Smoke and Mirrors

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I've just been learning some things about smoke detectors. Were you aware that most actually have a small amount of a radioactive element in them? Any that use ionization will have some kind of radioactive source. (Now there are also optical detectors which use light to detect the smoke, but these are more expensive so you're not going to find them as often.) Now checking out Wikipedia the most common radioactive element used is americium-241 (which denotes the isotope of americium with an atomic weight of 241). This element doesn't occur in nature and was first created in 1944.

NaNoWriMo

I just finished my novel's first draft. The books is tentatively called Mr. and Mrs. Gumshoe and the case of A Death in Death Valley.

So now I can get by to my regularly scheduled life.

Made in America

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This year for Thanksgiving we're going to try to serve foods that originally came from the Americas. Not as any kind of political statement, but as a reminder of how many of our foods came from America. For example turkey, that's fine since the wild turkey is a native North American bird. So what else should be include?

Stuck in Lodi

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Being well away of the danger (thanks, Credence Clearwater Revival) I went to Lodi for the Sandhill Crane festival. They have had a festival for the Sandhill Crane for the last 16 years. Their goal is to bring awareness to this large but little known bird.

Death Valley Days

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I've been doing a lot of thinking about Death Valley lately. I've been working on a big writing project dealing with Death Valley in the early 20^th Century. Actually it's a musical (working with Gary Mazzola) which I'm going to be working on for a while yet. And I've got another project I'm getting ready to start which will deal with a fictional event taking place in Death Valley in the 1930s. 

Fair is Fair

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The Kern County Fair just recently ended where Sharon Wood and I participated in some of the food contests. Now for many of these events (most baking and all preserved foods) you have to be signed up back in August though there are some you can sign up for the day of the event (such as pies and some cakes). But we tried several things, from jams and jellies to breads and pies. And we did OK.

Hidden Causative Agents

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The world is full of causes and effects. The wind blows and the trees sway. The wind blowing causes the tree to sway. The wind is the causative agent. Now biologically there is a strong adaptive reason for being able to recognize causative agents. If you're a monkey and a tree branch moves it is useful to be able to tell if the branch moved due to wind or if the branch moved due to a snake or other predator.

Hologram from Izzy

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Izzy Asher recently gave me a gift of a bolo tie. He'd wanted to give me one with stars in it. That sounded cool, and when I saw it, it was indeed pretty cool. And then he explained how it was a one of a kind. He'd made it out of an old TV picture tube and a bag with holograms of stars on it. “Recycled”, he said. Wow.

Better Angels

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I've just recently finished Steven Pinker's new book The Better Angels of Our Nature. This is a large book covering what many people may feel to be a mythological topic. The subtitle is “Why Violence Has Declined”. Yes, violence has indeed declined. 

Little Fuzzy

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There is a mathematical concept called “fuzzy sets”. Normally in mathematics (or logic) an object either belongs to a set, or it does not. If we talk about (counting) numbers the concept of an even number is precise enough that a number either is even or it isn't. But in everyday thinking we are constantly dealing with things that aren't so simply categorized.

Happy Birthday Woody

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On July 14^th 1912 Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Okemah Oklahoma. Now virtually no one knows him by that name. We just know him as Woody. Every year on the weekend closest to his birthday, there is a folk music festival held in his old home town. This year was the 15^th annual Woodyfest. The festival celebrates Woody's life and music. And I was lucky enough to get to go again this year.

Lucky 10,000

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Recently the web comic xkcd (xkcd.com/1053) had a comic about things “everyone knows”. There are so many things that we think “everybody knows” it can be easy to be surprised when we run across someone that doesn't know. For example everyone knows what happens when you put Mentos in Diet Coke. 

Tripping Through Time

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We are all the product of our times and cultures. But our ability to read and write, both history and fiction, gives us the opportunity to look back at other times and cultures. The presuppositions we have come from our culture, but these are always in flux. There is a constant struggle between change and stasis. 

Patris Dies

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Sometimes I seem to have vast holes in my memory. But with Father's Day coming up I've been thinking back to some of the events my Dad and I have shared. My Dad has always had a wide variety of interests. And he helped me develop my wide variety of interests too. 

Venus Transit

The Transit of Venus took place June 5th. A transit is where a planet goes between its star and the observer. So Venus was going to go between us and the Sun.

I still had available the solar observing telescope that was used for the eclipse a couple of weeks ago. This time set up in my backyard here in Tehachapi.

The transit started in the mid afternoon and continued through early evening. The usual Tuesday Poetry group gathered in my backyard and watched the transit. Then went inside and created poems inspired by the event that won't be seen again until 2117.

Here is an image of the transit, projected through the telescope onto the white metal screen of the solar observing system. The black dot on the image of the Sun is Venus.

 The citizen science group planethunters.org uses changing light levels as a way of detecting transits of extra-solar planets, that is, planets around other stars.

(Almost) Sunless Day at the Beach

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On May 20^th I went up north to try to catch the annular eclipse. Since the eclipse was to start after 4:00 PM we set out at 9:00 AM for the seven hour drive to Lake Tahoe. The GPS was quite confused at first but we headed up the 395 looking for wildflowers and gawking at geology. 

Got 10 Minutes?

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Just about everyone has a story. And you have, right now, an opportunity to tell it. The Tehachapi Community Theatre Playwright's Festival is entering it's first phase. This is the ten minute play festival that has been going on for the past three years. This year the festival is expanding to two weekends. 

Sunspot 1476

Right now on the Sun is a huge sunspot. This one is designated 1476. Using an inexpensive Tasco Telescope with a solar projection attachement I've gotten an image of the sunspot. (Don't ever look at the sun through a telescope, or even a camera without the correct filters. And if you don't know they are the correct ones they aren't.)

For more information you can check out the article at Space.com.

Annular Event

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Not “annual”. Annular. Though we get both words from the Latin, annual means yearly, annular means in the form of a ring. 

Solar eclipses occur when the Moon moves between the Earth and Sun blocking out the Sun for a brief period of time. As a side note, solar eclipses can only occur during a “new” moon. Which makes sense since the side facing us can't be getting any sunlight. 

Script Frenzy 2012

In April I took part in the annual Script Frenzy. That is a challenge to write 100 pages of scripted materials during the month of April.  Well, I did it. 103 pages total in two scripts. One a 10-minute play called NIMBY and the second a screenplay for a B-movie. So I "won" my challenge and can display the fact with the logo below.

Now if I can only find someone to buy the script.

National Poetry Month

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I have written poetry for many years. I have at least one that I wrote back in 1978. A fairly sappy thing called “The Unicorn”. At some point I'm going to have to bring myself to share it with people again. 

Who Gets the Dawn?

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In The Lion in Winter, the king and queen contest the succession to the throne of England. (I had to give a mention to the Tehachapi Community Theatre play that will still have a few shows when you read this.) And they bounce between a shortsighted “who's ahead now” and long term historical thinking. And we too, often think in the short term. Yet when we reach a point when our problems loom large, we wonder how we could have reached this point.

In Like a Lion

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Literature has loved the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. And the people making up the English royal family. There are many stories of Robin Hood with the characters of Prince John and Richard the Lionhearted in the background as villain and savior respectively. Ivanhoe too, tells of this same time. Henry II's children have had a lasting impact on stories we read and see growing up here in America. We've had movies, plays and books about Richard and the Crusades. Cartoons about Robin Hood. The name “Prince John” brings up a very definite image.

Anachronistic

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When you treat history like a science, or when you're doing a historical science (like geology), things that are out of place in time are important pieces of data. Things that are out of place in time are known as anachronisms. This would be like finding fossil cows mixed in with a herd of dinosaurs. You just never find those things together at the same time. And you'd never find disco music in the soundtrack of a movie made in the 50s.

Historical

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Things have been happening here on Earth for around four billion years. Most of the things that have happened during that time were unobserved. And for most of the things that have happened that have been observed, no one has bothered to note them down.

Getting caught up

Between work and the play (The Lion in Winter) I've barely kept up with getting articles done. Let alone putting them here on the blog. So the next few entries are me getting caught up on those. I should be able to do better, and perhaps post more often now.

Billions and Billions

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Back when I was teaching one of may favorite things was to answer questions. Sometimes you can just get by with the facts. But a lot of the time, when you're working on getting someone to understand some mathematical concept (or any other concept, I'm sure), you need to nudge them in a way that works for them. And people think differently. So to help them understand, you have to answer the same question different ways for different people.

To Thine Own Self

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Here in the new year, some of the events I've attended encouraged us to come up with a slogan for the new year. Something more general than a resolution, but a thought to guide oneself through the year. So I have selected the slogan of: “To thine own self be true”.