There is much that ails us as a society. There are many diseases, both literal and figurative, that rot us from the core.
I ran across something that I see not as one of those diseases, but merely a symptom. I don’t know how to solve it.
Charity auction, among the items are concert tickets with meet & greets with the artists.
When the winning bid on the Jonas Brothers concert is almost ten times the winning bid on the Incubus concert, we might not deserve to survive.
Just sayin’.
Still not sure if it’s “THE FUTURE!!” or the greatest techie Ponzi scheme of all time.
I’m leaning heavily toward the latter.
Filed under Photography
For decades California has had their primary in June, by which time the Presidential candidates had long since been chosen. Now they’ve moved the date up to Super Tuesday, so we got to vote today.
In addition, Los Angeles County has done a 52-pick up with the election process. Instead of having specific polling places with ink marks on paper ballots (and usually five to ten minute waits) we now have a small fraction of the number of polling places and they’re “Voting Centers” open for about ten days before the election. Piece of cake, you can vote any time in that ten days or so! Right?
Except they didn’t do a good job of advertising that, so 99% of us thought that today was the day. So we were all in line. Some of those lines got long.
The good news was that you could go to any “Voting Center” in the county, and it’s a big county. I didn’t have to drive all the way back home and get there at 7:00 or 7:30 and then wait for a couple of hours. I went to a place just a few blocks from the office, got there at 5:30, and then didn’t have more than about a 45 minute wait.
The process itself also changed completely. We got what was basically an almost legal-sized sheet of heat sensitive paper, which had some QR codes on it for security, which then got fed into a station with a touch screen about twice the size of my iPad. The touch screen process was easy, once it was done I got to confirm my choices, it printed out on the sheet, I got to review the sheet, then fed it back in to be stored. Interesting. Easy peasy.
Secure? Who knows?
But there were a couple of notable sights in the line:
A teenager with her grandmother. It looked like the teen was voting for the first time, while her grandmother must have been in her 80’s. Maybe it was her great-grandmother. But it was interesting to watch them go through the sample ballot and other materials to discuss the judges, measures, and the Presidential candidates.
There were signs all over for people who were just dropping off their mail-in ballots. No need to stand in line for that, so just bypass the line and go in. At one point a mom came in with a little girl. They were working their way through the crowded hallway and the little girl was real upset, worried that they were “cutting” the line and all of us would be mad at them. (We weren’t.)
Compared to other locations in LA County it was a breeze and not unpleasant. But let’s face it – it was a white, upscale neighborhood with a 35-40 minute wait. And our machines worked. Apparently there were plenty of other places where it was not so pleasant, the wait was 3-4 hours, and the machines didn’t work all the time.
Was it secure?
Good question.
Did my candidate win?
I’m sure she didn’t.
Filed under Los Angeles, Politics
After the Ives 3rd, during intermission, setting up for Dvorak’s 9th last week.
Yes, it is that beautiful.
And the acoustics are better.
Filed under Los Angeles, Music, Photography
The Disney Concert Hall is an amazing, beautiful building, designed by the genius Frank Gehey. It offers an almost endless variety of views of sweeping lines, both interior and exterior, and vast interior spaces.
These are the escalators that lead down into the parking garages, opening at top to the balconies leading to the upper level seats.
Gorgeous!
Filed under Los Angeles, Music, Photography
It’s February 29th, which doesn’t happen that often, so I figured I might comment in my unique and inimitable style. But first, what did I have to say about this unusual date four years ago? Oddly, pretty much NOTHING AT ALL about the date, but a bunch of really nice pictures of Clay Lacy’s DC-3.
It’s no doubt an amazing aircraft, but… Leap Day? Nothing?
Okay, so let’s make up for that a bit. Acknowledging that it’s a day that only comes once every four years and even then not in years evenly divided by 100 unless it’s also a year evenly divisible by 400 (a good summary here), the random synapse firing that occurred to my somewhat sleep deprived brain was along the lines of, “That’s messy. I don’t like it. Why don’t we fix it?”
And by “fix it” of course, I’m not talking about coming up with some weird and unique calendar that somehow does away with that quarter of a day (“ish”) that’s extra. I’m talking about moving the planet’s orbit so that it’s a precisely even number of days long.
Go big or go home!
Since the Earth’s orbit takes it around the Sun in 365.25 days, the easiest way to get to an even integer would be to get rid of the 0.25 days. Moving the Earth closer to the Sun would make it orbit faster, so it would be easier to go to 365 days than to 366.
But…
If we go to a precise 365 day orbit, all of those folks born on February 29th would never, ever again have a birthday. Plus, of course, by moving the Earth closer to the Sun when we’re already destroying it with climate change would mean that we’ll fry and die that much sooner, so maybe that would be a second negative on that plan.
Plus, with a 365 day year, we still have that somewhat annoying “extra” day in there that means that if this year your birthday is on a Monday, next year it will be on a Tuesday, and the year after that a Wednesday, and so on. Still messy.
So let’s move the Earth even closer to the Sun and give it a 364-day orbit! This solves the calendar problem completely! Thirteen months of 28 days each! Uniformity! Standardization! Easy to remember!
Oh, right, it’s also boring. We would also fry and die a LOT faster, which most days I would consider to be bad thing, but frying and dying fast while being bored is so, so much worse.
Instead, I think we’ll have to move the Earth’s orbit out, away from the sun. This gives us a slightly longer year while simultaneously helping to cool the planet so that we can continue sans guilt to burn fossil fuels like they’re going out of style.
Moving out to a precise 366-day orbit doesn’t give us a fantastic, evenly divisible calendar. We would have to go out to a 372-day orbit to do that, and that might be far enough away from the Sun that we would freeze to death slowly instead of frying and dying quickly, so let’s table that idea.
No, the 366-day orbit gets my vote. It makes permanent leap years, which we’re already used to. We’ve all seen tons of February 29ths – now we would just see them every year.
We would also still have an annual variance in respect to which dates fall on which days of the week. The 366-day calendar gives us 52 weeks plus two days, but since there are seven days in a week, the match of days of the week to dates on the calendars would repeat every seven years. In other words, if your birthday was on Monday this year it would be on Wednesday in 2021, on Friday in 2022, on Sunday in 2023, on Tuesday in 2024, on Thursday in 2025, on Saturday in 2026, and again on Monday in 2027.
A little bit regular, but not boring!
(And saving the world in good measure!)
I hope that someone gets right on this.
Filed under Astronomy, Deep Thoughts, Paul
(Click to embiggenate to the max)
Standing on the corner of 1st Street & Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles last night. The Disney Concert Hall is at the left, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (the south end of the Music Center) on the right. Just off to the far right of this view, down the hill, is the iconic Los Angeles City Hall.
The Ives 3rd Symphony was interesting, particularly after watching much of a pre-concert talk being given in the DCH lobby about Ives. There is so much I don’t know about him or his music. I’ll have to correct that.
The Dvorak 9th Symphony (the “New World” Symphony) was beyond words, spectacular, amazing, fantastic, ausgezeichnet, mind blowing… To hear it in that almost acoustically perfect space, with the LA Philharmonic giving it their all, and the energetic Gustavo Dudamel conducting… If you can listen to that without being moved to tears of joy, we probably can’t be friends.
Even if you’re not a classical music fan… Even if you can’t see it at the Disney Concert Hall or its like… Even if you can’t see it performed by the LA Philharmonic or an equivalent group… Even if it’s a high school band in the gym and you’re only there because your hair dresser’s kid is playing third flute…
Go see the New World Symphony performed live. It’s a bucket list item.
Filed under Los Angeles, Music, Panorama, Photography
Dvorak’s to be specific.
Dvorak’s 9th and Ives’ 3rd. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while.
I expect it to be spectacular!
Filed under Los Angeles, Music, Photography
Taken the same day as last week, just a different view.
(Click to enlarge)
From left to right, the A6M3 Zero, the P-51 Mustang, the F8 Bearcat, the (red) F-24, and the F6 Hellcat.
Filed under CAF, Panorama, Photography
There it is! I mentioned last night that I could see the one-day old crescent moon just barely above the horizon. Tonight it had climbed a bit and was easily visible with Venus.
About forty minutes later, after I had gotten my haircut, it was fully dark, but the moon was still above the hills and billboards. If you zoom in, even with this cheezy iPhone picture (which, let’s admit, has a pretty amazing camera in it as much as I might make jest), you can see the outline of the almost New Moon illuminated by Earthshine.
For the record, NO ONE in the shopping center was admiring the sight. and EVERYONE was wondering who the geek with the nice haircut was taking pictures of the sky while standing in traffic.
We know the answer to that one, don’t we?
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 