there are tens of thousands of people evacuated, and it might be 100,000+ by now. Nearer and dearer to my heart, tonight we’ve been watching the webcam (here) that looks over the Lick Observatory. It’s not looking good.

(Image: University of California Observatories / Lick Observatory)

The big dome’s the 3-meter telescope, with five others scattered around the peak near it. While the original observatory was build in 1888, the first observatory built on a mountain top, the current telescopes are still in use constantly.

Given all of the homes and lives threatened, I don’t know how many resources CalFire can put into defending Lick. Let’s pray that it’s enough.

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Filed under Astronomy, Disasters, Photography, Weather

August 18, 2020 · 22:51

Another Sunset

A little orange from all of the smoke, a little grey from some of the clouds.

A little pink from all of those fine particulates in the atmosphere.

The planet spins, the sun sets, only to rise again tomorrow. No matter how bad we mess things up, or how many stupid decisions we make.

Onward.

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Filed under Photography, Weather

August 17, 2020 · 20:58

Kelvin

It’s not just a ship in the Star Trek re-boot universe. (Although that opening scene, with George Kirk sacrificing himself to save his crew and family… Still a two-tissue opening for me!)

It’s also a measure of temperature, as you should remember from high school chemistry or physics.

I was surprised today to notice that on the Google News page, not only can you get the local five-day weather forecast in Fahrenheit and Celsius, but also in Kelvin.

Since my brain is thinking in Fahrenheit, the Kelvin figures match what it feels like in SoCal these days.

A balmy 314K tomorrow? We might need the A/C to work overtime. If the power stays on. And we’re not burning.

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Filed under Weather

August 16, 2020 · 21:55

Read Your Receipts

It could be that I’m the slowest and stupidest person on this particular bandwagon, but…

…do you read any of the fine print, or even the not-so-fine print at the bottom of your grocery store receipts?

I usually don’t. Unless there’s something that I want to check (“Did I get that 3 for the price of 4 special on Lucky Charms?”) I usually don’t look at it at all other than possibly to record the total.

But today…

So it’s not-so-small print. “Recall Notice – You may have purchased the product listed below.”

Let’s get real. Their computer gets our customer loyalty card account number every week so that we can get that special when we buy five boxes of Cheerios and pile up those fuel points to use to get gas. Their computer knows EXACTLY what I bought. Their computer knows what I bought, what minute I bought it, and what product was out on the floor at that time. Their computer is giving me this warning because it’s 99.999% sure that I bought that recalled onion.

Three thoughts:

First, on one level it’s creepy as hell that they can do this while on another level (from someone who has designed databases and written programs in my sordid past) this is trivially easy so OF COURSE they can do this! When you buy Brand A detergent and you get a coupon for Brand B, do you think that’s an accident?

Secondly, given that ability, it’s pretty great that they’re giving us this warning rather than just having it buried out there in a two-second news segment at midnight on a channel I don’t watch or buried off in an online news article from a source I don’t pay any attention to. That’s very helpful and I guess I should be reading the receipt more often, right?

Finally – WHY THE HELL DIDN’T THEY TELL US SOONER? If we’re going to take it as a given that they have all of this data, I’ll guarantee that they have my phone number, my email address, my home address, my mailing address, and probably my shoe size, inseam, and current blood pressure readings. We’ve already eaten the possibly contaminated onions, probably ate them two or three weeks ago. If they found out about this sometime weeks ago, instead of waiting until now to have something stuck on the bottom of a three-foot long receipt, why couldn’t I have gotten a text or email or phone call weeks ago?

If I’m going to sacrifice any semblance of privacy and sell my digital soul to the big corporate grocer in the sky, can I at least ask to get some efficiency and timeliness in the one small benefit that I might get out of it?

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul

August 15, 2020 · 23:52

Pyrocumulonimbus

As predicted, the temps went way up today. The reading in the van is always a few degrees high when it stretches into the extreme range, but it was 108° according to WeatherUnderground.

Which meant that the fires in the area went ballistic.

Even from Camarillo Airport, forty miles away, the pyrocumulonimbus clouds were seen growing all afternoon.

While cumulonimbus clouds are thunderstorms that grow from solar heating of moist air, forcing it to rise, cool, and form towering clouds that can go up tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere, pyrocumulonimbus clouds get their energy from a really large fire. The fire literally creates its own weather.

Including tornadoes. In this case, fire tornadoes.

While fire tornadoes are seen near really huge fires, this is the first time there’s been one big enough, lasting long enough, and heading out on its own away from the fire so that the National Weather Service had to issue a tornado, or in this case, a fire tornado alert.

If you had that on your 2020 Apocalypse Bingo Card, you’re a winner!

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Filed under Photography, Tornadoes, Weather

August 14, 2020 · 22:21

Dusk Clouds

Yesterday I had pictures of afternoon clouds, the first we’ve seen in weeks and weeks.

These are the clouds from dusk yesterday, just before it gets so dark that you can’t get the camera to autofocus on them. The color gradients are fantastic as the cloud layers lower down are grey, in shadow, while the layers higher up are still catching the odd sunbeam just as the sun disappears.

Today, as predicted, we had 103° here, with temps as high as 109° up in the Central Valley and in the mountains where the brush fires are burning.

And also as predicted, the relative humidity has dropped back down into the teens and the wind has picked up. For tomorrow it’s supposed to be even hotter, with no let up in sight. Bad, bad news for those on the front lines fighting the fires.

What that also means is power shortages as everyone who has air conditioning has it cranked up to eleven. Already tonight Pacific Gas & Electric up in Northern California and Southern California Edison down here are instituting rolling blackouts. A quarter million folks at a time will lose power for an hour or so, then the next group, then the next…

So far we haven’t heard any notices of rolling blackouts from LA Department of Water & Power, but we have to assume they’re coming. If you’re like me and on the computer (or multiple computers) all day long, remember the cardinal rule – save early and often!!

 

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Filed under Photography, Weather

August 13, 2020 · 23:33

Afternoon Clouds

What’s been great for comet watching and ISS watching has been an almost total and complete lack of clouds for months.

Not today. We woke up to it being gloomy and grey, with scattered showers. (We didn’t see a drop.)

Apparently it’s the leftovers from Hurricane Elida, churning as a Category 2 storm off of Cabo San Lucas, a thousand miles to our south.

By afternoon the gloomy part had given way to white, puffy, happy little clouds from horizon to horizon.

And humidity. Something that we don’t have a lot of, but were grateful for today. There are several large fires forty to sixty miles to our east and north, right on the edge of the Los Angeles metro area, and the humidity helps keep the fire from spreading so quickly.

Those clouds on the horizon are neither white, puffy, happy, or in fact, water. That’s smoke.

Tomorrow and into the weekend it promises to dry back out, kick up the winds, and push up into triple digits. Hang on to your hats.

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Filed under Photography, Weather

August 12, 2020 · 23:50

Remember Being Bored?

Remember when every day was a whole lot like every other day and there was a serious boredom factor involved and we wished for a little excitement?

Yeah, about that.

Let’s get back to a little more boredom, a little less stress, a little bit more routine, a little bit more predictability.

Is that too much to ask?

The critters are doing their part. Look out in the back yard – the lizards are lounging, the mockingbirds are mocking (it’s right there in their job description!), the finches are finching, the bunnies are bunnying…

How about we humans get with the program? Before the powers that be just reboot the planet by sending in that 900 gigaton iron ore meteor at .99C to solve the problem once and for all.

I know that the “Giant Meteor 2020!” bumper sticker is funny, but can I request “Boredom/Ennui 2020” as the ticket I would fully support?

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Politics