Cop Car's Beat

Virgin Hyperloop

More than you ever cared to know about the Hyperloop: Although these videos are, seemingly, ads, I hasten to inform you that I am related to neither Elon Musk nor Richard Branson and have no financial stake in their projects.

 

 

 

More from News for Nerds - Snow flake photos in high resolution

My morning walks have been particularly interesting this week. For one thing, it has been cool enough and, at times, windy enough to thin out the herd of dog walkers and such. Wednesday, it was snowing. It wasn't a heavy, large-flaked, blizzardy type, but a delicate sprinkling of tiny, sparkly flakes. I could not, however, see them to the fine detail that Nathan Myhrvold achieves in his photographs. I'm impressed.

"Yellowknife Flurry," a photograph by Nathan Myhrvold, captures the intricate structure of snowflakes. (Nathan Myhrvold / Modernist Cuisine Gallery, LLC)

The Highest Resolution Photos Ever Taken of Snowflakes (smithsonianmag.com) 43

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday January 28, 2021 @09:10PM from the never-before-seen-detail dept.

Photographer and scientist Nathan Myhrvold has developed a camera that captures snowflakes at a microscopic level never seen before. Smithsonian Magazine reports: Myhrvold, who holds a PhD in theoretical mathematics and physics from Princeton University and served as the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft for 14 years, leaned on his background as a scientist to create the camera. He also tapped into his experience as a photographer, most notably as the founder of Modernist Cuisine, a food innovation lab known for its high-resolution photographs of various food stuffs published into a five-volume book of photography of the same name that focuses on the art and science of cooking. Myhrvold first got the idea to photograph snowflakes 15 years ago after meeting Kenneth Libbrecht, a California Institute of Technology professor who happened to be studying the physics of snowflakes.

In simple terms, the system Myhrvold developed is comprised of one part microscope and one part camera, but with a number of parts that work in tandem to complete the arduous task of capturing an image of a snowflake, a subject that's not only miniscule (most snowflakes measure less than a half-inch in diameter) but also quick to melt. In fact, a snowflake's tendency to disintegrate was one of the biggest challenges Myhrvold had to overcome with this project. His solution: equipping his 50-pound camera system with a thermoelectric cooling system, a carbon fiber frame and LED lights, which give off less heat than standard lights. Every single part of his Frankenstein-esque device, which stands at about five feet in height off the ground when placed on a table, was built using materials that are less likely to cause melting or sublimation of the subject matter.

Myhrvold also had to figure out how to physically capture a snowflake. (It's not quite as simple as hoping that the perfect snowflake just so happens to fall into your mittened hand.) He quickly learned that catching them on a glass microscope slide wouldn't work; glass is a known insulator. But an artificial sapphire slide, made of the same crystal material as one would find in a high-end watch, had a lower thermal conductivity ratio than glass, making it the perfect material to gather specimens. [...] Once safely on the slide, he focuses his microscope to take the photograph, changing the exposure one micron at a time. (For reference, the width of a human hair measures approximately 70 microns.) On average, Myhrvold photographs each snowflake more than 100 times, or as many times as he can before the snowflake starts to melt. Using specialized computer software, Myhrvold combines multiple photographs of a single specimen to create the final photograph. "That photo [is usually the result of] 100 photographs put together using computer software," he says. "You have to take many photos in order to get a high enough resolution, because many photos put together allows you to have enough depth of field to see an entire snowflake very sharply."

It takes teamwork

I've checked our county's COVID-19 vaccination scheduling website every few hours for the past couple of days - ever since I saw on TV that the county had received some vaccine and were signing up people who were 83 years old and older. Although I'm just shy of 83 years old, Hunky Husband is 84; thus, I wanted to get him signed up ASAP. No dice. Everything was booked up.

I thought that, since we are well situated for waiting, we wouldn't worry as long as he received his first dose before March 1. Even better. I don't know where he chanced upon it; but, HH came across an announcement that some more slots had opened up. Rushing to my computer, I pounced on the website. Still nothing. However, this time I kept checking every few minutes. Lo and behold, not only did a bunch of slots open up, but the minimum age had been lowered to 80. Quickly, I signed HH up for his shot, next Monday. There was a way to set up an "account". Not seeing a downside to it, I signed HH up in an account. Not thinking about the need to sign out, after that, I went ahead and signed myself up for a shot. I was able to pin one down 45 minutes after HH's shot. This should work!

 

Paying respects to 400,000 COVID-19 deaths in USA

Full screen display is recommended for playing the embedded videos.

 

 

Among the nation-wide remembrances of those lost to COVID-19 is the lighting of the Empire State Building in New York City. It broke me when a commentator pointed out that the lighting mimics the beating of a human heart.

Young and old conversants

Working in the kitchen, I heard Hunky Husband guffawing in his basement den, so I had to go ask him why he was laughing. He showed me an item in a newsletter that he was reading. It illustrated the different ways in which various people use language - particularly when one of the people is young, the other old. I've changed the lead-in, for personal reasons, but not the quote. It sounds like something that HH would have told his troops 40 years ago.

After an aide answered a question, the questioner shook his head and said, “Pick up your phone, call your mother, read her what you just told me” ... “If she understands, we can keep talking.”

This was a lot funnier than what had happened about an hour, previously. I happened to go downstairs for something and heard beeps and siren noises coming from HH's den. He had somehow come upon a scam: the one that displays and announces messages to the effect that a bad thing on your computer is going to bring down the internet unless you call the given phone number RIGHT NOW! HH was trying to figure out what to do - difficult for anyone to do with all the bells, whistles, and flashing images. While he went into the laundry room to iron his weeks' worth of shirts, I shut down his machine and cleaned it up. Not that it will help, but I did change a couple of his security settings while I was at it.

16 Escapees

At times we see no wild turkeys for weeks-on-end. Sometimes we see 3 or 4 turkey nearly daily. Then there are the bonus days when we see a whole flock. For the past few days a flock of 10-16 turkey who seemed to have escaped being someone's entrée for Thanksgiving or Christmas have visited us. If they cross the creek that borders our lot they are subject, during season, to being shot by humans - with bow & arrow or shotgun.

The photos were taken on the 10th of this month and are in order from earliest to latest. There are no photos of the turkeys while they were near the house (on our patio and in the planting beds) because, to get a decent photo, I must open the sliding glass door. Obviously, that is most likely to flush them.

I just recalled that, last evening, as Hunky Husband and I sat chatting in the living room, I caught a glimpse of two turkey fluttering down from having flown over our house to settle in our back yard. I didn't get up to see them and it would have been too dark for me to have caught photos. They sometimes roost in the trees of our (or nearby) woods for the night. I have sometimes thought that some of them roost on our roof, as well.

It's a blurry world out there

The local weather guessers told us, last night, to expect fog out there today. In general, our fog hits us in the wee hours of the morning and the sun dissipates it by 10:00am. Today was different.

At 10:00am, today, I was in an eye surgeon's office - expecting Dr Leitner to give me one, final exam of the site in my left eye where a hemorrhage had occurred next to the optic nerve at sometime (probably) in early 2020. I had seen Dr Lightner last July, and again in September. In July, Dr L was reluctant to perform surgery because of proximity to the optic nerve. In September, she found that the hemorrhage was healing itself, nicely. Today, she said that the hemorrhage had resolved itself - that she wanted to check on it, again, in six months. By 10:45am, we were on our way home, we being Hunky Husband and me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The facility in which I saw Dr Leitner was an office (in Wichita - about 11 miles from our house). Because they would be dilating my eyes, I had asked HH to take me. On our way home, I was amazed that my eyes seemed to still be fully dilated - everything looked foggy. Recalling the forecast of fog from last night, and seeing that the McConnell AFB beacon (on the water tower of the above photos) was flashing, I asked HH to affirm that it had become foggy while we were in Wichita. It had.

Arriving at home, I made an early lunch and took a nap - activities for which I didn't need to see well. Amazingly, when I awoke from my nap, nearly five hours since the dilating drops had been introduced into my eyes, my eyes were still nearly fully dilated. Checking with Dr L's team (I didn't want to be left in a lurch, with tomorrow's being Saturday - surely an "off" day for Dr L), I was told that a long-lasting agent had been used. My eyes may be dilated for as long as 24 hours! Thanks for the "heads up", team. That would have been a nice piece of information for me to have had. When I took a selfie (below) to show the dilation, the flash forced the pupils to contract. Great thinking - lol. Next time I'll do the flash bit sooner.

2021 - a clean slate

For a few days the weather guessers have been telling us to expect snow and freezing rain this past Wednesday. By the time it got closer to Wednesday, the nasty weather had been pushed forward to Thursday - then to Friday. As it turned out, AFAIK, the rain/freezing rain that was to precede and proceed the snow and was to have started at around Midnight last night did not show up. When I trudged through the accumulated snow and blowing snow to retrieve our morning paper, there was no sign of slipperiness as I expected from a coating of ice. But...the world from our house, looks fresh and clean with its white coating. It is still snowing, but only half-heartedly with tiny flakes. The sun has been trying to peek out for the past hour. I've already had my first bowl of snow ice cream - for breakfast. (I'll take a small break, here.)

The first photo was taken at about 8am (the camera's date/time was off) at which time I measured a bit over 4 inches of snow on the patio table. At about 11:30am, I measured 5.5 inches. The sun came out just before noon and the snow had quit. By hovering your cursor over a photo you may reveal the caption to each photo.

When the weather turns bad, we always have a bountiful number of birds at our feeders. This morning, we've had European starlings (ugh!), a passel of slate-colored juncos (with one pink-sided amongst them), a handful of house finches, a like number of American gold finches, a few tufted titmice, one white-breasted nuthatch, one red-bellied woodpecker, a couple of downy woodpeckers, and a female cardinal - that I recall.

Please note the blue feeder in the above two photos. I have a hook on a pole that I use to retrieve/replace feeders through one or the other of the living room windows during weather such as this. A bit after these photos were taken, I tried to retrieve the blue feeder for re-filling. Unfortunately, I used one hand/arm in the process and fumbled the feeder when I took its full weight at the end of my pole, dumping it off onto the ground. I replaced it with another tube-type feeder rather than going out and trampling about in the snow. The snow looks better without my footprints.

Added at 3:33pm - No more ice cream

It warmed up, quickly, once the sun came out. About half of the snow has already melted. What is left wouldn't be fit for snow ice cream. It is 35 degrees Fahrenheit.