Tag: PASADENA

Fire: Comes With The Territory

2014-01-17-1nasa

SoCal is dry. It’s like living in a match factory. Everything is in place for major fires. One spark.

We got one this morning.

Dubbed the “Colby Fire,” the blaze started at around 5:50 a.m. Thursday morning and may have been started by people.

Glendora police arrested and charged three people with recklessly starting a fire. – Huffington Post

In other words, criminal stupidity!

Glendora, like Pasadena a few miles west, sits at the south end of the San Gabriel Mountains and Angeles National Forest.

Within a few hours the fire grew from campfire to 1,700 acres–twice the size of New York’s Central Park! Around a half dozen very expensive homes quickly burned to the ground.

You get your family and pets and you get out!

As spread out as SoCal is, there are huge chunks of land owned by the government. Lots of wilderness, the way it was when settlers first arrived. These are immense tracts in remote locations with steep canyon walls. Very difficult to reach, especially when on fire!

colby-fire-live-shotThis afternoon on TV it was plane after copter after copter after plane dropping water and chemicals on the blaze. Each individual bucketful, ineffectual. It will take dozens and dozens of drops to tame this fire.

This sort of thing can happen anywhere. Obviously, the more buried in the woods you are, the more likely you are to fall victim. From my minimal knowledge of that area, the homes that burned today had spectacular views and lots of privacy. They will be rebuilt.

Driving over the 405 this afternoon, the smoke layer trapped in the mid regions of the atmosphere was quite visible, though 25 miles north.

This is part of SoCal life. It comes with the territory.

Observations From The Tournament Of Roses Parade

We attended the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena yesterday. I think it’s almost as good as Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Helaine liked this one more. You can’t lose either way.

Traffic

With no traffic it’s a 1:05 trip to Pasadena. It didn’t take much longer Wednesday morning. We left the house around 5:15 AM. Things went smooth until we pulled into the parking garage near our seats.

I’d purchased parking before the event, so I was assured a space in a garage on the Pasadena City College campus. Which space was mine was a little more difficult. I had to hunt around until I found something.

Still early, we sat in the car and made believe we were resting.

There was a lot of foot traffic approaching the bleachers. At times we were stopped. Jammed. The crowd was well behaved, but there should be more access to open space.

Seats

IMG_1318

There is an official seller of bleacher seats at the parade. I bought two a few weeks ago. We were assigned seats in Row JJ–up high.

Our view was unobstructed, but probably a little too high and too far back. Being on the curb would be better, but you have to show up as if it’s a $29 HDTV on Black Friday at WalMart, to get a spot.

I brought my camera and shot away with reckless abandon. I mostly shot with a medium telephoto (28-70mm) then changed to a longer (70-200mm) lens toward the end. The longer reach of the second lens produced more pleasing shots, though it was often too long to capture an entire float.

Shots from the shorter lens had too much natural contrast in a small space. The camera just couldn’t do it justice.

The Dog

This was a tough call for Helaine and me. Would it be too long to leave Doppler alone? We took a chance and brought her.

We saw a few other dogs–none in the stands. Doppler was in a bag, pointed backwards, as Helaine walked past the usher. I followed closely, shielding them as we turned upstairs.

She was quiet. She didn’t fidget. She sat on Helaine’s lap.

How could someone have abandoned this dog?

We are exceptionally lucky to have her. She is as well behaved as a dog can be. She is better behaved than some humans, specifically me.

The Setting

Pasadena is beautiful, nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and featuring very tall, thin palms. The mountains are starkly visible north of the main drag, Colorado Blvd.

It was 41&#176 when we arrived. Quickly, the temperature rose to the sixties before topping out in the 70&#176s this afternoon.

Blue skies. No wind. Dry air.

It takes no getting used to.

The Floats

A few were really strong, but only a few.

Any float that had “people” looked creepy, as did one that had “dogs.”

Every surface of every float must be covered in a flower or plant or seed. I think there’s a loophole there. Sort of like those cake bakers on TV who make cakes which are mainly inedible! Lots of surfaces looked too flat to be legit… At least to me.

Some were unexpected. eharmony.com had a float. It wasn’t the one where the gay couple was married. Theirs was sponsored by an AIDS awareness group.

The Sea World float had extra security marching right alongside it. Earlier PETA demonstrators had blocked it and been arrested. Not where I could see.

Which reminds me…

Security

drone

There were police on site, but they surely weren’t doing the kind of ‘security theater’ we’ve come to expect in the 21st Century. No bag checks. No nothin’!

I felt no less safe.

The crowd was well behaved, but restrained in a very cramped space.

Around halfway through the parade I noticed a small white object hovering a few hundred feet behind the route. I couldn’t get a good shot, but it’s a definitely quadcopter. I understand they’re considered safe, but safe enough for this situation? A panic here would have been catastrophic.

Bands

The marching bands were cool–every single one! It’s not something you see all-the-time, for sure. All those feet and instruments in sync and on key!

What an undertaking bringing these kids, some from Pennsylvania and other points east, en mass to California. The bands often have over a hundred members, plus costumes and instruments.

Michigan State

Nearly everyone in our section was a Michigan State fan. Go Green. Go White. I shouted it with them. Everyone loves a party.

Helaine noticed one car with Michigan/Spartan side view mirror covers! Seriously? Can there still be unexplored marketing possibilities?

Michigan State must be making a mint off their trademarks. They’re licensed for nearly everything.

Celebrities

Vin Scully was the Grand Marshal. He smiled and waved and looked old. He doesn’t sound his age on-the-air.

Lynn Swan drove by. The top three winners of The Voice had a float.

KC and the Sunshine Band performed, while in motion. Harry Casey is older. There’s a lot of that going on.

Daryl Hall performed with his band. If John Oates was around, I missed him.

The After Parade

Immediately following the parade is a sort of anti-parade. Small groups of protesters march with signs and banners and even a few crudely made floats.

They’re not part of the line-of-march. They weren’t invited.

They’re taking advantage of their First Amendment rights in one of the few places they can be seen by a large audience.

We’re Going To The Tournament Of Roses Parade

rose parade

Every New Year’s Day Helaine would gaze at the tube and tell me how “one day” she’d like to see the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena. Tomorrow she gets her wish. I ordered tickets and a parking pass and gave them to her on Christmas Day. It was a huge surprise and proof it is better to give than receive.

You actually don’t need tickets to see the parade. People are already lining Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena and the parade is 19 hours away! That process just seemed too iffy.

I read the instructions on the parking pass yesterday. Be parked by seven and be prepared to stay until the parade is done! The lot will be staged like long term storage with cars blocked in. My assumption is their 7:00 AM deadline is a little flexible, we’ll still be up very early.

The parade gets underway at 8:00 AM, but doesn’t pass our location until a little before 9:00. The line-of-march takes 2&#189 hours to complete.

On a good day we’re an hour from Pasadena. I have no idea how traffic will be. We plan on leaving the house around 5:30 AM. We’ll only be off the freeway and on Pasadena streets for a few blocks.

Doppler will come along hidden in a shoulder bag. Shhhh. Clicky’s coming too.

We’ve been to Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. That will be tough to beat. It was spectacular. The big difference will be the weather. It should be in the fifties when we arrive, but close to 70&#176 by the time we’re done, all under sunny skies.

Idol Moves To A City Near Hollywood

Ten season watchers you are going to have to give me a little slack. This is my first time through the American Idol rodeo

We went to dinner tonight with our friends Bob and Karen. When I told Karen I was now an American Idol watcher she offered a fist bump. It’s cult-like… sort of like finding out you were both at Woodstock.

Ten season watchers you are going to have to give me a little slack. This is my first time through the American Idol rodeo. I’m just getting my bearings.

Through the auditions everyone was told they were going to Hollywood. Not quite. Somehow on American Idol Hollywood equals Pasadena.

Note to people named Nigel and Simon: It does not!

Pasadena has the Jet Propulsion Lab and real rocket scientists. Hollywood has guys dressed in Darth Vader outfits working for tips taking pictures with tourists at Grauman’s Chinese.

Last night Stef said Hollywood Blvd. was closed for a music video shoot. No such event on Pasadena’s main drag, Colorado Blvd. They were brushing their teeth at that moment in Pasadena.

Back to Idol.

I was surprised to find I haven’t yet picked any favorites. Luckily there are already people I dislike!

Annoying. There were annoying people–mainly crazy ex-girlfriend types though one guy who thought he was Frank Sinatra probably had an escort out. The judges mostly saw it my way.

Tonight’s culling of the herd was less satisfying than the auditions. I’m not even sure why it’s part of the series. It seems superfluous. I am curious to see the ratings in the morning.

Unless the producers do something dreadfully wrong they’ve got me hooked. I’m hoping tonight’s show is not indicative of what’s to come.

One More Planet – It Could Be Xena

Considering how long telescopes have been around and the limitations imposed by our atmosphere, it boggles the mind to think there are new discoveries – lots of new discoveries, from Earth based telescopes.

PASADENA, Calif.–A planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of the solar system with the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory, California Institute of Technology planetary scientist Mike Brown announced today.

The planet is a typical member of the Kuiper belt, but its sheer size in relation to the nine planets already known means that it can only be classified as a planet, Brown says. Currently about 97 astronomical units from the sun (an astronomical unit is the distance between the sun and Earth), the planet becomes the farthest-known object in the solar system, and the third brightest of the Kuiper belt objects.

“It will be visible over the next six months and is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky, in the constellation Cetus,” says Brown, who made the discovery with colleagues Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, on January 8.

Yale – wow! That means some of these discoveries are being made by people who work down the block from me. I decided to drop David Rabinowitz a congratulatory note.

Before we go on – I am not shy about using email to reach out, especially when there’s more information I want. I have corresponded with Nobel Prize winners, famous scientists and journalists, producers I’ve wanted to work for… even actor/lawyer/game show host/commentator Ben Stein&#185.

Hi David,

I just want you to know, every time I read about this amazing discovery, I am pleased to see there was a New Haven/Yale connection. Congratulations on your work.

When things calm down and you get a few minutes, could you tell me how this evaded detection for so long? I would have assumed there would be some gravitational component that was seen yet unaccounted for and would have led to an earlier search. Of course my knowledge of planetary physics leaves lots to be desired.

All the best,

Geoff Fox

A few hours later, there was a reply.

Hi Geoff. Thanks for the kudos.

It is amazing that this new planet, which I am still getting used to calling a planet, was not detected before. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the orbital dynamics. It is too small to have an effect on the orbits of the other planets. So it wouldn’t show up that way.

Really, the short answer is that nobody ever looked before. For the first time, we are using a large telescope and a large digital camera to search the whole northern hemisphere for distant planets. Building the camera was a major accomplishment – it was a team effort at the Yale Physics Dept and Indiana Univ. in Bloomginton IN. Called the Palomar-Quest camera, it is one of the worlds largest digital camera – 160 Megs. In combination with the special wide-field optics of the 48″” Samuel Oschin Schmidt at Palomar Observatory, we can search the whole northern hemisphere more efficiently than anybody else.

Now nobody ever though it would be very productive to search for distant planets far from the plane of the planets — the ecliptic plane. Our competitors, in fact, mostly search only within a few degrees of the ecliptic. But because we can search so much area with Palomar-Quest, we decided to search everywhere. We started at the ecliptic, believing this would be most productive. But strangely, the most intriguing discoveries have been out of the plane. We found Sedna 12 degrees below the plane, we found our new planet 14 deg below the plane. One of the new objects reported on Friday, called 2003 FY9, is the brightest (but not biggest) object in the Kuiper Belt. It is 30 degrees above the ecliptic plane.

What makes astronomy so exciting, there is so much out there left to be discovered. Building a new instruments helps. But just looking where nobody expects to find something, you can get lucky. We still have more area to search even farther from the ecliptic. So there could even be more exciting things to find.

Regards.

David Rabinowitz

Basically, the team took a succession of photos and then analyzed them for movement. From our perspective, distant stars stand still while much closer planets (or asteroids, comets and meteors) move in the sky. Look for something moving like a planet and you just might spot a planet! Or, you might just be picking out some noise in the telescope’s sensors. That’s where astronomers come in.

The picture on the left represents what you would see, looking at the Sun from this distant planet. It’s just another very bright star in a very dark sky.

To me, the “magic keys” to this discovery are both the laser guide star adaptive optics, which allows astronomers on the ground to take images as sharp as the images from the Hubble Space Telescope and the ability to have much of the grunt work of comparing images done by computer.

In any event, as more and more objects are discovered, there will be more and more controversy over what exactly is a planet? Lots of astronomers don’t think Pluto is a planet! And this new sighting, though larger than Pluto, is in some ways similar – especially its orbit.

In the meantime, the word is the discoverers are waiting for approval to call this planet, “Xena.”

&#185 – After the “Deep Throat” unmasking, I wrote Ben to disagree with a commentary he had written. We went back through three or four sets of emails, airing our opposing views. I enjoyed the discussion, and was meticulous in sourcing my conclusions. Ben also seemed to enjoy the ‘fight’ and gave back without hesitation.

Though we disagreed strongly, I have a great deal of respect for him and was more than a little pleased he was willing to engage me in this manner.

Global Warming

I watched Miles O’Brien’s CNN documentary on global warming this past weekend. Miles and I met at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena a few years ago. I’ve always enjoyed his space oriented science reporting. I was more than a little disappointed in this particular documentary&#185.

I knew where it was going as soon as I heard:

But now the scientific debate is largely over. There is overwhelming consensus that the threat is real, that humans are at least part of the cause, and that something must be done.

Maybe I missed the memo. I don’t think the debate is over, and I know I’m not alone in thinking that.

This all goes back to my view that the concept of global warming is being treated as both a scientific and political concept. I don’t mind hearing about the science, but most of the time it is a partisan political story, but portrayed as a scientific one.

Ask yourself, have you ever heard anything positive about global warming? In a true scientific discussion all the effects would be presented, not just the bad ones.

In any weather change scenario there will be winners and losers – but we only hear about the losers. You never hear about how much you’ll save in heating bills or how farmers in the Northern Plains and Siberia will get a longer growing season.

Is that a big deal? I’m not sure. But I’m sure growing season changes, or less need for heating oil in the industrialized world has to have more impact than what happens on Tuvalu – an island of a bit more than 10,000 people, that Miles spent lots of time on.

Among the operational, or forecasting, meteorologists I know, or whose opinions I read in online chat rooms, most are skeptical about the whole concept. Meteorologists involved in research or theoretical meteorology are more likely to be enamored with the concept.

Recently, one of the skeptics wrote on medialine.com:

Here are just a few things I deal with or have dealt with in forecasting: We still cannot find and correct the cool bias in summer and warm bias in winter of the Great Lakes within forecast models. I have computer models showing me highs today and this weekend in the mid to upper 40’s with a wind off 33 degree lake water. We know the lake temp. It is factored into the models, even our local meso models, and still it cannot forecast an accurate temp. The Great Lakes, I believe, have been here as long as modern Meteorology.

He’s right. Temperatures are very tough to forecast, even when we have a total understanding of the initializing conditions. We’re not aways right, even when we don’t need to make assumptions, as we do for most global warming scenarios.

The whole concept of global warming throws many variables into the mix. It’s not just the greenhouse gases, but also the offshoots of any warming, like cloudiness or increased water vapor in the atmosphere. Many of the individual variables are working against each other. Many are not properly or totally accounted for.

I’ve told this story here before. While sitting on an airplane, waiting to take off from the Tampa Airport, I looked at the sky. It was overcast.

When I looked closer, I realized the clouds were airplane contrails that had become diffuse with the weak upper air winds over Florida. These ‘clouds’ were unpredicted. They certainly changed the heat budget below them.

How did the computer models we use for forecasting handle them? I asked a friend, someone familiar with numeric weather prediction. His simple answer was, they’re not taken into account at all.

I am not doubting that greenhouse gases can make a difference, or that the greenhouse concept is, by itself wrong. Get into a parked car on a warm sunny day. That’s greenhouse warming at its finest!

All I’m saying is, there are lots of people speaking with total clarity about a subject on which, in my opinion, the jury is still out. And, they’re doing it using forecasting techniques that only see part of the picture.

&#185 – CNN provides online transcripts for many of their shows, including this documentary.

Too Weird For Words

I actually found this on Drudge, but a little research showed it really happened.

WFUS56 KLOX 211553

TORLOX

CAC037-211615-

BULLETIN – EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED

TORNADO WARNING

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE LOS ANGELES/OXNARD CA

839 AM PDT SAT AUG 21 2004

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN OXNARD HAS ISSUED A

* TORNADO WARNING FOR…

CENTRAL LOS ANGELES COUNTY IN SOUTHWEST CALIFORNIA

* UNTIL 915 AM PDT

* AT 825 AM PDT…NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING

A LARGE AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS TORNADO 7 MILES SOUTH OF

GLENDALE…OR ABOUT NEAR DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES…MOVING NORTHEAST AT

20 MPH.

* THE TORNADO IS EXPECTED TO BE NEAR…

PASADENA BY 850 AM PDT

MOUNT WILSON BY 905 AM PDT

WHEN A TORNADO WARNING IS ISSUED BASED ON DOPPLER RADAR…IT MEANS

THAT STRONG ROTATION HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THE STORM. A TORNADO MAY

ALREADY BE ON THE GROUND…OR IS EXPECTED TO DEVELOP SHORTLY. IF YOU

ARE IN THE PATH OF THIS DANGEROUS STORM…MOVE INDOORS AND TO THE

LOWEST LEVEL OF THE BUILDING. STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS. IF DRIVING…DO

NOT SEEK SHELTER UNDER A HIGHWAY OVERPASS.

THE SAFEST PLACE TO BE DURING A TORNADO IS IN A BASEMENT. GET UNDER A

WORKBENCH OR OTHER PIECE OF STURDY FURNITURE. IF NO BASEMENT IS

AVAILABLE…SEEK SHELTER ON THE LOWEST FLOOR OF THE BUILDING IN AN

INTERIOR HALLWAY OR ROOM SUCH AS A CLOSET. USE BLANKETS OR PILLOWS TO

COVER YOUR BODY AND ALWAYS STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS.

IF IN MOBILE HOMES OR VEHICLES…EVACUATE THEM AND GET INSIDE A

SUBSTANTIAL SHELTER. IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE…LIE FLAT IN THE

NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS.

LAT…LON 3413 11837 3400 11822 3425 11788 3441 11808

$$

WOFFORD

First, the most important part of the story – there was no tornado!

I have no idea exactly how this happened. This is the moral equivalent of crying fire in a crowded theater. Expect to hear more on this over the next few days.