How much of our world is random? How much can be planned for and foreseen?
(Image from RandomOrg app)
How much control can we have and how much do we just think (incorrectly) we have?
Despite all of our best efforts and intentions, how much is every decision just a bet with incomplete information and inaccurate assumptions?
And most importantly, does it matter? Do we just need to push on, doing our best, getting up when we’re knocked down, refusing to give up even when we know the game is random at best, rigged against us at worst, because for all of that it’s still the only game in town?
Yep, one of those deep thought nights. Sorry for being boring and “emo.” Just doing the best I can and pushing on.
But it would be nice every now and then to get a clue that it’s all working and not just a completely random outcome of 13,700,000,000 years of molecular Brownian motion and a handful of laws of physics.
I guess that’s what religion is for, and we all I know I’m not going down THAT road. Been there. Done that. It’s worse.
“What happened to all of the bird pictures?” I hear you asking. (No, really, I hear it.) Good question. “Life,” would be the answer, but said in character as Marvin the Paranoid Android (aka Marvin the Manically Depressed Robot).
But there are plenty of unseen bird pictures from earlier in the year, including a couple that I’ve never shown, so here you go!
I’ve only ever seen this guy four, maybe five times, and I’ve only gotten decent pictures twice. He’s a Spotted Towhee.
We have LOTS of California Towees. They’re pretty plain looking, dark, dark brown or gray.
The Spotted Towhee is quite stunning in comparison to their California cousins.
Black head, brownish-red belly, white band at the throat, black and white speckled back.
This one was living in our bushes for a month or two, from late April to mid July.
Not sure why this one moved on, especially given all of the free seed that gets scattered about every day.
However, since I only ever saw the one male, perhaps even daily free means wasn’t enough incentive to keep him here when female companionship was needed.
He obviously didn’t mind sharing the dinner table (i.e., the back yard) with the squirrels, mourning doves, California Towhees, juncos, and other residents.
I’ll keep an eye out. Maybe he’ll come back with a female that he’s regaled with tails of a California paradise.
And yet that new iPhone 13 “night mode” camera takes a pretty decent photo without even a tripod…
Jupiter at top, just left of center, Saturn just a scooch above center to the left of the tree, the quarter moon setting between the tree and the house. Various other stars visible if you click on the image to blow the whole thing up to full sized.
No tripod, so this image shows a little blur and jiggle – but as I said, everything is in motion.
The Moon in its orbit around the Earth has now moved to be visible at this time of night. The Earth has rotated so that we’re in night. The trees are all blowing in 16 knot winds, gusting to 24 knots, so they’re waving about a bit. And I’m trying to hold the phone/camera as still as possible while standing in those winds as a faux tripod.
I’m a little tired and fried tonight (been an odd weekend for lack of a better term) so I’ll share one mind-blowing factoid that I learned this weekend. I even double checked to make sure it wasn’t a silly meme thing designed to see how many folks would fall for it. Ready?
Historically and chronologically, Cleopatra lived closer to today than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
Wow!
I know that in a very general sense, I figured they were sort of concurrent. At least, within a few hundred, maybe a thousand years. That’s a pretty broad range. And I’m handicapped by having an American education.
But Cleopatra lived from 69 BCE to 30 BCE, roughly 2,180 years ago (to her birth). Where the Great Pyramid of Giza was started around 2,550 BCE, and finished about 2,500 BCE.
Another quick, impromptu test of what the iPhone 13 will do. I was out in the yard, catching up on some cleanup work and I had been hearing the hawks for a few minutes. Just like the soundtrack of the establishing shot in every Western movie ever made…
I heard them getting closer, so pulled the phone out, put it in video mode and started recording. No tripod, no instructions, just let’s see what happens. Here’s a 10-second shot that I edited out, when the pair was right overhead and maybe 300-400 feet up.
The sound isn’t overwhelming, but turn it up and watch it in full screen mode. Right around the four-second mark, when the second hawk flys in from the top, you can hear them calling.
It doesn’t suck for a five minute break from yard work.
I got a new camera yesterday and got it set up. I’ve been taking some test pictures to start.
This camera has been talked about a lot recently as folks anticipated its availability – they weren’t kidding! I just saw these images from the full-sized files on my desktop monitors. STUNNING!
These were all taken with just the ambient light from inside the houses and a couple of street lights. The street light in our front yard that’s been the bane of my existence (when I’ve been taking pictures of ISS passes) is out. It’s dark out there.
Poking through the clouds up there is Jupiter. Mind you, I haven’t done anything yet to learn about all of the features and settings on this camera. If you think these are cool, wait until I actually learn how to use it! All I did for these was push the button and see what happens. I didn’t even use a tripod, so the fact that these aren’t blurry or jiggly is amazing to me.
Again, Jupiter’s the bright one, Saturn is the one closest to the right edge, and if you blow this up to full sized you’ll see all kinds of stars it captured. And all I did was hold it while standing in my back yard and push the button.
What’s even MORE amazing about this camera is that it’s got two more lenses. These were taken with the regular lens, but there’s also a telephoto and a wide angle lens built in. Fun times ahead playing with those!
Oh, yeah, and this camera also has a small supercomputer built in, as well as wi-fi, bluetooth, it shows me TV, movies, streaming video, has a whole slew of business apps, GPS and maps, connects to the internet, can keep a huge music library as well as hundreds if not thousands of books, health apps, and on and on and on.
In my pre-teen days the latest and greatest was COLOR TV! NBC had “The Wonderful World of Disney” (not to be confused with ABC’s “The Wide World of Sports”) which was good, wholesome, family fare for Sunday night. It also helped sell more than a few of those color television sets.
One of the “classics” that we got repeatedly was “Pollyanna.” If we saw it in the theaters in 1960 I don’t remember it (I was only four) but I remember seeing it a couple times a year by the mid-60s. Which was fine – my pre-pubescent little hormones knew something was going on whenever Hayley Mills was on the screen and I was still in Catholic school and a couple years away from the start of my rebel, “they tried to teach me WHAT??!!” phase, so Pollyanna’s upbeat attitude no matter what happened went in one ear, rattled around a bit, and came out the other side none the worse for wear.
(What I didn’t like was my many siblings calling me “Pollyanna,” which came from their usually calling me “Pauley,” which I hate to this day. But what are siblings for if not torturing their older brother?)
This morning I was thinking about one of the themes of the story and one of the related plot devices, the Glad Game. I was having my teeth cleaned and examined (AGAIN!) with more things being found wrong and more poking and prodding and asking, “Does that hurt?” as I levitate three feet above the chair, sort of like Linda Blair with a little paper bib. In addition, laying there with that spotlight they use shining in my eyes, the “temporary” floaters in both eyes now were swimming around like a Busby Berkeley routine, and when trying to hold still my legs were cramping to remind me that they were still there. In that environment, it was tough to find a reason to be glad, just because. But I tried anyway.
I decided that while getting older might be a better alternative that the primary other option (i.e., death) it was starting to get to be a real pain in the ass. And all of the treatments I’m having rammed down my throat (eating better, exercising, losing weight, patience) are not in my wheelhouse. I keep getting told that they’re going to work eventually and the effort will have been worth it, and Pollyanna would no doubt believe that and be on that Peloton bike or climbing that hill every day while eating a granola bar and drinking pressed milkweed juice and singing the whole way.
Pollyanna needs to get real. This sucks.
I’m ready to go anti-Pollyanna. AP. Maybe pronounce it as “ape.” I’m going to “go ape.” The main aspect of which will be that I will be cranky every single day.
I’ll probably keep on doing the eating better, exercising, and losing weight. But I draw the line at “patience.” Enough is enough. Substitute in “cranky” for me.
Prior to last night’s little episode with lightning & thunder (which almost blew me into next month), the approaching storm gave a fantastic display of mammatus clouds just before it got dark.
Usually seen at the bottom of a cumulonimbus cloud, they’re a sign of a huge amount of turbulence above as opposing updrafts and downdrafts in the clouds churn the air.
The name comes from their sack-like appearance, looking like breasts hanging down from the clouds. As a pilot, I would avoid flying underneath.
We don’t see these out in this part of the world often, so this was a treat. This particular storm cell was just starting to drop some light rain, and it had moved on and wasn’t responsible for the lighting and thunder later, but with this sort of activity building you can bet that it lit up the skies up over Ventura and Santa Barbara counties later.
What stood out in a wider view is the distinct difference in the cloud’s appearance across the bottom. On the right you see it smooth and fairly featureless where rain was starting to fall and obscure the mammatus formations above it.
But on the left you can still see up through a hole in the rain layer to the higher formation in the cloud. I was surprised to see that foundry so clearly defined.
Mammatus clouds – a good sign that meteorological mischief is afoot. And maybe a good time to get inside, or at least under the porch awning, and off of the golf course or lawn.
Sort of out of nowhere today the weather kicked up over the Catalina Channel to our south and a series of fairly good sized thunderstorm cells started drifting north over the Los Angeles basin. We don’t get that sort of weather often, maybe once every couple of years at best, and often even when we do, the storms tend to drift inland into Riverside and San Bernardino Counties and miss us over here at the far west end of Los Angeles County.
Not today.
It’s no secret that I absolutely ❤ LOVE ❤ rain and thunderstorms. So when they started coming in, I grabbed a whole slew of cameras and gear over the evening to take pictures of the clouds (some fantastic pictures of mammatus clouds right over head), to listen to the rain, wind, and thunder, and to try to catch lightning strikes on video.
Eventually about 20:30 there was a good sized cell sitting just to our south.
(Image from NOAA High-Def Weather Radar app)
Sitting out in the back yard, listening to the rain pounding on the back porch roof and the howling of the wind, seeing the flashes of lightning, this (long-ish, 4:31 total) clip ends (at 3:36) with a HUGE boomer. That was a good one!
A little later things had fired up again and a couple of big thunder boomers had rattled the house, so I took my iPhone out into the front. Another cell was coming in south of Calabasas, so I started recording. It was raining pretty hard, so I stayed on the porch, but then I couldn’t see the sky real well, so I decided to walk down to the garage door, figuring I could lean against the garage and stay pretty much out of the rain, but still have a good view of the sky. Just as I got there, at about 0:55 in this clip, and turned around… (I urge caution if you’re listening with headphones or earbuds or have the volume turned up!!)
BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!
How I managed to not clear out the deepest darkest corner of my obscenity directory, I’ll never know. How I managed to not come in with brown jeans when I went out with blue jeans, I’ll never know.
Curious, once I got my heart rate back down into double digits, while editing the video I checked a few figures on the timeline.
The frame where the bolt struck, at 1:02977 seconds.
The frame where the sound hit, at 1.04070 seconds.
That’s an elapsed time of 1.093 seconds. With the speed of sound being 1100 feet per second, that means that the bolt hit somewhere down the street 1,202 feet away.
That’s a really high “pucker factor.”
Furthermore, look at the soundtrack magnified way, way up:
About 1/20 second before the sound hit, there’s this.
An extremely vivid part of my memory of the event is that the incredibly bright flash hit, but in that 1.093 seconds between the strike and the sound I very distinctly heard a frying or sizzling noise, almost like someone on the roof right above me had a big sheet of cellophane and was crumbling it up into a ball. I think this is that sound. Why I would hear it separate from the “BOOOOOOM!” and every so slightly earlier, I don’t know.
Looking at the map shows more waves of showers building to the south and headed our way…
(Image from RandomOrg app)
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 