It's a dog's life

Today is men-at-work day on the Daily Photo blog sites (such as London Daily Photo and Paris Daily Photo). Inspired by Ham's work in London, I offer a small contribution: the Horse Guards Under Stress. These poor guys have a job to do, and they have to do it with a straight face even as they're being undermined by swarms of motivated tourists. This poor guy is working on Christmas day. Or was it Boxing Day? It was a long flight and I'm rather confused on the point. It's a cold, rainy holiday night, and he's got to keep that stiff upper lip. I think they had even retired the horses for the night. Wouldn't want to send a horse out on a knight like this, eh?

Happy Birthday, Charles!

Today, 12 Feb 2007, is the 198th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. I struggled to find a photo of mine that might do him honor, but no joy. I did find a nice (spliced) photo of the Pont du Gard, a Roman aqueduct built in France, and I hope that Charles would appreciate how we humans have advanced from rock-stackers (wonderful and talented but still stackers of rocks) to elegant carvers of rock - etchers of silicon, to be exact. I find this change of scales to be an interesting metaphor of our evolution.

Two thousand years ago, it was a major achievement to build an enormous aqueduct that could channel water across miles and miles to provide a city with an essential of life and to power the fountains that would enchant their hearts. Today we can channel electrons across little cities of transistors, creating anything from pacemakers that maintain life itself or create games that fritter it away. I know two people undergoing cancer treatment now, and it is amazing they can be treated - it wasn't that long ago that cancer would have been untreatable, and now we talk about survival in years or decades. This all relates back to Darwin because it is his simple little theories that help explain how we developed to the point where we can even affect the climate of an entire planet. Let's hope we have also developed to the point where we can reverse the effects of our earlier simplicity.

Armchair travel

I own a domain (actually a couple) - pretty easy to do these days, at about $10 each per year. I have configured the domains such that any received email not sent to a legitimate user gets forwarded to me as the domain owner. I get some mail that needs to be forwarded, usually due to name confusion. In the last month or so, there seems to be a new virus out in the world, because I am getting a huge number of "delivery failure" messages. The message I see is usually a "reply" to a supposed sender message informing me that the message cannot be delivered because of the contents (virus), but occasionally because the destination address is defunct or full. The supposed sender is some bogus user within my domain - not only a fictitious user, but often something completely bizarre (e.g., "fl8noj12" or "bz8ankladfy" - not even a phat name from some haxxor). My guess is that a virus is out there, sending mail using my domain to create a seemingly legitimate email address and hoping to capture someone who opens the mail.

The messages come from all sorts of interesting domains - .ru, .jp, .kr, and so on. Had I been clever, I would have put up a map with pins in it.

Spam - It Brings the World Together(TM).

Whole lot of shakin' going' on?

The news is reporting that we are to have an earthquake this coming week. The Globe and Mail headline says "B.C. put on alert for huge quake"; as British Columbia is but a few short miles north of here and we can see Vancouver Island on a clear day (from the right vantage point), I think we'll be in on the party should one arrive.

Update: Hey, look what happened 307 years ago, on 26 Jan 1700: an earthquake... of magnitude 9.

The Road Not Taken

We were snowshoeing in the area of Stevens Pass, WA. One of the fun bits of snowshoe hikes is that there's no trail. Rather, one can follow a trail or one can make a trail. We did some of both. In this case, we were making our own trail. The area in the photo is a little over an hour from Seattle on US Route 2 and around 4000 feet in altitude. It was a great day for a snowshoe hike - the weather wasn't too sunny (well, it was overcast, but not oppressively so), and the temperatures were in the upper 20's (Fahrenheit). There was a fresh layer of snow over a deep encrusted base. At the lunch stop, some of the guys dug a hole in the snow to see if it was suitable for building igloos. They went down about four feet, and the snow was fine. It was fun walking among the trees in the snow and it was very quiet. About all one could hear was my heavy breathing as I labored to keep up with the group...

Cool future

LG Electronics announced the availability of a a TV refrigerator equipped with digital multimedia features (in 2004, here) -- a computer in a refrigerator. The buzz in the industry has been that every appliance would eventually be connected to the Internet so you can turn on the oven from your car as you drive home. Or your refrigerator would detect that you're out of milk and automatically send an order to the grocery store. Or the refrigerator computer could give you seventeen recipes that use the contents of your refrigerator (chicken-fried-steak pizza with lime pickles and hummus, mmm, mmm, good!).

I've never really figured out the allure of this, but I have recently finally understood the real motive. It is both simpler than I thought - and deeper.

It's to keep the microprocessor cool.

Snow fooling

We've had an odd winter this year - wet, snowy, and windy are typical but they are hitting extremes. The struggle is retain a sense of balance and humor among the assaults thrown our way by Mother Nature. We don't normally get a lot of snow, but this rose struggled forward to overcome hardship. Although we lost the traditional blossom, this bit of visual poetry more than compensates.

Marketing

In a recent posting, The 2008 Democrat, Barry Lieba makes the observation that

a lot of politics is sales and marketing, and sales and marketing have many similarities across domains. Sell a car, sell a political platform, sell yourself to the voters... they have a lot in common.

This statement is more accurate and literal than most people believe. I hereby submit the following file for your consideration.

I took a technical marketing class at Bell Labs (BTL) in about 1985. Normally, I wouldn't sign up for such a topic, but my manager discovered a conflict after she enrolled and offered to let me have the slot. I took it, thinking maybe I would learn something about marketing. Did I ever. To teach the course, BTL flew in a professor from a Virginia university each week to present the course for eight weeks. The professor had invented a multivariate analysis technique that could turn consumer preferences as expressed in structured questionnaires into two-dimensional vectors that highlighted the differences among the choices. The professor offered "lite beer" as his best example. Historically, there were two basic beer choices - cheap stuff and regular beer. According to the professor, the group that drank the cheap stuff preferred to drink hard and alone. The group drinking the regular stuff preferred to drink in groups (sociable) but wanted something that tasted good. The cheap stuff didn't taste very good, and the regular stuff was too filling, not allowing them to drink for the duration of the social activities.

Sounding familiar yet?

The questionnaire had taken many dimensional variables (self-perception, sociability, activity/sport, taste, desire to get drunk, and so on) and remapped them into two dimensions. There were a few clusters of responses on the resulting 2D chart - clusters that represented existing drinkers satisfied with existing products, and a cluster representing customers with unmet needs. This last cluster became lite beer. Low in alcohol, allowing one to drink a (relatively) large volume without getting drunk, and distinctively flavorful. Pitch it to active, social people who perceive themselves as attractive to the opposite sex.

The professor did exactly the same analysis for his political candidate (Reagan) and his opponents (Democrats). He analyzed the candidates of interest and mapped them onto a 2D plane. He found that Senator John Glenn was the strongest competitor to Reagan and Mondale was the least. The resulting strategy was simple - ignore Glenn and respond vigorously to Mondale, exaggerating the differences. This had the effect of making Glenn irrelevant (Reagan couldn't even be bothered to respond, so how could Glenn be a credible opponent?) and pushing the Mondale caricature to prominance (Reagan was aghast that Mondale could seriously propose surrendering to the Soviets).

I don't think the above gives a sufficient explanation of the technique, but it's all the detail I can recall from the time. The point is that it was my first exposure to the blatent expression of the idea that Presidential candidates were to be sold like cheap beer. As we go through the process that leads to the selection of candidates for 2008, I hope - perhaps in vain - that we'll consider the candidates on the basis of their merits and not on the cynical manipulators who want us to look carefuly at the "New and Improved Label".

Note: it appears that Joe Owades is generally viewed as the inventor of lite beer.

Holidays have arrived

We'll be off in the land of the Angles and the Gauls. Happy holidays and a joyous new year!

Black pine

When our neighborhood was laid out, it seems that Black Pine was a popular tree for landscape designers. We have lines of them alternating with flowering plum trees along the white fencing at the south entrance to our subdivision. They're nice looking trees with a dark green color and a puffy appearance. Our local evergreens tend to be pointy and lighter in color, so it's a pleasant contrast. We don't shape them as is done in Japan - they just grow freely.

Sadly, the recent windstorm was not kind to the black pines. These trees completely blocked this entrance to the neighborhood. A second entrance was partially blocked. The wind blew from the south and, as one might expect, virtually all the fallen trees point to the north.



The black pines that faced the wind without an upwind deflector didn't hold. Those in north-south rows did reasonably well, but those in east-west rows fell hard. Smaller trees were more likely to survive, but the larger, more mature trees had too much sail area.

Based on the way they fell, the black pine has a shallow, broad root system. The trees that were pulled up showed roots that rarely went deeper than a foot and were typically half that. The roots were barely deeper than the sod. The breadth of the root system wasn't enough to compensate. It's not clear if the root depth is natural or is a consequence of the soil structure. The soils around here are generally poor. The glaciers scraped off most of the soil and pushed it elsehwere. When they retreated, they left sand, gravel, and clay. The builders added just enough topsoil to allow the plants to survive. But I would think that twenty years of growth would have given the trees deeper roots. The black pines are also denser than the native trees. As I look at the firs and cedars, they have a more lacy look to them. Stands of them get very dark, but individual trees are more open than the black pine. The successful trees bend with the wind and let it pass.

There will be a faction in the neighborhood that wants to replace the fallen trees with the same type. I will lobby for native trees that have shown they can withstand our blustery days.

Risky business

I am fascinated by the risks that we take in our daily lives. We pay extra for special bottled water to avoid the perceived risks of tap water. Driving is particularly challenging. We drive cars at high speeds without seatbelts fastened. We talk on cell phones, apply make-up, and hand things to the kids while driving in heavy traffic. A sample of the damage left by the recent windstorm is shown here. A tall tree, probably a Douglas Fir or a Western Red Cedar, is suspended above the roadway by power lines. Many people were quite happy to drive under that tree on their way to shopping or soccer. Personally, I drove over on the shoulder to avoid a chance collapse. I know the chance was remote, but I just didn't want "Zap!" to be my epitaph.

I should have taken more photos. The damage was -- is dramatic.

What was your name?

The Seattle/Tacoma bureau of the National Weather Service wants your help naming the storm that blew some many electrons out of Seattle. The announcement page is here or you can send mail to namethewindstorm@noaa.gov .

Reeling in the years

It's been a while since I posted. I started to think that the content was not interesting to the audience. I have finally realized that the audience is rather small - probably just me - and I can't impress or disappoint myself, so I may as well start again. (No, I can't explain - it made sense at the time.)

We've just come out of a long, dark period. A major storm blew through the metropolitan Seattle area a week ago - Thursday night, 14 December 2006. It started with a few hours of pouring rain, almost three inches - an amount we normally get in a month. This was followed by strong winds - sustained at 50 mph. Trees started falling.

Although our home was not hit by anything falling, there were hundreds of thousands of homes without power as trees struck power lines. Ours was one of the many dark ones. We spend Friday thinking power would be restored shortly and we could resume our normal lives for the weekend. Not so. We finally had power restored Tuesday morning. Fortunately, we have a fireplace, but we had to source firewood from friends and neighbors. The furnace was inop (electric fan for circulation), but the hot water heater worked (natural gas). Washing the dishes has never been so popular. We dug out our camping gear - sleeping bags, flashlights, lanterns, and so on.

Once power was restored, we quickly forgot the hardships and returned to our normal, posh life. Lights, heat, computers, music, and garage door openers. As the Horsey cartoon (Seattle P-I) says, there's a thin line between civilization and nature.

Arachnophobia

It is one of the great mysteries of life: from whence come spiders and insects? What is the origin of life itself? At the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, there were theories of spontaneous generation. When I check Wikipedia, it goes back to Aristotle who believed that aphids sprang from the dew on roses, mice from dirty hay, and (one would think) fruit flies from aging fruit. Clearly from this photo, Aristotle would think that spiders sprang from unused bathtubs.

The bathtub is in our summer cottage and the spiders just appear. It's not like there are masses of webs on the ceiling, with thousands of wannabe Charlottes angling and dangling for a chance at pictorial fame on Blogger. No! The ceiling is quite finished and well maintained. So from whence come all these spiders? Inquiring minds want to know!

The end of summer

These floats got a lot of use this summer. Many hands and feet disturbed their quiet drifting. Shouts and laughter surrounded them. Splashes and tumbles soaked them all afternoon and into the evening. But the days have turned cooler, shortening as the sun drifts lower each day. Soon the floats will be pulled out for the season and set aside to dry. When the rainy season ends and the water warms, they will be brought out again. The feet will be larger, the hands stronger, the splashes bigger. There will even be delicate new hands and feet touching the floats for the first time. But for now, quiet and solitute in the September sun.

Nightlight

When I fly, I like to get a seat with a view. It's not easy and a peek out the window can reveal little more than the top of a wing or the back of a jet engine. For some reason, everyone seems to think business travelers like aisle seats and on personal flights, the kids tend to get first choice. This usually leaves me sitting in the middle seat, sometimes on the aisle. On a June flight, I got a window with a view.

It was a long flight that arrived in Seattle around sunset. Because we were coming in from the southeast, the view was fantastic. I don't know if the pilot planned this (thank you!) or if we were just lucky, but we flew right past the north face of Mt. Rainier on our descent. We must have been around 15,000 feet because we were only looking down slightly on the 14,410-foot mountain.

Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?

We live in the Sammamish Valley, carved by the Sammamish Slough. Once a naturally meandering river, the Slough is now channelized and arrow-straight for miles. A couple times a year, it rises in a fruitless attempt to reclaim its natural domain. Fortunately for those living nearby, the planners were thoughtful and they placed mostly sod farms, vegetable farms, soccer fields, and a golf course nearby. There is some housing that encroaches on the Slough, and some industry, but they seem to have well-designed dikes.

Quite a meandering introduction, eh? But you have survived to the point: the valley is scenic. The Red Hook Brewery and the Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery are at the north end of the valley. Somebody decided it would be a good place to run a balloon. The winds are generally northernly (out of the north), so they start at the north end of the valley and drift south. The balloons are surprisingly silent (except for the roar of the propane burners) so that I'm often tempted to start a conversation as the balloonists float over my backyard.

Camp Parsons, BSA

Over here on Dabob Bay, near Quilcene, WA, is the famous Camp Parsons, BSA. One of the famous features of this famous camp is the pier. At 500 feet in length, it extends far out into the waters of the Hood Canal. There is a significant tide in the area, so they need quite a pier to get out into reliably deep waters. One need is for boating, so the boats are tied up at the end of the pier. The other need is for Pier Jumping! Pier jumping is, as the name would suggest, jumping off the pier into the water. The tide varies, of course, so the jump ranges from 15 to 20-some feet. As a friend of mine mentioned, it doesn't look all that high when you're standing in dry street clothes, but when you're out there in a swimming suit, the jump takes on a new perspective. Highly recommended, though - it's a blast.

Mountain Flowers

The alpine flowers of Washington can be stunning. This has been a good year, at least in the early part of the summer.

Summer sun at the beach

It seems to have Beach Week over at the London Daily Photo and at the Paris Daily Photo, so here's my contribution: fun in the summer sun. These three boys are preparing for a water-balloon fight in celebration of a 12th birthday. I can't imagine what sort of strategy they were cooking up, but they were intently debating the options and the merits. I would have thought that a water-balloon fight would lose its charm were I standing waist-deep in the ocean, but I'm no longer twelve.